When I was in elementary school, the teachers would put on dances in the gymnasium for 7th and 8th graders to celebrate the major holidays. One year, as some friends and I were leaving the gym at the end of the Halloween dance, I noticed that one of the girls from my class (let's just call her Jennifer since that's actually her real name) was covering her face. As we left the darkness of the converted gymnasium and entered the lit hallway it became clear that she had been crying and was trying to hide her tears. When someone asked her what was the matter, she explained that, throughout the entire party, not a single boy had asked her to dance.
I don't remember being particularly moved by this at the time, but in hindsight it seems clear to me that this girl was the unfortunate victim of the rigid social norms that generally govern male-female relations. The problem wasn't that she was unattractive. I think it's more likely that all her potential dancing partners were either too shy, too scared, or too busy trying to dance with other girls. This could easily have been solved if Jennifer had been given license to be more proactive by asking the guys to dance. But the unwritten rule in my school was that the guy always asks the girl to dance. And herein lies the problem.
Traditionally women have been expected to assume a passive role when it comes to sex and dating. This is true from childhood all the way up to adulthood and even marriage. The most obvious example of this is the marriage proposal. Even among my own group of friends, whom I consider to be fairly progressive, not a single one of my friends' engagements began with the woman proposing to the man. This is in spite of the fact that many of my friends are either engaged or married, and all of the women in these pairings are educated and generally independent. What's worse is that, although couples like these may engage in indirect, casual discussions about the possibility of marriage, and the woman may gain a vague sense of how close her boyfriend is to proposing, she is generally kept in the dark about exactly when the proposal will take place.
Because we've all grown accustomed to this ritual, most of us don't see it as being out of the ordinary. But from the viewpoint of someone who is unversed in these gender protocols, this practice can only be described as bizarre. Think about it... In many cases the couple lives together and they discuss everything from what they'll eat for dinner, to what their next career move should be. Yet when it comes to one of the biggest decisions the couple will ever make, whether or not to get married, the woman is almost entirely left out of the deliberations. It seems to me that this decision ought to be more of a team effort.
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By the way, I just tried looking up the girl from my elementary school's Halloween dance, Jennifer, on facebook (for some reason I actually remember her first and last name). But I wasn't able to find her, which tells me she's either not on facebook (unlikely), or she's since married and changed her last name. The whole name change thing is another tradition I find unnecessary. But I guess it's a step up from never getting asked in the first place.
