High school girls fight back after male classmates rank their looks
Earlier this month, news broke that male students at a Maryland high school created and circulated a list ranking 18 of their female classmates based on their looks. Now, the female students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School are working to snuff out this type of misogyny at their campus and hope that such a message will be spread globally.
The list, which was created last year but resurfaced recently through text messages, ranked the appearances of 18 senior girls in the school’s International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme on a scale of 5.5 to 9.4, according to Today.
“Knowing that my friends, my closest peers in my community, had created that list felt like the ultimate betrayal,” senior Lee Schwartz told Today. “That I could hang out with them every day and talk to them but, under that, I was still a number.”
School officials said the boys who created the list were disciplined as per the school system’s code of conduct, but many students felt the punishment did not fit the crime. Students revealed that the one boy who was part of the group that created the list served just a day of in-school suspension and that it would not be entered onto his record, the Washington Post reported.
Student Yasmin Behbehani, one of the dozens of girls at the school standing up against the list, told the Washington Post, “It was the last straw… We’re the generation that is going to make a change.”
Senior Nicky Schmidt texted 15 girls she knew and told them to spread the word to others to show up to the school’s main office the following day during lunch, the Washington Post reported. She and the other students joining her wanted to tell the administration that they felt “unsafe in this environment” and that they were “tired of this toxicity.”
With about 40 girls by her side, Schmidt read a prepared statement. “We should be able to learn in an environment without the constant presence of objectification and misogyny,” it read in part.
Following the leaking of the ranking, nearly all the students in the IB program – male and female – sat in a conference room for two and a half hours to discuss the situation. During the time, female students described their feelings regarding the list, and previous experiences with sexual abuse, harassment and objectification.
The student credited with creating the list took responsibility during the meeting and stood up to apologize for any hurt he caused. The student, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Post, “It’s just a different time and things really do need to change. This memory is not going to leave me anytime soon.”
Yahoo Lifestyle reached out to Bethesda Chevy-Chase High Schol for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
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