Chapter 1: THE WAR ON EMBARRASSMENT
Every blush is a cause for new blushes.
-- DAVID HUME, 1741
One day in fourth grade, a nice lady suddenly appeared in our Wisconsin public elementary school classroom. This lady's name was Mrs. Nelson -- "Good morning, Mrs. Nelllllson!" -- and she arrived carrying a Question Box. It was a brown, medium-sized box about the size of a hat, and it had black question marks all over it. The Question Box was our Learning Tool, she said.
I was very excited about the Question Box, because it interrupted, then completely substituted for, the whole math lesson that day.
The class waited in anticipation. Mrs. Nelson opened the top of her box and pulled out a long slip of white paper. Then she read it, cheerily, as if she had just cracked open a fortune cookie: "And the first question is...'What is 69?'" She looked up from the white slip and faced us buoyantly: "What is 69, class?"
Well, that was a good question, because I certainly didn't know the answer. If she had asked what is 69 plus something, that would have been easy, but 69 all by itself was pretty philosophical. Some boys in the corner giggled. I immediately shot a glance at our teacher, who was standing up in the back of the classroom with his arms folded across his chest. Usually when the boys giggled, that meant something wrong was going on, and somebody was going to get into trouble. But this time our teacher didn't say a thing; he just looked straight ahead attentively at Mrs. Nelson. This confused me, but before I could try to make anything of it, Mrs. Nelson was speaking again.
"Now remember, boys and girls, there is absolutely nothing to giggle about! The first thing we're going to learn in Human Growth and Development is that no question is off limits!"
The outburst died down. Mrs. Nelson began again: "69 is...more giggles. Then "69 is, um..." I looked back at my teacher, who by now had turned bright red. This was a really strange math lesson.
Finally, after what seemed like 69 attempts to explain the number 69, I raised my hand and piped up, "May I please go to the bathroom?" As I left I could hear Mrs. Nelson was still quizzing: "Doesn't anyone know what 69 is? Well...these questions were put in by the fifth-grade class. You'll have the chance to fill the Question Box with your own questions."
When I came home I told my mother about my day, about this mysterious number that was very important and shouldn't be off limits. My mother wasn't so enthusiastic. She had me bring a note to school asking for a description of what we would be learning in our special math lessons. I brought it home, and when my mom opened it she was even less enthusiastic. She was also angry, and so was I -- but not for the same reason. I was annoyed because she wouldn't let me see the letter. She seemed to be under the impression that what was going on at our special math sessions was not math at all, but something else entirely. But what? She wouldn't let me see.
"If I knew you weren't going to let me see, I would have opened it before I walked home," I said petulantly.
But my mom wasn't paying attention. She was pacing around the kitchen, fuming. "I can't believe they're planning on teaching you how to masturbate in fourth grade. I can't believe it!"
What was she talking about?
"In fourth grade! Where is your father?" Then to me: "Go find your father."
That was when my mom called Mrs. Nelson. I had a feeling she was going to, so I ignored the directive to find my father. I remember, a few minutes later, my mom putting her hand over the phone and saying to me, in a high, extra polite voice, "Mrs. Nelson would like to know if I want you to be whispering in the locker room." Then she asked me, very gravely, "Do you want to be whispering in the locker room?" I thought about it, and said yes. I liked whispering. Whispering about stuff is exciting.
"Yes," my mom had returned the phone to her ear. "Yes, I've asked her, and she says she does want to whisper in the locker room." I found this terrifically funny, that adults could disagree over whispers. "I get to whisper in the locker room!" I called, jumping up and down.
"Yes, I'll have her bring another note. Goodbye."
From that day forward, I sat out sex education in the library. I always felt bad for the girls who didn't have this escape because after each sex ed session, as the lockers slammed and everyone prepared for the next class, the boys would pick on them, in a strange, new kind of teasing.
"Erica, do you masturbate?" one boy would say to one poor pigtailed victim as she struggled to remove her books as fast as she could. Then another boy would say, closing in on her from the other side, "It's really natural, you know." Or sometimes just "why aren't you masturbating now, Erica? It's normal, you know."
Then, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
"Why aren't you developing, Erica?"
"It's time for you to be developing, didn't you hear? Weren't you taking notes in class?"
"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
"Well, I was paying attention, and you're really behind your proper growth and development!"
"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
"You may be a treasure, Erica, but you ain't got no chest!"
And so on. Invariably just before the moment when the girl would burst into tears, I noticed that she would always say the same thing: "Mrs. Nelson says that if you tease us about what we learn in class, then you haven't understood the principle of respect." Respect is a very important doctrine in sex education class. Sex ed instructors often use Respect, a puppet turtle, to teach elementary school children about their "private places." As it happened, Mrs. Nelson was usually gone by the time the teasing began, so no one really cared about what they had learned from Respect the Turtle.
My public school wasn't unique. In 1993 more than 4,200 school-age girls reported to Seventeen magazine that "they have been pinched, fondled or subjected to sexually suggestive remarks at school, most of them...both frequently and publicly." Researchers from Wellesley College, following up on the magazine's survey, found "that nearly two-fifths of the girls reported being sexually harassed daily and another 29 percent said they were harassed weekly. More than two-thirds said the harassment occurred in view of other people. Almost 90 percent were the target of unwanted sexual comments or gestures." School officials do very little about this, the study also found. One 13-year-old girl from Pennsylvania told them: "I have told teachers about this a number of times; each time nothing was done about it."
More recently, psychologist Mary Pipher reports in Reviving Ophelia that she is seeing an increasing number of girls who are "school refusers," girls who "tell me they simply cannot face what happens to them at school." One client, Pipher says, "complained that boys slapped her behind and grabbed her breasts when she walked to her locker." Then "another wouldn't ride the school bus because boys teased her about oral sex." Pipher concludes that the harassment that girls experience in the 1990s is "much different in both quality and intensity" from the teasing she received as a girl in the late fifties.
When I was in college, a mother who owned the local deli persistently brought up in conversation how much her daughter was being sexually taunted by the boys at her school. The girl couldn't even concentrate on her homework when she was at home: all she did was dread returning to school. The mother was visibly distraught. She grew up in the fifties, she told me, and "this kind of thing never happened to us. Sure, the boys would flirt and tease us, but they were shy and nervous about it. They ne