https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...ale-classmates-based-looks-girls-fought-back/
Yasmin Behbehani had just walked into her third-period health class when her friend asked her if she had seen the list.
“There’s a list of the girls’ names,” her friend Nicky Schmidt, a fellow senior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, said. “And we’re ranked.”
Behbehani didn’t want to see the list, or know whether she was on it. She had spent the past four years recovering from an eating disorder, working hard to avoid comparing herself with others, she said. But by her sixth-period class on that Monday earlier this month, a text message appeared on her phone with a screenshot of the list, typed out on the iPhone Notes app.
It included the names of 18 girls in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School’s International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, ranked and rated on the basis of their looks, from 5.5 to 9.4, with decimal points to the hundredth place. There, with a number beside it, was Behbehani’s name.
A group of male students in their program created the list more than a year ago, but it resurfaced earlier this month, through text messages and whispers during class. One male classmate, seeing the name of his good friend Nicky Schmidt on the list, told her about it, and within 24 hours, dozens of girls had heard about the list.
They felt violated, objectified by classmates they considered their friends. They felt uncomfortable getting up to go to the bathroom, worried that the boys might be scanning them and “editing their decimal points,” said Lee Schwartz, one of the other senior girls on the list.
“Knowing that my closest friends were talking to me and hanging out with me but under that, silently numbering me, it definitely felt like a betrayal,” Schwartz said. “I was their friend, but I guess also a number.”
But there is power in numbers, too. Dozens of senior girls decided to speak up to the school administration and to their male classmates, demanding not only disciplinary action in response to the list but a schoolwide reckoning about the toxic culture that allowed it to happen.
That same Monday, a group of girls reported the list to an administrator, who encouraged the students not to talk about it around school, Schmidt said. The next day, the girls learned that after an investigation, school officials decided to discipline one male student with in-school detention for one day, which would not show up on his record.
Bethesda-Chevy Chase’s principal, Donna Redmond Jones, said an investigation revealed the list was made during school hours, and that “there was definitely discipline applied,” in line with the district’s code of conduct but that she could not give any more information because of privacy concerns.
Unsatisfied with the disciplinary action, Schmidt texted about 15 girls she knew, and told them to tell all of their friends to show up at the school’s main office the next day during lunch, “to tell them we feel unsafe in this environment and we are tired of this toxicity,” Schmidt wrote in her text.
About 40 senior girls showed up, packing into an assistant principal’s office as Schmidt read a statement she had written.
