Teaching a striptease
And avoiding chairs that can impregnate me
My first encounter with boys was in Irish college when I was fourteen. Having gone to all-girls’ schools since I was five, I was not used to the opposite sex. Not only that but I’d been taught, somewhere along the way, that all boys wanted to get me pregnant. As a result, for years, I was afraid to look one in the eye for fear that his semen would shoot out of his trousers and into the gusset of mine resulting in an immediate baby. I’d also heard rumours about girls who’d gotten pregnant from holding a penis in their hands, from rubbing one through a pair of jeans and even from just sitting on a chair. It seemed to me that the world was a sperm-drenched place that I needed to tiptoe around carefully.
In Irish college, there were boys everywhere. It was terrifying but also thrilling. However, I did everything I could to avoid arousing them and spent most of my time shuffling around with my eyes on the ground, hoping no one would impregnate me.
So imagine my confusion now, almost thirty years later, when I look back at that time and remember that for the end-of-term talent show, I organised a striptease…to music. The two hundred children at the college stayed in houses for the three weeks and each one had to have an act ready for the talent show. Most houses sang songs or acted out shitty plays, but not ours, no, like a madame with her whores, every evening for three weeks, I trained the girls to sex it up. I taught them how to seductively remove their belts and crack them like whips before discarding them like unwanted lingerie in front of the boys and girls who sat watching, cross-legged in the hall. Then, upon my command, they slowly pulled their jeans down, teasing the ten-year-olds with their sexual prowess, to reveal the name of the college written on a page on their arses (they had shorts on underneath).
Who knows what was going to happen next, I don’t remember, perhaps full nudity and a lap dance for the youngest member of the audience. The show got shut down before anyone could find out. The college principal, Sean Mor stormed the stage waving his hands and screaming, “STOP E SIN, ANOIS!” His face was puce with rage. He bustled us girls into a back room and barked, “What would your mothers’ say?” To which I remember thinking that mine would have been quite impressed. I didn’t, after all, see anything in the least bit inappropriate about the striptease and was baffled at the fuss he was making.
I love to think of the children in the audience when they went home and told their parents about the talent show. “There was a boy who played the guitar, a girl who said a poem and then a group of prostitutes came out and took their clothes off.” I don’t love, however, to think of the volume of semen that I may have inadvertently caused the generation of that day, there wouldn’t have been a safe chair in sight.
