Enough: Abstinence of Education
I imagine most sex ed classes are quiet.
The kids don’t really want to ask questions, which is great because the grownups really don’t want to answer them.
To understand why mine was not quiet, you need to know the room. Not the people in the room, the room itself.
I am in the eighth grade. I attend a massively overpopulated middle school—four elementaries feeding in, three high schools feeding out—thousands of shitty preteens crammed into long concrete buildings with well-trampled grass between them. The divide-and-conquer strategy is strong—we are all assigned a Block, and never will we take a class with a kid from a Block that is not our own.
I am in Block D: the Experimental Block. Is some new model of collaborative group education the thing? Let’s see!
My classes are taught in giant rooms with twice the students and twice the teachers. Blocks A, B, and C are in normal rooms that are normal public school over-crowded, thirty-something-to-one. Block D, on the other hand, is a cacophonous ode to the bygone one room schoolhouse, sixty-ish-to-two.
Recall that I am not in a special kind of school built for such a thing. Walls are knocked down to turn four classrooms into two. We are far wider than we were deep. There is no curve, no raised tiers, just a rectangle of rows that seem to ask through their sheer length, what exactly are we doing here? two big parallelograms of well why not? side by side, and cycling between them are 120 bumbling, hormonal souls.
It is the first year of this and it feels . . . chaotic. We jumble around and scoot behind and a polite “Can I just sneak through?” becomes a louder “You need to move” as eighth grade progresses. Space is determinant. Mumbling through Romeo and Juliet isn’t an option. We simply have to perform into the chair-screeching, pencil tapping, who-is-humming? expanse.
It is here on one morning that I receive the entirety of sex ed I will get in Phoenix, Arizona, between the mid-eighties and the new millennium.
They did not teach us about triggers in that single day of sex ed. For one thing, we did not yet have the word, not for that, not in 1995.
But here, in the now, I have a trigger in my left ear. Sometimes if a person whispers directly into either of my ears, but especially the left one, whether we are having sex or just telling secrets, my neck stiffens. I have an esophageal—from neither the gut nor the mouth—impulse to vomit. If I am being intimate with someone, I will need to stop, and it may be a while before I am up for it again once their voice has been in that precise, small piece of real estate on my body that I consider to be the only square inch on either side that I do not fully own and operate.
I have to tell new lovers about my trigger, of course. I am not fragile about sex, so even the conversation is an ill fit. But there is a reason it doesn’t suit me. It isn’t mine. It was left behind like a Sam Prekop CD and a television so heavy my later husband and I would come to call it “Alan’s Revenge” every time we had to move it. Alan wanted gone more than he wanted that TV. But my trigger, a different “he,” his trigger, seems to want to stick around.
The boys have gone. There was no nuance around binary gender in Arizona in the mid-nineties (let’s guess that there still isn’t), so we have been separated into our two sexes, with the boys in the adjacent megaroom.
It is just the girls of Block D here, in our thigh-high tights, discovering Jared Leto, giggling about Reese Witherspoon getting fingered in Fear, accessorizing with our sexual reputations á la Cher Horowitz. There are sexually active girls in this room. In our vast ignorance, “active” exclusively means heterosexual, penetrative, vaginal intercourse, so there are a lot more sexually active girls in this room than even we know of ourselves. Needless to say, we are ready if not overdue for our tour through the complexities of human sexuality. And it goes like this:
“The only way to practice safe sex is through abstinence.”
As if. That can’t be right. Does that sentence even make sense? Surely, that wasn’t it exactly, but in my memory, that is what I heard: Do it safely by not doing it.
Triggers aren’t choices. They are not even exactly thoughts. Having baggage is an over-ripe metaphor to be sure but, I tell you, there just were suitcases around when my best example of how triggers work hit my hippocampus. Hit my throat.
