THE DANGERS OF BIKE SHORTS

One downside I've noticed to the return of school and the deluge of freshmen: many young men and women have decided that wearing their workout clothes as daily attire poses no problems whatsoever. With the amount of skin and spandex I'm seeing (particularly the amount of skin my female students are showing in my class), I'm uncomfortably reminded of this passage from "Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From it All":

"...there is, I'm afraid, a frank sexuality that begins to get uncomfortable. You can already see some of the sixteen-year-olds out under the basketball hoop doing little warm-up twirls and splits, and they're disturbing enough to make me wish there was a copy of the state's criminal statutes handy and prominent."

I must be getting older because a) my first thought is always to accost these young women with the question "Does your mother know you're dressed like that?" and b) all my students look so young to me that any display of sexuality on their parts does seem, well . . . uncomfortable. Like something I should not be privy to (or something I might be in trouble for being privy to). A friend mentioned that it's "Freshman Mating Season" at the school where she teaches, but my students, I'm convinced, are too young to have any part of that--even if they seem very desperately to want to have one.

I realize that this makes me sound totally uncool and kind of like an unenlightened misogynist who wants to dictate what is appropriate for females to wear and to control their sexuality, etc., etc. I've got no real response to any of those charges. I guess I just find it hard to teach when I'm wondering if I might get arrested for the amount of cleavage on display in the first row.