Students.

Daughters and sons.

Freshman.

Jaguars.

Students, checking their Instagram feed, expecting smiling faces and wholesome content were met with a list ranking attractiveness that stripped away their individuality and personality, to be rendered down from human to a digit.

People are being reduced from human being to a single number, a single digit that constitutes their worth. Socially affluent freshman are being ranked from 1-50 on a list of conventional attractiveness.The individual who did this may have been grasping for their five minutes of fame, but have unearthed an underlying societal issue of objectifying others and judging humans solely based on conventional beauty norms. In this pained society, the last thing we need is to discount human worth even more. This account is participating in defamation of character by making false claims of ‘hot or not’. Ranking others causes harm emotionally and socially to those who were and weren’t ranked. This can take part in damaging reputations.

I wholeheartedly oppose rcranks and their actions. I am appalled by the level of disrespect for human decency portrayed in their posts. People aren’t mere objects to be written up like a grocery list. Not only was there one account that ranked the top 50 freshman girls and boys, but there was a copycat account created that ranked soley girls. These students were ranked without giving their consent to rcranks. Relatable RC even took part in this matter and made a post opposing the rcranks accounts. Nicholas Bogani 22’ was ranked on the list and opposed it. “I was shocked…I mean I don’t know how they came up with this information. There’s no one hottest person,” Bogani said.

Elise Barton 22’ who was following the chain of events that transpired was upset by the list.“I think it’s pretty mean and unfair because they’re basically just rating like the most popular people in the grade. It’s kind of saying that the rest of the people are inferior. People are just really mean to each other,” Barton said.

The individual who created this rank of freshman may have thought they were helping to make a few popular students feel better about themselves or created this list to make themselves feel more socially successful. Obviously, their possible intentions have made people who are and aren’t on the list feel bad about themselves. There is no positive to come out of creating this list and it has only had negative ramifications which include hundreds of student comments demanding that the lists and accounts are taken down. “Whoever created this account is despicable. I really, really hope you take this account down. Labeling and giving girls numbers is horrifying! If you do have some kind of messed up opinions, fine. But don’t voice them. You are taking something society is trying to move away from and applying it to highschool freshman. No one cares…You have no right to be ranking girls on their appearance. No one likes it, not even the girls on the list,” Madeline Conrad 21’ commented in an Instagram comment on the list from rcranks2.

I feel that this ranking being on a widespread social media platform, Instagram, more people are able to see this list, including Future Jags. This can damage the reputation of our school in the eyes of Future Jags and make our school environment unwelcoming. “Well I think it’s kinda ridiculous and this kind of thing is something that elementary schoolers normally do. The only positive effect this could possibly have is an esteem boost for the people who ranked high. It does make me angry that a group of people would make such a childish list,” Future Jag, Jamie Kim 23’ said.

I propose that everyone reports the accounts to Instagram and school administration to be taken down and the person responsible for them faces the appropriate consequences. As a student body, we need to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. There was a student attractiveness ranking list during current freshmen’s time in Rocky Heights Middle School, and it happened again. We need to discourage students from this behavior and give them a reality check. We are the future leaders of this country and if we continue to behave years below our age, we have a grim future ahead of us. I believe that we can do better and be better. We need to grow and learn from this lapse in judgement and work on treating others better and showing respect to our peers.