in some ways it was kind of an odd situation i found myself in but because i had been teaching in that district for 16 years when i started doing the health unit i had built up a lot of trust with parents and my principals and because i approached the material fearlessly and honestly it got the respect of the students. i never lied to them about any of it and, if someone asked me a question that i couldn’t really answer in an age appropriate way, i told them straight up that it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to answer them. i definitely wasn’t going to get into details of sexual techniques with a group of 11 and 12 year olds and as for the ones whose parents had asked me to talk to them about contraception i did so privately and with only enough details for them to understand the main types.
during the second year i was teaching the course another teacher asked me to have “the talk” with her daughter who was in band because she and her husband were too chicken to do it themselves.
another oddity of my situation was that i was the teacher on the 6th grade hall who kept menstrual supplies for the kids to use. that started because the 6th grade hall was as far from the nurse’s office as you could get and still be in the building and one of my homeroom girls asked if there was any way i could keep some pads in my desk so she wouldn’t have to go all the way to the nurse’s office. i cleared it with the nurse and she gave me pads to keep in my drawer. it didn’t take long before some of the other girls on my team got wind of what i was doing for the first girl and they started coming to me if they needed a pad. eventually it filtered out to the girls on the other team. because some of the girls that first year had sisters who were in the fifth grade, the next year there were already a few “customers” and so by the end of the second year it became common knowledge that i was the “pad king” of the sixth grade hall. i also let them know that i would always keep them in one particular drawer so if that was what they needed they didn’t have to ask, they could just get it.
So many parents too scared to talk to their kids about sex-once again putting the idea that feeling embarrassed as a reason to avoid taking about a topic as a valid reason not to do so. See also restrictions on discussing race, economics, and public health.
After all, they have to know something about sex if they’re parents, right? Even adoptive parents must understand how the kid got here.
A. Women’s sport exists as a category because the dominance of men athletes was threatened by women competing.
We see this over and over again in the history of sport…
(Several example posts)
More examples exist but the pattern is clear:
Where women were included (or simply included themselves) it was only when they started threatening men’s dominance/entitlement that we were segregated into a separate category.
It is why we still see Sport & Women’s Sport )
Women’s inclusion was on the terms of those in power. They didn’t want women ‘taking opportunities’ away from men so they segregated women.
It was never about a benevolent (still sexist) aim of supposedly ‘giving women a chance to win’.
It was about control.
And the narrative (B) about women being inherently physically inferior to men? Concocted as a reason to segregate us without threatening masculinity.
(I’d happily cross-post this to one of our trans rights threads, but I’m not sure which one would be the best home for it.)
Although this film is a comedy, it contains a lot of thoughtful references to women’s history and misogyny (especially how those views affected laws and society). There’s a fictionalized courtroom scene featuring Gisèle Halimi at the Bobigny abortion trial in 1972. It reflects the themes from this manifesto:
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