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sanpaku_backup

Tip o' the pin to

librarygrrl for pointing out a delightful story from my home town. This will help me the next time someone tells me I must be exaggerating when I describe what my high school was like...

Edit: Yes, clearly, you are all correct. My high school was a flowering garden of the intellect and clearly not the hellish jock institution of evil that I remember, and yours was much, much worse. My apologies.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mabfan.livejournal.com

it said that I couldn't read the article without registering. Could you give details?

From:

alsoname.livejournal.com

Nothing I've heard about Mt. Lebanon High School made it sound all that different from any other high school in the country ... except for the fact that in terms of academics y'all are the HIGHEST RANKED PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL IN THE NATION. Based on that fact alone I would elect to go there if I were forced to relive my high-school years but given a choice of institutions. I mean, it's not like repulsive things like that didn't happen at my high school. So you'd might as well go to where you can get the best public education possible.

From: (Anonymous)

there is no "registration"...it's just a 'none shall pass' forum for click-through advertising. click on uncle sam and then you can read anything you'd like.

you think Mt. Lebo was bad? please. i went to bethel park. mt. lebanon was considered the high school for 'opulent aristocrats' (not that we used such elevated diction in bethel park, but that's the notion). the last non-AP class i took in high school was regularly interrupted by the following (no kidding): a kid running through class with his pants off holding a roll of toilet paper, a belligerent lad who liked to turn off the lights (he sat next to the light switch) and knock over desks while screaming curses, another charming gentleman who liked to urinate in the garbage can, and, famously, a skunk.

From:

flw.livejournal.com

I don't quite follow what upsets or surprises you... is it what the boys did, or is it the Administration and Police response? Because only in Lebo would this even merit a response. In other School Districts, the teachers would be joining in, and they'd be videotaping it...

The Bethel Park respondent brings up some good points, but I would remind Bethel Park graduates that BP was a high class school compared to Brashear or... who knows? There are doubtless some nightmarish High Schools around that are far, far worse than even the lowly Bethel Park.

I'm not trying to excuse any of the behavior, I just think... from what I've read, that the Administrations response was appropriate, and so was the police response. What is going unsaid is that the school is a defacto Police State now, as are all schools, where students have zero expectation of privacy. No one is going to defend the boys right to say terrible things to each other? This is fucking America! Or at least it was. If I want to privately speculate on my classmates bodies, that's my god-given right.

The news here is that they used traceable email. If this had been done with notes, it would all be in the garbage.

From:

flw.livejournal.com

I don't mean to be a total jerk-ass, but girls do this kind of stuff all the time, only they are smart enough to use code. If this was girls, the big hub-bub would be, "Who dared violate my daughter's email privacy?"

We're not getting the whole story.

Still, the guy's are assholes. But we're not getting the whole story.

From: (Anonymous)

good point FLW, but i think the hypocrisy goes even further. how many of these self-appointed guardians of adolescent purity (i.e. school admins, local cops, the parent who said this list is "like raping my daughter", etc.) did exactly the same sort of stuff in high school? likely all of them. so and so is cute, she has nice X's, he has great Y's. they just never quantified it, made a spreadsheet, and got caught, etc. totally agree.

From:

flw.livejournal.com

I don't mean to be a total jerk, and must continually qualify every statement. The guys were assholes. But I guarantee you. I guaran-goddamn-mother-effing-tee-to-the-ee you that much, much more damage is done by girls to other girls. Girls know how to hit each other below the belt and they know how to get away with it. And they can be vicious... the kind of things that make some girls feel like they can't take a step or breathe in school. There are girls who are terrified to stay at home, and terrified to go to school because of the constant smear campaigns that some girls will engineer against them. I mean, girls commit suicide over this kind of stuff.

But you can't go after the girls, because their harmless girls. Now there is someone to point a finger at... I bet if the truth ever came out, we'd find out that a lot of what was written was written by girls. Not that I am defending these guys, but they need to be defended, and I don't see anyone stepping up to the plate to make a reasonable defense. "Boys will be boys" is not a good defense. And defending... what? What am I trying to say.

I draw an analogy to the whole Google/China situation. China is a deplorable slave nation that claims to be Communist, yet executes Union Organizers and sells their organs for transplant. Despicable, but we can't go after China (we need the stuff)... But we can go after Google! It's all Google's fault!

And yes, I think there is a "word-rape" type of thing going on in this situation. It's what you get when you take 17 year old boys and expose them to a cavalcade of completely inaccessable young girls. And you expect them to tuck their shirts in? Are you people mad? I don't remember one second of High School in which I didn't have an erection... or one on the way. That is my primary memory of High School... thinking, "Will my erection subside before the bell? If not, how will I rearrange so as to obscure? Goddammit! Even if you don't need a Trapper Keeper for this class take it anyway! What a fool I am!"

Anyways, so, yeah, if you take starving people and parade the finest dishes from all over the world in front of them 8 hours a day, don't be surprised if they build a complicated world of imaginary eating with a little aggression toward... everything thrown in to the mix. Did I just compare teenage girls to food? For the 17 year old boy, it's an unimaginable, unedurable hunger that is mocked for hours every day. You have to learn to pretend that you aren't thinking about it constantly... It's really cruel and unnatural.

Spreadsheets?