(This entry has nothing to do with Japan, I’m just making a second effort to watch Enter the Void at the moment. Christ, I don’t even think I would have liked this back when I was getting high.)

Whenever I feel like Netflix Instant and I are going to have to break up, a whole shitload of new stuff is added and I get to spend an entire Saturday on my couch with a cat leaning on my leg.  Easy A was added sometime this week, and I’d already been told by a number of people that I had to see it because Emma Stone must have been what I was like in high school.  None of the people telling me this were people who went to high school with me, which is the point I’m about to make.

Maybe it’s because I went to a small Catholic high school where nobody had any money and everyone knew who everyone was in some roundabout way.  My graduating class included just over 100 people, most of whom had been going to school together since kindergarten.  Because we were all similarly disadvantaged in some way, knew not only one another but also one another’s parents, and had been subjected to the parochially-mandated “sex is evil!” doctrine from the beginning, nobody thought it was a big deal when someone else started doing it. To my knowledge, nobody got called a whore or was bullied just for having sex, and the rumor mill was pretty well contained. You were either having sex or you weren’t. Actually, nobody much cared about how you spent your personal time, and the only real backlash occurred when you showed up pregnant (though that never lasted long, because so many people were doing it that teachers started getting excited about seeing ultrasound photos).

I had sex for the first time when I was in high school. I didn’t do it because of social pressure or because I was in love. I just felt like getting it over with. Not for anyone else. Just for me. So I did it, and nobody cared, and the only time I was ever asked about it in detail is when I went back to Planned Parenthood to renew my Pill prescription and the administering doctor had her hand up my vagina and was saying “baby, you tight!”.

So movies like Easy A – any movie about people having sex in high school, really – confuse me a little. I would be surprised to know that there are any high school virgins left at all, and no, Kids Today, I don’t think that sticking to anal still means you’re a virgin.  And again, this just may be because of my atypical high school experience, but really? Does this kind of thing still concern high schoolers?

And another thing.  Girls Today, I know you think you grew up on 80s high school movies and maybe you did see them on TBS every weekend, but I’m here to assure you that they  are in no way indicative of what your life is supposed to be like.

For example:

You don’t want Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, because any boy that makes the grandest romantic gesture of his life at age 17 is fucking crazy.

You don’t want Patrick Dempsey in Can’t Buy Me Love, because he’ll hold that “you’re rich and I’m poor” sword over your head for as long as he can (I know this because I did it to people).

You don’t want Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles because he’s a fucking pussy who’s going back to that snotty girl in a second, and you don’t want John Bender from The Breakfast Club because he’s a criminal lunatic.

You don’t need to lose your virginity just because you think it’ll make boys like you more, and you don’t need to call other girls whores just because they’re misguided enough to believe that sort of thing.  Take your lesson from my high school, where the drama nerds got laid the most, everyone else did it when they felt like it, and nobody gave a shit until someone got knocked up.

And don’t ever dress like Molly Ringwald. I know the witty redheads are movie gold, but she looked like an old lady and I don’t know what all the fuss was about.