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1 1 Introduction Asking More of Sex Education When I entered seventh grade in Connecticut in the late s, school felt like a minefield of sexual pleasure and danger. I flirted with boys in the hallways, wore sparkly lip balm to class, and gathered with friends in the girls’ bathroom to check that no hairs or scents were out of place. As a pretty-enough white girl in a school dominated by white students, popularity was within my reach. Popularity promised protection from the assaults that started early: every morning in homeroom, boys called out that they “smelled fish” when they walked past the girls—a not so subtle reference to the possibility that one of us was menstruating. One day the social studies teacher called the girls into a classroom to watch a puberty video that offered no help on my most pressing question—how best to respond to the boys’ taunts. I yearned to be older, desirable, and free of middle school. When a handsome gym teacher signed my yearbook, “If you were older and I were younger, what a time we would have,” I blushed with fear and delight at the attention. While I fantasized about growing up to date handsome gym teachers, I watched my young and newly divorced mother reenter the dating scene. Pop songs, afternoon soap operas, and fashion magazines offered us advice for navigating our respective minefields. A more reliable resource was the now famous Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective ), a well-worn paperback that my mother stored on a bookshelf in the living room of our modest apartment. I pored over its images—photographs of women giving birth, line drawings of bodies in various developmental bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Chap-01.qxd 4/12/08 7:19 PM Page 1 stages, sketches of sexual positions, and images of women embracing men and other women. I thought then that I read Our Bodies, Ourselves in secret, but I know now that my mother wanted me to read that book. She hoped that my younger sister and I would turn to her for answers to our questions and concerns about bodies, relationships, and feelings. She hoped I would shake off the pleasure I took in lip balm and the shame I felt about menstruation . I wanted to be the powerful, feminist daughter she hoped for; I also, however, wanted to flirt with boys, and I had to find a way to survive the teasing. The advice I gleaned from Seventeen and Tiger Beat magazines and the long phone calls I had with friends offered more immediate and practical help than did my mother’s calls to feminism and independence. Learning and sexuality remained intertwined when I attended an allgirls Catholic high school in the s. In our school’s parking lot each morning my friends and I hiked our uniform skirts above our knees and flirted with students from the boys’ school down the road. In my first year of high school, I stopped hanging out at the roller skating rink in favor of riding around with older boys in their cars, having sex, and experimenting with drugs. At school, I smoked, got high, talked back to teachers, and spent a lot of time in after-school detention. My sexuality, maturing body, and misbehavior bewildered my mother, my teachers, and me. Neither home nor school provided the guidance that I needed, so I resorted to simply going through the motions in order to get by. Once again sex education offered little useful guidance. As a high school senior, I took my first official sex education class. In this half-year course entitled “Love and Marriage,” the teacher assigned me a presentation on the adoption services available at a local Catholic social services agency. The agency worker explained in our interview that many families wanted to have children but could not and that white babies were especially hard for adoptive parents to come by. In an experience I now remember with chagrin, I argued in my report to the all-white and all-girls class that the best thing any young woman could do if she found herself with an unwanted pregnancy would be to carry the pregnancy to term and allow one of those unfortunate couples to adopt a newborn baby. I delivered this message earnestly, never betraying how a combination of contraceptives and very good luck had helped me avoid pregnancy and the decision whether to abort. RISKY LESSONS...

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