Don't Hate the Playah, Part the First

“You hate men, don’t you?!” he demanded.  It was more of a statement than a question. 

The guy is maybe 25, 26—one of the oldest students in the class of 35.  He had just described a play, a comedy, in which three wives discover that their husbands accidentally got locked in a meat cellar, and collectively the wives decide to…leave them in there. 

I laughed.  Because it sounds like a funny premise for a dark comedy.  And the guy was describing a comedy. But then:  “You hate men, don’t you?!”

Quite honestly, I was floored.  “Hate men?” I thought, “Me, of all people?”  I stood there in front of the class, mouth gaping open, trying to process the accusation.  And everything in the room went all foggy and turned into colorful, squiggly lines—you know, the psychedelic ones that transport you into the mandatory dream sequence in The Brady Bunch or really, in any other 1970s-era TV show—as I fell backwards down the rabbit hole of my own mind, looking for what could have ever inspired such a comment.

Honestly, I’d be lying if I said that my relationship with men as a whole is unconflicted.  It’s totally conflicted.  I’m not sure, but a bit of conflict might be an inherent part of heterosexuality—gender-based differences become significant because of sexual tension.  Maybe.  But that seems like kind of a lame rationale.

When I was super, super young—maybe four or five years old—I remember thinking that when I grew up, I was going to turn into my father.  Literally.  I thought I would grow up to be a man.  The why for this is anyone’s guess, but my concept of transformation into my dad—because hey, I was a little baby—was absolutely literal.  Literal to the point where I forced myself to eat spinach because my dad said it would “put hair on my chest”.  Because I thought that would be awesome.  Because men had hair on their chests. 

Oh, thank god that didn’t happen.

I don’t know exactly when the shift occurred, but by the time I was in junior high, I was very glad that I was a girl.  Particularly the day I saw Don Carrigan and some of his cronies trying to bully this 5^th grader for his lunch money.  After shaming them into breaking it up, I remember thinking how glad I was to be a girl, since we don’t do that to each other.  Or at least, I never saw any girls throwing smaller girls against cinderblock walls for $5.  That little glimpse of what some boys have to go through growing up—negotiating that animalistic hierarchy of power that is, say, the boys locker room—made me perfectly content to play with makeup and clothes and gossip with my girlfriends about dreamy alterna-rock stars.  It seemed so much more pleasurable, and no one was going to end up with a bloody nose.

But thinking about it, there was never a time that boys were gross to me.  I never thought they had cooties.   Only last year, my old babysitter told me that when I was around six years old, she discovered her son and I kissing and holding hands, and when she asked us what was up, I declared, “It’s okay. He’s my boyfriend!”  Her son, she told me, was over the moon at this.  (Funny that I didn’t remember any of this until she reminded me.  I had gone through my life thinking I never had a legitimate case of puppy love, when apparently I was getting hot and heavy in the backyard at six years old.)

And when I trace myself back, I realize that at every point in my life, I always had multiple circles of friends, multiple crowds that I could run with at any given point, but one of those circles was always exclusively boys.  Well, a bunch of boys and me.  And the thing is, I was never a tomboy or anything, really.  While I was probably tougher and more physical than other girls, and I had quite an unfeminine case of the SassMouth, I was never the “guy’s girl” who played sports and liked beer and wore sweatshirts. Instead, I wrote poetry and drank liquor and liked loud, live music, and I wore combat boots with short black skirts and fishnets (younger) or little retro heels with sundresses and cardigans (older).  So I don’t think I’d be the automatic choice for the only girl in a group of guys.

But somehow, it always happened that way.  I mean, in high school, I never had a curfew, although my older sister did.  She had a curfew and had the talk about how you can never have boys in your room, and she was forbidden to have guys over to the house when the Ps weren’t home.  But not me.  My folks essentially told me that no boy was ever going to want a Great Big Girl like me, so I never got “the talk” or curfew or anything.  Because curfews are enforced exclusively to keep one's daughters from getting pregnant.  And so I ran wild.  I’d stay out all night and drove to parts of The City I wasn’t supposed to go and went to parties with college kids when I was still in my early teens.  

But the only other people with a similar lack of restrictions were boys.  So when Rick would come pick me up in his sleazy bachelor wagon with the louvered windows, I’d say we were going over to Sam’s house to watch movies and don’t wait up.  But really, Rick and Cory and Sam and Bart and I would head over to Rick’s apartment and drink way too much Jaegermeister, to the point where Sam would have to help me tie my boots back on at the end of the night.  And then he’d drive me home, and on the way, he’d confess all of his secrets to me.  “It’s okay to tell you about this stuff because you’re so drunk you’ll never remember it,” he’d say, never suspecting that my memory is impervious to the effects of alcohol.  Or since the guys were older than me, anyway, we’d end up at some college keg party, and the boys would end up passed out at 3am, so I’d have to hoof it miles across town by myself so that I could get home before dawn.

And it didn’t stop once I was out on my own, although I needed much less help lacing up my own boots.  There was always some group of boys I was chosen by and integrated into.  However, while I was one of the group, I was never “one of the guys”, and this seemed to be an important distinction.  I was always a girl, so there was always the recognition of difference in there.  Sometimes it would manifest as trades of information.  You know, like, “Okay, if you tell me why guys are obsessed with girl-on-girl porn, I’ll tell you why girls always go to the bathroom in groups.”  And sure, there’d be some tension and flirting and general play in there, too.  I mean, that’s going to be there, right? 

