Nostalgia

Recently, the ten and eleven-year-old boys I teach are starting to get really interested in their own hair, skin, and eyebrows.  Were this America, I imagine there would be a media scare about the "homosexuals indoctrinating our children", but this isn't America, and boys beginning to pay attention to their physical appearance isn't necessarily a sign of budding homosexuality, but a sign of budding sexuality (especially in countries where the survival of offspring is a relative certainty).  

I remember when I was ten or twelve and began gelling and spiking my hair along with the other boys in my class.  It was more memetic than conscious choice I think, and seemed to coincide with the strange, new phenomenon of liking girls, which was also more memetic than conscious choice I think.  Basically, we all had no idea what was going on.

Here's how liking girls worked: there was one girl named Kate* that it became popular for nearly all the boys to like.  Kate's best friend was Sarah.  Suddenly, one boy would decide to "ask Kate out", which meant asking Sarah to ask Kate out for him and maybe even giving Sarah a snap bracelet to give to Kate.  This would make all the other boys who claimed to like Kate do the same thing.  And so Sarah would approach Kate and say something like, "Tim, Joe, Dan, Steven, Josh, Tony, Jeff, and Chris all like you and want to go out with you.  Which one do you want to go out with?"  Kate would choose Dan, and thereafter Kate and Dan would "go out" without ever having spoken to each other.  Eventually, everyone would forget about Kate and Dan, including Kate and Dan, and Molly would become the new girl that every boy liked.  Whenever we talked about "going out", we would just repeat lines we had heard that week on Singled Out, which we watched because that's what the older kids watched.       

This newfound "going out" in elementary school seemed to grip parents with a sort of primal terror.  After all, there were stories from only two towns away of pregnant 12-year-olds and middle school blowjob parties and whatnot, and who's to say the same thing wasn't going on in our town?  And, President Clinton was a role-model to kids everywhere, and you couldn't turn on the TV without hearing the name Gennifer Flowers.  Things weren't like they were when we were kids.

From what I could gather from eavesdropping on my own parents's conversations, there was a group of "idiot parents" who thought the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing was cute.  My parents definitely did not think it was cute at all, and preceded to repeatedly tell me that there would be no "dating" until age 16, which made me want to participate even more in the "going out" scientific research programme.

Eventually the whole town panic began to take on the structure of a South Park episode, the full mature expression of which was a health class "scared straight" style laserdisc curriculum one part viewing close-up photographs of venereal-disease infected genitalia, one-part memorizing facts and figures about AIDS (Did you know AIDS can be contracted from blood, semen, vaginal fluids, and breast milk?), and one-part watching after school specials about pregnant teenagers and crack-addicted babies.  By the time I got to age 16, I still couldn't shake off the trauma, and had no interest in dating.  The program had achieved its goals.    

*I've changed all names here to avoid embarrassment.