Flashback
I’m 13 years old, at my first musical theatre rehearsal, a boy from the neighbouring school brings his walkman, tells me he burnt me a copy of the RENT soundtrack, and declares: “you have to listen to this”.
He puts his headphones on my ears, and it’s one of the first times I remember learning “provocative” words around sex. For context: my all-girls Catholic school idea of sex-ed was abstinence-only, and we did not cover the finer points outlined in RENT.
We spent the next years of high school riding around in his station wagon, screaming La Vie Boheme at the top of our lungs. Shouting extra hard on the words we found most “scandalous”:
“to leather, to DILDOS…”
“Mucho MASTURBATION!”
“BISEXUALS, TRISEXUALS, HOMOSAPIENS!”
That was our version of being “punk”. Two theatre kids in a Ford screaming “To sodomy, it’s between God and me… TO S&M!!!” Bless.
That’s where my sex education started. Not that walkman moment specifically, but pop culture:
I learnt kinky words first through a burnt CD of RENT.
I learnt about chastity belts from Robin Hood Men in Tights.
I learnt “to get drunk and screw” was a taboo thing adults did because Jimmy Buffett was a staple on family road trips and that song was always skipped.
I picked up the vocabulary in fragments, from things that weren’t trying to educate me at all.
Meanwhile, the actual “sex ed” I got looked like a youth pastor telling a room of pre-teen and teenage girls how he was so relieved he didn’t have sex with his high school girlfriend because he was able to “save” her and himself.
Turns out that’s not really an education about sex. It’s an education about fear. And it meant I learnt shame had a vocabulary long before pleasure did.
Today I can say “dildos”, “masturbation” and “S&M” without whispering. Not because the words changed over the last 20 years, but I did.
Anyways, La Vie Boheme came on my daylist this morning. I turned it up, sang, and smiled. I still shout the words that felt scandalous to teenage me.
And that’s kind of the point of the Baths. It’s an event where you don’t have to smuggle the words in through a burnt CD on a walkman. You can just say them.
Until next time bathers,
Laura
P.S. I can do all the parts of La Vie Boheme with voices. So if you need a recovered theatre nerd for your next dinner party, you know who to call. 😉