Story by Bob
How to Become an Adolescent Social Misfit in Southern Male Society Without Really Trying.
(couldn’t think of anything better to call it *shrug*)
Dear Jutta,
You asked how old I was when I began to reject typical American male “socialization.” Other roughly similar experiences that the one I am about to relate were working to push me in the same direction, but even added together, they would not have been enough and I have forgotten every one of them. But this event, which took place when I was 16 and is now 40 years old, I remember in detail as though it happened yesterday. It started a chain of decisions & life direction that ultimately led me to my marriage with Toni and probably figures in the struggles we have had as well.
I spent 17 years (age 6-23) in the American Southeast during the most formative period of life. We lived in Louisville Ky. for six years and Atlanta Ga. for nine. I spent most of my adolescent years in Atlanta, something I do not recommend. The south has a unique social culture heavily steeped in traditions, formalities, and stereotyped norms of behavior. As a teenager, one’s interactions with other boys and with girls are highly ritualized—much more then than now, I should add. It was more like theater than life, with well defined roles that everyone was expected to play and for the most part did play. Although I tried my best, I did not find it a comfortable fit, especially in regard to interactions with girls and in how my friends referred to the girls when they weren’t present. This general pattern of male attitudes and behaviors remains present to varying degrees everywhere in American male culture today, and I recognize the beast lurking behind some rather elaborate disguises from time to time, but in the South when I was growing up it took on a particularly extreme form.
This story is about one girl in particular, although I did not know her well and today cannot remember her name. But I owe her a great debt, for quite accidentally she shocked me into believing that it was okay not to fit into the roles I was expected to fill.
She was the daughter of another sergeant stationed on the same base as my dad, and was also 15 or 16. However, unlike my family, her family was from the South, as were most families working on the base (a giant medical supply facility). Though I can’t recall her name, I can recall her face and body, which were both spectacularly beautiful by the normal definitions! Without trying, without even being aware, she exuded sexuality from every movement she made and every boy in her school and on the base lusted after her. In a quiet way, I was no exception. We did not attend the same school so summer at the pool was the typical extent of our mutual contact. At the pool I would notice that she was nearly always subtly being teased sexually: pawed at, touched, or even grabbed, and was the frequent subject of sexual innuendo (suggestive verbal teasing) behind her back or to her face—it didn’t matter. She was a cheerful kid, took it good naturedly and even playfully returned some of it on occasion as was her expected role. I tended to stand back, admire her wonderful feminine charms at a distance and sigh a lot. When I spoke to her or was otherwise near her, I was friendly, but respectful and slightly shy. I often just smiled straightforwardly at her with a simple word or two of trivial social conversation as we passed. I don’t think we ever sat down and had a real conversation and I never touched her. Sure wanted to, but was never invited and so never did.
Okay, so one day we find out that her daddy was getting transferred to another base and she would be leaving very soon. When this happens there is a frantic round of good-byes among friends over several days. I was playing golf with a friend named Harold when she tracked us down to say goodbye to him. (Her dad and mine played golf together and I had seen her once before on the course—in fact I had to endure being close to this wonderful creature for several hours in the company of our fathers. I was playing and she was caddying (carrying clubs, etc) for her dad. I was a nervous wreck just being around her and played perhaps the worst golf of my life. But she talked and smiled and we laughed occasionally together as we made our way around the course and I survived the day.) Now back to saying good-bye. She had come looking for Harold, who was a schoolmate of hers and I just happened to be there. So she finds us and bounces over. I stood by about 3 meters away and watched. There was much smiling and laughing between them and the usual good-bye stuff and I think a hug, but I don’t remember that for sure. What I do remember is that in the middle of this Good-bye “social dance,” Harold, whom I had always thought of as a quiet considerate guy, certainly not a jerk, did something that astonished and angered me. Standing right in front of this friend who had hunted him down to say good-bye he lifted his golf club between her legs and began prodding her crotch with the iron head, laughing out loud. She put her thighs together like you do if some one throws cold water on you from the front, bent forward slightly, twisted a bit to one side and managed to quickly remove the club while saying “Ahhhhhh!” All the time she remained her usual cheerful self and even laughed as she pushed the club head away—but her eyes were not laughing.
I was livid—furious. I thought, “Jesus Christ, Harold, you flaming Asshole!—this is a human being and supposedly a friend—someone you actually like! How in the hell can you do this and then laugh about it? I wanted to break my own club over his head but only stood there in silence. He was playing his expected role, she was playing hers—though without his enthusiasm.
Then something extraordinary happened, which is why this casual girl acquaintance and my experience of her remains so vibrant in my memory to this day. The good-byes with Harold done, she turned to look at me. Then she quietly walked over to where I stood, and to my utter astonishment reached out and gave me a slightly longer than average, genuinely affectionate hug. A hug very much like the one I described getting from Marit at our parting in Berlin. A hug that said simply, “I care about you.” I managed to hug her back. As we separated, she took both my hands in hers, smiled that sweet smile, looked me straight in the eyes and said in a low voice that Harold could not hear, “Thanks Bob. Thanks for not being like the rest of them. I will miss you.” Then she gave me a light kiss on the cheek and was gone.
I never saw her again but in that small gesture she changed my life. She gave me permission to be different, freedom to stop trying to fit in to this bizarre theater that felt so foreign to me. So completely wrong. And I did stop trying to fit in. From that moment forward I started trying to be myself—whoever that was—which at age 16 I had no clue! But I now knew who I wasn’t; who I didn’t want to be, who I could never be, and that at least was a start.
So I became this sort of semi-loner guy, there but not “there” in typical adolescent male group company, a bit shy around the girls and informally respectful to them. By “informally”, I mean genuinely. There was a great deal of overtly formal respect paid to the girls in high school and college in Atlanta. But it was nearly all show—just so much Bullshit. And it was underlain by a nearly total disrespect in behavior and casual conversation for women as people with feelings—feelings as worthy of consideration as those of anyone else. By the time I left Atlanta for the PNW (Pacific Northwest), I had managed ~ two small sexual romances and two or three more that came close. This was partly because of my uncertainty around women due to simple human respect and an inability to reliably read their feelings (recall how my young friend had handled teasing and advances that were later, by her words to me, proven to be unwelcome). And it was partly because I just refused to play this game.
That’s not much experience to draw on as you enter adulthood. I was hoping to improve it with independence and the move away from the South. And as the nature of interactions between young men and women here in Seattle were hugely different in a positive direction, you might think that I would have fit right in. But I didn’t. I had an entire adolescence of experience attempting and then observing the bizarre social-sexual “dance” between boys and girls in the South. I had exactly zero experience of the two genders interacting in the reasonably honest, open, non-stereotyped way that I encountered in the PNW—not everywhere by all people but enough to make a huge difference.
Though I appreciated this refreshingly different mode of interaction, I didn’t have a clue how to do it—and was therefore at least as awkward and uncertain in the presence of women here as I had been in Atlanta since that day on the golf course at age 16, probably more so!
This pattern continued with no significant change for my first six-eight months in Seattle. I had essentially no relationships with women, certainly no intimate ones. And then I met Toni.
And here I will end and at another time begin a new.
Bob
11/11/04
