When I was in about fourth grade, I had a very worldly neighbor, also in the fourth grade, who delighted in informing me about sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and other such things.
At the age of nine, and for a long time after, I didn't really know much about any of these topics, and was often made to feel quite ashamed about this by my peers. I never knew any of the slang that the other kids used, and was too embarrassed to ask them. Besides, I didn't want to reveal my incredible ignorance. I often felt completely disconnected from conversations and almost never spoke. I have to confess that I was a little bit neurotic, too, which reduced me to near silence in elementary school.
Alicia, my neighbor, would often say things that were quite appalling to my little ears and then ask me to repeat them. Yes, before you ask, it was one of those awful elementary school friendships that is all about popularity and playground politics. Alicia would taunt me mercilessly if I didn't comply with her weird demands. Because of her, I actually couldn't bring myself to flick someone off, even jokingly, until my junior year of college.
One day when Alicia was trying to persuade me to do or say some vulgar thing she called me a \prude."" I was stunned. There was such incredible venom and contempt in her voice as she said this that I was convinced that it was the worst possible thing that one could be. And I had no idea what it meant.
Once a few years, before, I had seen the words ""Fuck U"" spray-painted on the cement wall of a large drainage ditch. I had tried looking up the meaning in a dictionary, but had not found an entry, and eventually worked up the courage to ask my mother what it meant. She told me that it was ""bad,"" that it was a slang term for sex and that I should NEVER say it.
Well, when Alicia said ""prude"" it was so much worse sounding than anything else I had ever heard come out of her dirty little mouth. I was certain that the word wouldn't be in the dictionary, and eventually asked my mother what it meant. I hedged around a great deal, already mortified and ashamed about what I would soon utter in front of my mom, before I actually whispered the word that I desperately needed defined.
I am sure that my mother was relieved and tickled that her 9-year-old was considered a prude by her peers. I, however, was more embarrassed and ashamed than I ever had been. It sort of served to seal my silence, and more than anything marked me as a prude for the rest of my life.
Suddenly, as a grad student, I find myself as a TA for Human Sexuality. It amuses me in a quiet way every time I stand in front of my class and ask them to list slang terms for male and female genitalia. It also amuses me how much these words really have a hold over us. My students' eyes get big and they'and sometimes I'blush.
I find it funny how my students selected to take the class, but at the same time are reluctant to talk about sex. Our fascination with it, from grade school on up, indicates the importance of sex in our lives, but we are all such prudes that we can't bring ourselves to talk about ""it."" Well, some of us are recovering prudes.
Emily Kremer is a graduate student in sociology and a teaching assistant for Sociology 160. She can be reached at theweeklypiece@yahoo.com.
