Putting My Gym Teacher's Head Between My Thighs
Appreciators of Sex and the City deep cuts might recognize Suffern, New York, as the fictional setting for Aidan’s country house, where bonafide city-girl Carrie Bradshaw sees a squirrel and declares she is “suffering in Suffern.” Why Carrie—written to originally be from Connecticut—was so distraught over a squirrel, I’m not sure. But the sentiment of Suffering in Suffern was one I understood immediately.
I was a deeply awkward, sensitive kid when I started Suffern Senior High School in 2003. I struggled socially and wanted so deeply to be liked and understood, yearning for Hot Topic or Abercrombie or Juicy Couture—whatever it took to fit-in. My parents, a teacher and a construction worker, did not understand my aspirations to create a new identity via consumerism, and I remained a JCPenney girl.
There was one particular fashion statement within my reach, though—a Self Defense shirt. These were shirts that every girl at Suffern High School had at least one of. They were shapeless, unisex-fitted cotton T-shirts—as generic-looking as any other youth sports shirt—with the words “SELF DEFENSE” displayed in big bold letters across the front. Every single girl had at least one, often multiples and in different colors.
Self Defense was a P.E. elective at Suffern High for over thirty years. The program taught basic attack and defensive moves to girls. The only male allowed in class was the teacher, Mr. Biddy, an affable bald man in his fifties who seemed genuinely passionate about teaching the program—which he had designed and implemented himself.
When I was there, you could take Self Defense all year, meeting in the school’s wrestling room twice a week, where wall-to-wall mats covered the floor. Often we gathered in a circle while Mr. Biddy demonstrated a move, then asked one of us to perform it on him as the rest of the class watched.
One day when I was the one to wrestle with Mr. Biddy, the move ended with his head face-up between my thighs as I squeezed. He turned beet red, the blood vessels in his forehead bulged, as he uttered expressions of shock and discomfort before tapping out. Giggles erupted from my classmates. It was always so fun when a teacher broke the fourth wall. Scenarios where they are just a person, lacking any authority, one of us. That feeling was amplified even more by tackling him to the ground and watching as he expressed displeasure and awe in equal parts at our strength. He seemed to enjoy getting his ass kicked. “You have legs like a nutcracker,” he told me after I released the hold, shaking his head in disbelief.
Later that year, my mom was picking me up from the school office when Mr. Biddy happened to be there. “My daughter loves your class,” she said. He smiled and complimented my work. “Mom, he said I have legs that could crack nuts,” I added, preening. An awkward beat passed between the three of us. I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it.
The thing was, I loved that he had said that. I was bad at gym, my hand-eye coordination, agility and ability to care about sports virtually nonexistent. The personification of the opening of Daria, where she stands expressionless in the back court of a volleyball game, barely moving as her teammates play. Mr. Biddy was the only P.E. teacher I ever had who made me feel capable and strong. I was good in Self Defense in a way I wasn’t good anywhere else. My body cooperated there. That mattered more than I understood at the time.
By Junior year I would be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and my inability to catch a ball or stay awake in class before noon would become a whole lot more contextualized, but I had two years of High School to get through before a diagnosis and until then I just blamed myself—a sign of my own laziness and ineptness that seemed to seep through every pore of my body, except in Self Defense.
Besides wrestling him, we wrestled each other, too. The class would break into pairs, and each match continued until one girl tapped out. A whistle would be blown and one person rotated so you both could face someone new.
I was nervous—wrestling your peers in the middle of the school day will do that—but I also liked it. The physicality was unlike anything else we did in P.E. You couldn’t hide. You had to engage the person in front of you. Plus, Mr. Biddy had said I was good and no other gym teacher had ever told me that before.
When the matches began, I blacked out, singularly focused on getting my opponent into a hold she couldn’t escape, while she did the same to me. Our bodies collided in a deceptively intimate way—skin on skin—but we weren’t thinking about sex. We were thinking about winning. Predictably, the teenage guys in our school didn't see it this way. "Can I come watch you wrestle?," was a common refrain.
I’d developed hips and an ass that started getting me a small amount of male attention—both wanted and unwanted. This was long before the time of ubiquitous BBLs and I had a hard time understanding how a fat ass could be desired by men in a world obsessed with thinness. Becoming sexualized and sexual while simultaneously contemplating if I was too old to trick-or-treat anymore felt shameful, the male gaze like a leery and slightly uncomfortable sun shining on me. I wanted to bask in the warmth, but often was left feeling burnt. Like when a grown man leaned out of an HVAC truck to whistle at me when I was only fourteen. Or when I had my first kiss and the guy’s ex-girlfriend made it her mission to tell everyone that I was a weirdo and he was misguided for kissing me. He never talked to me again. I felt like it had been revealed that I had an STD and didn’t tell him. Only my STD was that I was a loser.
