and dull, and so it was. There was the sperm and the egg and
they met on a blackboard.
By that time I had learned always to listen to what was not
being said, to the empty space, as it were, to the verbal void.
The key to al adult pedagogy was not in what they did say but
in what they would not say. They would say the word “contraception, ” but they would not say what it was. This was a time in the United States when contraception and abortion
were both still illegal. I knew about abortion, or enough
about it to suit me then. I asked about contraception and got
an awkward runaround. I fucking wanted to know what it
was, and they fucking were not going to tell me. I couldn’t let
it go, as usual, and so got from them the statement that they
discussed contraception only with married people. The group
that sponsored the lecture, with its almost-famous woman
speaker, would not come clean; now that group, headed by
the same woman until she died in the last decade, is part of
the free speech lobby in the United States protecting the
rights of pornographers.
What I learned was simple and eventually evolved into my
own pedagogy: listen to what adults refuse to say; find the
answers they won’t give; note the manipulative ways they
have of using authority to cut the child or student or teenager
of at the knees; notice their immoral, sneaky reliance on peer
pressure to shut up a questioner (because, of course, if one
persists, the others in the audience get mad or embarrassed).
The writing is in the configuration of white around print; the
verbal answer is buried in silence, a purposeful and wicked
silence, a lying, cheating silence. Every pregnant girl owes her
pregnancy not to the heroic lover who figured out how the
sperm gets inside her but to the adults who will not show her
a diaphragm, an IUD, a female condom, and - sor y, Ma - a
rubber. I left the lecture that night with the certain knowledge
that I did not know what contraception was even if I knew the
word and that adults were not going to tell me.
Miss Bel , my physical education teacher who also taught
health, had the only method that successful y resisted both my
Socratic urgency and emerging Kabalistic axioms: on one test
paper she mimeographed a huge drawing of the male genitals,
and the students had to write on the drawing the name of
each part - “scrotum, ” for instance. In an equivalent test on
female sexuality, she had this true-or-false statement for extra
credit of twenty points: if a girl is not a virgin when she gets
married, she wil go to hel . I was the only student in my class
not to get the extra twenty points.
