https://www.pagewings.com/products/pagewings-banned-books-tour-unisex-washed-t-shirt
Wow! Thanks!
I went to high school in Indiana-- however, it was a university town that was heavily populated with transplants, and has never had a Republican mayor.
We did that. We actually did that. While doing an exercise with our arms that we thought would improve the underlying chest muscles and therefore improve the projection of our breasts.
Somewhere around seventh grade, and around 1964.
We added another couple of lines to the chant; the bigger, the better, if you want to fit into [the housemother’s] sweater.
When I was somewhere around that age, my parents and I went to visit some friends. In the bedroom they put me in for the night someone had left a copy of Justine.
I concluded, after reading it for a while, that the author probably wasn’t getting any, and was therefore making up wilder and wilder stuff in an attempt to make up for lack of actual stimulation.
I also concluded that I’d better not tell the grownups that I’d noticed the book. My parents in general did let me read whatever I wanted, but I think Justine would have been pushing it — when I was significantly younger a book titled “bawdy verses” or something similar vanished after I complained that I didn’t think they were funny, which was what I’d thought “bawdy” meant. There were a lot of books in our house and I routinely pulled books off the shelves and read them without paying any attention to what age group they were meant for.
My civics teacher in junior high would always set aside one day of the week to let us work on homework or listen to her read a book. She probably said so at the time, but it wasn’t until decades later that I realized she was reading us books from the banned books list.
About ten years later that was “the bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us!”
I learned it:
the bigger the better
The tighter the sweater
The boys are depending on us!
This isn’t giving the kids much credit. Would they watch Titanic and think, “This is dumb because with modern radar systems they never would have hit the iceberg”? I don’t think so.
I suspect that some authors and filmmakers deliberately choose to set their stories and films in pre-internet, pre-cellphone times to avoid this very thing. Too often I watch something set in modern times and think, “None of this would have happened if someone had just made a simple phone call.” Set it in the 70s or 80s and you take that possibility away.