whistle, or jab each other in the ribs and call out “I see London …” when the waistband of a boy’s shorts shows. Their sex talk is softer because it’s less taken for granted and smiled at than the boys’ is (“Boys will be boys.…”), but it’s there, all right, whispered under the blankets at Girl Scout sleepovers or in heads-together huddles on the playground. Boys, coming home from school at three, would weave and spin on their bikes, making little orbits around us as we walked, standing up on the seats when they passed us, to call out some new and thrilling combination of four-letter words, or taking their hands off the bars and giving us the finger. And we would clutch our neatly lettered notebooks to what we still shyly referred to as our “fronts” and speculate about the sex lives of our teachers. The little boys were being nothing more than little boys while we, the fifth-grade girls, who saw special movies and wore bras and dreamed of John Lennon and the eighth-grade baseball team, we were the true pornographers. Our shyness about real-life sex, when it concerned us personally, was concealed behind the gusto with which we dwelt upon its aberrations. Never acknowledging our own sexual vulnerability, we were thrilled, shocked and titillated by the exploits of others.
And in a classroom full of smart, wise-cracking dirty jokesters, I was the biggest know-it-all of all. Whether my sex information was accurate or not, the point is that I thought it was and, thinking that, I set myself up as the counselor and information center for our class. I was full of sex lore; I glibly expounded on the meanings of the most sophisticated Playboy jokes; I had vague but elaborate notions about lesbians and eunuchs and—when the explanations were too embarrassing to give—I escorted my friends into the girls’ room at school, wrote out the definitions on toilet paper (or drew explanatory diagrams) then, after showing what I’d written, dramatically flushed them down the toilet. I wrote pornographic stories and circulated them at school, hoping of course, to buy myself an in. The situation is a common one: the never-wholly-accepted kid discovers that he’s got something negotiable—a swimming pool, a talent for math, an electric Yo-yo, an exploitable knack for writing dirty stories and so he thinks, just briefly, that he can parlay what he has into social capital, that now he will be liked, plummeted to stardom. Cocker-spaniel eager, he repeats over and over the song and dance that worked so well, brought him such favor, the first time round. It’s the one tune he knows, though, and so of course his audience tires of it—by that time, they’ve found a new court jester. The whole point of the jester system is that the briefly well-loved clown-show-off can gain at best only a temporary place within the group. He interests them only so long as he is different from them. They are amused and entertained—fond, even—because he is and will always remain an outsider.
Anyway, for a while I basked in my role as classroom sex expert, until the subject filled my life almost completely. Somewhere I had read about phallic symbols, and from then on my girl friends and I imagined them everyplace we looked, which wasn’t hard, since everything except a square is either longer than it is wide or wider than it is long. (I realize this now, but back in fifth grade it seemed as if my landscape was filled with innuendo, with richly sexual, symbolic Meaning.) We marveled at our history teacher’s calm (how thick she was; didn’t she know ?) as she described to us, while we sat frozen with mixed relish and horror, that monumental event of 1889, the erection of the Eiffel Tower.
I set myself up as a counselor too, full of advice for girls just starting out with boy friends while I had none, myself. Suddenly, though, just about everyone else knew more than me, and what they knew came from experience, not books read in the closet,
And in a classroom full of smart, wise-cracking dirty jokesters, I was the biggest know-it-all of all. Whether my sex information was accurate or not, the point is that I thought it was and, thinking that, I set myself up as the counselor and information center for our class. I was full of sex lore; I glibly expounded on the meanings of the most sophisticated Playboy jokes; I had vague but elaborate notions about lesbians and eunuchs and—when the explanations were too embarrassing to give—I escorted my friends into the girls’ room at school, wrote out the definitions on toilet paper (or drew explanatory diagrams) then, after showing what I’d written, dramatically flushed them down the toilet. I wrote pornographic stories and circulated them at school, hoping of course, to buy myself an in. The situation is a common one: the never-wholly-accepted kid discovers that he’s got something negotiable—a swimming pool, a talent for math, an electric Yo-yo, an exploitable knack for writing dirty stories and so he thinks, just briefly, that he can parlay what he has into social capital, that now he will be liked, plummeted to stardom. Cocker-spaniel eager, he repeats over and over the song and dance that worked so well, brought him such favor, the first time round. It’s the one tune he knows, though, and so of course his audience tires of it—by that time, they’ve found a new court jester. The whole point of the jester system is that the briefly well-loved clown-show-off can gain at best only a temporary place within the group. He interests them only so long as he is different from them. They are amused and entertained—fond, even—because he is and will always remain an outsider.
Anyway, for a while I basked in my role as classroom sex expert, until the subject filled my life almost completely. Somewhere I had read about phallic symbols, and from then on my girl friends and I imagined them everyplace we looked, which wasn’t hard, since everything except a square is either longer than it is wide or wider than it is long. (I realize this now, but back in fifth grade it seemed as if my landscape was filled with innuendo, with richly sexual, symbolic Meaning.) We marveled at our history teacher’s calm (how thick she was; didn’t she know ?) as she described to us, while we sat frozen with mixed relish and horror, that monumental event of 1889, the erection of the Eiffel Tower.
I set myself up as a counselor too, full of advice for girls just starting out with boy friends while I had none, myself. Suddenly, though, just about everyone else knew more than me, and what they knew came from experience, not books read in the closet,
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