Éducation Sexuelle

Over Spring Break, eight GCS students travelled to France to complete their exchange program, which began last year when a group of French students came to visit New York. Accompanied by Ms. Wood and Mr. Todd, the group spent a total of four days in Senlis, a small town about an hour out of Paris. Each student was paired with a French student from the Lycée Saint-Vincent, a private school built on the property of an old nunnery, dating back to the ninth or tenth century. Our petit group inched across the Southern coast of France with stops in towns like Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Nice, and Grasse. We enjoyed nights out when we were allowed to roam the city as well as guided tours through most of the more culturally prominent features of the South of France. However, even with bags full of macaroons and French perfume, on the flight back I mostly thought about my time in class at Lycée Saint-Vincent.

Despite the language barrier, many lessons were perfectly understandable in classes such as chemistry (la chimie) or math (des mathes). We mainly tried to disrupt the classes as little as possible, only speaking to introduce ourselves or answer specific questions directed at our group.  In groups, as well as separately, all of the GCS students gave presentations to the Saint-Vincent students about life and GCS, stuttering through explanations of Wednesday lab days and the difference between downtown and uptown in the city. However, the most prominent time that a lesson seemed foreign or difficult to understand was not in any core class, but, instead, sexual education, a class I had with only one other American student.

The teacher (la prof), Madame Vindri, began with a fairly standard statement saying that it was okay to feel uncomfortable or laugh. This was, perhaps, the only similarity between her lesson and, say, a sex ed class at GCS. Madame Vindri drew a line down one of the boards and labeled one side “Filles” (girls) and the other “Garçons” (boys). Asking for feedback from her students, a co-ed class of about 20 kids, she proceeded to fill out a chart, separating the needs of girls versus the needs of boys in relationships.

Madame Vindri began by asking her class what girls did in their freetime. The list began to take shape with expected answers like shopping, hanging out with friends, etc. Then asking the same for boys, she wrote things like playing video games and watching TV. After she had a full list on both sides, she compared how girls versus boys rely on relationships, highlighting that the main difference between was that boys don’t need relationships at all. She explained it like this: when a girl is in a relationship, everything that she loves to do becomes centered around the boy she’s dating. She shops for clothes she thinks her boyfriend will like; when she’s with her friends all they talk about is boys, even when she’s home with her family, she wishes she could be with her boyfriend instead. However, according to Madame Vindri, the daily life of boys is unaffected by a relationship. When boys play video games they don’t think about their girlfriends; when they’re with their friends, they prefer to talk about more manly things. At this point in the class, the teacher puffed out her chest and strolled across the front of the classroom, presumably imitating the boy she was trying to define: strong, macho, and unconcerned with the more touchy-feely aspects of a relationship. Any possibility that I was mistranslating the lesson disappeared when she wrote “filles=émotion” on the other side of the board.

The more Madame Vindri talked, the more shocked I was by the blunt message of her lesson: girls, as a general group, are reliant on boys. Coming from a place like GCS where generalizations are discouraged and gender roles are so frequently challenged, this approach to education about maintaining healthy relationships genuinely took me off guard. Looking around the class I saw students rolling their eyes and nodding along as if they had heard this all before in previous years. The only other GCS student in the room was having a bit of a harder time following the lesson, and I believe the students around me took the confused look on my face to be a reaction to confusing vocabulary as opposed to a confusing message. By drawing that line down the board at the beginning of class, Madame Vindri created a choice of black and white, male and female, macho or emotional; choices that would be met with outrage and shock at a school like GCS; emotions that simply were not present in her classroom.

Whether the way this method of gender definition and sexual education truly affects the social or political views of the students in that class most likely depends on whether or not each student enters the class with preexisting notions about gender roles in their day-to-day lives. Considering that Senlis is a traditionally wealthy town with old money and a generally conservative mindset, it is more than likely that this single class in not a reflection of sexual education in France as a whole or even in the area. Nevertheless, it did call me to rethink my view of my own education; from what I’ve witnessed, most education blurs the line between some sort of opinion and fact to a point where they become indistinguishable. One teacher at a single suburban high school certainly cannot define an entire country’s view on gender roles, but perhaps the most interesting thing to consider is the way that the students rolled their eyes and tapped their pencils in unattentiveness, a sure sign that was far from out of the ordinary, and this enforcement of stereotypes was completely routine.