Cake, cake for Mt. Lebanon High / don't give us cookies, don't give us pie / send the sophomores out for more / and don't let our rivals think we're poor. / We are from Lebo, we are the BEST / we eat more cake than all the rest ...

Most everyone who attended Mt. Lebanon High School during my era sang this fight song at games and pep rallies. The words were tongue-in-cheek, but just barely, and as an expat I can report that a lot of Lebo kids really did think they were the best. Kids from Dormont and Castle Shannon didn't call us "cake-eaters" for nothing.

But now someone's left the cake out in the rain: the "Top 25" rankings published by as-yet-unnamed Mt. Lebanon High School students about female classmates has made the news with a giant splat.

Anyone who dismisses the list with "boys will be boys" has not seen the actual document. It was produced on a computer and includes the girls' names, photos, letter grades for body parts and a paragraph of "commentary" in the style of the NFL draft.

I have argued without success that this newspaper should publish a few excerpts verbatim, minus names, because sanitized descriptions make it seem that the authors were just doing what guys have always done. Here's Executive Editor David Shribman's veto:

"Our goal here is to disseminate the news. I can identify no real journalistic purpose at this time in violating our own standards of good taste by publishing these crude and demeaning personal descriptions, no matter how shocking the impact of those words might be on our readers."

He's right, but we still have a dilemma. Comments from readers' on our Web site indicate that some are defending the boys in a vacuum. If they knew the actual content, many would hang their heads in shame. Failing that, I have to ask you to trust me when I say: This is not your father's ranking, unless your father is Al Goldstein of Screw magazine. It is not the slam book of your own high school career. It is the Duke University lacrosse team in training -- or could be, if left unaddressed.

The document is not only vile and pornographic; it drips with contempt for its targets. It's not about admiration for female attributes, but a brutal, swaggering, racist attack on the very characteristics the writers claim to desire.

The girls are not even portrayed as human. They're just mounds of flesh that exist for the sexual appraisal and humiliation of the authors. The possibility that their targets might have any feelings seems never to have occurred to them.

And remember, these are the girls the guys would like to be with. Imagine what they must think of their other female classmates.

The school district passed the matter to police, who determined the list was not a crime. But criminality is not really the issue. The fact that the perpetrators violated the girls must not get lost in the question of whether they violated the law.

The document runs afoul of the district's policies on sexual harassment, but officials may have limited options if it was made and circulated outside of school. Yet the fallout doesn't respect boundary lines. If nothing else, students need to understand that once something like this is produced there is no controlling where it goes and whom it injures.

Civil lawsuits by some of the girls' parents may be forthcoming. At least one boy's parents have hired defense attorney William H. Difenderfer, who issued a veiled threat to drag any plaintiffs through the mud. Lovely.

From the district's end, the perpetrators could be suspended, seniors banned from graduation. Letters could be sent to their colleges of choice. At home, one hopes their parents have insisted they apologize to the girls. As for Mt. Lebanon itself, some folks must be longing for a return to the stocks in the town square. A public shaming would make it clear that the community at large won't tolerate such behavior, even from "good kids," as Mr. Difenderfer described them.

The inevitable backlash has begun: High school girls ask for it by the way they dress and act; some young women are willing partners in exploitation so all girls everywhere are fair game. Spurious arguments, unless these girls approved the list and its contents, which no one has suggested. And there is the predictable excuse: It's not the boys' fault, because popular culture is a cesspool and they have no choice but to revel in it. Which is part true and part rot. Popular culture is a cesspool that is making some inhabitants numb to its increasing coarseness. But millions of teen-agers survive it without publishing anything like this. So what happened here?

The shrinks, lawyers and preachers can sort out the influences -- locker-room banter, Internet porn, sports talk radio, Howard Stern, ESPN, MTV, moral/spiritual bankruptcy, privileged entitlement, enabling adults, your nominee here. More important: What are families and institutions doing to prevent future episodes like this?

My contribution is a fantasy list of the Top 25 deterrents. No. 1: a new set of stocks int the public square, and the understanding that next time around, aggrieved community members get to hold forth with a barrel of rotten eggs. That, as they say, would take the cake.