Once I smelled his cologne in the airport in El Paso so so many years later and I did not consciously experience anger or fear or any of that. I’m not sure my brain was meaningfully involved. My sense of smell caused my arms to twitch at the chance to grab the handle of every single suitcase slowly passing them on that carousel (making us stand there and wait until our own came along) and fling it off the conveyor with quiet but considerable force. I didn’t think mad thoughts. My triceps and biceps and sinuses agreed silently that luggage needed to be spun across the dull carpet into the fake potted plants behind me at a velocity surely beyond our ability, but I managed somehow to remain still.
Some people don’t like the word, “trigger.” I don’t like it. If you give me a better extremity-isolating-suitcase-flying-fury of a word, I will use it.
My middle school teachers are lovely. Lovely and lively and not responsible for the meager state of my education. My favorite is the duo of women who teach my Social Studies and English block. (Yes, they are combined. Block D is not just an interior decorating decision. It’s a pedagogical phenomenon!) One of the teachers is called Foster or Flores. The other one is Patterson. Quite possibly Peters.
Within the experiment, the teachers seem distant (because they literally are) from everything except one another. Foster-cum-Flores and Patterson-possibly-Peters are, for example, one unit of a joyful kind of unflappable with hints of exhausted. Everything in the experiment is bigger than it would otherwise be, and they rise to it together. Gestures are performed as if in a theater with some very cheap seats. The book isn’t “over there” (pointy finger, delicate jab); it is “Over There”—fully extended arm sweeping across the body, indicating the position of the text and providing some wind at the back of the person industrious enough to go and get it.
Both women are slight, one blonde, one brunette. They always seem near to one another physically and psychically. They go big, as required, but I believe they also burn out as one. They exchange looks of camaraderie regularly. Even through the din of that giant room and the rasp of my fraying-at-the-seams early teen brain, I sense their shared suffering as something euphonic.
The trigger was installed when I was sixteen by a man who was twenty-five. “Statutory” is the word I eventually found for this, a word that means rules, the rules here being about age. It became important to me to preface the word “rape” with the word “statutory” for a few years thereafter. I didn’t want to lie that yes, “yes” is a word I said. Statutory is a word that hushes its successor. Not really rape, statutory rape.
To speak out about such a thing would have been impossible for a load of reasons but at the center of them, definitional. To be a victim of the not-really-rape kind of rape would have been to admit that I lacked agency and wherewithal, to admit that I was just a kid. By the time I would get anywhere near that, the word had made its way back to me, statutory limitations having run their course.
FosterFlores has positioned herself stiffly on a stool placed front and center of the hippodrome on the day of our sexual education. Her body is angled a bit to one side, and a fat binder lays open across the lap of her long skirt. PattersonPeters was probably present? She was the elder of the two, the one whose furtive looks most concretely said, it’ll be fine. I believe it is her stoicism that has me forgetting her.
I imagine most sex ed classes are quiet.
The kids don’t really want to ask questions, which is great because the grownups really don’t want to answer them.
But we are Block D. We critique the chaos of our doublewide educational hypothesis and group work sessions louder than an oncoming train, but the experiment also gives us a sense of in-it-togetherness. We can speak up, shout even, because the room requires it. We do not have “but when do I know he loves me?” kinds of questions. The shot vs. the pill, the efficacy of condoms against pregnancy, was that STD treatable and how and how long? We have questions, are terrified, and know just about nothing at all about AIDS.
FosterFlores listens and nods after each question. She folds in around that binder some and is uncharacteristically even-toned and tight-gestured. She flips through the pages because maybe just maybe, just in case. . . . Only to find the same answer again and again. Swallowing hard, “All I can tell you . . .” is how she starts up every time.
Because there is someone else in the room.
My friends and I guess later from whence she came and we overshoot for sure: Just generically “the government”? The city? The state? The school board? Adult me guesses the District Office, but we will never know. Whoever she is, this new-to-us-woman has been sent to surveil and ensure, presumably because our teachers have deviated from the script in years past. In the back row, at the far corner of so many girls, one woman’s silent presence is able to hush this whole ruckus.
