Truth is, we didn’t have sex ed when I was in public school. But, as things go when you’re growing up, lessons will be taught and learned, whether you officially ask for them or not.
In a seventh grade junior high school class we, a class of relatively intelligent kids from scholarly-oriented families, became involuntary lab rats in a well-meaning socio-psycho-educational experience.
Those ‘ologists had developed an experiment they hoped would help bad students who were additionally delinquent in other respects, maybe heading for a career in crime. Such kids were to be placed in classrooms of smart kids of good character, where our radiant presence would encourage the bad boys to re-form into good students with good character. Like us.
So, one day, a beaming school official brought into our classroom a model bad boy. Our model bad boy. He was introduced by name and led to a desk. He sat. We all murmured some sort of welcome, and class continued.
Was it a class in New York history or civics? I’m not sure. But I am clear about what followed, when our teacher left the classroom for whatever reason. And our new classmate got up from his desk, sidled up to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk and drew something that could be interpreted as a vulva, and right next to it something definitively a penis.
No, it was not a traumatic or threatening experience, not for us girls anyway. However pre-pubescent girls expressed disapproval and embarassment in those days, well, we expressed.
But the boys? They grinned and sniggered and smirked, swiveling around to give Those Looks to each other, and to the bad boy who was having a great time at the blackboard.
That was the end of the experiment. The next day, bad boy was no longer in our class and we were never told what happened. But we were smart; we didn’t need to be told.
The boys grinned and sniggered and smirked at dirty pictures drawn on a blackboard by a bad boy.
Now, why on earth did that incident pop up in my brain a couple of days ago?