In today’s society, we should be educated enough to put gender aside when it comes to things as trivial as school dances. Who asks who to a dance shouldn’t be a problem. That’s why the Sadie Hawkins Dance is outdated.

Some may  think of Sadie’s as an opportunity for girls to take charge and be bold by doing the asking. But the origins of the tradition prove otherwise, and are offensive too.

The tradition of the Sadie Hawkins dance was started by a comic strip, “Li’l Abner”, where an ugly “old maid” named Sadie Hawkins was getting too old to be without a husband. Her father came up with the idea of having a day where Sadie would literally chase after all the eligible bachelors and “marry up” whoever she could catch.

The man she caught was legally bound as a husband to Sadie, whether he liked it or not. The idea caught on with  all the unmarried women of the fictional town Dogpatch in “Li’l Abner,” and it became a mandatory event. In the comic strip, which ran from 1934 to 1977, it was named Sadie Hawkins’ Day.

In the United States and Canada, people began applying the concept of Sadie Hawkins’ Day to dance events, where a girl had the chance to ask a guy, rather than wait around to be asked. In fact, by 1952, there were an estimated 40,000 Sadie Hawkins dances that had taken place.

High school and college campuses adopted the dance as a “women-empowerment” rite, but if you look beyond the surface, that’s not the case.

Maybe people think that it’s empowering to women for there to be a day where they can ask guys to a dance. But if we didn’t have a patriarchal norm where it’s guys who ask girls, we wouldn’t need a special day where girls can turn the tables.

If the “Li’l Abner” cartoonist, Al Capp, was presenting such sexist ideas, like being an unmarried woman is shameful, why should we celebrate his work?

We shouldn’t. A man with such little respect for women shouldn’t be behind a day that’s supposedly for empowering them.

Sadie’s isn’t just an issue concerning feminism; it affects members of the LGBTQ+ community as well. In a gay couple, who asks who? What about a lesbian couple? For genderqueer kids, who identify as neither of the binary female or male genders, Sadie’s makes asking much more difficult than anything needs to be. At SCHS, there are plenty of LGBTQ+ couples that have to deal with this dilemma.

To solve these issues, here is a simple solution: ask whoever you want to whatever dance you want, regardless of gender. But no matter what, don’t chase after your prospective date, as Sadie did.

School dances shouldn’t make things so hard and complicated. After all, asking your crush to a school dance is hard and complicated enough. Sadie’s has got to go.