Well this is just plain mean.  An all-girls high school in Staten Island is making girls bring a date to their junior prom. Or else they can't go.

Back when I was a senior at my all-girls high school, a quintillion years ago (seriously, it's amazing I can even type with my aged, gnarled fingers), the Hunt For The Prom Date was taken as seriously as getting into college. I hadn’t bothered to ask any guy friends to any of the other dances, but I was not missing prom.

So I asked a nice but nerdy guy who was kind enough to scrape up cash for tux rental and a corsage on his college student's budget and then I was less than nice to him. Still a major blot on my karmic record. Almost all of my little posse went with guys we brought just to have a date, and it's a tossup as to who had a worse time, us or them.

See, back in my day, we didn’t think about going with friends. So I think it is fabulous that girls today are independent and smart enough to realize they'd have more fun with a group of friends than with a guy who's there strictly as a date.

This smacks of either homophobia – what if girls on a quasi-date get infected with The Gay? Quelle horreur! – or the apparently epidemic terror of teenage girls left  to their own devices.  Which I can tell you is a hell of a lot more tame than what even the most platonic of hetero couples might get into on prom night.