I just don’t get it… Why is that important, especially for kids now, that feel like they need to do a YouTube video asking for a date or doing some meme stuff. Some teens even hire the hottest celebrity or ask them to appear in their prom? This is so bizarre for me, all that just for a frivolous night.
In my country prom was a thing but nowhere near as theatrical, I didn’t went to either my prom trip or the party. Also skipped half of my middle school trips.
It’s ridiculous and goes along with the gender reveal parties and outrageous destination bachelor/ette parties. Opportunities to post pics of yourself and say ‘look how cool i am’.
Haterade
I though that as well
Have you seen all those high school movies? The US is obsessed with high school. I guess prom is just part of that.
That’s like asking why people celebrate holidays.
That’s all it is. It’s a holiday that’s just for teens.
The USA is what we call the Great American Melting Pot. A bunch of cultures stripped of their cultural practices as much as possible.
It means we have very little in the way of innate cultural practices. Which is why we cling to things like sports, fast food, pop music, (much of which isn’t ours, but anyway), military celebrations; because we’re desperately trying to find ceremonial right of passage/cultural identity. We are a blank slate.
We don’t have a quince, we don’t have a bat mitzvah, we have prom. It’s stupid, but it’s ours.
Tbf, being a melting pot also means all those cultures impact and influence “ours.” Plenty of Americans have bat mitzvahs, for instance, of course they’d be particularly the ones that are Jewish, but plenty of Americans also observe Ramadan. We have a lack of cohesive culture because we’re not just one cohesive “people,” yet we all are under the banner of “American.”
Our country is a melting pot, and so “our culture” is too, made up of pieces immigrants have brought with them from everywhere in the world. I think it’s pretty cool, personally.
Or to put it concisely: “even the fascists eat kebabs”
Yes yes I’m a fascist because I was born in a place you don’t like and appreciate the cultures others have decided to share with us. Does it get tiring, being a contrarian just for the sake of it?
Hey, I was agreeing with you. If even the far-right consume the foods of the very cultures they rally against, then those cultures have already assimilated into the public’s unconscious
Ah I misunderstood, my mistake.
“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.”
-Tyler Durden
You have fun with all that! I otoh am going to eat shwarma, then hit the mexican ice cream truck for dessert. Maybe watch some anime after that with my friend from Prague.
Tbf that’s a better explanation than any other I’ve heard.
I disagree we have everything that everyone has because we have everyone living here it’s just celebrated by whoever wants to celebrate what. Stop making it sound like a couple hundred year old country doesn’t have ceremonies we cherish.
Whoosh
The main thing is that prom didn’t start to become big until the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present. Prom and Homecoming were the exception, so for the teens this was a big deal. The biggest thing you notice looking at the dances of this time period is that the dresses are relatively simple, because it really wasn’t that big of a deal back then.
Then, those kids grew up, had kids of their own, started making movies, and on doing so impressed on the following generation that homecoming and prom were the most fun nights in all of high school. This created pressure to make your proms and homecomings be as cool as the ones your parents told you about. This led to a lot more effort being put in. Dresses got way more expensive, tuxes became pretty much mandatory, guys began doing elaborate prom-posals.
This created a big economic opening in the market. Somebody needs to make colorful dresses for the girls and tuxes for the guys. The wedding industry immediately took over this area, and homecoming and prom became rush time for that industry. Somebody needs to play music. Back in the 50s they would hire bands, but by the 70s and 80 we started getting disc jockeys and now the party dj industry is fully enmeshed in high school dances. Then there’s the decorations, which became themeing, which feeds into the party industry.
Now you have the cultural snowball rolling downhill, building up speed, slowly getting bigger. It is encouraged by a growing industry that advertises to teens how cool their prom will be if they just wear this dress, and then social media happened. Now teens are advertising prom to each other, and feeling they need to be better than that TikTok they saw earlier, so the social pressure to have the coolest prom ever is more ubiquitous that it has ever been.
Funny, in Australia we have school dances and they don’t get anything like American proms, with the possible exception of girls’ debutante balls which we dress up for
The US in nutshell here
We really are in our “let them eat cake” era
the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present.
Perhaps this was a regional thing.
I was born in 1970, but from what my parents have described, dates were not chaperoned in the 50s unless you happened to have particularly strict parents. Like maybe if you were Amish or something.
Here’s the only thing I was able to find online about dating in the 50’s
Thanks. Gonna edit my comment since another commenter said he was going to save my comment to copy-paste later if it becomes relevant. I dont want to spread misinformation.
