Who Could Forget Chastity Day?
Advocating for sexual education in the classroom.
A field trip. Nice. It’s been awhile since I’d been forced to leave the classroom during school hours. My mom was a stickler for getting that perfect attendance award at the end of the year. And I mean me simply being the onstage recipient of what she liked to believe was her perfect attendance award. Parents are weird. Thanks to her foresight, however, I’ve been the unwilling beneficiary of a private Catholic school education since I was four years old. It helped me tremendously in many ways, but could have potentially hindered me in a very important one had I not been a highly discerning kid. I was never offered the opportunity to take a class in sexual education throughout my middle school or high school career. In fact, my middle school’s administration thought they had a better idea.
We embarked on our twenty minute bus ride and pulled into the parking lot of one of our brother schools, Belen Jesuit, to attend a mandatory one-day quote abstinence training workshop unquote fetchingly referred to as Chastity Day. Kill me, I thought. The banner was printed in big, bold lettering and strung above the entrance to the auditorium.
None of the authority figures in my early life ever took the time to show me how to put a condom on a banana, explain what it was, how it worked, or why it was necessary. And outside of my household, none of them ever vouched for contraceptive use because they weren’t vouching for sex at all. Well, at least, not before marriage. Apparently, they didn’t want my sweet little lotus to be deflowered before the tender age of 30 by anyone but my future doting husband (also in the hopes that I’d have just one). Although my parents themselves had never married and my sexual urges had already kicked in long before this workshop transpired in 8th grade because I was a ducking human being with primitive wiring and needs. A young red headed woman eager to offer her safeguarded virginity (in real life) to her soon to be husband on their wedding night got on stage and presented an off-white Converse sneaker to the auditorium. Dirty and weathered from the usual wear and tear of actually wearing all-white Converse outside for more than an hour. She reeked of one-college-credit-thespianism (and so began my distaste for thespians) as she explained to a mostly inattentive audience full of teenagers feigning looks of disinterest that she was so excited to be able to offer such a sacred gift to her life partner. That partner entered stage left with the other side of the Converse pair in tow. His right shoe was looking brand spanking new. So fresh out of the box, it was blinding. Had I been a sucker or a hopeless romantic, I might have fallen for it.
“I’ve held on to this for you for 30 years,” he said as he held out the right sneaker and handed it to her. A bit embarrassed, she handed him the left. It had clearly touched the floor at least once (again, for emphasis, once is all it takes to dirty a white Converse). Gasp. Slut! Heathen! Whore! Shame! Shame on you! On your ancestors, your late night rendezvous, and your family cow, too! probably wailed his internal dialogue thus perpetuating the suppression of female sexuality. He immediately seemed much less enthusiastic about having put a ring on it. Disappointed. Deject, even. As was every young girl that sat in the audience that day, but for a very different reason. Because the only thing that immediately came to their minds was: why did she have to be the one with the dirty shoe?
We were all dismissed and granted permission to leave the auditorium after signing our shiny new virginity cards. I signed mine in the loveliest cursive I could manage at the time and was urged to give that piece of plastic to that special someone one day. It was all so endearing, really. Encouraging adolescents that really wanted to abide by their faith’s heavily ingrained doctrines, but also really just wanted to have sex, to simply get married at a younger age in order to act on their insatiable desires and end up in divorce court a decade ahead of schedule. I checked the stats online when I got home. This just in! The nation’s divorce rate just hit 50% and is still steadily on the rise! More than half of the nuptial vows made across the country were dissolving every year. Rates of infidelity were just as high.
So if, idealistically, you wanted young practitioners of the Catholic faith to wait till marriage, but realistically, almost everyone in the auditorium that day was guaranteed to transgress (some probably in the bathroom during the presentation) before entering the ‘union of holy matrimony’, why not face the music of your unrealistic expectations and make a minor investment in educating them on what could possibly go wrong? Why not teach 8th graders and highschoolers safe sex practices and the importance of them? Because, in the real world, people are having it. Twenty-five hours a day. Eight days a week. Sexually transmitted diseases exist. Unwanted pregnancies happen. The sky is blue. And most people have more than one partner over the course of their lifetimes. Isn’t that why confession exists? Because even Catholics are unavoidably human bound to make human mistakes, but the most important part of making a mistake is learning from it so Father What’s-his-face doesn’t have to hear their pleas for the exact same misdemeanors the following week? And just in case there was any confusion, pregnancy for a sixteen or seventeen-year-old girl is a hard mistake to simply bounce back from. She can go to the confessional, but she doesn’t get a redo.
I’m just as relieved I was able to see beyond the bubble of my Catholic school education as I was grateful for it. But, I don’t know if everyone comes out nearly as unscathed. Ya digg?
