White Ribbon Week is inspired by the week of drug and alcohol prevention, Red Ribbon Week. What’s different about this week is the prevention and awareness of the “dangers” and “destruction” caused by pornography. The White Ribbon Week tradition began last year and works about the same as Red Ribbon week, where there’s activities and free candy to butter the kids up with sugar instead of shots, but Red Ribbon Week is more need than this ridiculous attempt to tell kids how to live and make decisions in their personal lives.
White Ribbon Week is flawed in more ways than one. It makes you wonder how this can be pulled off correctly without being hypocritical and brainwashing to the student body. To start, the music they obnoxiously play during lunch is from controversial, overly sexually artists like Rihanna and LMFAO. How is playing music from these artists encouraging us to stay away from porn when the music playing has an underlying message of sexual activities and adultery? “Blow” by Ke$ha isn’t going to help back up your plan on having students stay away from porn when their ears are exposed to overly sexual songs like this one. With lyrics like “Go, go, go, go insane/Go insane/Throw some glitter/Make it rain on him/Let me see them Hanes/Let me, let me see them Hanes”, you’re not doing a very good job at making this week successful.
Not only is this apparent in popular music, but modern advertisements, television shows, and even some books use the philosophy of “sex sells” and use that to their advantage. People say to stay away from porn, but say nothing about the messed up society we live in, with the media objectifying women and creating stereotypes that affect how teenagers, or at least the gullible ones, into thinking that doing things like that will be acceptable in the real world. Besides, why can’t we focus on more important matters than this? With the world in the condition it’s in, why can’t we have a week to focus on what’s actually going on outside of the bubble that is Kaysville? Why does pornography need to be addressed when the culture that we live in doesn’t even support any lusty material or sexual deviance in the first place? There are many alternatives to replace White Ribbon week, like a week to prevent violence, with is more accepted into this world and is nonchalantly publically displayed. As clique as that idea is, if it was done right, it would be more effective than this week has ever been.
To step it up a bit on the argument of why this week is a waste of time, White Ribbon Week only started because of a sermon delivered by a pastor in Butler, PA, so what does it have to do with a school all the way out here? What’s also influenced WRW and intensified its “importance” is the incident at Farmington Jr. High in 2008 with students sending racy pictures to each other that caused controversial chaos statewide, plaguing all of the news stations for months on end. After this happened, parents began their personal paranoia about their children’s cell phone activity and even went to the extreme by disabling sending media messages out to their friends. Ever since, the WRW has parents brainwashing their kids with shock value facts pasted around the school and discretely hinting to the students to “remember what happened at Farmington Jr.!” It’s a lame excuse, first of all, with an event that happened years ago that should’ve been buried down underground, and secondly, it feels as though instead of realizing that this was the student’s own decisions, they’re focusing on how teenagers are totally exposed to the temptation to do it and just can’t resist on doing it when that’s not even true and making ugly assumptions. Also with these facts around the school, how can they be trusted when there’s no resource or citation to go along with it?
On this subject, as much as people at Davis High don’t want to talk about this subject, your sex life is your own business and always has been, whatever your beliefs or decisions are on that subject. To those teenagers who are buzzing with hormones and sexual curiosity, attempts to muffle them and have kids “figure it out on their own” is illogical, and in a way, fueling conservative beliefs. As long as not taken to the extremes or hurting anyone else, why should it matter? No education on sex can actually cause more problems than teaching the kids of reality of what happens with unprotected sex and the true, raw facts that will get them to make the right decisions upon the subject instead of being scared when put into a situation relating to it. That really should be what White Ribbon Week should be about instead of scaring them to a point where they never ask about what’s wrong and right, having them pay when they’re older and clueless on what happens or what will happen when getting involved in sexual activities when they believe that they are ready.
In short, White Ribbon Week is just a way to get teenagers to be fearful of something that people should be educated about and a thing that people do every day, because let’s be honest, that’s how your parents created you and brought you upon this Earth, as much as that thought disturbs you. White Ribbon Week is really weak in its objective and needs to be double checked on what really needs to be achieved here. White Ribbon Week could be successful if done right, but ever since it’s started here at Davis High, no one has seen any change on the student’s ideas and beliefs on the topic.
