Teenage Miss Lady (It was SASSY, y'all.)

Here's a little story I wrote for/ read to my students when it's time to model the personal narrative process. Or learn about the many modern faces of transcedentalism. It's made to read aloud and display a simple accomplishable style for various levels of learners...in case you notice that the diction is somewhat different from the usual Miss Lady.

A Disruption to the Educational Environment

From the very beginning…wait…no…from some time in middle school, I was a rule breaker. Halloween seventh grade, due to it being 1987, I dressed up as a “punk rocker.” Blue hair and safety pin covered jeans really worked for me. So did the eye rolls I got from prissy popular girls. For that reason I stayed in costume for the rest of the year more or less. I took a break from such rebellion in 8^th grade because I had gotten really good at styling and frying my 80’s mall bangs into place, perhaps better than any other girl in the school, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could receive some validation from my classmates since this was the standard that all girls were judged by in the late 80s. I guess that didn’t work out, cause I don’t remember being popular or liked outside my small group of lightly nerdy friends.  At the end of the year I remember telling my friend Tien, “I’d rather be exotic than pretty, anyhow.”

Much to my mother’s dismay, I proceeded with that plan by spending most of the 9^th grade filtering all the non-black clothes out of my wardrobe and adding black lipstick & nail polish, pale pale make-up, and striped tights to the mix. By the 10^th grade even this wasn’t exotic enough for me. I decided that a few costumes would also be required. Bathrobes, psychedelic 60s dresses, and paisley face painting, nothing was beyond me.  I needed to be a freak even to the freaks.

My mother, who does not ever like to cause trouble or call attention to herself, no longer knew what to do with me or what to make of my outfits. So when I breezed out of my bathroom one morning dressed as a tree on fire, she just shook her head and let me sashay towards the bus stop.  At that point a green and brown outfit might have seemed preferable to her. Hair sculpted into a 8 inch flames and sprayed orange, burning tree branches delicately water-colored onto my forehead, orange lipstick paired with blazing eye shadow created from my “fete o fire” shadow quad…what were all of these things in comparison to studded dog collars and my black velvet cloak? She was numb to her freak of a daughter. How could she possibly tell what was too much?

She couldn’t tell, but Mr. Mojica, one of our ever changing assistant principals, he was pretty sure he could tell. My bus was the first one on campus and the minute I walked in the door, he was shuffling me, the so called “YOUNG LADY”, into the front office and radioing for back-up or something. Freaks were troublesome on any day. I was an emergency.

“This is unacceptable”…”It’s not fitting for a young girl”… “We DO NOT allow hair colors that do not occur naturally”… “a disruption to the educational environment!”

All these things were spoken to my surly stony face. First I tried explaining to them that the students who were so easily distracted were totally stupid, and therefore not as deserving of an education as myself… if at all. This was not very effective.

My mother was called. “Ms. Hendrix? Yes, your daughter looks like a freak. We can’t educate her. Can you come get her out of our way? Thanks.” It went something like that. Mr. Mojica reported that she was on her way. I was not leaving. I made that clear.

Additional principals were rotated in for their turn at bat with the freak. While Mr. Dibinsky was explaining that the school was protecting my safety, helping me to avoid bullying, harassment, and violence, by policing my freakness, I had an idea. Which was remarkable. At this point, I had turned not living up to my academic potential into an art form. Teachers talked all day and I barely learned a thing. I produced just enough work to maintain my status as an honor student and that was it. The word “disobedience” must have woken me up one day in history class though, because as I was sitting there listening to Mr. Dibinsky’s flawed reasoning, I had a flash memory of learning about Henry David Thoreau’s protest against paying taxes to a government he found to be unfair. I was clearly in the exact same situation.

I launched into this new platform:

“ I cannot follow a rule that I am opposed to. I have a moral obligation that requires me to object to your rule.” Damn honor students. I would make them sorry they ever tried to educate me.

The details aren’t necessary, but trust me, I was very persuasive. The administrators were unflinching. My mother arrived. I sat firm. Then she cried. I caved. Yes, I caved and with much shame I went home to wash my hair and change into a black dress topped by a 1960s swim cover-up. All capped off by black lipstick, something that was just inside the perimeters of the dress code.

After returning to school, I cried with my friends at the horror that I experienced. I commiserated with my English teacher who said “They just don’t get your creativity.” And even though it led to me discovering that he stank, I was delighted to get a consoling hug from a black- clad boy that I sorta liked cause he sorta liked me back or first or something.

I was pissed, but just as the rejection of my stupid middle school peers caused me to explore myself through fashion and hairstyling, this experience defined me too. I wasn’t my classmates. I didn’t share their values and I certainly didn’t value what the admin valued. I did, and still do, value personal expression above baseless, subjective, and ineffective rules.

So…now, I’m the teacher. My days are spent bothering students to bring their books, to plan out an essay that I can only hope they are interested in, and to stop disrupting the educational environment by talking to their friends. “Do you think this is a party?” “This is not McDonald’s Playland!” I’m an agent of the administration…or so they think.

