Girl Germs.

I can’t tell you when it started, but the steady stream of mixed messages has definitely informed my perspective (or, as Frank Zappa once put it, “messed my mind up.”) I was born in 1970, approximately the same year as the birth of the modern feminist movement. To say that I have been tossed between worlds since approximately that moment is a bit of an understatement. 

 

I’m not sure when I became a feminist, or when I started identifying as one. I wasn’t given a choice, in my opinion; my mother has a will of iron, and comes from a long line of nurses. She was not going to give up her career when she met my father, nor do I think he was foolish enough to ever suggest such a thing. As fate would have it, he developed an utterly debilitating galaxy of cardiovascular and respiratory disorders when I was still an infant…so my mother was the one who taught me how to throw a ball, drive a stick-shift, mow a lawn, punch without breaking my thumb, kick a soccer ball, whittle, and remove my own splinters. The concept of a world where all women were not my mother was, despite seeming simplistic and Freudian, improbable at best. In her poem “Men”, Lorenza Calvillo Craig says that my gender are “totally unable to see beyond the body of a woman,” and “erroneously decree that a woman hath no spirit, no soul.” While I met a lot of people like that, not all of whom were men, in my elementary school years, it sounds a bit primitive. It also sounds like something you shouldn’t say to my mother (or me, for that matter.) My father, had he been told this, would have chuckled lightly and mentioned something about that denier needing a bit more education. 

 

So they had souls from the get-go, these mystical creatures who were not my mother. That didn’t preclude them from being attractive; if anything, knowing that we were equals was a bit of a relief. I was an awkward oblong eggplant of child, with no balance and unfortunate fashion choices. If I could just find a woman who saw past that, I could…well, I could do something. The idea was too fantastic, even to my eight-year-old self. I would liken it to a dog chasing squirrels; you know you’re supposed to do it, nobody has really explained why or why not, but what do you if you, well, catch one? (I ask this as a middle-aged man who still lacks a reasonable answer to that question.)

Coming from a small, middle-class neighborhood, I felt a lot of pressure from my betters, most of whom had to hammer that idea home on a regular basis (sometimes literally.) I can’t agree with their enactment of Joseph Pleck’s male-power hierarchy, as found in his article “Men’s Power with Women, Other Men, and Society”, but I understood, even at an early age, that it stemmed from their own regressive paterfamiliae. There had to be a pecking order, and, as someone who didn’t see a problem with girls (other than perhaps their superficial nature, or the inventory on hand), I was bound to get pecked pretty hard and pretty often. 

 

And despite coming from the same environs, even the same block, Dad was not like them. He wasn’t the most progressive soul, but he’d learned a lot about people simply by talking to them. It lent him a mercy, on some fronts, that was missing in other houses.

Stan Gray, in his article “Sharing the Shop Floor”, depicts a social maladroit known as a working class patriarch. These are men who, upon escape from their employers, come home to exercise all the power they lack on, say, the shop floor in question. That just was never going to happen in my house, and for a variety of simple reasons. They include the instinct for self-preservation.

My father had all the authority he could handle: he ran a newspaper, worked with several local charities, and came home to a somewhat-well-oiled, if Rube Goldberg-designed, machine that was run by my mother. If he had tried, in the tradition of those patriarchs, to put his foot down, I have little doubt that she would have, perhaps on a good day when my teachers weren’t calling about all that homework I was too busy to do, asked him to switch jobs. I come from fairly intelligent people, and that includes my father. If, as Barbara Povee Polk alleges in her essay, “Male Power and the Women’s Movement”, it is “in men’s interest to maintain…power and privilege”, Dad definitely sold us (men of the Seventies, anyways) out. 

We weren’t the only ones who were stretching the boundaries, though. One of my best friends’ dads took off to the West Coast with his secretary, so his mother, like mine, shrugged and stepped up. While the old roles and activities were maintained, no one seemed to bat an eye about who was doing what. Everything had to get done, though. Boys had to play sports; if girls did, too, then nobody cared who was coaching or driving. Boys were supposed to be tough; if the person teaching them that stoicism was a woman, well, it was the Seventies. It would be at least another twenty years before the activities were similarly blendable, although many efforts were made. They were shrugging efforts, like allowing girls to play youth soccer with the boys because only the boys had a league. None of us had operable hormones yet, and everybody got dressed at home, so it was not a thing. Of course, the parents’ encouragement differed, and our roster seemed to be a little more homogeneous by about midseason…but that wasn’t the institution. West Haven Youth Soccer appreciated every check, and they were high-minded enough to take anyone’s money. That mentality trickled down to the coaches, especially mine. It wasn’t like we were going to win, but even a loss was better than a forfeit based on too few players. 

 

That focus on roster size would show up again later, just as puberty reared its draconian head. I still thought about girls (though I now suspected they were becoming women, particularly in nomenclature, but maybe in other arcane ways as well), but with little exception, they were either absent or quite vocal in their unwillingness to be that metaphorical squirrel. I went to an all-boy Catholic high school, hung out with comic-book geeks in downtown New Haven, where there were only Yale undergrads (if more of them had been Primatology majors, I might have married my way out of the suburbs), then went home to a neighborhood where there was one girl my age (Debbie N., who preferred more athletic guys. To each their own, but she really was the only girl. No pressure, Deb.)

There I was, in a world that didn’t fear or hate me. Worse, it was indifferent. I just couldn’t seem to find my demographic, even after I got a driver’s license and started hanging out at the mall. It’s possible that I was too advanced for them. I blame my parents…who occasionally insinuated, probably jokingly, that I certainly spent more time with men than women. My retort was based in fact: if they’d moved us to a neighborhood with more girls, especially ones with lower standards, I’d have brought home at least one pregnant girlfriend already.

A few short years later, that response stopped being funny…but that is a whole other story.