In life, there are a lot of double standards.
And they’re no stranger to the Florida A&M University campus.
Every couple of weeks, the modeling and dance troupes on campus put on a show, and all I heard (before actually attending one) was how risqué performers danced and dressed. Wanting to see if this was really true, I went to a dance team tryout and a modeling show.
When I went to the dance troupe audition, I was in awe. It was a little better than I expected. It wasn’t the ballet, but beautiful women were dancing-provocatively. All the other guys there looked like they were enjoying the show, too.
About a week later, I went to a modeling show. Some of the models were dressed fairly decent, while others-well I’ll just say from a male’s perspective, I liked what I saw.
But something was puzzling me. The reaction from the women in the audience made me think about the performances.
From what I saw, there were three categories of women who attended the show. The girls who wanted to be on stage, friends of girls on stage and girls who were there with their friends to criticize the people on stage.
The latter went to the show to deliberately make fun of the ones performing. They knocked their clothes, walk, look…just name it and they talked about it.
“She is showing too much, skin.”
“She needs to work on her walk.”
“Like they look like models?”
What’s so funny is the same girls who talk about the dancers and models will go see one of the male dance teams and the conversations will sound completely different.
When one of the male dance groups performed two weeks ago, I didn’t attend.
But I might as well have because I definitely heard about it. All of the girls kept gushing over how the guys had on thongs. I couldn’t understand how they could talk about the female performers for doing their thing when the guys were doing more sexually explicit stuff than the girls.
These are the kinds of double standards that really bother me. Students say it’s alright for guys to be sexual, but knock the girls for doing the same thing.
Even in terms of dating, guys are called pimps when they have a lot of women and girls are called hoes.
I just hope we quit talking negatively about what our peers are doing when we don’t have the courage to go get involved, and try to change what’s seemingly wrong.
If you are not a part of the solution, then you’re a part of the problem.
Royle King is a freshman broadcast journalism student from Dallas. Contact him at royle_04@hotmail.com.