Experiment

Someone holds the makeshift beach up from one end, and the world floods, swell surging to one side of the homemade wave machine before the water rushes back, quick, aggressive, eroding bits of the science fair project with violence before softening slowly, slowly. Repetition eventually grinds everything down to nothing.

We are supposed to make a good wave, seventh-grade science a mixture of earth studies and physics, building habitats for the bugs we capture and let wander our palms before we stick a pin through their abdomens and watch them scurry to nowhere. Their bodies flatten slowly, slowly. We learn about the squid that undulate off our California coast, watch them billow and burst in a video before we fry and eat samples our teacher brought in, crunching the creatures to a rubbery pulp between our strong white teeth.

The year is an exercise in power—who controls the land and the bodies on it, how much fear means to the ones who aren’t feeling it, the frequency with which some of us will feel terror crash over us in waves.

Middle-school science class is where we learn the female body is destined for dissection, that womanhood means an inevitable encounter with the slick edge of a blade, boys and men thrilled by their power and our panic, our pregnant mothers—eventually ourselves—ripped open by the surprising strength of our own bodies, or sliced open via episiotomy and cesarean, the ultimate experiment.

I learn like this: The task is to slice through the pale flesh of an earthworm, those delicate creatures that curlicue across the cement when it rains, girls squealing as they try not to grind them underfoot, the boys stomping proudly behind, their sneakers slick with death, threatening to push the girls into that which we do not want.

We have to do this, the teacher explains, scalpel glinting in his hands. For science.

Already science is gendered, math too, the teacher telling us girls that we might not be cut out for algebra or geometry, many of us believing it, for why else would all the examples from the book involve trucks or trains, things we will never command? Our names are never in math problems, which feature Dave or Scott instead.

When the girls protest, squeamish about the killing or the knife, our science teacher decides we need assistance, partnering each girl with a boy who might guide her hand.

My partner is the boy who has spent the year tickling me, watching me gasp for breath, growing powerful despite his much shorter stature because I cannot protest, move, speak at all. Perhaps he’s seen men do this to women, wrap their grip around a woman’s throat, render her speechless with a hand, a cock. Pornography and the newly popular South Park are all the boys talk about in the halls, raising their voices for everyone to hear about how the new ’90s internet is making them men.

I try my best to avoid the boy near the lockers, where he reaches under my backpack toward my ass. I try to avoid him in concert band, where he strokes my clarinet up and down, chuckling at his innuendo, or thrusts his trombone slide toward me, trying to frighten me with the noise before clearing the instrument’s spit valve at my feet, on my back, another poorly mimicked trick he’s picked up from the web.

I try to avoid him in science, where he and the other boys reign supreme despite grades that put them lowest in the class. We sit alphabetically at first, but as the semester wears on, the girls ask the teacher to move until, one by one, we all sit at the back table, our gender in a long row.

His name is Patrick—the name of boys in math books, boys with blond bowl cuts (which he has), boys who like to whisper pussy and tits to see girls blush at their own bodies, boys who think that frightening girls is the same as flirting. And when the time comes for me to hold steady the scalpel in my hand, tower over a creature that has done nothing to deserve dissection, he does what boys named Patrick do. He lifts the back of my shirt, exposes me, and tosses down the worms he’s casually slashed to bits. Then he turns to bow in front of the audience of boys he’s assembled to witness.

I scream. Turn sharply with the scalpel. I feel his wet trickle down my back, hear laughter. A dozen sets of eyes dissect me. A chorus: “You like that?” “Ooh, dirty girl.” “Does that feel good?”

Our teacher sends Patrick outside for the rest of the period, sighing at our hormones and inability to focus. He taps through the glass at me like I’m a bug on display.

The boys continue to stare, but now their smirks stretch thin and angry, a look that will become familiar throughout my life, the look of men angry at women who tell them no. Now I’m not a “dirty girl,” but “dramatic,” “a bitch.” They pout, refuse to talk to me or the other girls in our class, the ones they’ve been forced to work with when we all know who owns knives and hurt and science.