Thoroughly explained and well supported. I want to save this in case this topic ever comes up again so I can copy-pasta this.
👍🏽 thank you
It’s an important social event for teenagers. It affords a time for teens to dress up and look extra nice and make some coming of adult age decisions like asking your crush to dance, abstaining from peer pressure, etc.
It’s an event for teens to be feel special, have fun and to exercise self control. College comes quickly after and a lot of them are studying for finals and so on so it’s a good way to blow off steam.
Ultimately, just another cultural implementation. Other countries have similar events I can only imagine
It’s sort of a first step into adulthood and just a way of marking a coming of age threshold as people head out into the wider world.
Most proms aren’t that crazy, I think the real thing you’re noticing is more the distorting effecf social media can have on any cultural tradition or practice. You’re seeing people who would go overboard about anything they thought might get them attention. Kind of like people who have insane weddings, the majority of people still have totally normal weddings for the most part.
Yeah it’s important to remember that social media has a distorting effect and shouldn’t be confused for reality. The things you see on social media have passed a certain filter. Namely that the person sharing it believed it ought to be shared. This alone means that viewing the world through social media will hide a lot of the mundanity and normality that actually is out there all around us.
most proms are held in a the gym with a shitty dj and shitty catered food. but you’re not gonna see that portrayed in media. parents drop them off, there are no limos.
Here they are big, catered events in a rented venue with expensive tickets, limos, etc. Friends daughter has several ~$500 dresses. I don’t understand how or why.
It goes to show the socioeconomic differences. The more affluent kids at my school went all out. There was expensive outfits, limos, and after parties at other venues. For others it was just mom dropping them off at the vanilla school hosted event and that’s it.
Most US kids skip prom as well but there is a lot of pressure to go and have someone to bring. Honestly its not as big a thing as TV/movies makes it.
I don’t know, why do Japanese schools have culture festivals? Is it not enough to say that some countries have different cultural norms and traditions?
There’s also a lot of variance within the US. In some towns prom is huge. In my home town it wasn’t as much. Many students elected not to go at all.
For a lot of high school seniors, prom is the last big event before graduation. It’s an event where you can hang out with a lot of your classmates away from school and parents and such. There aren’t too many opportunities to just hang out for a lot of teens, what with the homework and extra curricular activities and such occupying a lot of their free time. That being said, it’s not uncommon for people to skip the prom and some schools make it a bigger deal than others.
You’re only seeing the most outrageous edge cases. It’s a weird kind of survivorship bias.
Prom was kinda like graduation to me. It’s a school event, I mostly went because it was important to someone else, and it’s a very common and relatable event in American life. All in, it was a waste of 50 bucks and a few good hours of gaming/relaxing with my GF.
Prom is part of the culture and teenage experience here. Some people are more into it than others. It’s ok not to totally understand or like it. I’m sure there are things that we don’t understand about other places too.
Thanks to COVID, we didn’t get to have a prom. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything.
It of course varries from one school or area to another, and from different age groups.
I ended up going to 4 proms, my own junior and senior proms, the senior prom my junior year because a girl asked me, and then I ended up dating a girl at another high school after I graduated and ended up going to her senior prom (in case anyone’s getting skeeved at that, we were both 18 at the time we started dating, just a few months difference between us, I just barely made the cutoff to be part of the previous grade and she just missed it)
That last prom was the only one where I was actually dating my date, the other 3 we just went as friends, although I did have a pretty big crush on the girl I took to both of my own proms but could never quite work up the nerve to ask her out.
There were never any elaborate promposals or anything, that was just starting around that time and hadn’t quite caught on yet, my sister a couple years behind me did it, nothing too elaborate I think she gave her friend a cake and balloons.
The promposal thing is mostly just that it’s silly and fun, and nowadays I guess it probably makes for a funny tiktok.
Prom was not a particularly big deal in my area, if I had to attach any particular significance to it, it’s just that it’s kind of your first “adult” formal event that you’re attending for your own sake, not because you’re going to a cousins wedding, not something like your first communion or bar mitzvah or whatever when you’re still very much a kid. You get to dress up, you get a fancy meal, you rent a limo, maybe you go to a cool post-prom party and you’re going to be out till the wee hours of the morning mostly left to your own devices. It’s fun for its own sake, and the kind of event most teens don’t really get to experience very often.
