Sex Education, revised and updated (?)

I got the kind of Sex Education that some people might say makes parents into grandparents when they are still in their thirties. That is: effectively, I received none at all. I do not consider this a chief failing on my parents' part, though. Because I? Was a nun. You would not need to equip a nun with information about reproduction. She took a vow of celibacy, after all. And I was a nun for all of the years I lived under my parents' roof. It is only with some hindsight that I understand better the kind of education my parents did impart. 

Had I asked my parents as a teenager, probably whilst riding through a very loud car wash, what an erection was or how I could get on the Pill, please believe they would have talked to me about it. I just had no interest in mining information from them on these and other matters (Teen Embarrassment, Population 4.6 Billion). The fact that the internet was not accessible to me in all the years I lived under their roof would imply that I must have been a patient child. However, this was patently not the case.

I was wildly curious. I was also wildly busy being a Very Pious Good Girl at my all-girls Catholic high school. You could not defy my surefooted rhetoric around the importance of abstinence.  I cut out a badge from the newspaper that said "Proud to be a Virgin" and taped it to my daily planner (that I had any friends in high school is a complete miracle). I was a vehement pro-life crusader (even my locker senior year bore a magnet that said, "Choose Life! Your Mom Did!" and again with the miracle that was anyone who agreed to be seen near High School Kendra).

The irony in all this is that I had to be on birth control during the latter part of high school. I hated this since I was so abstinent and so anti-contraceptive, but my anxiety and overachieving zeal caused a perfect storm of the loss of much weight and much menstruation. So by the time I went to college, I was 17 years-old and had never used a tampon but I took the Pill every day and could tell you all ways you should not have an abortion.

In the spring before I graduated from high school, a rent-a-cop visited our theology class to warn us about the hazards of being a female living on a university campus. It was like Scared Straight: Sex Ed edition. The rent-a-cop presented several case studies of young women who had been just like we were (overachieving, overprivileged) and they were all basically pillaged and raped because they left their dorm rooms alone at night. Probably to do laundry. 

The intentions of the rent-a-cop and the school that hired him were well-meaning. There is a place for precautionary training, and law enforcement plays a meaningful role in helping to prevent sexual assault. But it's problematic to me that this was, up until this time, perhaps the most direct an adult had ever spoken to me about sex. And it was not about sex, per se. It wasn't about relationships or physical boundaries or pacing or pleasure. It was about sexual violence and its inevitability. The angle was basically, you, as young females away from your parents, are a vulnerable population and you will be preyed upon and the best thing we can do for you is to prepare you as to what to do when an assault occurs, either to you or someone you know.

***

I only wish that things appeared to have changed in the twenty years since I graduated high school. But it still seems to me that the pervasive message about sex education is directed at girls and women, and it is still one that places us on the defensive. The Law sees us as both the preyed upon as well as the gatekeepers, so we best know how to react when we're in a situation that could become a sexual one. Otherwise, things are going to get pretty (choose your own adventure: messy, awkward, uncomfortable, harmful, hurtful, unable to be remembered).

I don't purport to know about the sex education imparted to my male counterparts in high school.  Was a rent-a-cop hired to speak in the theology classes at our brother schools? If so, did he or she remind them that curiosity and hormones and strength, especially when mixed with alcohol, can be a potent cocktail of poor decisionmaking? What did their parents tell them before they hung out with girls? What did they ask them after they drove girls home? If they got a girl pregnant, were they ever asked whether or not they intended to finish high school?

I only know what it's like to be told to never leave a party alone, to be taught how to use my car keys if an attacker is holding me down, and to know how to detect whether my drink has been rufied or not. I only know what it's like to be afraid, constantly, of not being able to get out of a situation that I might have consented to being in, initially. I only know what it's like to feel freighted with responsibility and to remain  vigilant at all times that sex might happen and that it won't be good.

