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A Girl's Education
The social/sexual savagery of the all girls' school
Sarah D. Bunting, Tomato Nation
You can never start planning too early for your child's education. Even if you haven't started a family yet, you'll want to begin thinking about your options - and your child's - well in advance. Still, what with the mind-boggling array of educational choices available to many parents, you may have overlooked the very one that could help your daughter take those first crucial steps on the road to a lifetime of insecurity, neurosis, and alienation: all-girls' school.
An all-female environment will bring out talents in your child that she might not have developed in a co-ed setting. She'll learn how to make herself throw up. She'll become an expert with hair colorants. She'll even master the ancient art of cat-fighting - and she'll accomplish all this in an absolutely testosterone-free environment, attired in the clever kilt of dress-code yesteryear. Best of all, attending an all-girls' school will squash the remnants of that pesky self-esteem by throwing your daughter into contact with nature's cruelest and most ruthless creatures - her peers in the 11-to-14 age group.
Okay, so I've exaggerated slightly for effect. But only slightly. I attended an all-girls' school for twelve years - known in some circles as »serving a life sentence« - and while our non-sectarian teachers didn't whack us with rulers by any means, I could still describe it as a punishing experience. No BBC »Nature« program narrated in dulcet tones by David Attenborough; no »Mutual Of Omaha« footage of Marlon Perkins getting mauled by an enraged baboon; no element of wildlife red in tooth and claw compares to the social savagery that the students of an all-female educational institution endure on a daily basis.
Much of the torment comes in the form of sex: more accurately, the certainty on the part of most of the students that they will never have any sex, because other girls have deemed them too fat or fashion-ignorant to attract a boy, coupled with the fear that they might have some but won't know what to do when the situation presents itself, because few totalitarian governments disseminate quite as much outright misinformation as the sexual grapevine at an all-girls' school.
I suppose the confusion begins with the very nature of a single-sex institution. All-girls' schools like to claim that their students learn faster, speak up in class more often and more boldly, have higher self-confidence, and earn better grades than their female counterparts in co-ed schools, simply by virtue of not having to contend with boys all day. This assertion sounds logical enough at first, but after a moment's thought, it begins to seem more than a little condescending. It implies that girls need protection from boys, that girls cower in fear of boys and their domineering opinions, and while this may hold true of some girls, I don't think most young women benefit from the subtext, i.e. that they can only excel in a milieu without the boys who would otherwise overwhelm and distract them. I can't speak for my schoolmates, but I often longed for the rambunctious presence of guys; my peers had long since ostracized me for speaking up in class and earning top marks, and I would have enjoyed the company of a boy or two in the classroom.
Of course, I would have welcomed a less judgmental peer group, too. Women who complain about the double standards held by men should pay a visit to an all-girls' school sometime; girls at my school put a premium on appearing sexually desirable, while simultaneously disapproving of actual sexual activity - unless, of course, you engaged in it with a boyfriend. Basically, it broke down like this: in order to make your existence worthwhile, you had to have a boyfriend. To that end you would have to do certain sticky and shameful things. Why? Well, boys expected you to do them, and you didn't dare deny boys, lest they break up with you. But you couldn't enjoy the sticky and shameful things either, or boys would talk about you, and girls hate nothing more than another girl that boys talk about, so other girls would talk about you too, and they'd use words like »slut« and »whore.« In other words, you couldn't say »no,« and you couldn't say an enthusiastic »yes.« You could only say »okay,« and then lie there while the boy in question fumbled around, wondering to yourself why everyone made such a fuss about something so tedious and uncomfortable.
Yes, »tedious.« Girls' school taught you early on to hate your body and to view its fluids with suspicion and disgust, so of course you had never »touched yourself down there« and you could scarcely recognize the signs of your own arousal, much less did you know what an orgasm felt like or how to achieve one. And even if you had known, you wouldn't have risked speaking up to your boyfriend about it, or expected him to give you one. No surprise, then, that you viewed sex as a chore to get through or the price you paid for not having to worry about a date for prom.
I didn't subscribe to these beliefs, myself. I didn't give myself an eating disorder, because I didn't have the Herculean willpower anorexia seemed to require, and my phobic fear of puking eliminated bulimia as an option. I had body image »issues,« like a lot of teenage girls, but I didn't find my vagina or any of the things that issued from it revolting. I »touched myself down there,« too, although I knew better than to admit that. I discovered later that everyone did, and I felt much better about it, but that didn't help me in high school. See, the myth that has sprung up around all-female education tells us that young women function better in a less competitive environment. Never mind the fact that we need to put the shrinking-violet theory to rest once and for all - in reality, young women cloistered together without young men will become poisonously competitive and hostile themselves. We devoted ourselves to tearing each other down when we should have banded instead: told one another that masturbating wasn't sinful or shameful; supported one another's decisions to do as we pleased regarding sex, whether that meant enjoying it frequently without commitment or refusing to have any at all; spoken frankly to each other, without rancor, in order to demystify the entire process. I doubt that such consciousness-raising goes on in co-ed schools, but I can attest to the reverse process - the »consciousness-dampening« - that went on in all-girls' schools.
And I think we all deserved better.
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