Patrick returns the following day, his and the other boys’ attention renewed. They know that if a woman protests, she must mean yes. Hands at my neck, my lower back, my waist as I bend over beakers. All year they experiment with what they can get away with.

The girls praise the attention I receive—with desire comes power—while simultaneously feeling sorry for me. They know better than to speak up, lest the attention turn to them, their own bodies. Most keep their heads down, hunched in front of their experiments, turning now and then with wonder and worry to watch the circle of boys closing in around me.

I still remember turning abruptly, the scalpel in my hand. My female body knew instinctually to brace for violation, violence. But I did not swing the blade. Instead, I held it close to my body. One slip and I could have harmed myself. This, too, was instinctual—hold yourself still, prepare for harm. Know you are destined to hurt.

When our teacher had ushered Patrick outside, he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. When he returned, he snatched the scalpel from my hand. I’d been careless, he said. I could have hurt someone.

Shame on me.

While we control the variables of our experiments in class—the temperature of the flame, the amount of applied pressure before the bottle bursts—we do not have the same freedoms with our bodies.

The next year in eighth-grade science, we still experiment on bodies, slicing them open to dismantle what is inside. But now we focus on the maternal—we slice open large fish, sacks of guppies nestled in their bellies. We open these too, a hundred tiny bodies spilling onto the table.

We slice through fetal pigs and cats. Always, always, the bodies are female, something to be explored, pain inflicted for the greater good.

In the spring, we turn our attention to ourselves, dissection through co-ed sex education, a study that lasts several weeks and teaches us girls that ours is a maternal body, whether we want it to be or not. We best prepare ourselves for dismantling.

All year I sit across from a beautiful boy with tan skin and golden hair from surfing and soccer. I think him brave because even though we both have braces, he laughs with his mouth open.

I’ve thought him beautiful since the fifth grade when our small school separated boys from girls for sex ed. The boys were given deodorant so strong it spread across the room, signaling to all that they claimed manhood. The girls were told we would soon menstruate, that it would be gross and smelly and sometimes stain our clothes so everyone would know. We were given tiny powder-scented pads and told to keep our legs crossed and mouths shut about that time of the month, our own maturation somehow shameful. The scent of baby powder still makes me ill, suffocates with artificial sweetness.

This fifth-grade discussion of bodies served as a Band-Aid to get us through the early stages of puberty—to keep the boys from stinking up the classrooms, though soon they did anyway with cheap cologne and hair gel; to keep the girls from crying when they saw blood in the toilet or at the back of their pants, though we did anyway, thinking we were dying because we’d never been shown pictures, just the powder products, feeling embarrassed because everyone knew what tying a sweatshirt around one’s waist signified.

Eighth-grade sex education includes a male audience. Now we sit together, regarding the body as something to be studied, which seems grown-up enough, except that the boys jeer and groan at what’s on-screen. Our school is small, my graduating class under seventy-five, moving from year to year together. I have grown up with the beautiful boy, who has grown more beautiful by the confidence afforded those with privilege—he walks with purpose, speaks freely in class, and is unafraid of being incorrect, all things I want for myself but am too afraid to claim. He has also grown irritating: arrogant, quick to point out fault in others. When he laughs, his braces glint sharp.

Still, I believe him beautiful because he is so like the boys and men I see on television and in films, and because my breasts have never developed, though I bleed each month, and because I do not feel beautiful. All year he reaches his foot under the table to rub against mine, which stays motionless and quiet because I do not think a girl can rub back, because I believe that the female body is meant to be immobile while the male one pursues. It is a quiet dance at first, both of us staring at the board and taking notes while our feet touch, tentative pulses before coming together. Sometimes we glance at one another, a knowing smile, and then class ends and we separate, never speaking. The memory makes me blush with pleasure later, alone in my room, and I relish the sweet secret.

