Having heard from another student that this was happening, the principal confiscated the students’ cell phones and found evidence in black and white: the girl had texted the boy expressing her excitement about the blowjobs she was planning to give him. It seems a girl at the high school had been giving a boy, one of my partner’s art students, regular blowjobs in an art classroom during lunchtime. Three weeks ago, just as the #metoo campaign gained momentum, my partner-a genderqueer teacher at a public high school in Southern California, received a formal reprimand from the principal at her school. My partner and I-like many queer people-are included in this group of people for whom the complexities are often the real story, not the marginal notes. The complexity-by which I mean the fact that seemingly feminist, zero-tolerance responses to sexual assault are often animated by racism, sexism, and heteronormativity rather than any kind of substantive feminist intervention-is the key fact for many of us, absolutely impossible to compartmentalize or put off for discussion until a more convenient time. Nor are they evidenced only by the starkest historical examples, such as Carolyn Bryant’s lies about Emmett Till, or the day-care satanic sexual abuse panic of the 1980s and 90s, or the lesbians now known as the San Antonio Four, falsely accused of sexual abuse in the mid 1990s (A case I’ll discuss further in a moment). This is finally working! In trusted company we acknowledge these complexities, but we ask that they not be spoken outside our carefully guarded feminist chambers, where we trust they will be handled with great care.īut these complexities are not theoretical. We are admonishing each other out of fear, please, I beg you not to distract from this powerful wellspring of feminist truths, this unstoppable testimony of violation and survival, by attending to gray areas and complexities. We are whispering to one another, please don’t muddy the waters by talking about false equivalences right now.
We, it seems, are also being careful, strategic.