Most Likely To Succeed, Neatest Locker, Mr and Mrs Popularity. These are the kind of light-hearted, no-consequence awards you expect to see a High School dish out to their students. One US High School cheerleading program, however, has been forced into an embarrassing backdown after America’s leading civil rights defence agency gave them an absolute pizzling over a pair of cheerleading awards named, respectively, “Big Boobie” and “Big Booty.”
That’s what they were called.
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Tremper High School in Kenosha, Wisconsin – about an hour south of Milwaukee – has sagely decided to retire the awards for both Big Booty and Big Boogie (singular, just the one boobie) after a tersely-worded was issued by, of all people, the American Civil Liberties Union.
The awards were handed out to unidentified actual real-life teenage human females at a banquet last year, in front of staff, family, and fellow students.
Once again: That’s the awards for Big Boobie and Big Booty.
Somehow the situation made it all the way up the ladder to the ACLU without being amended, and as such they conducted a year-long (yes) investigation into the culture and awards at the school, discovered that it had been on-going for at least five years, and sent a seven-page legal smackdown to the school’s district administrators, which included this particularly searing sign off:
For the aforementioned reasons, the ACLU has serious concerns that [Kenosha Unified School District] is enabling sexual harassment in its schools in violation of Title IX, Wisconsin’s Pupil Nondiscrimination Law, and the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. The incidents described all reveal a culture in which female students are objectified and sexualised, rather than valued for their intellect or athleticism. Further, these students are taught that any harassment they suffer is a result of the clothing they wear or their failure to adequately fight back, rather than a perpetrator’s inappropriate behaviour.
And as such, despite remarkably petulant resistance from the school’s principal and cheerleading coach after the story made it to the NEW YORK TIMES, Tremper High’s Big Boobie and Big Booty awards are no more.
Gone but not forgotten. Leave the memories alone. As we go on we remember, etc.
