I saw the photo of the Canadian male shop teacher with gigantic prosthetic breasts and protruding nipples making the rounds on social media last week and felt a combination of fury, disgust, and protectiveness. Fury and disgust at all the adults who allowed such perverse and inappropriate attire and behavior in a school and protective of the young students forced to participate in the sexual fetish of the predator-teacher.
The photos reminded me of the time I was forced to participate in a man’s public sex fetish. I was 18 years old and a newly arrived Barnard freshman riding on the subway. This was the tail end of the 1980s and a rougher NYC than we have enjoyed in the decades since, but one our elected leaders seem hell-bent on returning to.
After a few stops, I looked up and saw a man across from me wearing cutoff jean shorts. To my shock, I saw his penis poking out of his shorts. My first thought was the absurdly innocent “how embarrassing–someone should tell him!” But then I looked up and he caught my eyes. He was staring straight at me. And I realized it was no innocent mistake, no unzipped fly that one would want to be told about.
As he stared at me, his erection grew. I felt trapped. I could have and should have gotten up and walked away, but inexplicably I did not. I thought it better to pretend I had not seen what he clearly wanted me to see. Getting up would have meant acknowledging him and his display which somehow seemed worse. I stayed seated and looked down, and at other people on the train trying to pretend everything was normal. I felt more and more uncomfortable and more and more trapped.
He was using me to indulge his fantasy even though he was not touching me or even speaking to me.
That is what the shop teacher in the super-sized prosthetic breasts is doing to the kids in his class. He is using them to indulge his sexual fantasies and fetishes. He is a predator and they are the prey. And in the case of students, they can’t even leave their classroom without repercussions.
Wearing the prosthetic breast with exaggerated erect nipples is only one part of the fetish, the other part is the reaction it produces among those who see him and have to pretend that everything is normal. The school children are being forced to participate. Every kid who glances at the bizarre breasts or snickers at the weirdness of it all is feeding his fetish and turning him on. And the adults who sanction the behaviors are accomplices.
Indecent exposure is a crime and actually used to be prosecuted so the man on the subway all those years ago was breaking the law, but doing so in a crafty way that would make it hard to be caught or punished. The teacher is doing the same thing. Using others to feed a sexual fantasy.
The cult of gender ideology is very dangerous for children precisely because sexual fetishes get to come into the public realm cloaked as “gender identity.” The support this pervert-teacher has from his workplace is a horrifying example of administrators choosing to elevate his fantasies and fetishes above the safety, health, and well-being of the students which should be their first priority.
Parents are at a terrible disadvantage in trying to protect their students from the harms of gender ideology in school precisely because it comes in under cover of DEI and the laudable idea of being compassionate to those who are different. This is how drag queens wind up at elementary schools and graphic novels glorifying sex between minors and adults wind up on the shelves of school libraries.
The compelled speech pronoun rituals many high school children just experienced here in NYC as they returned to school are part of the same cult of gender ideology. Less visually repugnant but just as dangerous. Forcing kids to say their pronouns is forcing them to pretend that a teacher would not know their sex otherwise. That is a lie.
Compelling students to participate in other people’s fantasies and delusions at the risk of being labeled a bigot and becoming a social outcast is wrong and should not happen in schools. When children have to participate in lies they have to suppress the very instincts that they need to protect themselves from those that would do them harm.
