We were talking about sex education in one of my classes and how problematic so many of the things we're told during our "education" are. Most of my classmates talked about their abstinence-only education, but I had a very different experience in middle school.

Anyone from my middle school will remember the "bruised tomato" speech we received in eighth grade, and it didn't even take place during sex ed.

We were in an assembly with our entire grade talking about an upcoming field trip. At the end of assembly, my grade's vice principal sent the boys back to class and kept all the girls behind. She started telling a story about how she grocery shops for fruit, using a tomato as an example. The tomatoes at the top of the stack in the store are the ones everyone looks at and touches. This causes them to bruise, so nobody wants these tomatoes anymore.

She then turned this story into a metaphor, making the room full of 13 and 14-year-old girls the tomatoes.

The girls who had been repeatedly looked at and touched, the ones who had already kissed boys and had boyfriends and gone further than just kissing, were the tomatoes at the top of the stack. They were the bruised tomatoes, and according to my vice principal, nobody was going to want them in the future.

At the time, I think most of us found the metaphor funny at the time. I remember all of us teasing our friends and calling them bruised tomatoes, even the ones who had never so much as hugged a boy. And we all knew who the girls in our grade were that our vice principal was specifically talking about.

As we've all gotten older, we've come to realize how unacceptable this once funny bruised tomato speech was.

A grown woman stood in front of a room of girls who were barely teenagers and shamed us for any sexual experience we'd had. She told us that these experiences were bad and wrong, something to be ashamed of. She told us that any sexual experience made us dirty. She told us that these experiences made us undesirable.

A grown woman, someone we were supposed to respect and admire, proudly stood in front of a room of female students and slut-shamed us without giving it a second thought.

When I told this story in class, six years after it happened, everyone wanted to know what the boys were told in their assembly. I had to laugh at this question because, of course, the boys didn't have a separate assembly. A boy with any form of sexual experience was cool, a lady's man, a stud, the man.

He wasn't a bruised tomato.

The girls got shamed while the boys did not.

The girls got shamed while the boys were allowed to continue their tradition of "slap-ass Friday" where they would run around campus grabbing girls' butts.

The girls got shamed while the boys who tried looking into the girls' locker room in PE didn't even get in trouble.

The girls got shamed while the boy who slid his hand up my thigh on the bus almost every day and made sexual comments to me was allowed to sit next to me still, even after I reported it to the bus driver.

The girls got shamed for being looked at and touched while boys were continuously allowed to look at us, touch us, and talk dirty to us without repercussions.