Thongs for the Memories

Even though I personally have not been enrolled in high school for two years now (and the last time I actually did work in a high school classroom was four years ago), I read a story recently that reminded me of just how brutal high school can be: a high school girl may have flashed her private parts in a yearbook photo. (In case you don’t believe me for some reason, here’s the story) Basically, the story is that some junior was sitting down in the front row of a group picture for a club and she claims that you can see up her dress, and needless to say she wasn’t wearing any underwear. On the day that seniors received their books, she was informed by some of them that her vagina appeared more times in the yearbook than half the student body. (Haha student body! Get it?)

Of course, all of you that have been through high school know what happened next. Unable to endure the thought of her classmates teasing her, the girl has not been back to school since the incident and her mother is trying to get the school to take all of the yearbooks back and redistribute them without the picture. As of the last time I bothered to any actual fact checking on this story, nothing has happened.

Many of you may now be asking yourself several questions. For instance, why was this girl not wearing any underwear? Well, according to her, she did not want her panty lines to show in the yearbook picture. Because I don’t know about you, but I would rather let the entire school give me a pap smear than have my panty lines showing through my dress. Speaking of pap smears (I bet that’s the first time that sentence has ever been uttered) one of the hot searches on AOL the day this story came out was anal cancer. And no, it’s not people trying to type in keywords for Dick Cheney, it is actually a legit cancer. Apparently, you can do an anal pap smear to test for it. I am not making any of this up I swear, and feel free to subtly drop these interesting facts into conversations with people you are trying to impress.

Anyway, a lot of people sent me this story because of my reputation for not wearing underwear most of the time (which is underserved in my opinion) in the hopes that I will stop. However, there are several key differences between me and this girl. For one, I rarely wear dresses in public, so it doesn’t really matter if I don’t wear underwear. And if I were wearing a dress with no panties (once again, we’re talking hypothetical here), I would probably remember to cross my legs, as the two girls in the picture next to her are. Secondly, I would have taken a different course of action when someone told me about it. (That must have been an awkward conversation by the way. How do you begin to bring it up? “Speaking of pap smears…”). I would have kept it on the down low and tried to say that it wasn’t me in the picture. Yearbooks always have at least one picture on every page where they either butcher the spelling of a name or mix up names, so I could probably get away with that. Except I’m going to bet that as a girl who goes to school commando in a short sundress, everyone can probably identify her vagina in a lineup, if you get what I mean (and if you don’t get what I mean, I mean she is a slut). I realize that this is unfairly stereo-typing someone I don’t even know. I don’t really care. But anyway, this girl does the exact opposite and freaks out and has her mom go and talk to the media so instead of only the school seeing the picture, the entire world can see it. At least if she didn’t freak out, she could have always moved schools and make new friends and spread Chlamydia without everyone knowing vagina as well as her OBGYN. Now no matter where she goes she will be haunted by this incident. Just think of the nicknames: Leave it to Beaver, Flash Gordon, Britney Spears.

But do you know what the saddest thing about all of this is? Most of the people interviewed at the school said that they didn’t think the picture revealed anything. Even the school board said that they believe it is “just a shadow,” (this is kind of creepy, because it implies that the school board held a meeting and examined the picture with magnifying glasses or something). So this whole thing could have been prevented if this girl had shut her legs or her mouth (a strategy Lindsey Lohan should try once in awhile). But I think that through all of this, we’ve all learned a valuable lesson: remember to talk to your loved ones about the importance of regular anal pap smears.