My oldest daughter Samantha just finished 8th grade and is preparing to enter high school in the fall. She is brilliant and gorgeous. She is also sharp tongued and salty. The boys she has been going to school with for years know this about her. They also know she is Mormon. For those reasons they learned early on not to mess with her. Those who have messed have had their heads handed to them enough times to teach the rest of the kids to watch their steps. <\/p>\n
But these boys certainly don’t mind messing with the other (non-Mormon) girls. You wouldn’t believe the amount of sexual harassment that these 8th grade boys regularly foisted upon their female classmates. Sam reported that groping girls, rubbing crotches on girls (sometimes in basketball shorts and aroused), and all kinds of other sexual harassment were basically daily occurrences in her school. The most disturbing part about her tales has been how much the girls encouraged and enabled this behavior. While it was traditional for the girls to superficially complain among themselves about the boys sexually aggressive behavior it was clear that many of these girls loved the attention. In other words, there was very little “Don’t!” and “Stop!” and too much “don’t stop” from these girls. It baffled and dismayed Sam and we spent may hours analyzing and discussing the situation with her.
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\nMidway through the year a handsome kid moved in to the school and locked in on Sam pretty quickly. He was too new to have been trained that Sam was not someone to be trifled with. She reported that a few weeks after moving in he openly said to Sam and another girl: “I can’t stop thinking about boobs and vaginas”. (!!!!). Seriously. Apparently that is what passes for having game these days. Of course upon hearing this story Kristen and I immediately dubbed the kid Vagina Boy (VB for short) and he is known as that to this day. But besides the ridiculousness of that kind of talk it dawned on me that this is one of the results of easy and ubiquitous access to porn on the internet these days. He was no doubt being completely honest with that comment. I strongly suspect such easy access to online porn for these boys is contributing to these boys becoming sexual harassers en masse. <\/p>\n
But that brings me back to the Mormons. There are a lot of Mormons here is my part of Arizona. I’d say 20%+ of Sam’s 8th grade class were active Mormon kids. They tended to hang together and as the Mormon clique they were sort of resented by the other kids. But the sexual harassers never ever messed with the Mormon girls. The Mormon girls made the message clear with their more-modest-than-average dress and behavior that such advances were not welcome at all. The funny thing is that when the new kid started treating Sam like one of the other girls she didn’t even have time to verbally rip the kid’s head off before the non-Mormon boys in the grade came down on the kid pretty hard with reprimands like “You don’t talk to Sam that way!” and “Sam is not like that”. <\/p>\n
Anyhow, recent discussions about how we teach our Young Women about modesty made me think of this story. Dressing modestly is part of the uniform of the Mormon “tribe” here in our area. It designates the Mormon girls (and the handful of adopted non-Mormons in the clique) as different. All of these markers are important I think. And they can indeed serve as a protection to our kids.