The Wall Street Journal reports that high schools across the U.S. are preventing teens from reaching their full sexy potential this prom season by banning dresses that flaunt their hot young teen parts.

And what, apart from nature/hormones/the way Aaron looks with his hair pushed back (sexy) is compelling teens to dress so revealingly? According to the experts and just about any person you might ask off the street: Hollywood.

Specifically, old-ass Hollywood. The Journal singles out Jennifer Lopez (age 42), the casts of the various Real Housewives franchises (most of whom appear to be in at least their late-sixties), and teen-favorite television program Dancing With The Stars (my Nana loves it but she doesn't know who anyone is) as major inspirations behind sexy teens' less-is-more sartorial aesthetic.

Now, in order to get the message across to students they are not allowed to emulate their favorite premenopausal celebrities' sexed up style of dress, administrators are putting together image-heavy PowerPoint presentations and throwing up posters illustrating banned looks.

While it might, at first, seem counter-productive to plaster the hallways with photos of beautiful models in skimpy formalwear, decorating the school with the precisely the kind of lustful imagery administrators are hoping to avoid on prom night, you can't argue that these kids are dumb dumb dumb, dumb as doornails, dumb as their number one fashion icon Alexis from the Real Housewives of Orange County, dumber in fact, because she has an elegant line of non-couture couture acrylic dresses and they are putting a strip of duct tape over their nips and calling it "chic, prom-appropriate fashion." And, unfortunately, these dum-dums only respond to pixxx.

As one Algebra teacher and "junior class co-sponsor" (?) from Oklahoma City put it to the paper:

"Words don't mean much to [the students.] They had to see the pictures."

In actuality, the rules these schools are peddling aren't all that absurd: no fabric cut-outs below the bust line ("flesh touching flesh below the bust" to use the administrators' own, vaguely erotic, wording), no hemlines higher than three inches above the knee, no boob-baring deep-Vs in front, no ass-baring deep-Us in back. Pretty standard stuff.

The oddest item on any of the guidelines available on the Journal's website comes, as surely a great many odd things must, from Sunnyvale, Texas, where the local high school has also instituted a prom-wide ban on "cosmetic contact lenses of a color not natural to a person, or patterned lenses (unless prescribed by a doctor)."

Meaning that Texas' most popular teens have only a few short weeks to sweet-talk a doctor into writing them a prescription for some tight flame-pattern contacts.

Aside from that: cover your bits for an hour and have fun at the clothing-optional after prom parties, kids.

[Image via Shutterstock]