And once this phenomenon carried over into grad school, and I was adopted by this group of these hyper-masculine undergraduate boys who called themselves the Industrial Ward Social Club, I started to notice some pretty specific dynamics.  One of the boys, Dion, gave me the title of The Sexiest Woman in the Department, which I think he actually meant, and which of course, I played along with.  I mean, I think my appeal was in being ever-so-slightly older than him and smart and self-possessed and badass.  You know, that I was different from the little undergrad girlies who tried so hard to impress the boys through simpering and polyester clubwear and giggling and agreeing with whatever they said.  Whereas me, I’d be house managing in a 1940s, peacock blue peplum skirt suit with vintage platform heels and sheer black stockings and a garter belt.  And I wasn’t trying to impress anyone but myself.   

And they’d take me out to bars in A Town Near You, and I could see them competing to try to impress me.  You know, they’d see who could make me laugh the hardest, or who could make me blush the hardest, or who could keep up with me the most in an intellectual discussion.  So it was this big flirty game of charm and banter and booze and dancing, which was fun for all of us, I think.  And while it sounds like it was just one big orgy waiting to happen, it was really quite innocent.  (Okay, mostly innocent.)  I think that the charming and the flirting was a way of recognizing me as a woman, and by extension, a way of confirming their respective masculinities.  And I’m all for that.  I like a bit of attention, and I think it's fun to confirm a guy’s masculinity.  So everybody won.

But far, far beyond that, I found that when I hung out with the Industrial Ward Social Club, things were simple.  I could have whatever opinions I wanted and express them loudly.  I could bust chops as hard as I wanted, and not only would no one’s feelings get hurt, more often than not, it became group entertainment.  And we’d have marathon nights out that took us unexpected places throughout A Town Near You, and we’d get into scrapes and have dubious adventures and end up in the houses or cars of strange local characters.  And it was all great and fun and occasionally a little scary, but the thing is, it didn’t matter that I was a woman.  It didn’t matter that according to mainstream social standards, engaging in the same activities as the rest of the Industrial Ward Social Club marked me as being too wild, too loud, too open for a woman—or for a proper woman, anyway.  The rules didn't apply to me there.

 

And since they respected me, I wasn’t judged.  It was like this really simple code of honor—as long as you were good to them, they’d remain faithful no matter what you did.  For real.  It was so, so simple.  If you hadn’t done wrong by the guys in the group, then all of your other failings as a human being or mistakes you made in relationships with other people would be met with unwavering loyalty and a tight lip.  As in, “s/he’s done alright by me, so as far as I’m concerned, s/he’s all good”, followed by a steadfast refusal to engage in further conversation about the issue.  Which is unusually uncomplicated for any social group, but absolutely remarkable for a theatre department.

But it was so beautiful and pure in its simplicity.

I never noticed that this was a recurring phenomenon in my life until one particular phone conversation with Clark, after he had moved away from A Town Near You.  He called me in the middle of the day on Sunday, and I was just walking in the door after a marathon Saturday night with the Industrial Ward Social Club—you know, one of those nights where you stumble to the door the next morning barefoot, carrying your cute heels in your hand, even though you’re not drunk anymore; one of those nights that involves somehow shoving eight people in your little Honda, a narrow escape from something, a bottle of Wild Turkey, a jump in a lake, and having to borrow a shirt from someone?  Well, I stumbled through the door as the phone was ringing, and Clark instantly knew something was up. 

“And just what have you been doing?” he says.

And I say, “Oh, you know, I just got home from a night out with the boys.”

And Clark says, all sly and knowing, “Just like always, huh?  It’s always you and the boys.”

That had never occurred to me.  But it felt true, in a way.  And the thing is, I love my girls.  I love my girls so hard that my identity actually split in half in order to birth a SuperHero to defend them.  My girls are sewn into the fabric of my soul. 

But running with the boys, though…there’s a freedom there that I don’t really get otherwise.  It’s freedom from all the “Should I? Shouldn’t I?  Will people think bad things about me?”  It’s a license to act and experience and adventure.  It’s a place to play and banter and be.  It’s a different neighborhood from where I'm supposed to live, and it's states away from where most of my girls live.  And I can't imagine life without that.   

So I love the boys.  I’ve always loved the boys.

So after all this reverie, my head started to turn back to the inspiration for it—the stern-faced student accusing me of hating men.  And I returned my focus to the class, trying to find the right way to respond to the accusation that my entire life experience refuted.  And I didn't know what to say, but as soon as I opened my mouth, some instinct took over, laying out the real deal for everyone within earshot.  I said:

Look, I don’t know where you get that from.  I don’t hate men.  I love men.

It’s patriarchy that I hate.  I object to the Rule By the Fathers, okay, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You know, I object to earning 75 cents to the dollar of my male counterparts with the same level of education and experience.

I object to the idea that since some guy hasn’t purchased the exclusive rights to my vagina with a diamond ring, I must be some kind of sexual pariah or predator.

I object to strange men thinking they have the right to put their hands on me, just because they want to put their hands on me.

I object to being a fucking brilliant graduate student who is told not to “worry her pretty little head” about how hard it’s going to be to read an excerpt from Aristotle, when I read the entire Poetics and Nicomachean Ethics when I was 18.

I object to older male administrators calling me into their office to give me “fatherly advice”, just because I am young and female.

I object to getting lip from students that I know they would not be dishing out to a 60 year-old man, or even a man my own age.

I object to being told, "You know, you'd be a lot hotter if you'd just dumb it down a little.  No guy wants a girl who's smarter than him."

I object.  I object.  I totally object. 

That stuff pisses me off to no fucking end, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.  But I certainly don’t hate men.  I don't hate the playah, but goddamn, I hate the game.

Well, okay…that’s more like what I wish I said.  What I actually said was probably closer to this:

Dear Boys,

Goddamn, I love you.

But I’m still not taking any of your shit.

Love,

Great Big Girl