It’s something we all have to do…high school. There are some classes we will enjoy, and some we will loathe. Tonight I give you an essay about being female in PE class.

TENNIS, BASKETBALL, AND SCRABBLE

In high school, I hated PE. Of course, nearly everyone hates PE, but some of us hate it more than others. Part of the reason I hated PE was being female in a mixed sex class. Trying to play tennis against the boys, or golf with the boys, or anything else was hard enough for the athletic girls. For the quiet, dreamy, bookish girls, it was a nightmare.

To start with, boys have more strength than girls. This is so obvious I don’t know why it needs to be stated, and have no idea why PE was mixed sex by high school. In grade school, there is less of a dichotomy, and kids play together more easily. Trying to hit a tennis ball a boy has slammed over the net right toward my head was difficult; I wasn’t good at hitting things anyway…baseball, golf, tennis, all of them showed my deficiencies, but tennis was the worst. A lot of the kids, boys and girls alike, missed their fair share of baseballs, and golf…who would ever make such a game? Trying to hit a small ball into a small hole you couldn’t even see, a hole a long distance away? Seriously? Must have been a physicist, or someone else who likes to torture innocent school children.

The utter humiliation of being unable to perform at a level that could be identified as mediocre was exacerbated in games where they chose teams. When you are the worst at a sport (and I was worst at all of them), you will be the last picked. Since we often had uneven numbers of students in class on any given day, that meant not being picked at all unless the teacher insisted someone put you on their team. That was worse, though. It was sort of like when all the kids were told they had to include you in their valentines in grade school…being picked (or given valentines) was almost more humiliating than not being picked.

When I was a freshman, the coach approached me. He wanted me to try out for the basketball team. You see, I am tall…taller than average for a woman by several inches. People often picked me for volleyball, too…the first time. After that, never again. They quickly realized that being tall isn’t as important as being able to accurately access the trajectory of the ball, be able to intercept it, and hit it hard enough to get it back over the net. I simply lacked every one of those skills…I have in recent years discovered I can actually figure out the trajectory of a ball; I suspect knowing any return I tried to make would end up in the middle of the net was the reason I couldn’t in high school. Better leave it to another one of the girls. Why are we playing the boys, again? We always lose. They get to jeer at us, again. And again. And again.

It might not have been quite so bad to lose all the time if it wasn’t for other things that went along with being a teenage girl in PE class. Short shorts. The uniform was selected by the coach (always male in those days) at the beginning of the year. My mother fumed at the shortness of the shorts, but she discovered the school could become an immovable force even when met with the irresistible force of my mother’s fury. It did no good to complain. The short shorts were required, and that was that. The only consolation I had was that the sports shop where we bought the uniform was in the same plaza as the library. I always had a new book tucked in my bag along with my gym clothes, and when I wasn’t picked (which was most of the time), I sat on the bench in the gym in my short shorts watching the other kids play and reading my book.

The day I got my period, my mother sent a note to the gym teacher. Please excuse. I didn’t give him the note; he was in the habit of making sure everyone knew why you were sitting out. Everyone knew, anyway. If a girl didn’t suit up, she was on her period. By the end of PE class, my shorts would be stained with a telltale red at the back. I tried to walk with my book over my butt until I could get changed but of course everyone saw. Everyone knew. (Why were they looking at my butt? That’s a rhetorical question…you don’t have to answer.)

I was fortunate that I didn’t get bad cramps, so I could play during my period. I was unfortunate that being poor has a lot of downsides, and not having enough pads to get through a day was one of them, so sooner or later, everyone would know. Girls might be sympathetic, but they most of them were more than willing to join the mockery and humiliation. The boys, though, were the worst. At least the girls understood, and would be the subject of it themselves in another week. The boys were loud, brutish, vulgar, and had no mercy.

Even when a girl wasn’t on her period, PE class was hell. If the boys and girls weren’t playing each other, they were in mixed teams. Many boys saw this as an excuse to grab things the girls wouldn’t let them grab in any other setting. They had all sorts of ways to pretend it was an ‘accident’. Yeah, sure. We all knew better, but the coach wasn’t going to say anything to them.  He was on their side; we all understood that, even though he never said it openly.

The following year, boys and girls were separated, no longer in PE class together. That didn’t help me; I took the barest minimum of PE required, which was one year. As a non-athlete, and a bumbling clumsy ass, I thought it better not to subject myself or anyone else to that anymore. I also told the basketball coach I didn’t see any reason for me to try out since I don’t run well, I don’t dribble well, and I certainly don’t shoot well. I had played a little basketball with my siblings, and I was the worst in that setting, as well

I did get my revenge, just a little. I don’t remember why, but the end of the school year we played Scrabble a couple of weeks in PE. After the first time, none of the boys were willing to play me in Scrabble. It seems there are some games they weren’t guaranteed to win.