Read Online Sex Object by Jessica Valenti - Free Book Online

day of class, Mr. Z told us that if anyone came in to observe the class—“an important-looking person”—we should raise our hand no matter what question he asked.
    If you don’t know the answer, raise your right hand. If you do know the answer, raise your left. I’ll only call on you if you’re raising the left!
    Everyone looked around at each other, smirking. The social currency at Stuyvesant High School wasn’t coolness as muchas it was ambition and the ability to get good grades, even if you didn’t deserve them—and easy teachers were a necessity for students who had overloaded on calculus and AP science classes. (I was not one of those students.)
    Mr. Z didn’t really teach as much as he showed movies like Braveheart , but one day he had an actual lesson. And though he almost never called on students, he called on me. Come up to the board, Jessica . He smiled, small bits of white spit accumulating at the corners of his mouth. We all want to get a closer look at your shirt .
    He laughed, but the class was silent. I wasn’t really wearing a shirt but a brown bodysuit, which was popular at the time—it snapped at the crotch and I wore it with jeans baggy enough to see the cutout above my hips. I remember the way I slid sideways through rows of desks, my arms crossed over my chest. I don’t remember what I wrote on the board. I never went back to the class.
    When I started at Stuyvesant as a freshman, I went from being one of the smartest kids in my junior high school to being a nominally good student without the same drive and pedigree of my cute and smart girlfriends. Their parents had gone to college, grad school even. They lived on the Upper West Side or in Park Slope in apartments filled with books and paintings and cabinets full of alcohol. One friend had an entire floor of a four-story park-side brownstone as their “room.” I lived in a house where once or twice a week my mom would go outside wearing yellow rubber gloves to clean up the used condoms that litteredthe sidewalk from the men who parked there with prostitutes.
    One of my best girlfriends was a lithe dancer who had professional head shots for when she did the occasional acting job. She was the kind of WASP-y pretty I desperately wanted to be—the type of beauty that provoked starry-eyed crushes instead of ass slaps. She lived in a duplex apartment with a spiral staircase, and we bonded as freshmen over our junior-year boyfriends. The first time she came over to my house, she remarked how much she liked my mom’s “uneducated” accent. It’s cute! she said, smiling as she helped herself to a soda from the fridge.
    That same year I was called to the board in Mr. Z’s class, 1995, Stuyvesant started investigating an English teacher for describing sex fantasies and his masturbation routine during class. He talked about having a dream in which he raped a maid who had his wife’s face. Another student said he asked her to play Spin the Bottle with him and later let her out of writing an essay because she was “pretty.” He was suspended for a few months, and then four years later—after a different man, an assistant principal, was arrested for fondling and exposing himself to a freshman—he was suspended again. That first time, though, the feigned outrage in the school only lasted as long as the newspaper articles did. We had a brief student assembly on the subject and moved on.
    My favorite French teacher also had complaints filed against him. But he was dapper and wore suits to class and asked me and my friends what kind of wine we liked. So while we weren’t clear on the details of the accusations against him, my friendsand I felt quite strongly at the time that they were total bullshit. He didn’t need to harass anyone.
    One day, as this teacher walked alongside me and one of my friends on Chambers Street, he told us about the girl—this