***

Now that I have taught university and am raising a daughter and a son to eventually leave home and attend university, I am a bit more circumspect about the sex education. I now see it as a mere thread in a more holistic education in helping to raise a capable and contributing member of society.

Whereas my parents did not address, say, the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases with me, they fed and clothed me, took me for regular physicals, asked me about my friends, encouraged me to pursue hobbies, and they constantly showed that they cared about my well-being. This is all a part of educating a person as a healthy physical, social, spiritual, and eventually a sexual being.

But I still have such angst for the two-pronged messaging we are constantly imparting to young people about sex. If you are male, sex will probably be something you'll be interested in pursuing, either with a female or male or both. Just make sure it's consensual. If you are female, you should be very prepared. Because it could all go very wrong, very fast.

I trust that no one is surprised about the Aziz Ansari story that is having a moment. By this I don't mean, based on Ansari's comedy, one should deduce he is an aggressively sexual person. I mean that it all adds up: both the the account of the anonymous woman who alleges he would not take no for an answer, as well as her guilt and shame after the fact. They had both received the memo. Ansari, as a male, would be the one who pursues. And she, as the female, should be ever vigilant as the gatekeeper. And when things don't go the way she wanted them to have gone? Well. Pay no mind. He, like so many of his peers, weren't given the holistic portrait that sex is about more than consent. It is about respect and affection and mutuality.

Master of None, indeed.

Required Reading: What Made Maddy Run

I haven't visited Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam and seen where she and her family hid in the annex until the Gestapo found them. I have, however, imagined many times what it was like for her father to return to that place and find her diary. I understand if you visit the house, you will watch a television clip of Otto Frank saying how surprised he was to finally read Anne's "deep thoughts, the seriousness, especially the self-criticism." I am always so amazed at the honesty, the humility it must have taken this loving father who had lived in the closest of proximity that any parent could imagine to occupy with his or her teenager for years to say, "My conclusion is...that most parents don't know --really--their children." Madison Holleran kept an Anne Frank quotation in her inspiration log on her MacBook. This is what journalist Kate Fagan found after Holleran committed suicide and Holleran's family gave Fagan the laptop. Fagan first reported on Holleran's tragic death in an excellent feature, "Split Image" on espnW. Fagan has expanded the piece into a book, What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen that I believe should be required reading for anyone living in 2017.

I think this book is so important because Maddy is every kid who has ever put pressure on himself or herself to not just do well but to be excellent in order to make her parents proud. This passage by Fagan resonated with me:

Those lucky enough to grow up envisioning college start hearing about the building blocks of a college resume (the boxes that need checking, the optics that need preserving) from the moment they enter high school, and sometimes even sooner. Too often, kids are herded into commitments and activities that are born not of passion but of obligation. These obligations can continue for years because stopping is not seen as a possibility. Those who do stop risk being perceived as lacking fortitude to push through when the going gets tough.

I was Maddy to the nth degree, working two jobs in high school while pulling a 4.0, leading every imaginable service club, and crushing it with the extra-curriculars. The chief difference is that I slid into my depression/anxiety valley in which I stopped eating and menstruating and generally wanting to be alive well before I left for college. My parents helped me to get the extra support I needed. I believe my story could have been Maddy's story had I not already been in therapy by the time I left for school.

The other chief difference is that Maddy came of age on social media. Fagan does a first-rate job of explaining the paradox of overconnection and undercommunication. Although we are in touch with one another all day, few of us are engaged in face-to-face communication with each other, or hearing the deep, heaving sigh on the phone. We are constantly decoding what is uttered between the emoji. Fagan's indictment of this 24/7 texting, posting culture is accurate and she concedes that she has admittedly perpetuated it at times.

What Made Maddy Run is part communication scholarship, part journalism, and part mental health exposition. It is a book that comes alongside a grieving family and asks them to share what they knew then and what they know now. It is not a parenting guide for how to launch a teen into a safe Instagram filter. It is not a playbook for suicide prevention. It is simply a necessary book that has made me feel less alone, not only as one who battles generalized anxiety/depression, but as one who is shepherding kids through uncharted territory. Like every parent who has gone before me, I'm just trying not to be in the dark.

