Pranks and the Rape Culture

[Trigger warning for bullying/child abuse, incest, sexual violence.]

Yesterday, I wrote about a school-sanctioned parental prank at a high school in Minnesota, in which sports captains were blindfolded and promised a special kiss from a classmate, but were instead kissed by their parents. In the video of the incident, parents can be seen planting big smooches on their kids; one parent-child couple rolls around on the floor, and one mom grabs her son's hand and puts it on her butt. The entire scene is played for huge laughs.

Shaker Demivierge dropped into comments the link to an editorial in the local newspaper, which runs interference on behalf of the school and parents. There's a lot of minimizing and excuse-making and finger-wagging at anyone who takes issue with the "prank," and then there's this pathetic admonishment not to believe your lying eyes:

The parents hammed it up as they played their part. At least, we assume nobody was making out as intensely as the video seems to show. [Rosemount High School principal John Wollersheim] and others who were there say they weren't, and we tend to believe them. Parents have taken the opportunity at many other RHS pep fests to make their kids a little uncomfortable, but we suspect they'd all draw the line at the kind of passionate kisses the video seemed to show.

Just casually assuming that every parent would "draw the line" at sexual intimacy with hir own child is absurd. I also wrote yesterday about the CDC survey which found that "Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives," and, of those survivors, 42.2% of female victims experienced their first completed rape before age 18, and 27.8% of male victims experienced their first rape when they were 10 years of age or younger. Over half of all survivors reported being raped by someone they knew.

Some of those children who were raped by someone they knew were raped by their parents. And many more will have been subjected to inappropriate sexual contact that doesn't meet the technical definition of rape.

Do the editors of the Rosemount TownPages believe that a parent who sexually abuses hir child will self-select out of a public event at which they have been given license to make out with hir kid? Because that's not how abusers work. That there was even a chance that a parent who's sexually abused hir kid just got an official stamp of approval from mandated reporters to go for it should underline how incredibly inappropriate this incident was, irrespective of what it "looked like," or what we might like to assume.

And, listen, I'm not a parent (but I am a daughter), and it's my impression that most parents, even the best ones, sometimes forget what it's like to be a kid. That's not a function of parenting; it's a function of human nature. I forget sometimes what it's like to be a kid, inclined as are we all to cast our minds backwards and look out through the eyes of memory with perspectives and instincts formed in the intervening years.

But I suspect that what constitutes a not-passionate kiss to me now, as an adult woman, would be very different than what constituted a not-passionate kiss to me as a teenage girl. A standard good-night kiss with my husband would have turned my legs to jelly when I was an unsophisticated kid, so new to the world of sexuality that when the math teacher on whom I had a crush gave me an entirely appropriate kiss on the cheek at the end of the year, I nearly fainted. (Or jizzed in my pants. Or both.)

I guess I'm just not sure that what feels not-passionate to a parent who knows zie's kissing hir kid definitely feels the same way to the kid who doesn't know zie's kissing hir parent. And that's is, suffice it to say, a problem.

More Parental Prankery

[Trigger warning for bullying/child abuse and incest.]

If you thought the Jimmy Kimmel Christmas prank was bad (it was! it was sooooo terrible!), get a load of the cool parents at Rosemount High in Minnesota who pranked their kids by blindfolding them and then making out with them: "And these are not just innocent pecks on the lips. The parents are intimately lip-locking their children for several seconds. One even progresses to rolling around on the gym floor. In another instance, a mother moves her son's hand south so he's grasping her butt."

To be clear: The kids were blindfolded. The parents were not. They knew they were kissing their kids, and they laughed uproariously as the kids were further embarrassed by being interviewed about what they thought of the kiss. "Luscious lips," answers one young man, before it is revealed he kissed his mother. My god.

There is video at the link, which I am not going to embed here, and I was pretty skeeved out watching it (to put it mildly). It's terrible enough that these kids were obliged into accepting "a kiss" while blindfolded in the first place, no less that they were "pranked" into kissing their own parents (some of whom might have previously sexually abused their kids). What a horror.

I quite honestly cannot begin to imagine why any parent would participate in this activity.

Now that the video is getting attention, the school has apparently apologized for the prank. Except: Schools who are made aware of the abuse of their students are obliged by law to report it. An apology is not enough. The students of Rosemount High should have some assurance that their school won't help orchestrate their abuse. Remedial mandated reporting for everyone, please.

"Why do I want ponies? They're for girls."

[Trigger warning for bullying/child abuse and gender essentialism.]

