Not Going Back

I grew up in the sixties and came of age in the seventies. By the time I was aware of what grown up lives could be like women were demanding equality. Bobby Riggs, the world famous male chauvinist pig, and 55 year old tennis champ challenged Tennis great, 29 year old Billie Jean King to a match claiming that he could beat her, just because he was a man. This flexing of his wee little penis did not go well for him. King beat him in straight set claiming the title of the “battle of the sexes.” Billie Jean gave young women everywhere the courage to stand up for ourselves.

A mere few months after that “battle of the sexes” whomping Bobby Riggs took I faced my own show down. As sixth grader I, along with every other sixth grader from my school, went to the Walter Schalk dance classes held in the gym at our junior high school.

Schalk had been holding dance lessons for tweens and teens in our town and the one next door for years. To encourage boys to come to dance classes Schalk would recruit sports coaches to require his players to take dance so they would be more coordinated. Schalk sweetened the deal by bribing kids once at class.

The bribes were in the form of tickets that the dance leaders would give out. At the end of class they would draw tickets and the winners would each get a dollar. There were about 200 kids in my class and they would draw three or four numbers. So the probability of winning a dollar was small to begin with.

There was one catch to getting a ticket. All girls in the class had to wear white gloves. The dance leaders would inspect our gloves to ensure they were spanking clean white. If your gloves were dirty you did not get a ticket.

Boys had a requirement for tickets also. Their shoes had to be shined. This was 1973, time of wallabies made of suede. Wallabies could not be shined so boys who wore those got a ticket out of default.

Often the dance leaders would forget to give us our tickets until we had already danced one or two dances. One of those nights as the ticket givers were circling the room checking gloves and the four pairs of boys shoes that could be shined I was called out for dirty gloves. Not getting a ticket was bad enough, but you were also ridiculed publicly for dirty gloves.

Channeling my inner Billie Jean King I stood up and claimed this was unfair. “My gloves were clean when I walked in. You did not check our gloves then. I just danced two dances with two boys with sweaty, dirty hands. They is why my gloves are dirty now. I should not be penalized for their dirty hands.”

Then I doubled down on the hypocrisy. “Also, no boys are ever denied tickets because they don’t even wear shoes that can be shined. This whole thing is chauvinistic.”

Walter Shaulk himself took great umbrage with my out burst, but I stood my ground. He denied my ticket that night and demand I right an apology 100 times. I did. I wrote 100 times, “I am sorry Walter Shaulk is a male chauvinist pig.”

I came into class the next week and as the gloves were being inspected I marched my paper up to Mr. Shaulk and handed it to him. “The apology you asked for.” He never even read the words, not seeing exactly how I wrote it. But I had stood my ground and when classes began I would call out, “Please look at gloves before we dance.” Which they always did fearing I might make another scene. No longer were girls denied tickets for boys’ dirty hands.

I think of this story now as women’s rights are being challenged. Women have had to fight for those rights. No one just gave them to us. We can not go back to a time where men, by the mere fact that they were born with a penis, can tell women what to do.

Equal rights mean you get to start on a level playing field. If you want to get something you work for it and may the best person win. Not like Walter Schalk dancing school, boys get tickets for showing up, girls had to wash their gloves and be clean.

Walter Schalk used to defend the ticket system by saying he would never have enough boys in dancing school to dance with all the girls if he didn’t make it easy for them to win money. What a fool. Dance class was the closet boys ever got to girls breasts in sixth grade. They would have paid him the dollar.