Small Wonder (16 page)

And it is
so
easy to screw this one up. When I was a teenager, the story I got from the world around me on how to behave with boys was a real song and dance, which boiled down to this: Boys want only one thing, which is to have sex with you, which is too nasty even to talk about, and it's your job to prevent it. They're also stronger than you and likely can do what they want, but if they succeed in raping you it's your fault, actually, because it was your job to avoid getting yourself into a position where you couldn't stop it. Also males are more important, they run the world, and if you want any kind of happiness or power, you're going to have to win their favor. Got it? Ready, set, go.

The day I sat down with you on your bed to talk about the Grade 5 boy problem, I felt as if I were jumping out of a speeding car, blindfolded, into a snake pit. I took a breath and said, “This is a good time for you to start learning how to handle inappropriate male attention.” I told you three things: First, if you ever got truly scared, I would intervene. Second, it was fine to get really pissed off at this boy, because everybody deserved the right to go about her business without being harassed; the creepy feeling you had was
not
your fault, it was his. Third, boys are just people like us, and if they behave sensibly they can be very cool to be around—even in a physical way if that is your inclination, when you eventually feel the confidence and fondness to be with a guy like that.

Finally, I told you that unfortunately there would always be some guys who feel it's their gift to behave as irritants and scoundrels. You'd run into this many times in your life, and a classroom was a safer place to learn to defend yourself than, say, a college bar or a workplace.

Then we practiced role-playing. I wanted you to say, “No, I hate that, you make me sick, go away.” You found it hard; your tendency was to be polite, even coy. I realized, with agony, that the world had already begun teaching you that girls should be pleased with, or at least politely tolerant of, male attention of any type. I tried not to hyperventilate. We practiced some more, you learned to take a very firm tone, and you made it through fifth grade.
I
learned what you were up against. It was not too early for me to begin thinking of you, and talking with you, as a transitional woman, with important disputed ground to claim for yourself on the map of equality. You've kept me posted on the main events in the boy-girl arena, and so far I've been impressed with how you've handled them.

I didn't do nearly so well myself, as a teenager. My first kiss happened the summer after I turned fourteen, at band camp—a school-sanctioned activity during which I was theoretically chaperoned every minute of the day. I met a cute boy named Dave who showed a flattering interest in me, and one evening when we were meant to be washing dishes he asked me to go outside instead, and mess around behind the so-called mess hall. I was scared to death; I went. Our kissing was nowhere near as graceful as the movies, with an icky dampness factor that seemed categorically not too different from washing dishes, but I felt thrilled to have been chosen. After camp ended I never heard from him again because, of course, we'd had no friendship, and I felt creepy about my tryst. I'm lucky he didn't expect me to go beyond kissing. I hope I'd have resisted (I'm pretty sure terror would have helped me out), but I'm sad to admit I can't say for certain. It took me years to get over being flattered and flattened by any kind of male approval. My first relationships in high school and early college were stunted by my inability to separate my interests from my boyfriend's. The guys who did time in that capacity during those years were invariably sweet; it wasn't as if they
meant
to ignore or
malign me. It was just that I felt such pressure to remain coupled that I swallowed my own will to keep from rocking the boat.
Like
what he
likes
,
do
what he
wants:
I couldn't imagine just acting like myself in the company of a guy.

I see a lot of girls your age who are just the way I was then. I remember hearing one of your friends declare helplessly, “I can't say no to boys”—in the sixth grade! I feared for her future reproductive life. But not yours. I can see very well that if a male friend didn't take an interest in the things you care about, or wasn't respectful, you would use your remarkable charm and wit to lose him, fast. Or at least tell him that, as I heard you recently say, “he's not
all that
and a bag of potato chips.” It's a huge relief to me. I look forward to meeting the guys you'll date.

You already know a lot of the things I had to teach myself in my late teens and early twenties. What saved me was nothing short of a complete transformation, the kind of soul-shattering revelation that some people find in religious salvation.
I
found it in the novels of Doris Lessing, Maxine Hong Kingston, Margaret Drabble, and Marilyn French, along with the words of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and lots of others. I began to find these books my last year in high school and then really sank into them in college, reading the way a drowning person breathes air when she finally breaks the surface. I stayed up late reading; I sat all day in the library on Saturdays, reading. Every word made sense to me, every claim brought me closer to being a friend to myself. These writers put names to the kinds of pain I'd been feeling for so long, the ways I felt useless in a culture in which women could be stewardesses but the pilots were all men. They helped me understand why I'd been so driven by the opinions of men. I was not stupid; in pandering to male favor I'd been pursuing what would be the smartest possible route to power in, say, Jane Austen's day, when women couldn't own property or vote. But these writers allowed me to imagine other
possibilities. There are still many countries where women have to go the Jane Austen route: Muslim extremists stone women to death if they show their faces and declare their opinions in public, but here you'll only get some hate mail for it. The worst that was likely to happen to me, if I began standing up for myself at age nineteen, was that some guys who handled me with less deep concern than their auto transmissions would probably cut bait and run. This loss could be endured; that was all I needed to know. When my despair finally crystallized as anger, my conversion was rapid and absolute: I cut off my long hair, I began to dress for function rather than sexiness, I got mad at whosoever tried to bully me by virtue of unearned privilege—and I discovered there were guys who actually
liked
me this way. I joined a women's group on campus, then found a church that was more forgiving of personal lapses of judgment than of larger, social ones, such as war and hunger. I began working with migrant farm workers in central Indiana whose problems were larger than mine: They had no clean water or shelter. I learned more about the Vietnam war than I'd previously gleaned from
Reader's Digest
. By concentrating on what I could do to make things better for people who were worse off than me, I taught myself to feel significant. Word by word, day by day, I revised the word
stupid
out of my journal.

