[Trek] Mirror, Mirror

[thefourthvine]

Mirror, Mirror won the poll handily, and is now appointed Lord High King of All Episodes TFV Should Watch after the Gay Sex One, the Robot Kirk One, and the One Where Everyone Is CreepyAnd the poll was right! Or the voters were, anyway. Mirror, Mirror is amazingly good. And it was educational for me; I never knew, before this, why people said

Comments

[thefourthvine]

Weird. Okay. Maybe it was just my health teacher's thing? But I've heard it other places! Maybe she adapted it freely.

So. One morning, everyone on the earth wakes up with a blue dot on their forehead corresponding to how gay they are - the darker the color, the higher the person is on the Kinsey scale. Barely there light blue = a 1, dark dark midnight blue = 6. Her main points:

1. Almost everyone in the class would have some blue on their heads. No, really, you're laughing, but studies show that only 10% of you wouldn't have any blue at all (pretty sure she made this number up), so that's three of you.
   
   
2. We normally think of "gay" as the darkest blue people, and "straight" as almost everyone else, but it doesn't work like that - true gay and true straight are the rarities. The norm is to be somewhere in between.
   
   
3. So when you say "faggot" or "that's so gay," you're saying it in the hearing of people who are at least somewhat gay, and it's probably as true of you as it is of the people you're saying it to, and if it's true of basically

[lucia_tanaka]

Talking about gayness? In health class? WHAT BIZARRO WORLD DID YOU ATTEND SCHOOL IN? Do they have goatees there?

[runpunkrun]

This was my PRECISE reaction. I'm pretty sure the word never even came up.

[thefourthvine]

But - but - like half the class was AIDS (and other STDS): don't get them. How do you have that discussion and not talk about the sex people actually have? *mystified*

[lucia_tanaka]

Answer: You just don't. Advocate abstinence and keep mum on everything else.

I just got out of high school in Rural Missouri, so YMMV, but sex is barely mentioned in school at all, and gayness just isn't talked about at all.

[thefourthvine]

See, I find this really depressing. You JUST GRADUATED. This is backwards. *shakes fist at all Abstinence Only bullshit everywhere*

[j00j]

Sex ed in US public schools is, by and large, not effective because it *doesn't* talk about the sex people actually have. I went to a good public school in a liberal Chicago suburb in the late 90s and while we did talk about contraception and STD-prevention, there was almost no discussion of what kinds of risks were involved in different acts. The talk we got at one of the gay-straight alliance (the school did have one of those without much fuss) meetings was *much better*.

[thefourthvine]

...You didn't get the chart showing the risks of various sex acts, then? We got one, although it turned out it was wrong, but it was right in terms of what we knew at the time.

Apparently my health teacher was ahead of her time. If she's still teaching, and she might be, she's probably STILL ahead of her time.

[azurelunatic]

We got the condoms, the other forms of birth control, the dental dams, the risks of sex acts, but not the orientations. (Alaska, and with an AWESOME teacher.)

[runpunkrun]

Yeah, easy, you don't mention AIDS or STDs, or sex at all, really. We didn't put the condom on the banana either.

I remember we had "sex ed" in health in junior high, for, like, a day. I honestly don't remember any sex ed in high school health. Though I do remember having to do an embarrassing oral report (can that be TRUE?) on artificial insemination.

[thefourthvine]

We put the condom on the banana, and we also had the lady from Planned Parenthood come in. She put the condom over her HEAD. ("If anyone tells you the condom is too small for his great big penis, I want you to remember what I'm about to do.")

My junior high health class was awful and sex-ed-free, because we had a teacher who hadn't trained for it and she was hideously uncomfortable with the whole topic of human bodies (I knew we would not be doing much sex ed when she starting blushing and stammering uncontrollably while we talked about the digestive system), but in high school, we had half a semester of sex ed, which divided into Don't Get Sick and Don't Make Babies. (Ironic, of course, because one of the girls in my class was finding out she was pregnant - unplanned, of course - at 13 just as we started the Don't Make Babies bit; she sat next to me, and I remember her looking at the early pregnancy symptoms chart and turning white and whispering, "Oh god, oh god

[insane_duckfish]

She put the condom over her HEAD.

Yeah, there was a guy a couple years above me in school who tried that trick too. He nearly suffocated. And no one ever let him live it down.

[runpunkrun]

This is why I put "sex-ed" in scare quotes. It was half an hour of one of the coaches aka our "health teacher" awkwardly trying to explain sex to us without getting showing us any pictures or using any technical terms or doing anything that might be seen as teaching. I remember him perched on the edge of a table while talking to us.

Then, in high school, I guess we did have a very brief section (like, a week) on sex ed because I'm remembering a lady came in to talk to us one day, but the most memorable thing about her was her hair. It was crazy-ass ostrich hair. So apparently there was some form of sex ed in high school, but clearly it made no impression on me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[misspamela]

No, no, OUR class was about getting your period and DON'T HAVE SEX because now you can make babies, and how you shouldn't smoke or do drugs. We learned a LOT of names for drugs that nobody ever used except health books.

[thefourthvine]

Oh, man, we learned those names, too. In seventh grade, when our teacher could not BEAR the topic of human bodies, we really had a lot of drug ed to make up the blank space in the curriculum, and we saw a lot of really, really bad movies and memorized a lot of bizarre names. (A girl from that class: "What is the point of this? Is it so I can buy drugs anywhere I go?" The funny part being that most of those names would not help her buy drugs, since they were known only to the DEA.) And, of course, the totally wrong drug information - that was a class highlight. I remember my father ranting at me, "How can they STILL be saying pot is a gateway drug? The problem is, you guys hear that, you look around and see that that's complete bullshit, and you STOP BELIEVING ANYTHING ANYONE SAYS." He was a big advocate of not believing anything anyone says, but he still thought it was stupid.

By ninth grade health class, of course, I had enough experience with - you know, substances of various kinds - that I knew what he meant. Our ninth grade

[misspamela]

...how many health classes did you HAVE? I am so boggled by all these differences! We just had the one in 7th or 8th grade and then a three-month refresher in 10th that was mostly about death and dying and drugs.