#how risky im not omitting the names of the school HAHA

[birdscreeches]

Kids These Days || Aisha R.

The Marian Auditorium of Miriam CoIIege could seat one thousand fifty people, apparently, and on that day, it was a full house. Not necessarily by choice, of course. Every student there, aged twelve to probably fourteen at the oldest, had congregated into the air conditioned structure and settled into the smooth, wooden seats of the auditorium because this was a required thing, this talk on sexuality.

And if that isn’t a big, scary word. Sexuality. In a place like an all girls Catholic high school, saying the word “sexuality” was like opening a bag of chips in a dead quiet room. You will be met with winces or sneers or snickers. You might even get in trouble. The metaphor isn’t really foolproof, because on one hand, you’ve got a snack, and on the other, you’ve got an integral aspect of the human experience with endless variations. It’s a lot less “palatable”, for one. Not as tasty. Sexuality was funny. It was dirty. It was something to be whispered about and not spoken of, especially if you were twelve or thirteen or fourteen. Hell, even if you were older, it could still be something taboo. Growing up, or the failure of thereof, was a little peculiar like that.

But here they were for an entire two hour long talk all about sexuality. October of 2016, roughly one thousand fifty students were chucked into an auditorium where they tittered in a classic mixture of teenage curiosity, anticipation, and habitual boredom. On stage, the speaker, a family psychologist, walks out. The voices of the one thousand fifty students hush from a buzz to a hum to silence.

And the thus the talk began.

To say that the talk was a trainwreck would be a fantastic, monumental understatement. It seemed like every high school freshman I spoke to had something to say about the talk.

“Oh,” said A, a bookish girl with glasses who looked quiet and shy right up until I brought up The Talk. She pushed her glasses up in a way one knew meant she was livid. “It was awful.”

B, a student I had spoken to via email correspondence had written “It was terrible. Obscure. Immature.”

“I wanted to cry,” said R, looking like she was about to cry. “That talk made me want to cry.”

In a nutshell, the so-called sexuality talk was a verbal cavalcade of sexist stereotypes only thinly disguised as something educational. The speaker had talked about how men and women were different, how men’s brains were like waffles (boxed and organized) and women’s brains were like spaghetti (“Noodling around,” A told me. “I’m not shitting you. The speaker said, ‘women think like spaghetti, we’re always noodling around.’ What the hell does that mean?”) By the halfway point of the talk, students had resigned themselves to the fact that this was another one of those inane things the school did that they’ll have to forcibly erase from their memory. The talk went on about boys and girls and flirting and relationships and stuff everybody already knew about before always peddling back to “Studies first!” Educational stuff right here.

But the real kicker was this: one brave girl, just one out of roughly one thousand fifty, stood up, walked to the microphone set up in the aisle, and asked a question. She asked the question that was thrumming through the heads of a lot of students in the auditorium. She asked, “What do you think of LGBT?”

In front of one thousand fifty students, the speaker had smiled sweetly—sweet in the way that probably made you feel sick—and said “All the feelings you have for women, project them onto men instead.”

-

See, non-heterosexual people exist. Non-heterosexual teenagers exist. It just so happens some of them will end up in an all girls Catholic high school.

“It sucks,” R told me. R is a high school freshman. She had short hair and glasses and good grades and she was Not Straight. We spoke just a little bit after class ended at a lunch table in the school’s cafeteria. To her left was A, one of her friends who also was Not Straight, eyes downcast, as if she already knows the rest of what R was going to say. R said, “But, I don’t know. You get used to it.”

Which begs the question what exactly it is kids these days are forced to get used to.

The horror stories spanning from different schools are myriad. Sometimes it’s subtle. Miriam CoIIege High School had certain days where students could come in civilian attire, but “crossdressing” was not allowed. Students must dress like ladies.  St. PauI College Pasig has a rule against short hair. A bobcut is pushing it, and if you had a cut that was no longer in the realm of “female hair” you’d get talked to. L, a student from St. Paul, rocked something of a pixie cut during her stay at the school. She was called to the principal’s office for it every year and was even threatened with expulsion. Gender norms and non-heterosexual presentation are closely linked, and rules like these are tiny ways to make sure nothing happens even at a surface level. Rules like these are pretty nifty because it’s rather easy to shake one’s head and say this has nothing to do lesbians. It was about image.

Sometimes it’s more blatant. A had told me about a school—she couldn’t remember which one, just one from the expansive catalog of all girls Catholic schools—that had written in their handbook something along the lines of “girl on girl relations are strictly prohibited.”

