When I was ten my DARE teacher, Officer Engold, told us to just say No. He brough in a case of pills and drugs to show us so that we would knew what we'd be getting ourselves into if we were ever offered drugs. I remember 25 fifth graders crowded around Engold's display case, enticed by the forbidden. Every one of us wondering if we would ever have the chance to say No and make him proud, or maybe if we would ever have a chance to say Yes.
Fast forward three years and our gym teacher is talking about testes to a group of 25 13yrs. old girls and boys. All of the girls were really smug because the boys were humiliated. Giggles were coming from every corner of the room. Jokes with sex organs as the punch line being whispered to every classmate. Because there, for all to see, were diagrams displaying urethras, scrotums, and penises. The diagrams felt cold and invasive, as if when simplified, we are all just maps with lines protruding from our bodies leading to label box entitled "Heart" or in this case, "Testes". I remember feeling as if I was being let in on a secret that the boys were trying to hide all this time. I remember being impressed that they were so much different than I.
The talk about female bodies came next week. Any girl who felt smug in the face of the boys' embarassment, quickly sported the same flushed face and averted eyes our classmates did the week before. It was almost worse because with our lesson plan came videos with babies struggling their way out of vaginas, diagrams of breasts that showed where the milk glands are, and in depth conversation about how every month for the next 50 or so years we would be cranky and bleed a lot. And we learned that even after a lifetime of bleeding and crying because of "horomones" that we would be given Menopause as our Reproductive Organs Retirement Reward. (We would find out later that with periods also came worrying about periods. Late periods, light periods, extremely heavy periods, clotting periods, irregular periods, periods that come more than once a month, etc.) A lot of us had already started getting visits from "Aunt Flo" (I'm still surprised that we were using that term as late as 1999) and had tried our damndest to keep it a secret from the guys, but Thanks Mr. Niger for letting that cat out of the bag. When you're a 13 year old girl the problem of whether or not you're approved of by some guy is a big deal. Try feel comfortable flirting after a visual of a uterus shedding its inner wall was just projected onto the blackboard. Bigger than life.
I barely remember the sex talk. I remember xeroxed quizzes about how babies are made. I remember talking about condoms and birth control pills. Best of all, I remember that abstinence (from kissing-sex) is the best way to avoid any STDs, unwanted pregnancies, depletion in self-respect, and fun. I remember all of these things that make sense on paper and seemed to be the biggest, most important issues. But something was left out: When did we talk about consent? When did any teacher ever talk about consent in middle school or in high school? The one message I can glean from my education about consent is "Just say No. No means no." You see why I opened up with DARE?
It was all supposed to be so simple. No means no, just say no. If you say no then whoever is pressuring you will think back to their DARE class and they'll back off. This is assuming that the person who's being pressured feels comfortable saying No. And the assumption is also made that the person who is doing the asking will smile, nod, turn on their heels and walk away. The idea that there are other ways of saying No than just verbal communication was one that had not been addressed until very recently in my life. Like, I'm gonna say, last summer. In my head if you didn't say NO, you were saying Yes. With this reasoning, encounters I have had in my life which were not consensual were permissable because I did not say NO. I never thought about how I had turned my head away to avoid a kiss, changed the topic of conversation when it was getting too out of hand, or how I had made excuses to leave. These are all ways of expressing my discomfort, making these situations non-consensual. I had spent so much time beating myself up for "letting this happen", placing all the blame on myself.
I started talking with other women about saying No. I talked to them about feeling silenced, being pressured by someone to engage in (unwanted) physical activity and not being able to speak, opening the mouth with nothing coming out. The discussion always led to the mentality of just "Getting through it": Kissing someone or whathaveyou just to get them off your back. It feels easier to just play the part than to say No. What are we so afraid of? What am I so afraid of? I can only speak for myself here: There is the seizing fear of not being liked (sounds so retro to say it out loud in an age where I feel women are more empowered than ever, but here I am dealing with a seemingly ancient problem.). I suspect that no matter how many public service announcements there are about how a woman should not need a person's approval to validate themselves, there is still a void that needs to be filled by a lot of women and there will always be women who Get Through It.
Not everyone is able to say No, but if you look closely, more women than you might think are saying No. With averted eyes, blank expressions during sex, stiff bodies.
Much different that my DARE experience, there was no t-shirt that came with the completion of my Sex Ed. class. There was no ceremony with a gym full of happy parents content knowing that their child will never engage in illegal or self-destructive activity because now they Know Better. Instead parents lay in their beds at the end of the day breathing sighs of relief that Everything Was Explained and kids lay in their own beds at night doing God knows what with a mixes sense of shame, pleasure, excitement, and validation because now we knew everyone else was doing the same thing. But now I can see that that wasn't the completion of my education about sex anyway. Eight years later I am still learning about my body, who I am as a sexual being, where my boundaries lie. Instead of a certificate with my name embossed in raised black letters, I get a little more comfortable in my own skin when I learn something new about myself or come to understand something once frustrating. Like this whole Saying No business.