Did You Have Sex-Ed or Did You Have Pam Stenzel?
Reckoning with Abstinence Education’s Shame Culture
It often feels as if I’ve reverted to my high school self this year, minus the feather hair extensions and Death Cab for Cutie obsession. I’d thought I’d grown out of the angsty, insecure phase of my youth — but when March 2020 came around, and I went back to my Missouri hometown, I felt myself becoming a huge fucking asshole again.
Why couldn’t my parents knock before interrupting Zoom school? Why were mayo and butter piled on literally every food? Never mind the fact my family was generously cooking for me; I grimaced at my carb-laden roots. I had a bad attitude and even worse acne.
Friends told me they, too, were retrograding to mean and pimpled past selves. Turns out, it’s science: regression is most common in 20-somethings according to psychologist Nadine Kaslow. Isolation simply compounds this phenomenon. Spending so much time in our brains lends itself to strange memories, often long-repressed ones.
While deep cleaning my childhood bedroom, it seemed I’d also opened an old trunk in my subconscious, one that I’d never really sorted out. Now I have questions, like:
- Did Dave Matthews Band really stop coming to St. Louis because The Kids boozed annoyingly hard at his concerts?
