4. Cactus needles, derisive laughter, and other sharp things
Many girls, when they smile, are only moving their lips to feel their sharp teeth. I had no illusions otherwise. Sometimes you have to rise to your own defense, and some people strike back first. But girl ways were always a little more understandable, cold, dignified. Boys were more like animals, wild dog-creatures without leashes. Incomprehensible, hot, uncivilized. Girl ways don't work so well for boys, though.
Girl ways are designed to strike home at the feelings of another sensitive or vulnerable person, and they take practice -- you have to polish and sharpen your fangs, and you have to know where to strike. Trying to use girl taunting methods against boy antagonists was usually impractical for me, since the worst things I could think of to imply about them were generally true and they weren't exactly ashamed -- besides, I was the uncertain one, and my own indignation showed and made me vulnerable to laughter. I was effective at expressing contempt, and, terrified or not, I would stand my ground when they tried to intimidate me. This seemed to bother them a lot, but their most common reaction to these tactics was to physically attack me. As far as contending with the girls, the occasion didn't occur often, and when it did, I lacked the practice. All in all, I bled but drew very little blood. Not because I never wanted to, mind you! I don't feel to inclined to show all my scars, but no complete assault on sexism can exclude the treatment of the sex role nonconformist at the hands of his peers.
* * *
Boys tend to fight, to curl their hands up into fists and punch, and sexism encourages them to think boys are supposed to do this, and that to avoid such a situation is the height of unmasculine conduct. Good old physical violence. Teaches you how to be threatening. How to dominate and inspire fear.
Most boys fight over petty irritations, more than from total fury or fear, and brag about it. Even when they come out the worse for it. It's practically a sport, with rules of chivalrous conduct followed more often than not: you fight "like a man" with your fists, not like an animal fighting for survival.
Of course, one can make the real fight a fight between violence and nonviolence if so inclined, finding the sport not to your liking, but some people can be awfully insistent. For the boy who chooses not to fight, the initial challenge turns to vicious hatred, contempt, and disgust...and, though not pleased by the prospect, some of these boys will start punching you even if you refuse to raise your fists. They try to make you mad, incensed, furious, thinking that will make you want to fight and the ritual will proceed from there. Being trapped in between, hating to fight but quite susceptible to these angering tactics, that's agony. Over time, layers of pure hate coat upon each other, cut off from adequate expression. Getting socked in the nose is no fun, either, and a long history of nonviolence hardly leaves you feeling confident of your ability to contend if your survival is endangered by someone who just won't quit. Fear leaves your stomach feeling awful and you tremble all over, you want to scream or cry...
The boy who doesn't conform to sexist conditioning in other ways clearly invites such challenges to see if he can be made to act masculine...and, if not, punching sissies seems to be the duty of every real boy.
* * *
Sissy, faggot, baby, queer, square, chicken, pansy, homo, fairy, wimp, pussy, fruit, stupid, pervert, cunt, retard, whore...yeah, I had a lot of nicknames as a child. What hurt, though, what struck home was not what they said, but how they said it. Tone of voice. Expression. I could feel the walls of contempt, disgust, hatred, feelings for which there are hardly words to describe, strong, intense things that shocked me and stunned me and sliced me up inside. How could so many people feel this way about me so often?
Half the things I was called I didn't really understand, and I mainly figured they just chose the worst epithet available and applied it to me, an error that both insulated me and kept me naÔve about what it was they were implying. Of course, I was good at not understanding what I didn't want to understand, too. At any rate, all I really took in was the hate.
The boys struck verbally ten times more than the girls, but an occasional girl would find me revolting, and would cut much deeper with her long, drawn-out, more verbally vivid description of the obscenity she felt me to be: "Why don't you sit somewhere else, okay? I can't stand looking at you, it makes me feel like throwing up. You're so sick you don't deserve to live. Why don't you do your parents a big favor and kill yourself? Look, Vicky, have you ever seen a more disgusting thing in your life? You're a thing, you belong in a toilet, someone should have flushed you a long time ago, I can't believe they let you live. Must have been an accident. Go look at yourself, then you'll see. How can you stand yourself? You should hide in a deep sewer where no one can see you. Don't look at me, your eyes make people feel like taking a bath in garbage to clean themselves off. Vicky, did you hear the word he said? Come on, let's go tell the teacher...I hope he kills you..."
* * *
Being uprooted, whether from your school or from your town, and placed in a new social setting to start over, can be traumatic to many people.
Take a popular kid and take him away from the familiar crowd, and he has to build from scratch, and if that popularity didn't come easy, he will probably not relish the thought of losing all his friends and his status.