Miriam College High School, the school where participants were taken from, has, in the curriculum for Christian Life, an entire section on Sexuality and Marriage. As expected, it all boiled down to teaching pissed off teenagers that if you weren’t straight, you were going to hell. Sure, it was sugar coated, but fancy plating doesn’t change the truth. If you took a shot for every time an earnest CL teacher said “God hates the sin, and not the sinner,” whilst making awkward eye contact with every visible lesbian in the classroom, we’d be getting to hell much earlier due to alcohol poisoning.

A controversial example of the curriculum at work would be the third term CL final exam given to the graduating batch of 2016. Questions upon questions of situations and matching values were put into a test that decided a student’s grade. Insert name here is a gay man in a relationship and dot dot dot. Insert name here thinks she is bisexual and dot dot dot. As a Christian, what is your response?

Many students refused to answer these questions at all. That was their response.

The act of existing in an all girls Catholic high school is one that’s implicit with resignation concerning this kind of treatment. Catholicism is obvious in its restrictions. It’s Adam and Eve, etcetera, but beyond religion, the structure of high schools and how they’re run creates an environment where not much can be done about it. The students are gay and the teachings are against you. If you’re really unlucky, a few teachers will be too. There can be teachers who are supportive, but they can’t really do much against the entirety of the administration. A joke I heard from a student was something along the lines of “There’s a reason why the CL department is so far away from the English department.” Right. Gotta keep the liberals away from the conservatives. An accepting teacher is a treat, but ultimately a bandaid in a world of gashes.

But, as R said, you get used to it. Or maybe you already were.

“And that’s messed up,” A told me. A was another freshman from a different class, and she really looked like a sweet girl. Anger didn’t suit her, but it graced her features anyway. It was mostly in her eyes; a hardened, steeled gaze. She is thirteen years old.

-

The thing about the infamous sexuality talk is that it’s the paragon of reinforcement. Smaller strains of it exist in things like religion class, disapproving teachers, guidance counselors who tilt their heads when you mention a girlfriend, and the list goes on.

It’s tempting to be confused as to why these things continue when they obviously don’t “work.” Work in the sense that these people and their attitudes don’t magically craft an army of straight girls. This much is evident by the persisting population of non heterosexuals existing in all girls Catholic schools. Talk after class after session, one after the other, and they’re still there and still as gay as ever.

These things continue because it’s a new coat of paint on the Straight Is Good sign. To students, this is something they’ll get to see on a regular basis. Those who disagree will continue to disagree, but there will be those who believe it. Of the non heterosexuals, this is just a small jab in the midst of many. They’ll get used to it, but some of them won’t. There will be those who believe it.

Of those who get used to it, the thought now is the fact that in an ideal world, they shouldn’t have to be.

“We’re used to being treated like this. There are worst things, but there are better ones too.” A said, “I wanna be used to better things.”

-

“I mean, I guess we’re lucky.” R told me a little later. We had taken a short break to buy food. R and A were now munching on gummy candies shaped like pizzas. There was something about this contrast that struck me; soft gummies and hard issues and teenagers who have both. “At least the students are really accepting. Just a week ago there was this, this romantic thing?”

“Yeah!” A piped in. “This girl had this sign like ‘I love you’ for another girl and they did this thing with flowers and stuff. It was really sweet. Right in the middle of the covered court, lunchtime. All the students were cheering.”

“And I figure, any teachers in the vicinity would just pretend not to notice,” I joked, but A just fixed her eyes on me again.

“What else can they do?” She said. And really, what else was there?

Ignorance, it seemed, was the easiest out. It certainly was the kinder evil. Averted eyes and skillful segues, and you never have to talk about gay students because well, they don’t really exist, anyway. “I’d take that over ‘gay is a sin’ any day,” A told me. “At least they stay away. They leave us alone.”

How lonely, I thought, but I didn’t tell her this. Instead, I just nodded and accepted that sometimes you have to settle. Whether it was a tragedy or not didn’t matter as much as the circumstances that pushed kids to have to set their standards low in the first place for something as simple as wanting to be accepted.

It seems if you’re a non-heterosexual student in a Catholic high school, it’s either you exist and you’re punished for it, or you’re ignored and you take what you can get. So flip a coin for it. I tell them this, and they laugh.

“I kind of don’t want to, though,” R said, squishing a gummy between her fingers. “It’s 2017. I kind of want more. Is that too much to ask?”

Not at all, I thought. Not at all.

-

In an auditorium filled with roughly one thousand fifty students, everybody hushed down, gritted their teeth, and listened. But if there’s something I’m getting from the kids I’ve seen and spoken to, it’s that they’re getting a little bit tired of that routine.

Perhaps, slowly, the silence will pick up. The murmurs will start. The words. The discussions. The voices will up in volume and confidence, a cadence of identity. Once upon a time, these kids were told to project their feelings elsewhere, and, in a sense, they are.

They’re projecting their feelings outward and beyond, loud and clear, absolutely demanding to be heard.