The premises of feminism—that women are entitled to do any kind of work men do, for the same pay, and to be accorded an equal measure of social respect—must seem obvious to you. But in 1973 these items were just barely on the agenda. The first time I suggested to my father that a woman could be president, he got a pained expression on his face just thinking about a woman having to go through that mess. He asked me, as delicately as he could, to consider what a disaster it would be if we had a war, and the president was on her menses. Both of us were acutely embarrassed, and that was the end of that. (It didn't occur to me until years later that most presidents are elected well past the age when menses
would be an issue.) When I told my parents about an older college friend I admired who intended to keep her name after she got married, my mother offered sadly, “Any woman who'd do that doesn't love her husband.”

My parents, in telling me of these and a thousand other limitations on my gender, weren't trying to hold me in contempt. They were merely advising me of the ways of the world—which, in 1973, held me in contempt. Since then they've changed their minds about many things, including my keeping my last name, which is now also yours. (And if you ever run for president, I'm positive Dad will vote for you.) But the persistence of misogyny in the world outside our family is not forgivable, and it makes me crazy. Why is it, for instance, that on the popular teen radio station, all the women are singing about guys who treat them like dirt (or, on a more optimistic note, declaring the jerk must go), while the men are chanting, sometimes literally, “Die, bitch, die!” It scares me that boys listen to this stuff; it scares me more that
girls
do. I can't tell you what to listen to, I know. To this day I get a buzz when I hear the first notes of “Lay Down Sally,” probably from all the warnings I received against its morals and grammar. But if you're going to listen to these guys,
listen
. Eric Clapton was singing to me, “You are
so
the best, I can't stand for you to leave the room.” I'd just once like to hear that from some rapper. One of the best gifts you ever gave me was when you turned off Eminem and started listening more to Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morisette on your CD player. I think—I hope—you did it not for me but for you. Because you didn't need “Die, bitch,” as bedtime music.

I know that some girls of your acquaintance worship Eminem. Some are already doing drugs and having sex with guys because they need male approval that badly. I understand that perfectly, because of how
I
was in my teens. I wish I could tell them it's not too late yet: If they can just yank it back for a minute and find
some little island of pride, there's hope. But it takes believing in some larger space for women in the world than they can presently see. For me, that belief came from the right books, because I happened to revere the printed word. Even more, it was finding and joining a huge, heady current that allowed me to believe I could change things a little—that I could fight back against what made me angry, in some way that was real and grown-up. Piercing and branding one's flesh or getting pregnant or getting AIDS is
not
fighting back, even though it may feel like it from the inside. From the outsider's point of view, these things make a display of self-loathing, which is the opposite of fighting back—it's a score for the opposition. I know, because I used to hate myself, and now I don't.

You never did, it seems. You like who you are, you work hard at whatever you do, you're kind to your friends, you show compassion for the world. You're a person I'd choose as a friend even if we weren't related. I actually like the ways you're turning out different from me; your confidence and smart-aleck wit inspire me. I was impressed, the day we were listening to the presidential campaign and the one guy started pandering to the audience, when you rolled your eyes and said, “What a suckup!”

If I'd said that about a presidential candidate when I was your age, I would have gotten it for disrespecting authority. So I had to ask myself,
Am I allowed to laugh at what she just said?
Answer: Yes. I agreed with you totally; he was groveling for the vote. I can't insist to you that all authority is worthy of your respect, because much of it is not. In five years you'll have to see through all the sucking-up and vote for your own president. Why
shouldn't
you start practicing now?

Every authority has its limits. I find myself defusing the menace of maleness by viewing it as a source of fascination. I study it constantly, not trying to learn how to
be
that, just trying to understand it. To say they run the world just doesn't cover it, because we do,
too, in our less material way. Not in terms of real power, of course; it's impossible to imagine a reverse Saudi Arabia, in which we walked around doing whatever we pleased while forcing our entire male population to vacate themselves from public life and wear black cloth sacks with sideways slits for their eyes. We could never get them to do it; they're devoted to being in charge of things, and we seem unable to whip up any zeal for treating people like that. It's hard even to imagine a tradition of fine art in which naked men would recline on picnic blankets while fully clothed women looked on. Recently an artist in Colorado tried to communicate (especially to men, presumably) how it feels to have our sex so constantly and casually appropriated: She created a display of colorful penises pinned to a clothesline. The surfeit of masculine heebie-jeebies wrought by this little demonstration made national news, and lasted only days before a man broke in and destroyed the installation. I hope the artist has sense of humor enough to see that she made her point perfectly. Men rule, but in general seem to lack our fortitude.

And yet in some way or other their whole lives long, heterosexual guys are knocking themselves senseless to get our attention, and you can't help being charmed by the parade of nonsense. One of the most absurd, sexiest, most entrancing things I've ever seen took place right outside my study window. I was trying to think of a metaphor or something, staring out there into the mesquite woods, when suddenly my eyes snapped to focus on some movement: two rattlesnakes rising up together, face to face, as if they were being noodled up out of two snake charmers' baskets. Moving slowly with muscular, sinuous strength, they levitated nearly the entire front halves of their bodies, twisted themselves together, tussled a little, and finally slammed to the ground. It resembled arm wrestling. I ran to get everyone else in the house, and we all watched this thing go on for nearly an hour, the two snakes rearing up again and again, silently entwining, and then throwing
themselves to the ground. We called our friend Cecil, the Arizona reptile expert, who informed us that arm wrestling wasn't such a bad analogy: These were two male snakes doing a dance of combat to win the favor of a female that was surely watching from somewhere nearby. We scanned the brush carefully from behind my window—these snakes were not even thirty feet away—and there she was, sure enough, stretched out languidly under a bush.