So, the other night, Jimmy Kimmel aired a segment which compiled viewers' video responses to his latest challenge for parents to pull holiday-related trickery on their children, after his "film your kids' reaction after telling them you ate all their Halloween candy" segment went viral last month. This challenge was to wrap up some random garbage and give it to kids as an early Christmas present.

I find this entire thing really troubling, because pranks are a form of bullying even between peers, and a prank played by someone in a position of power, especially a parent pranking a child, is bullying that can fundamentally undermine trust.

So I normally wouldn't even give this any attention, except that I thought it was very interesting (where "interesting" = "fucked up") how many parents interpreted "give your kid a crap gift" as "give your son a girl's item," and what effect that had on the boys who received them. Yikes.

Post-feminist world, etc.

Jimmy Kimmel: Last week, I issued a challenge: I asked the parents of America to pull a little holiday trick on their children—we did this on Halloween with candy, and it got a lot of response to it, so we did it again, this time for Christmas—I asked parents to tell their kids they were going to let them open one present a few weeks early, but instead of a good present, I said, "Put something the kids won't like in the box," and then upload the video of that to YouTube, labeled "Hey, Jimmy Kimmel, I gave my kids a terrible present," and a lot of people did do this, and, um, they did give their kids terrible presents, and a lot of the kids, surprisingly, reacted poorly to that.

Clip of two little white boys opening presents; one unwraps a half-drunk bottle of juice and whines, "I don't like this!"

Clip of a white girl opening a present; she unwraps an old, brown banana. "What is it?" asks Mom from behind the camera. "An old banana," the girl says. "Isn't that exciting?" Mom asks. "No," replies the girl. She holds it up, sqooshes it, eats it.

Clip of two white girls who have just opened an onion and a battery. "Wow, a battery and an onion!" Dad says from behind the camera. The girl who opened the onion flops over and begins to cry. "What's wrong?" asks Dad. The other little girl says, "We don't want a onion!" Dad asks the crying girl, "Did you smell your onion? Here, smell it." She cries. "No, I smelled it!"

Clip of a white and/or Latin@ boy and girl opening presents; he unwraps a hotdog and she unwraps a carton of eggs. The little girl starts cracking an egg to see if there's anything inside.

Clip of three white children, a boy and two girls, opening presents. The little boy holds up a pink activity book. Deeply aggrieved, he complains, "I got a girl activity book with stickers!" Angry now, he adds: "I'M NOT A GIRL!" His sister, who got some "boy" gift, says, "And I'm not a boy!" Their sister adds: "I'm not a boy, either!" The boy begins to cry: "This is the worst present ever."

Clip of a white girl and a white boy; the girl has just unwrapped a half-eaten sandwich. She has an exchange with Mom, behind the camera, about how she likes Mom's cooking, so Mom thought she'd like the sandwich. The little girl replies she meant when Mom cooks things like "Hot Pockets." The boy offers to eat the sandwich.

Clip of a little boy of color opening a Hello Kitty sweater. "You stinking parents!" he shouts, throwing it down. He charges Dad behind the camera. "Take it back!" he shouts. "I want a refund." Later in the video, he is seen tantruming, extremely upset, about having received a girls' sweater.

Clip of a white boy unwrapping a half-eaten sandwich. "It's a half-eaten sandwich!" exclaims Mom from behind the camera. "Isn't that what you asked for?!" The little boy replies, "No, I asked for toys!" and throws the sandwich across the room.

Clip of three black children, a girl and two boys, opening presents. From behind the camera, Mom says, "What did you get, Jason? Some black beans, cheese, and a Waffle House hat!" To the little girl, she says, "What's in there?" The little girl pulls out a potato. "Oh, you got a Mister Potato Head!" exclaims Mom. The other son cries and accuses Mom of giving them the terrible gifts.

Clip of four white children, a girl and three boys, opening presents. One boy opens a hammer. Another exclaims, "I got ponies?!" Then, later: "I got ponies. Why do I want ponies? They're for girls." The girl adds, "And I got a stupid book." Mom says, "We thought really hard about what to get you this year." The boy who opened the hammer retorts, "Well, you didn't do a very good job!" The boy who got the ponies complains, "This is the worst Christmas I ever had."

Clip of three children of color, a girl and two boys, opening presents, which are of course terrible. Mom explains, "Well, Jimmy Kimmel told me to do it." Yells one of the boys from the other side of the room, "Well, tell him to suck my balls!"

The audience laughs and cheers. Jimmy Kimmel says: "Noted."

[Via.]