You’d probably be surprised at what I learned in my first public school sex education class. It was all connected to sets of cement stairs. I grew up in an old Nebraska neighborhood and walked to school past big heavy black metal rings set into the cement curbs. Not all houses hosted them so mine held a certain status because a ring lived at the bottom of my front yard steps. The house next door, a larger fancier corner house fronting the long tree filled boulevard, had a tall cement staircase of three steps as well as a hitching ring.
Our parents told us when they were young, families still rode in horse drawn carriages and needed the hitching rings to tie their horses to but everyone lucky enough to have Mrs. Platz as a teacher also received sex education in relation to those three cement steps.
Mrs. Platz was SO SORRY we were wearing knee length skirts! For the first few times she’d repeated her lament we didn’t hear it because we were too busy thinking how LUCKY and FREE we were.  We no longer had to have our skirts measured from the ground to some magical number on the first day of school and periodically after. For my first few years in school, all girls would wear skirts at an exact distance from the ground, this number, depending on age, was sent to our parents in August to they could prepare our clothes and teachers grabbed yard sticks to check on the modesty distance every time they stepped out of their class rooms. And any teacher could measure a girl’s skirt at ant time.
“Why?” all the girls would ask their moms. The answer given most often was, “So in school photographs as you girls stand in a row, all your skirts will all line up.”
That sounded lame but Mrs. Platz had the real reason. When finally we’d heard her sad lament often enough we asked her about it.
“Because men and women enjoyed themselves so much more when women’s skirts were down to the ground.” she said and, “Men would loiter at the cement steps waiting to see a women’s ankle as they stepped up into a carriage. Women didn’t show anything below the neck, wrist, or above boot heal.”
I was thinking, “So when they saw an ankle it was in a boot and they were excited?” Evidently, yes and Mrs. Platz said some men were so overcome with excitement, when they saw their new wives in nightgowns; they fainted clean away for the joy of it all. Men loved the curves of a bare ankle, the various shapes in a leg, the delicate wrist, (that’s why we wear bracelets to show that off), the soft lower and upper arms, the throat and shoulders; all the hundreds of other voluptuous curves we no notice, no longer SEE, let alone enjoy. Men and women’s enjoyment in life was been substantially diminished. What a pity!!!  nancymauerman.com