An open letter to the white supremacist

Dear White Supremacist: You are not faceless or voiceless or nameless--but on this last account, you are most certainly wrongly named. Chief among reasons, I am compelled to write you to suggest a better category under which to file yourself.

*** When I was in my early 20s, I worked with young people at a community center.  Timmy was one of the youths who came to the center every day. It's immaterial to discuss Timmy's family, his race, his hopes, the grades he earned in school. What you need to know is that Timmy was an average size for a boy in the ninth grade who had not yet hit his growth spurt. He had noodle arms and walked with a forward tilt to his feet. He was not, at first glance, a fearsome presence. But when he played basketball, he told himself that he was the best. He wouldn't let anyone get inside his head. Timmy could not dunk. He was not the most legendary of ball-handlers. He wasn't in danger of being drafted out of seventh grade to the NBA. But he played as though he were. He would stick one, resolute, pointer finger in the air when he made a basket. He was Number One and could not have been convinced otherwise.

Timmy, delusional or not, inspired me. He threw his whole body into a game and played with all of his soul, and told the haters where to go.

***

The difference between Timmy and you, a so-called white supremacist, is that your delusion is in vain. Where Timmy threw up a pointer finger, you carry a tiki torch aflame. Timmy's torch was more powerful because it sprang forth from a confidence that he was, indeed, supreme at being Timmy on a basketball court. Whereas your torch, carried under darkness of night when it is hard to ascertain your supposed supremacy, is merely the implement of a coward.

I know so little about you, and yet I know what I need to know in order to decide how wrongly you've been categorized, White Supremacist. I don't know if you care for an ailing parent, if you've served in the armed forces, if you are a vegetarian. Given your affiliation, though, I know that you are hellbent on the eradication of any whose skin's melanin exceeds your own.

Given that you are human, I know you didn't enter into the world this way.

Instead, I know you entered into this beautiful, fractured world with all the wholeness and wellness your birth afforded you. You arrived uncloaked and tethered only to a life source. You came not yet having learned the words of hatred and violence; you were not hard-wired to delight in scourge and plunder.

You could show me the topographic map of your life from your innocence to your decision to adorn the proverbial or actual hood of cowardice. There, I might ascertain the peaks and valleys that delivered you to this plateau where you identify as a White Supremacist. But your geography is still disoriented, inscrutable. For your cause, your aim is not, in my view, White Supremacy.

It is rather Bald-Faced Inferiority.

Whereas Timmy with his noodle arms and tilted gait suppressed no one while asserting his own superiority, he became a supreme noodle-armed being dribbling a basketball.

But your animus as a so-called White Supremacists is born of your own inferiority complex. For if you, as a crusader, were truly convinced of you own supremacy, you would recognize your privilege is already guaranteed by the star under which you were born. You are effectively cloaked (no hood required) by the countless privileges afforded your white-skinnedness. You need not be threatened by the perceived encroachment of other populations, of seemingly unmerited opportunities of said populations, of the removal of the so-called emblems of your supremacy. Supreme beings are secure in their supremacy. Supremacy is found within, not in contrast to others. Supremely satisfied within themselves such that they enjoy the good that comes to others who are not just like they. Supremely secure in their position such that they enjoy helping others who are not just alike.

I myself have reached no such supreme nirvana. I am no Timmy on the basketball court. I waver, I doubt, I am a chaotic place. What I am certain about, what I believe to be the supremacy I'm striving for, is recognizing the Imago Dei in all of humanity: the stamp of divinity in each person created by God. In this way, my finger is pointed up in the manner of Timmy. Pointed toward the Truly Supreme who breathed life into each one of us, born whole, innocent, tethered only to a life source.

Sincerely, Kendra