[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

[runpunkrun]

We pause so I can explain the blue dot metaphor to Best Beloved, who somehow missed that part of health class.

I...don't get it. Did I miss that part of health class too?

[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.

[stillane]

Yeah. Every year, we had the same round of topics covered: You are a girl, these are your girlparts, once a month it will suck to be a girl (to varying degrees), these are STDs and they suck (always), and here is a diorama of drug paraphernalia (which is bad). The guys had a separate class (except for the drug stuff, which was apparently not something we could get bad sexthought!cooties from if we all shared a room).

Funnily enough, my most enduring Health Class memory involves asking the local sheriff where marijuana is a native species. For me, it was all about the scientific curiosity (I mean, it's got to grow wild somewhere, right?), but The Law did not see it that way. They tried to tell me that it is not native to anywhere. I disagreed with their scientific method. Vocally.

I'm pretty sure I'm still on some list of troublemakers that gets handed out at township meetings and county fairs. :/

[laura47]

wait, you go this? and you're older than me! wow!

[sapote3]

In the state I went to high school teachers are forbidden by law from saying the word, unless it's in response to a student's question.

Law.

The logic is that way at least they won't say anything bad. Oh, the south.

[indywind]

what state was that? I need to know so I can not move there.

[sapote3]

North Carolina. It was sponsored by Jesse Helms, the same notorious killjoy responsible for the law forbidding the distribution of condoms on school grounds, even in the case of my old school which had a medicare clinic built on-site. They had to send you down to Planned Parenthood with a note.

[thefourthvine]

It's possible she just decided to go there on her own, because she was pretty awesome and the gay-as-an-insult thing was making her (and me, although I never would have admitted it, of course) completely crazy. But, really, I went to school in New Mexico in the 1980s. I would have assumed that they were talking about this EVERYWHERE by now.

[melannen]

You can read a PDF of "Am I Blue" by google-searching "am I blue" "coville" (It's the first result.) Not sure whether it's up-by-permission or I'd direct-link.

(I would have guessed that was out too late for TFV's health teacher, but maybe it was previously published somewhere that only teachers would see? Anyway I never found it in my read-all-Coville-everywhere phase in the early '90s. ...or, you know what, it would have been out by the time I was in high school health, I was just past YA reading by then. Or maybe Coville got the idea from something health teachers were already doing.)

[thefourthvine]

Am I Blue? is exactly why I thought it was a standard part of the curriculum! Because, hey, I had it in health class, and then later I read the story, and as we all know, two points are PLENTY of data for extrapolation! Especially if you are deeply interested in lines.

And she followed through on this threat. "VAGINAAAAA!"

See, now, I realize this was horrible to live through, but I admit I'd kind of like to see video of it.

[simplysly]

I went to three different high schools, and had to explain something about sex to other kids at all three of them. I had my Health Class (complete with actual sex ed, instead of just "this is the female body and how it works") in 9th grade, which seemed to be pretty standard at all three schools. I thought it was a pretty good class, over all, even if it didn't go so much into the mechanics of gay sex, or mention the Kinsey scale at all. At my next high school, I was a Junior, and at lunch with two girls in their Sophomore year. They had taken their Health class the previous year, but neither knew what a hymen was, or that it was used a lot of times as a measure of "virginity".

Senior year at the third high school was fun, though. I got to explain about anal sex during lunch. Good times.