But as soon as sex ed begins, the dynamic changes. His foot lunges toward mine the moment we sit down each class, pushing, insistent. It taps mine over and over, demanding something I cannot figure out. It presses hard until the pressure begins to hurt.

He stares, locks me in his sights. The look is different than before, when he seemed shy and authentic. Now there is performance, bravado, a forceful show he stylizes by licking his braces and lips, rolling his eyes back in his head, his mouth in a silent moan.

I dislike the distraction, the way he seems more concerned with audience than my affection. That I cannot speak is what I think he likes best, for while our teacher does not seem to notice when he stares, she scolds me if my eyes move from the board. “Do you want to keep your A?” she asks after class. I need to focus.

I try, there beneath his stare, his foot kicking now. I desperately want him to leave me alone but also worry about who will love me if he doesn’t. Isn’t this what we teach girls, after all? That to be loved is to be hurt, that ache is a part of romance?

Day after day we examine photos on the projector, read textbooks that dissect us down to parts. But while images of the boys focus on the external, photos of the girls require entering our bodies. The images of our vaginas, our uteri, our ovaries feel like a violation.

Even childbirth is sexualized, legs splayed like in the pornography the boys search for on the classroom computers. We are exposed, bleeding and vulnerable, images at once sexual and maternal. The reaction to our bodies is confusing, because the boys mimic either blow jobs or throwing up. Which is it? Are we desired or disgusting?

One day I move my foot, an act of bravery prompted by scolding from my teacher, who sighs, “What is wrong with you lately? The body is not to be ignored.”

I pull my foot back and turn my head to the board, refuse to look at the boy. He does not like this and kicks at the air between us, his rage growing.

The next class period he begins to tap the desk, lightly at first, then more insistently. He whistles at me, mutters under his breath. He balls up bits of paper to throw on my notes, then at my face.

Next he throws paper clips, and staples he pries from the corners of his papers. He stands and swipes at me as he walks to the edge of the room to sharpen his pencil, licking his lips as the gears grind the wood down to nothing. When he sits, he aims the freshly sharpened pencil. I cannot tell if I still believe him beautiful, or if I am afraid, or if I am afraid because he is beautiful despite my fear. As mixed-up as I am about the female body, I am more confused about the male body, the ways it can both delight and destroy.

His increasing aggression does not go unnoticed. Our advanced science class has few girls, so I sit at a table of three boys. The boy who sits next to me glares and collects the thrown items to toss into the trash can. The boy across the table, so shy he can hardly speak to girls, casts me empathetic looks and leans away from the aggressor. But soon the boy next to me pulls my chair close to his, an act of protection that quickly changes when he runs his hand along the length of my arm, places it on my thigh.

By the end of the month even the shy boy across the table is reaching his foot under the table toward mine, fighting for space with others.

Science class—fifth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade—teaches us that the female body is to be tested, cut open, forever on display. While women are not meant to be scientists, we are responsible for the social experiment. It is up to us not to have sex, not to get pregnant, abstinence preached to girls while boys learn about the condoms they later fling at us in the cafeteria.

Shame, too, is what we learn, female bodies filthy, maternal potential a threat. We are mothers, every one, slides and textbooks promise. Our monthly cycle and potential promiscuity are framed as suspect, and in this way we become a threat: we might trap or ensnare the boys—even though they first try to corner us in the hallways, chase us around classrooms, then later dance floors, workplaces, and subway platforms.

We are not yet maternal—few have started to menstruate, and those who have know better than to publicize the information, because Jessica started just before the fifth-grade graduation pool party, had to learn to use tampons in order to swim, a team of us comforting her in the restroom as she cried, each of us realizing we’d never been taught to use the products we’d been given, our group returning to the pool where the boys yelled “shark” and swam to the other side. And we are not yet sexual—few have touched a boy, myself included, though my “boyfriend” stops by my girls-only lunch spot each day for a hug, then promptly breaks up with me when I refuse to watch him play sports instead of eating.