There is one more variable though.
We don’t learn the nothing we were meant to that day because eventually FosterFlores’s voice starts to crack and her eyes start to well. By question six or seven she is going through every motion just the same—flipping, checking, reciting all she can tell us—but tears big enough to see from four rows back and eleven desks across are streaming down her face and landing on those less than empty pages.
A man I would not have said groomed me because I was thirty when I learned the term “grooming” left me a few triggers, but most of them have faded away. That is a lie. Most of them have been intentionally diminished by years of work on my part and the part of people who loved me well and carefully. None of those triggers were mysteries—particular means of touch, that aforementioned smell—I could pinpoint the origin to each. My resilient whisper issue is no different.
He snuck me out of my friend’s house, where I supposedly spent the night on some weeknights for ease of school-related something-or-another-who-cares-it-wasn’t-true. In the morning, he dropped me off at the high school where I was a sophomore, pulling through the circle drive right up next to the cars of parents, saying some coy thing about having a good day, making a joke of our age difference as I tumbled down out of his red Toyota pickup truck.
In the in-between, we were in his always dark, rented, hardly furnished house. He slipped me into his bedroom because he lived with his brother who must not see or hear me. There were rules and procedures even around my access to the bathroom. Couldn’t I hold it? The kitchen was out of the question. The whispers were instructions.
A trigger is a fiction. I think of it as the immature nibbling of a panic attack, also a fiction, the body responding to a threat that doesn’t exist, at least not right now. As I have been saddled with a fiction not of my making, I gift myself a fiction as exchange:
It is me, FosterFlores, and the girls of Block D. There is an extra stool at the front of the room and no sign of District Lady. PattersonPeters stands close-banked to her junior colleague, still immemorably expressionless but essential. With one hand on the back of FosterFlores’ chair, the other arm points and pumps a fist and lays flat an upward facing palm, illustrating basic facts as literal flesh we can build from. Together, they seem as they did so many other days to me, exponential, not dwarfed by the room or the crowd but made greater than two by them.
It’s an experiment. First go the girls who, in reality, shot their hands high in immediate need. PatersonPeters and FosterFlores do not stutter. All they can say is everything that they know. Herpes, Stigma, Pleasure, Agency, Depo Provera, Abortion. Some girls go to the front. Others call out from where they are. The room gets loud again. Eventually it is my turn.
I take the parallel stool at the front of the room next to my teachers. I am still what I consider to be a virgin having not yet been instructed otherwise by an adult in a dark room I can tell no one of. I don’t know what questions to ask, so FosterFlores offers prophecy in their place.
“Listen,” she says, her hands neatly folded where a binder might have been, “pretty soon a grown man will see your pimpley face and your precocious body and know full well that his attention will mean too much to you.” PatersonPeters nods and scans the sixtyish faces, extending the lesson to the entire swarm. FosterFlores takes a breath and looks straight at me until I cannot help but let our eyes lock. “Tell him to fuck off forever,” she says. “Luxuriate in crushes on boys at school who date clear-faced not-loud girls who are not smarter than them. They aren’t going to love you back but get into that pain and get good at it. You’ll find clumsy teenage pleasure elsewhere.”
“I don’t know,” she says facing out to this mass of fidgety but regardful girls, “but maybe you can learn to name the persistent, quiet harm that seeks you. And even when all this adolescent shit is over with,” FosterFlores sighs, pivoting her whole self on that stool until her knees graze my own, “let your life speak to you audibly, saying nothing it couldn’t say so that others can hear. If in moving forward from here nothing ever happens that leaves you triggered by whispers, hate them anyway.”
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Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler
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ENOUGH is a Rumpus original series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women, trans, and nonbinary people who engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We believe that while this subject matter is especially timely now, it is also timeless. We want to make sure that this conversation doesn’t stop—not until our laws and societal norms reflect real change.
Many names appearing in these stories have been changed.
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