If you haven’t seen the pictures of a Kentucky high school’s racy homecoming festivities yet, you might want to just close this tab and go about your day.
Still here? All right, but I warned you. The pictures are SFW in the sense that you won’t get fired or anything, but you’ll definitely get some weird looks, so make sure your boss isn’t walking by. Coast clear? OK, here’s the link.
If you’d rather not click it, I’ll paint you a quick word picture of a few of the images in that sordid gallery:
- Male student, fully clothed (unfortunately, yes, I do have to specify that), braced against a table as though anticipating a prostate exam, is paddled by an adult in front of a gymnasium full of onlookers
- Male student wearing only candy-apple red panties with matching padded bra, straddles the lap of an adult man, placing one hand on the lap dance recipient’s shoulder and the other behind his head; the recipient averts his eyes
- Group of female students, dressed in Hooters uniforms (not the new ones, thank God), enter the gymnasium holding mugs full of what looks like beer
- Male student wearing lingerie and fishnets bends over in front of an adult male; the adult male roars with laughter (apparently having underage buttocks touching or almost touching his genitals is hilarious to this man)
It’s amazing to me that any of the adults in the room sat through this. I, as both a former high-school teacher and a human being possessing normal levels of jail aversion, would have bolted from that room at the first glimpse of a 15-year-old boy in a blonde wig and bikini briefs. Unfortunately, the twin failsafes of propriety and self-preservation seem to have failed the faculty and staff of Hazard High School.
This “man pageant” is a hallowed tradition at Hazard. One shudders to imagine the perversions performed in that gym before this year’s were posted on Facebook. Thankfully, the administration appears to be pumping the brakes now. According to an official statement, “we value our student’s creativity” but “this time it was carried too far.”
Self-expression, especially sexual self-expression, being carried too far in inappropriate circumstances is fast becoming a hallmark of our society. The mere suggestion that sexual display should be discouraged in certain contexts is often viewed as oppressive. Dress codes that prevent underage girls from flaunting their assets in school are instances of patriarchal tyranny. Not being allowed to bring your ball gags and leather whips to an all-ages Pride Parade is a huge step backward for the LGBT movement. Some particularly disturbed theorists and journalists think having sex in public, anytime and anywhere, is a human right, especially for queer folx.
Maybe it’s all a symptom of our regression to paganism. The passage in 1 Corinthians in which St Paul explains that women should cover their hair in church “because of the angels” is notoriously thorny, but one explanation connects it to a Roman theory that long hair could serve as a sort of ancillary sex organ. In this reading, Paul is hammering into the heads of his Gentile convert audience, accustomed as they were to the X-rated festivities of Lupercalia and Bacchanalia, that sexual display has no place in Christian worship. This Pauline prudery touched off a sexual revolution that purged once-ubiquitous pornography from the Roman public sphere and brought greater protections for women and slaves.
None of what we’re seeing is new. Rome had drag kids. One even became emperor. The perversions of Jeffrey Epstein’s island resemble nothing so much as those of Tiberius’s court at Capri. Ovid blogged about ethical non-monogamy. What we need more than anything is a fresh dose of whatever Paul was serving. Maybe Katherine Dee is right and the sexual counter-revolution has already begun.
But this is bigger than just sex. A recent New York Times piece on Gen Z workplace culture included descriptions of recent college grads oversharing about their mental health issues and menstrual complications, engaging in what amounted to group therapy sessions on company time, and bullying their employers into posting messages of support for BLM and banning the phrase “hey guys.” They want maximal self-expression across every sphere of life.
The old conception of the self was defined by the roles one played, especially in relation to others. I am husband, co-worker, neighbor, parishioner, writer, citizen, et cetera. The modern self, by contrast, is that which exists apart from those roles, which defies and deconstructs them. These are the selves that Gen Z is bringing to the office, that armies of university DEI experts are paid six figures to coddle, that Hazard High’s administrators encouraged their students to display is the school gymnasium, and that trans-affirming parents seek to protect when they drag their confused toddlers to the gender clinic. They can hardly be blamed. Our whole society has been brainwashed by Dead Poets Society into believing that any restrictions on young people’s self-expression lead inevitably to suicide.
How did we get here? It’s hard to say. Blame Jean-Paul Sartre, who declared that existence precedes essence and that therefore any obstacles to complete self-creation must be removed. Blame Sigmund Freud, who taught that repression is the root of all evil. Hell, even blame Martin Luther if that’s your thing. But if we want to avoid more debacles like the one in Kentucky, we’ll need to remember that, as shocking as it might sound, not all behavior is appropriate at all times and in all places.
Grayson Quay is a Young Voices associate contributor based in Arlington, Virginia. His writing has been published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington Examiner and the American Conservative.