Sex education for girls is a conditioning against sex, focused on the fear of babies and the necessary burden of breastfeeding, while for the boys, who soon grab their crotches at us during recess, it focuses on masturbation and ejaculation: active, aggressive.

That girls and women could orgasm is never mentioned. Will sex taste sweet, a bubble-gum tongue in our mouths? Or will it taste metallic, like when boys throw girls against the lockers to steal a kiss, sometimes leaving lips braces-bloody?

No one ever mentions that it might taste like bursting berries, the kind we smell on girls’ lips in the locker room, that it might feel like when their hair brushes against us at the mirror, all thrill and swell. Even though science teaches us the female body is an experiment, sex education says that a woman’s sexuality is nothing to investigate. Straight and submissive—the only images we see are of men and women in the missionary position, stifling in its prescriptiveness, another hand about the throat.

And what does a sexual woman look like? Certainly not us, hunched in our chairs, hiding our training bras. Certainly not our eighth-grade teacher, a woman of science, someone out of place in a male discipline.

Her reputation on campus is strict. She runs class efficiently, asks us to engage with the field beyond Bill Nye and the movies we often watch in her male counterparts’ science classes. Mostly, she is called “fat bitch.”

Her body is maternal—soft and sprawling, with thick hips and thighs, a bobbing to her walk that must have once been sexy but now reminds everyone of their mother, except that she does not nurture us by accepting excuses or late work; instead, she grades accurately the boys’ poor performance on tests and demands they stop talking while she speaks.

She is a symbol of what will happen if we girls pursue science or math, if we ask the boys to be quiet and leave us alone, or if we get pregnant, which seems inevitable. Eighth-grade science class is her domain, but it is also where we see what will happen if we protest gender roles. The boys talk mercilessly about her, mutter under their breath during lecture, remark on her hanging breasts, say that no one would ever want to fuck her, even though we all know someone did because she just had a baby.

Patrick likes to raise his hands to ask questions she’s already answered in order to watch her get mad and then be able to call her crazy. The beautiful boy across from me smiles at her face, then puffs out his cheeks when she turns.

During our lesson on female anatomy, I also learn the word cunt, a label for her, but also for us if we dare protest too much. Am I a cunt for moving my foot? For refusing to watch my boyfriend play sports? Am I a cunt because I do well on the tests?

Our teacher sets quiet timers for tests, reminders that ring out when there are ten minutes remaining, then five. It is a kindness she provides for students who do not know well enough to look up at the clock themselves, but they called her cunt for it, and Nazi.

After sex education I begin to hear the timer everywhere, quietly, quietly as a countdown to my future. It is a timer to the next boy lifting up our shirts and releasing something slimy inside. It is a timer to becoming the disinterested woman in the pictures, a man atop her, her face turned away. The timer is counting down until we get pregnant. Until it is our fault. “You like that?” “Ooh, dirty girl.” “Does that feel good?”

It is a timer to us becoming mothers, the kind of women whose bodies are natural but reviled, who do not do science or math or anything really; all the mothers we know are stay-at-home moms, nothing like our teacher, who is a bad mom, folks whisper, for leaving her child so quickly in order to get back to work.

Tick tick the timer goes, quietly, quietly like we girls are supposed to be despite the pencil spears and the feet kicking at us beneath the table.

Tick tick during the test while we dissect fish bodies, split open mothers to pull out their children, leave the females splayed and seeping.

Tick tick while we label body parts, male parts we know too well from the drawings on our lockers, from how the boys rub them on our backsides while we fill the beakers, try not to get burned.

Tick tick until we are the bodies, ultrasounds lighting us up fluorescent, our destiny—a baby—inside, our bodies splitting with power we never knew we possessed, or sliced clean though, splayed and seeping.

Read more from Issue 17.2.