…and guys heavy into fashion, apparently. While teenaged girls are giddy with excitement, swarming the malls like manic lunatics looking for dresses and accessories to go with their shoes and hair and manicure designs, teenaged boys really aren’t pressed. Frankly, they don’t give a damn. This revelation was pretty sobering for me, a mother who was once an emotional teenaged girl who took big stock in prom. Mines didn’t live up to the hype so I was hoping to make my sons a little better, although he couldn’t care less. It has been a struggle to even get him to go shopping. Last Saturday he hemmed and hawed at the suggestion that we make a trip to get fitted at JosA Bank, which would’ve temporarily taken him away from his video game playing, so I backed off and let him and his friend continue slaying folks in Skyrim. He doesn’t even want his own chauffeured car, opting instead to limo-pool with two of his buddies, one of whom practically begged my son to buy himself a prom ticket. He didn’t want to “spend $65 on a dance,” so he waited until yesterday to get his ticket. Hemming and hawing, I imagine, all the way to the Student Affairs office. At first I thought that maybe he didn’t want to go because he didn’t have a date but then I overheard (okay, I eavesdropped) him and his friends talking and discovered that two girls had asked him to be their date and he’d arranged for one of them to go with his friend, DJ who has never had a girlfriend. So Tuesday night before Glee came on he and I were chatting, as usual, and prom came up. We were laughing about one of the twins saying that his prom date last year looked like "a delicious chocolate mint" in her green dress, while he resembled a "giant pistachio." This girl asked him to be her date to her prom and his mother prodded him to accept.
That was maybe our fourth time discussing prom, after I'd had similar discussions about the other prom-aged boys in my family with my mother, and it finally became clear to me that boys just really don’t care; prom is primarily for chicks. The shopping trips, the manicures, pedicures, new shoes (one of his classmates convinced her dad to buy her a pair of $700 shoes, which the boys found utterly ridiculous), and new hairstyles, the glamour of it all is highly appealing to girls (who have all been sold Cinderella stories). Boys just tend to show up for the dancing and camaraderie, which isn’t novel at all, despite it never really getting old. While they were supposed to be out tuxedo shopping they were in my backyard sparring with each other like mixed martial arts fighters and videotaping it for their other friends to see. They didn’t have to get dressed up and admission to my backyard is free. Plus, the refrigerator was stocked.
So girls want that Cinderella experience and boys just want to box. I saw on the news that many parents are planning to spend a small fortune on prom for their daughters, equating it to a mini-wedding. How sad. As if to say “we’d better do this now, while we can because who knows if you’ll ever get married,” putting way too much importance on pomp and circumstance. The pageantry of it all will have at least half of these girls needing a shrink before they’re 30. So actually, it’s kind of a relief for me that my boy doesn’t need the type of validation and attention that teenaged girls crave. He’d actually rather SAVE me money than spend it. I guess I had him pegged all wrong, lol. Anyway, I’m glad that cultural mores have changed a bit and this generation’s kids aren’t feeling as much pressure and anxiety to fit the same mold we’ve been cramming ourselves into since the 50s. After all, it’s just a party.
That was maybe our fourth time discussing prom, after I'd had similar discussions about the other prom-aged boys in my family with my mother, and it finally became clear to me that boys just really don’t care; prom is primarily for chicks. The shopping trips, the manicures, pedicures, new shoes (one of his classmates convinced her dad to buy her a pair of $700 shoes, which the boys found utterly ridiculous), and new hairstyles, the glamour of it all is highly appealing to girls (who have all been sold Cinderella stories). Boys just tend to show up for the dancing and camaraderie, which isn’t novel at all, despite it never really getting old. While they were supposed to be out tuxedo shopping they were in my backyard sparring with each other like mixed martial arts fighters and videotaping it for their other friends to see. They didn’t have to get dressed up and admission to my backyard is free. Plus, the refrigerator was stocked.
So girls want that Cinderella experience and boys just want to box. I saw on the news that many parents are planning to spend a small fortune on prom for their daughters, equating it to a mini-wedding. How sad. As if to say “we’d better do this now, while we can because who knows if you’ll ever get married,” putting way too much importance on pomp and circumstance. The pageantry of it all will have at least half of these girls needing a shrink before they’re 30. So actually, it’s kind of a relief for me that my boy doesn’t need the type of validation and attention that teenaged girls crave. He’d actually rather SAVE me money than spend it. I guess I had him pegged all wrong, lol. Anyway, I’m glad that cultural mores have changed a bit and this generation’s kids aren’t feeling as much pressure and anxiety to fit the same mold we’ve been cramming ourselves into since the 50s. After all, it’s just a party.
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