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underwear fashion of the youth of today
Thursday, May 2 2002setting: Park Slope, Brooklyn, New YorkI read a freaky article today about a high school near San Diego where a vice principal recently performed public underwear inspections of students attending a dance on school grounds. This vice principal apparently had some sort of fetishistic revulsion to female students wearing "thong" underwear and was thus moved to take the extraordinary measure of lifting up female student's skirts to see what sort of panties they were wearing. So blinded was she in this personal crusade that she did these inspections right in front of other students, policemen, and other assorted passersby. You can imagine the humiliation!
There isn't any question in my mind that a vice principal taking such extreme measures should be fired, sued, made to show her own panties, etc. But I think someone needs to dig into this story a little deeper and ask the question, "How did we come to this?" Such an inspection, extreme as it is, didn't happen in a vacuum. It's nothing but an excessive foray launched from some safer ground of fascistic intrusion into the personal space of American teens.
Increasingly through the years, you see, American high school students have been the victims of every-greater hysteria-fueled attacks on their personal liberties. First came locker inspection, then mandatory nudity in gym settings. These days many schools even have mandatory drug testing for kids wishing to participate in after-school activities. What could be next, virginity inspections? I'm sure that Rita Wilson, the panty-inspecting vice principal of Rancho Bernardo, in what was probably an erotic fugue state of self-righteous rationalization, came to view panty inspection as no more intrusive than requesting urine samples.
The problem with treating high school kids as proto-humans devoid of natural rights (while executing them when they commit adult crimes) is that they eventually come to accept their lessened status as the norm while their adult oppressors come up with ever-more liberties to curtail. Our schools turn from cultivating the future citizens of democracy to churning out broken souls more suited for populating a totalitarian police state. Salon had a great article about this a few days back.
Another interesting thing about this story is the fact that teenage girls these days "won't be caught dead" wearing anything but "thong underwear" in a locker room situation. I had no idea that the underwear fashion of the youth of today had reached such extremes. Indeed, it's likely that many girls prefer other forms of underwear, but only want to be seen wearing fashionable thongs. The routine personal violation of the locker room has forced them to conform to an orthodoxy sluttier (or whatever the word should be) than their own preference.
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