The misfit, however, looks towards a clean slate with hope and anticipation. But that hope can be tragic when the same problems always reappear. When you defy something as inescapably wisdspread as your own sex role, it's pathetic to think that by going somewhere where no one has heard of your reputation, you can escape it at last. Maybe this time they'll like me, I'll find different people...wow, no one here was in my class last year, so there's no one to start that stuff again...okay, a whole new town, this time things are going to be different...but it's never different, and it takes an average of about a week to begin making its reappearance, and your eyes go haunted and wide as you cry out, deep inside, no, no, not again!
If the crowd never changed, you could maybe believe you were just stuck with some exceptionally hateful people, but when you try to run from it and there's no place it can't follow you, the only place to run is deep inside your head...
The prisoner can stare out between the bars in the window at the sky and dream of freedom, but for the prisoner of sexism, the entire world is a cage, and the sky, no matter how blue, is only a Pyrex dome. When your problems are terrible and also inescapable, you don't think about it, you deny that it's there and view it all as a series of unassociated, unrelated incidents, and you never are able to dream of things being any different, you can't picture how you want things to be instead, ...you lock it all in a room deep inside your mind and you kid yourself, you cheat yourself, saying every morning and every night that it's all right except for certain individuals and their individual actions. If it weren't for Mike and David and Joe...if it weren't for the new teacher, the old neighborhood,...if we didn't have to live in this stupid town, where my enemies turn everyone else against me...it's his fault, it's her fault, it's their fault...if only they would stop, everything would be okay!
It's a long climb before you get high enough and far enough away from the day-to-day nuts and bolts of your life to see the pattern that you're up against, and only the desperate, the lonely, the emotionally exhausted victims ready to scream are really ready to open their eyes and know what awful truth to scream about.
* * *
My own personal mirage was named Someday; Someday kept me waiting and hoping when otherwise I might not have been able to tolerate my life...but waiting and hoping in vain. Someday's full name was Someday When I'm Grown, for I was sure adulthood would free me at last, and my childhood was spent waiting for it to end.
By the time I hit Junior High School, the clues were everywhere, if I was willing to look -- things weren't going to get better.
As a teenager, anyone could see my behavior was not just designed to obey the adults, "the system", and so forth, which was how I had often been perceived when I was younger: here I was, drinking beer, flaunting my disrespect for authority along with the rest, smoking Oaxaca's finest as it passed my way. The weed taught me at first how to relax, feeling warm and friendly and totally unworried about the others, and was fast chipping away at that sense of otherness and difference I'd carried so long...but it was in precisely such condition that someone drove it all home for me. I made some comment making fun of the cult of male fighting and was instantaneously flattened by a fellow on my right. I apologized and quickly went to the other side of the party, but it didn't end there -- he ambushed me as I left, first coming up to apologize, but the handshake became a wicked punch to the jaw, and my eyes were blinded by three of his friends bearing flashlights.
An audience formed. My face was lit up like a football stadium, and all I could see were the makeshift spotlights as he amused himself and the others with a midnight mugging exhibition. Taunts and inferences about my masculinity rang in my ears. He tried to kick me in the balls. I ran to grab him so I might know at least where he was, and was pulled to the ground by another. I rolled and ran, and was blocked to all escape except up the side of the steep hill, where I crawled blindly straight into a huge cactus, to the amusement of all watching.
An hour later, pulling needles and branches of walking stick cactus out of my arms, shoulder, chest, and thigh by the light of the moon, I had time to think.
* * *
As you can see, there are penalites for behaving as I did. Every boy has the option of rejecting the masculinization, but only in the same sense that cattle have the option of turning from the way to the pen and ramming headlong into the cattle prods.
I did not realize this at the time. I directly blamed the boys who exemplified masculinity for all that they were and all that they did. Now it seems strange to be telling my story more or less in their defense! Yet, if any of these had broken the code and dared to be different, they would have risked suffering all that I suffered; and, of course, I served as an ever-present reminder to all the rest, an example of what would happen to them if they stepped out of the manhood line.
Meanwhile, some of the pains I experienced and cried out about were common to all boys, and I'm certain that many other boys found them just as unpleasant as I did. There are certain delicacies of human temperament that are violated by the boyhood experience, and those violations must have hurt others as well as myself. But the desensitizing, delicacy-deadening process which was taking place was numbing most boys' sensitivities (both in the sense of pain and in the sense of responsiveness); whereas, in some important way, I was surviving the process relatively intact, if not untouched.
It did not, however, strike me that way at the time.
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