It’s the American
Way, or perhaps I should write, the American Process: create a new ritual to display
a human emotion and then develop a range of products and services to help people
express the emotion.
But now that we’ve
run out of major emotions, like love for mother, father or significant other,
we’re moved on to the trivial. Evidently asking someone to the prom has become
a big deal. Young bucks are outdoing themselves in constructing elaborate
asks—making fortune cookies with “ask” messages, creating flash mobs or appearing
at the young lady’s front door in a giant teddy bear costume. One parochial
high school is running a “best ask” contest.
The New York Times article in which I discovered this trend pays
close attention to the consumer aspects of the phenomenon, detailing how “romantic
events” companies and “etiquette coaches” are jumping on the trend. Since real
holidays such as Christmas have devolved into a potlatch of spending, it makes
sense that manufactured holidays or life events would quickly become
commoditized into a series of goods and services—it’s another opportunity to
meet an emotional need by spending money.
A few things strike me
as interesting about the development of the elaborate prom “ask.” The Times
article and all the thousands of other stories about asking someone to go to
the prom that are in the news media this week all assume that it is the boy who
asks the girl. Not only could I find no reference to a gay individual asking
someone to a prom, there was not one mention of a girl asking a boy. Shocking,
but perhaps just to me, since in the late 1960’s I was asked to go to my prom
by a girl.
Surely, some girl
somewhere in the country asked a boy in a cute enough way to make the evening
news this year. Yes, there was one: a
heart-warming story about a girl who asked a boy with autism to the prom as an act of kindness. Admirable and maybe worth a human-interest
feature in the evening news, but the hidden message about normal expectations
is pernicious. My take is that the editors and writers who specialize in
prom-type stuff are always striving to confirm a set of traditional values,
including the “boy asks girl” principle, which is a corollary to the principle
that “boy decides.”
Beyond the covert
sexism in the reporting of the cute “prom ask” trend, there is the essence of
the event—the anxiety that many teenage boys and girls feel when asking someone
for a date. Of course, it’s not just teenagers who when dialing the phone
suffer a deep fear of rejection even as they feel an exhilaration considering
the possibilities. It’s typical for American companies to create anxieties or
needs and then fill them with products and services. The “prom ask” is
ready-made, since the anxiety always existed. Retailers, consultants and
trend-setters just needed to channel that anxiety into a situation that
required making purchases.
With or without the “prom
ask” ritual, the prom gets too much attention nowadays: dresses have gotten too
expensive and prom night has flowered into a series of rituals like the
after-prom party, the hotel stay and events the following day, each of which
raise the cost of participation. The
prom has come to exemplify Thorsten Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption,
which means the spending on luxury goods and services to demonstrate social
status.
The prom has also
become a stage for acting out social issues, as each year the news media
uncovers stories about segregated proms, prom dress restrictions, anti-proms,
use of social media in prom planning and the cost of proms.
In total, some 13.4
million stories popped up when searching for “prom” on Google News; “prom ask”
yielded 49,700 of them. A search for “global warming” yielded 76,700 stories;
“college loans” yielded 1.3 million; “Plan B,” which refers to FDA plans to
allow the over-the-counter sale of Plan B birth control to prom queens and any
other girl aged 15 or older, yielded 21,7000 stories. In other words, in the narrow slice of time
covered in any standard Google News search, more media outlets cared about how
teens ask other teens to go to a dance than about a breaking news story related
to sexual freedom for teenage girls.
Of course, there are
so many possible ways for the mass media to cover proms: asks, dresses,
corsages, decorations, social issues. But read closely: virtually all the stories soon reduce to
discussions of shopping for goods and services.
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