A middle school girl carelessly used the phrase ‘sexual assault’ in a class I was teaching last week. Startled by the presence of this phrase in the classroom outside of a specific context, I was struck by its placement in children’s vernacular by our current political circus. When ‘sexual assault’ becomes a commonplace phrase of adolescence (much in the way ‘gay’ was before its reclamation), young people become desensitized to its seriousness. Young girls are not discovering their own subjectivity, instead, its possibilities are being foreclosed around them.
Teaching adolescents about healthy friendships and sexual partnerships should be characteristic of a contemporary education in the United States. Unfortunately, this is far from the case across great swaths of the country. Even more upsetting is the subject positioning and acceptance of inappropriate behavior that is being forced on young girls. This deplorable practice in collaboration with the quick dismissal of sexual assault charges against the man running the most powerful nation in the world gives a bleak outlook that is closely reminiscent of the education Fine and McClelland situate in the past.
Educated as neither as desiring subjects seeking pleasure nor potentially abused subjects who could fight back, young women were denied knowledge and skills, and left to their own (and others’) devices in a sea of pleasure and dangers (Fine and McClelland, 2006).
As Fine and McClelland point out, the work of education (or its lack thereof) abandons young women not only in an ocean of their own emotions and hormones, it refuses to fight against the complicit work of the state as well as individuals who are working to normalize the deliberate debilitation of sexuality and autonomy.
Thank you for this post. It really resonated with me and reminded me of a recent conversation I had with an ELA teacher at my placement. She teaches an English elective on gender studies. We frequently discuss the importance of gender and frank open discussions on gender roles. I really appreciate your point about the normalizing of the term sexual assault, as well as the recent resurgence of the term due to the President elect. I second your point that schools need to openly address issues like safe sexual relationships.
Dear Clare,
I also really appreciated this post, as well as your commitment to discussing the issue of sexual assault and integrating it into curriculum for adolescents. It also made me sad for the rest of the nation outside of the New York City bubble (and for some schools within it), the “great swaths of the country,” as you mentioned, whose schools and educators wouldn’t touch this issue with a ten-foot pole. Growing up in Georgia, I certainly had sex education, from 6th grade on, in my private school near Atlanta, but I really don’t remember discussing positive sexual relationships and sexual assault in school until attending undergrad in Virginia. I was lucky enough to learn from a mother who taught me to trust my gut, to discuss sexual intercourse with partners before committing to it, and to remove myself from situations in which I felt uncomfortable; all against her own Catholic upbringing that did not discuss these issues because of the assumption that sex was not to take place until marriage. But not all adolescent girls are so fortunate, and school systems that rely on sex education to take place at home place many teen girls and boys, who do not receive this family education, at a horrible disadvantage. I’m with you (and Michelle) in supporting education on constructive sexual relationships in schools.