telophase | (no subject)

rachelmanija links to a competition for Most Terrifying PSA* and also asks readers what PSAs they remember being subjected to and terrorized by as children.

* Public Safety Announcement

We didn't get any anti-sex or safe-sex messages, as we were vaguely in the south end of the Bible Belt and the bare MENTION of sex in school would cause us impressionable kids to throw off all our clothing and engage in orgies in the gym. Or something.

Not that we didn't have plenty of traumatizing moments. I was in the advanced biology class in 9th grade, and one day we got separated into the boys and the girls and watched the Nova show on human reproduction, which included film of a woman giving birth. That was far more effective than any other anti-sex or safe-sex message could have been, however, as all of us girls walked out of the classroom going I AM NEVER GOING TO HAVE A BABY OR SEX EVER EVER EVER EVER. And I was in a health class where the teacher - who was also the girls' volleyball coach - did what I can only describe as interpretive dance to illustrate the sentence "The uterus sloughs its lining every month." And she repeated it 2 or 3 times to drive the point home. I REMEMBER IT VIVIDLY TO THIS DAY, IT WAS THAT TRAUMATIZING.

We had duck-and-cover drills, but as we were in Tornado Alley, they were actually useful, to minimize injuries caused by flying glass and such if a tornado were to hit the school. :D

The one PSA we were shown in school that made an impact on me was a fire-safety one. It had a family in a two-story home that had a fire and because they had a fire safety plan in place, they all survived. Naturally, that wasn't the part that affected me. The makers of the film knew the propensity of kids to go "Cool!" and imitate anything dangerous they saw in PSAa, and therefore showed a fire starting in a completely impossible way: one of the kids, when they finished playing an electronic game of some sort, unplugged the cord and threw it into a cardboard box, where the contact of the metal prongs on the unplugged plug to the cardboard caused a fire to start.

TO THIS DAY I CANNOT STAND THE PRONGS OF A PLUG TOUCHING ANYTHING FLAMMABLE EVEN THOUGH I KNOW IT'S COMPLETE BOLLOCKS.

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Our health teacher showed us a video of three different births -- standard, episiotomy (sp?), and c-section. My god, if that didn't close every girl's legs for the next five years, I don't know what would. @_@

(and yet we had several teen mothers on that campus, go figure)

Total side note, but I've always loved your icon.

We named our Pembroke Welsh Corgi Arwen, only sort-of after Tolkien--we were looking for Welsh girl's names, and when we saw "Arwenna" in the baby name book, we figured we'd go directly for the nickname we'd end up using (we also once had a cat named Elbereth Gilthonial, Elly for short, and before I was born, my parents also had a cat named Galadrial). I used to call her "Arrrrrrwen," "Arfwen," and "Wen-wen"/"Wan-wan" (uber-geeky joke about the Japanese onomatopoeia for dogs barking).

I realized after I posted there that the best PSA I ever saw was when the Long Island Railroad sent someone to talk to us about rail safety. An electrified train line ran relatively close to both the elementary school and junior high so this was pretty necessary. Anyway, as part of talking about electrical safety and why you don't touch the third rail, they brought in a model that was wired with live electricity. They then proceeded to show the electricity arcing, grounding and setting things aflame. Not only was it cool, but it really did bring home the danger.

I had to watch a birth video in college, but it was part of a film class, and the film (Baby Bath Window Something Something I forget the actual title) was a work of Art made by a film-geek-director and his pregnant wife. I was the only person so disturbed I had to get up and go outside for fresh air, which made feel incredibly self-conscious.

Except for the horrible clotted-blood-soaked movies made from real video footage of fatal car accidents I had to watch in driving class, all the times I've been traumatized in the course of my education have been unintentional on the part of the teachers.

Freshman year. Medical Anthropology course. Taught by a prof who was specializing in the New Age movement in Austin* and was writing a book on birth as an institutionalized rite of passage. We saw more films and slides on birth than I care to recall, including one film called Birth in the Squatting Position that was twenty or thirty minutes of nothing but clip after clip of births from around the world in - you guessed it - the squatting position.

* And brought in someone to channel for us at the end of the course.

A few days before prom we had to watch something on the dangers of drunk driving. Lots of BLOOD AND GUTS AND TWISTED METAL, and a funeral march played over the end, when they showed the names of all of the people who'd died in accidents, the footage of which had been used in the film.

But I'm pretty sure that's a standard trauma, as the whole POINT of the film was to traumatize us into never driving drunk.