I have to tell you that I wrote this during faculty meeting. “Folks, we gotta catch these dress code offenders early in the day. Everyone has to work together to enforce this consistently.” I hear others ask, “What about hats?”…”Are we going to do anything about all this cleavage?” … “What are we doing about baggy pants?”

It’s funny. I’ve come all this way. Beauty school, college, master’s degree, more college, 2 careers, Denton, Dallas, Austin, feminist, queer activist, teacher. I’ve traveled all that way to end up in pretty much that same place as when I was fifteen.

I sigh and wonder what we are doing to promote artistic expression and creative freedom. Should I follow my district’s mandated curriculum? Will it turn my students into free thinkers? What if a standardized test gets in the way of what I know is right for my them? If one of my students wants to cross dress this year, will I stand up for them if the administration balks? What will happen to me if I do? As always, I wonder if it is my job to follow the rules.

Dress Code

While digging around in my thousands of emails for another file I ran across this little thing that I wrote in 2006 in response to some new (now forgotten thankfully) school dress code initiative that directed me to scope out the necklines of all of my female students. Me now is impressed with the badass passion of me then, and I post it here for your consider fucking ration.

Why do all these rules seem be directed towards policing the dress of women?

Because we live in a world where female sexuality is always ALWAYS policed and it never belongs to the woman who really fucking owns it.

A world where…

            A girl can still be thought of as “asking for it”

             Where one in four girls in the state of Texas will have to personally endure a violent sexual act in her lifetime and our best idea of a solution is to tell them not to walk alone at night

             Where a man’s erection is a woman’s fault, and worse, somehow her responsibility

A world where

            Even though every conservative hack with a tv show, radio hour, or syndicated column will tell us that provocative dress is ruining our society and our little darlings’ purity, girls see and know that a shapely piece of skin will get you more quick attention than math and science savvy

           

             Where people can usually separate a man’s looks from his brains, his physicality from his sexuality and both from his intellect, but not so much for women.

            Where women who are told to cover up, are uncovered in the billion dollar porn industry which has to cover itself up on magazine stands and hide in the shady part of town so that ministers and husbands and dads and football coaches and other perverts can gaze upon them and then hide them away in a closet or a secret file.

A world where

            A whore will and a bitch won’t

             Where governments make it hard for girl to run their own bodies: maybe you can have emergency contraceptive, maybe you can have an abortion, maybe you can have an HPV vaccination that protects you from FUCKING CANCER!

            Where little girls are told they need a husband and should grow up to be a mommy and boys are taught that they need a good job and a lot of pussy to be a man

A world where

           

            Wearing a short skirt could make you a slut in some people’s eyes, but wearing athletic pants could make you a lesbian. Supposedly that’s bad too.

            Where women are looked at every day by millions of eyes that say pretty, not pretty, great tits, fat ass, gross thighs, hot body, not after 30 beers, I’d like to hit that. It never stops, no matter what you look like.

            where men look at little girls all the time; we blame the men; we tell the girls to act like ladies, but everything we hold up as beautiful in women (small waist, perky breasts, etc) is best done by little girls. Its all of us.

And you want me to tell a girl how to dress? You want me to look at her skirt to see if its too sexy? Shouldn’t I be welcoming her to my engaging learning environment? I am supposed to check to see if she has been burdened/blessed with the kind of breasts that spill out of shirts? Shouldn’t I be trying to assess her reading comprehension skills or wondering if she could be a poetic genius with the right kind of encouragement?

.

When I was in high school, I rarely dressed in ways that my school fully approved of, but I was pretty used to the idea that the school got to regulate that somewhat. I tested the boundaries, and the school let me know they were there by sending me home to change from time to time. There were many other arenas that taught me that my body was policed, under control, and male property, at least visually if not actually. And some other healthier voices, but I just didn’t hear them over the din of patriarchal, paternalistic noise. So, in my senior year, when my boyfriend told me to wear shirts that covered me up, it seemed like a fairly natural thing. I may have even thought it was a compliment, him protecting me from the eyes of other men like that. It wasn’t until he got violent with his possessive protection that I understood that none of this was his right or his duty. I don’t know if my experience or all the similar experiences would really turn out differently if we didn’t put out the message that girls need their daddy and their principal to protect and police their sexuality, but I’m inclined to think it would help.

So, I won’t do it. I’m a woman; a feminist; and a proud rule breaker. Not a traitor.  I don’t need a government or a school, a parent, a man, or an employer to tell me what to do with my body and I won’t tell a young girl that she does either.  I own this body. Its easy to forget in this world where… well…you know, but most of the time I remember that I get to decide if this body is pretty or not. I clothe it. And I give out permission to touch it. I decide what it does. It’s mine. And I promise you I had to dress like a slut, whatever that means, a time or two, or right now to fucking get here.