Sophomore year, a friend and I went through another girl’s locker and found a note that she had in there about giving blowjobs while at sleep away camp. Participating in our school’s culture of girl-on-girl violence, we shared the note, and word got around that it was me who had raided her locker and found it. She approached me in the hallway about it—which, honestly, rightfully so; I shouldn’t have gone through her stuff. Fifteen-year-old me clammed up as she confronted me. I denied that it was me who found the note, insinuating that it must have been someone else. Our back-and-forth was loud enough that a lot of people stopped and watched.
Sure enough, she was also in my Self Defense class. So, when we met that week and it was her and my turn to wrestle—everyone sneakily stopped what they were doing to watch. The beef was personal. She was about my size, but right away I could tell how much stronger than me she was. So muscular and scrappy. She wholly kicked my ass, with gusto. Then the whistle rang, we shook hands as we were instructed to, and she got up and rotated.
No one said anything—just went right back to what we were doing. But I knew everyone saw. I felt so humiliated. I was suffering in Suffern.
Decades later, after Me Too and a lot of self-reflection on my girlhood, I had this thought—why the hell were we all wrestling our male gym teacher? Why was that man's head between my thighs multiple times? We even had T-shirts.
I typed "Mr. Biddy Suffern High School" into Google and found an article titled “MMA Move Could Leave School Liable to Student” where it's stated that Mr. Biddy had never been certified to teach the class, and that a girl had sued the district after breaking her femur during a match. The femur is the body's strongest bone, it takes tremendous force to break one, usually only occurring in high-trauma incidents, like a car crash. A Facebook group pops-up as well called “Save Self Defense” where I find out the program had been cancelled in 2010. It’s unclear whether the lawsuit ended the program, or what.
My internet sleuthing barely scratches the itch of my wonderings. Besides these two things, there is little else online. Which is frustrating considering how little I remember of that time. I finally got all the brand name clothes I yearned for in adolescence, along with a supportive partner and friends. I'm one of the lucky ones, although I often don't feel lucky. I feel gypped. I am, after all, part of a generation that heard about Clinton's sexual predilections ad nauseum as a child and now I'm hearing it all over again as an adult.
Navigating girlhood in the early 2000s was complicated, even without being asked to wrestle your teachers and peers. The class rested on the false premise that violence against women comes primarily from strangers. I imagined one day using the moves we learned if someone attacked me in an alley. When I was eventually assaulted, it was by someone I knew. The gravity of it didn't actually compute until the next day. Either way, putting him in a headlock with my legs when it happened wouldn't have helped. At the least, it would have been very very strange. Or worse, it could've put him or myself in real danger.
Mentioning my own sexual assault is like a fish pointing out the water. I don't know of many women who haven't been assaulted at least once. It would've been helpful—for boys and girls—if we were taught about consent, coercion, slut-shaming, or the everyday institutional violence that shapes people's lives.
It's grasping at straws to say that Mr. Biddy was ‘never creepy’ and ‘actually nice,’ as though that were something exceptional instead of the bare minimum. I do seriously wonder if ever got off from watching us or having us tackle him. Odds are yes, but I have no way of confirming for sure and no evidence to suggest so. My suspicions are based on the actions of other men who are not him, which feels unfair.
Perhaps he was actually a well-intentioned, slightly overzealous, adult who looked around one day and decided that all us girls needed was to wrestle. Seems likely considering the older I get, the more I realize how many adults who had influence over me while growing up were stuck in a perpetual state of arrested development.
As a teacher myself, I also encounter how hard it is to fix a broken system from within the system on a daily basis. It's impossible, you just have to try your best. Although, I can confidently say I would never have my students wrestle me or each other, especially being un-certified to do so.
What stays with me is the normalcy of it all— the way none of us found it odd. We liked wrestling Mr. Biddy and each other, so much so that it was a fashion statement. All I wanted was for him and my peers to just see me and like, not realizing until much later that that was always something I could've just freely given to myself. I didn't have to wait for anyone.
We all needed so much more than T-shirts and jiu-jitsu moves. But when you’re drowning, anything can look like a raft.
-Katie Brain
Katie Brain is a writer and educator living in Brooklyn, New York with her two dogs. Her work explores girlhood, memory, embodiment, and the various influences of the early 2000s.