The Girls' School Tried To Mute My Mojo

It’s done, it worked. It’s like the X-Files. I’ve been spayed.

The Right Wing Whackos have done zapped my sex drive and there will be no more feisty gay kittens spawned at my love ranch.

Readers, I’ve been in a very frightening place.

A School For Girls. Not a bad place, but a frightening place.

I have two more months to ride out, because I’m not going back next year, but I could write a book about these months alone. There are so many different layers: The wealth, the privilege, the legions of interchangeable little blonde girls in skirts with names like “Stuart” and “Morgan” are all hella strange.

But the thing that really bewilders me the amped up homophobia.

I mean…I figured it would be weird, right? Lesbianism at a girls’ school has to be the ultimate sin. Not the perversely fun kind with like, a rocker girl soundtrack and hot little uniforms, but more a deafening silence.

Like maybe if you’re too out and proud you’re going to drag all the trust fund and trophy daughters over that lavender line and they’ll chop their hair off in solidarity while blowing the family money on liberal scams like Green Peace.

But homophobes, you can take comfort in this:

Teaching at the girls’ school has killed this homo’s sex drive.
(Well at least put the damper in the hamper, ok?).

There is nothing sexy about a building full of neurotic, over-privileged teenaged girls and the women who fawn over them. It’s almost like reverse prison effect, I’m so not into girls right now. (And you know the wife is not amused).

And then I realize: It’s the right wing at work, slowly trying to kill the “gay agenda.”

I hear the term “gay agenda” a lot. The parents claim there’s a “gay agenda,” the head of the school has to kiss the parent’s and the board’s collective asses and placate their fears that all of those Amazonian sport rituals don’t make the girls appreciative of each other in suspiciously non-platonic ways.

I mean, maybe some of the older students are getting down with each other, which I cannot comment on, but according to the students who talk to me and an openly gay (but male and very young) coworker the gay straight alliance club is all-straight.

Shocking! But truthfully, I doubt I would’ve joined in high school, even if I did think it would’ve gotten me dates.

This school is as old as the hills and if you can read between the lines, which, by the way, is a Homo 101 prerequisite. It was started by a pro-feminist academic-minded spinster. School history acknowledges her living arrangements with another female teacher, and blah blah … blah blah fast-forward one hundred plus years and the school which used to be for progressive forward-thinking young women is all creepy and kinky, but in that bad-touch way. Like watching Hitchcock’s Rebecca and wondering what was going on with that maid, Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca’s underwear drawer.

But…I digress.

However the Mrs. Danvers archetype works: It’s all over the school. It’s beyond weird how these prematurely old, disturbingly sexless women make their careers about fetishizing their “girls,” yet present such aloof models of adulthood.

Sexuality on any level (unless made obvious by sanctioned procreation activities like pregnancy) is that strange elephant in the room. I don’t know what it’s like at other girls’ schools, but the atmosphere at this school is that sex doesn’t exist, it gets in the way of fund-raising.

As if to support this fact, the male faculty are mostly gay, married or geeky enough that they’re considered safe. If only in that benign good-touch way. It must be some unspoken rule when they’re hired that they have to snip their balls off.

As for the women, popping out babies is wonderful. Especially if they’re daughters! But anything else is sort of frowned upon. Especially for the straight girls. It’s like if they’re too hot they’re sort of dangerous and not “settled.”

(One of the school’s other pet phrases is, “err on the side of conservative” – oh don’t your toes just curl with joy?!)

So where does it leave us gay girls? Yes, beneath all the subtext we still exist, we’re the cliché gym teachers (although I am psyched to say that the goofiest, least-sexy gym teachers are mostly straight –ha! Represent, yo!). We are the sullen scientists and the cynical cyber wizards and the hunky punky kindergarten teachers, we (blah blah … blah blah) are “everywhere”.

And I cannot speak for anyone but myself, however I need to dispel the myth here and now that there is anything hot about being a lesbian teaching at a girls’ school. I don’t really trust my straight male coworkers enough to ask, but all these teenage girls have either killed my sex drive or made me unable to even look at anyone under thirty (shit, maybe forty) ever again.

It’s done, it worked. It’s like the X-Files. I’ve been spayed.

I mean, I’m the most married and monogamous girl on the planet, but I’m just saying.

Teenage girls are not hot.

I’ve been forced to watch them cavort in their short skirts, and it’s like conversion therapy. The adults, however, are far worse. They frighten me with their blank eyes and their tight smiles. By Fridays it feels like A Clockwork Orange. I can’t handle it anymore.

This must be what happens to nuns.

I never want to look at anything female, ever again.

And it’s so sad that the right wing wins again, as I (jokingly) refuse to consider sex with my wife. Working at a girls’ school has ruined me!

It’s not like I don’t remember the wonders of young female bodies. I was a sexually active teen, I remember the girls I was with fondly. But our teenage drama and insecurities? Oh please. Being in your thirties is beyond cool, everything is sort of amusing at a distance in that “been there, done that” way. You don’t have as much to prove, you know who you are, what you want, and presumably how to get it. And for a chick, gay or straight, you can sing it like Johnny Rotten, because you are that bad-ass.

Truthfully the kids I teach are mostly too young to articulate issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, but I do teach one older grade where it must come up. And among even my youngest students, realistically not all of them will grow up to be straight. I might be old enough to be their mother, but I knew I was gay when I was their age. And I can’t say that I don’t see glimpses of my pre-teen and teenage self in some of these girls.

So the best “role model” I can be is that emblem of life after high school/ college and being a happy as an adult. My sense of humor is a tool, and I have hopefully taught my students and the other girls who see me daily, even if I don’t work with them, a glimpse of how awesome things are when you have the dumb shit sorted out.

And I do mean sorted, sweeties.

Sexually I was the queen of inexperience, and surely a bore until I hit my late-teens and girlfriend number two. I say this to undo the damaging, pedophilic notion that virginity is a commodity. And you know what? Smart people know this.

From my own experience, the sex thing only got good once both parties involved knew what they were doing, how to do it and there wasn’t some unsorted experience dynamic.

And while some of my straight male friends who teach college seem to pine for the idea of those young girls to “teach,” all I can think when I look at my students is.

“Gimme their mothers.” So maybe the right wing hasn’t completely muted my mojo, but that of course, is a completely different post.