'Hot or Not' ranking of Mount Si High girls under fire -- again



SNOQUALMIE, Wash. -- A local high school is having its own draft of sorts, and it's making a lot of people uncomfortable.

Boys at Mount Si High School rolled out their own online 'Hot or Not' contest of girls at the school -- it's called May Madness.

Some girls are fighting back, saying their names don't belong in brackets.

It's become an annual tradition at Mount Si that girls say just won't go away.

"Yeah, I vote. I just don't really care," said senior James Fleisch. "They are saying they are objectifying women or that it's sexist, but for me it doesn't have anything to do with sex."

It's essentially a bracket on a private Twitter page followed by more than 100 students.

They rate their classmates -- girls like Nicole Wood.

"It's unfair in so many ways," she said, adding that it's impossible to escape it when it's all over social media. "The more you try to stay above it, the harder it becomes to keep yourself out of it. It's almost worse not knowing if you're in it or if you're not."

"Any way around it, it seems like somebody ends up getting their feelings hurt," parent Danna McCall said, adding that bother her daughters have been subjected to the scrutiny.

"Everybody likes to be told they're pretty, but to be voted on it --  and the fact that these girls can't put their name in or out, they just get picked."

Nicole and her friends say it feels more like getting picked on.

"Brackets shouldn't be filled with girls' names," Nicole said.

So some girls are fighting back with their own campaign, including T-shirts.

"The front (of the T-shirt) is an empty bracket, and the back says, Be Above the Madness," Nicole said.

Student Hannah Rovito is also against the bracket, saying the boys "don't understand what effect this has on girls."

"Nore steps need to be taken to shut this down and make the boys realize what consequences are going to happen," she said.

Mount Si High School said the Facebook site has been removed and they are working to shut down the Twitter page, too -- but there are challenges when it comes to monitoring and policing social media.

The school said officials have reached out to as many parents as possible about respecting one another.