Mississippi Prom Lawsuit and the Broader Significance of the High School Prom in American Culture

As an American ex-pat living in London, the tale of my high school prom has been my go-to party story for some time. When all else fails, I find that Brits are reliably fascinated by a firsthand account of the unique American coming-of-age ritual that they've gleaned knowledge of from repeated watching of John Hughes movies and the Taylor Swift music video where she's totally nerdy until she takes her glasses off and turns up at the dance, totally transformed.

I tell them all of the bizarre details: the complex social machinations around who would go to the dance with who; the principal who greeted us at the entrance so that he could smell our breath to ensure that we hadn't been drinking; the rusty limousine that was provided by the school to drive those of us who were too poor to rent our own from the high school parking lot to the red carpet - yes, the red carpet - where we made our entrances.

'What's that flower thing you wear on your wrist called?' they say. 'A bricolage?'

'A corsage,' I reply.

'Wow,' they say. 'America is so weird.'

Outside the US, and with the wisdom of ten years since I danced around a gym in a silver gown made from stiff polyester silk, I too can see that the prom is pretty weird. But reading about the current lawsuit being brought on behalf of the ACLU against a Mississippi high school that has cancelled its prom, rather than deal with one female student, Constance McMillen, who simply wishes to attend the evening with her girlfriend.

To non-Americans a formal party for high schoolers must seem an odd battleground for civil rights. Yet every year a similar story hits the headlines, of teenagers who are outsiders in their communities - because of their sexual orientation, or their skin colour - striving for inclusion in this perculiar American ritual, which is at once enshrined in our culture for its conservation of heteronormative, old-fashioned values and the opportunity it presents for teenagers to do their best to ride roughshod over those values. It doesn't matter that it's old-fashioned and weird: the prom remains one of the most significant and central tropes of what it is to grow up in America, and as a result even the kids on the fringes of their community because of their deviation from white bread values are keen to participate and feel a sense of failure if they don't. My friends who didn't go to the prom, most of whom are now engaged or married and in impressive careers, still mention the film that they went to see that night as a sort of consolation prize - the Sandra Bullock stinker, Hope Floats, as if it is a symbol of their now long-gone social failure.

Prom night is sex and drugs and alcohol clad in chiffon and Puritanism; communities celebrating their children standing on the edge of adulthood, and the edge of sexual maturity, by photographing them in sophisticated simulations of adult formal clothing of an elaborateness that they will be unlikely to wear again until they get married, while accompanied by members of the opposite sex, while simultaneously being strongly discouraged to engage in the adult activities that the outfits and settings - country clubs, hotels, the back seats of limousines - are most suitable for.

And, of course, like all other micro-managed, highly-imagined social events, the prom is frequently a disappointment - expensive, uncomfortable, and deflating, especially for young girls who are sold a night of romance only to find that the boys who escort them are not transformed into charming princes simply by being winched into ill-fitting suits that their mothers have rented for them from American Tuxedo. But in communities across America - and it is notable that the prom is one ritual that seems to be performed throughout all regions of the country, despite their other many cultural disparities - we go on marking this anachronistic celebration of American anxieties about teenage sexuality.

Constance McMillen should, like any patriotic high school student, have the opportunity to engage in this most American of humiliating experiences. But I'd be willing to bet that if Constance is admitted into that crepe paper-festooned banquet room, where she will have the right to rub shoulders with classmates who neck cheap bourbon from hip flasks that they've stolen from the parents, she too will look back on it in a few years as a strange, disappointing, and slightly surreal introduction to American adulthood.