Eye of the Beholder

by David Raney

Call me male-ish. According to cultural assumptions, men are supposed to like guns, but I’m not really a gun guy. As a boy I wheedled a BB gun for Christmas with the solemn vow not to shoot birds, which I did at the first opportunity. “You’ll shoot your eye out” runs the refrain from the movie Christmas Story, and at least I didn’t do that. But I shot out a bird’s. Stalking the wild sparrow in our back yard, I missed innumerable times before chance brought down a luckless thing from our birch tree, a bead of blood vividly welling where its eye had been. I stood over it dumbfounded until a rap at the picture window startled me and I saw my brother pointing in the dramatic full-body pose we now refer to as J’Accuse! before running off to find my mother and bring down justice. It didn’t surprise me when I later read that the last wild passenger pigeon, out of billions darkening pre-1900 American skies, was killed in Ohio by a boy with a BB gun.

Men are fascinated by cars, too, I’m told, and football and fixing things, and we’re competitive sexbots, comparing conquests and notching headboards. I don’t really qualify as “manly” on those counts either, though I can be adolescently competitive in the sports I care about. But testosterone levels aside, here’s my question: Is it possible to connect with people first as humans, and only afterward as men and women? Unless we’ve taken monastic vows, we interact with each other all day, at work and play and school, shopping, dating. But sometimes it seems less interacting than circling: shy, cocky, avid, wary, desperate for attention, wishing we were invisible.

I’ve been interested in this terra incognita for the better part of my life, as we all have, but lately I’ve been thinking about a certain backwater of the territory that used to be called wolf whistling or catcalling, and now in our less poetic times is referred to as “street harassment.” Consigned by cliché to certain neighborhoods, particularly to wharves and construction sites, it’s been treated for generations as a behavioral imperative issued with the sailor suit and hardhat.

Is it a behavioral imperative though? Whether sexual attitudes and behavior owe more to biology or culture, a debate that’s far from over, this isn’t 1965 after all. Surely gross misogyny is on the wane, like smoking, if only from the pressure of broad social disapproval. Even the word “catcalling” sounds like a Mad Men plot point. But it hasn’t gone away, of course, as half-open eyes and ears will tell you.

I react to women, and if I were homosexual, I’d react to men. That’s a biological imperative, not a behavioral one. No one, I think, wants us to stop noticing each other. I just don’t react like the wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood. I’ve never offered a public assessment of a woman’s body or suggested to a stranger what a fool she’d be not to avail herself of my outsized charms. This makes me a paragon of nothing, as I don’t imagine my friends do it either. I know my father didn’t. In any case, who does it is less interesting to me than why, and what it feels like. So I started asking women.

The problem was how to approach someone at a bus stop or coffee shop without sounding like the saddest pickup artist ever. (“’Scuse me, just wondering, do guys hit on you all the time?”) But I wanted to hear from more than friends or the internet — where, as you’d expect, treatments range from intellectual to comic to incendiary — so at the risk of being slapped or simply ignored, I ask.

What works best, after establishing that I’m a writer, is to ask women if they’ve lived somewhere else and noticed any differences in catcalling. I realize this begs the question, but no one has ever corrected me. Precisely zero women said they’d never been whistled at or otherwise harassed in public. My unscientific survey suggests it happens nearly everywhere, to pretty much all women, regardless of age, attire or weather.

Researchers have done some work in this field, though I was surprised to find how little of that research occurred until recently. The CDC reported in 2010 that worldwide seventy to ninety-nine percent of women experienced “non-contact unwanted sexual experiences.” In a 2008 study by StopStreetHarassment.com, nearly ninety percent of women said they’d experienced harassment by age nineteen, almost a quarter by age twelve. Twelve. Americans, incidentally, have no special claim on this ugly street theater: in one study more than eighty percent of women in both Egypt and Canada reported harassment, and in Yemen, where women typically go about modestly dressed or veiled, the figure is over ninety percent.

The women who have been kind enough to talk to me about their own experiences confirm these findings, as well as the appalling range of misbehavior that can accompany the hooting, whistling, and verbal vivisection. One woman was biking along a country road between grocery store and home when a man pulled up next to her, masturbating, then turned around and drove past again, clearly enjoying her fear. The women with whom I’ve spoken say this sort of thing started when they were eleven, twelve, fourteen, describing plenty of “Hey babys” and all manner of unwanted advances. One woman wrote, “It’s hard to explain how invasive it feels. I’ve had my entire house robbed twice, and it doesn’t even approach that hit-and-run feeling. It makes you wary; you shut down.”

Men, none of this will be news to your friend, girlfriend, daughter, sister, wife. But it was to me, and the more I listened, the more troubling it got. “Strangely enough,” one woman told me, “the college towns I grew up in were the worst, whereas during five years in Philadelphia, I can only recall one stray comment yelled from a car.” Others spoke differently of Philly, Atlanta, Chicago and every other city I heard about, with two women saying the opposite about college towns.

I’ve spent a good part of my life in university settings, and I think the reason I haven’t seen much of the cat or wolf isn’t that everyone’s so proper; I just haven’t seen it. I’m not the recipient, for one thing, but apparently, I’m also oblivious. As I spoke with women, I was shocked at how ubiquitous such harassment is on campuses where I’ve worked. One woman told me she was repeatedly harassed by a university security guard; another filed a report on campus workers for leering at undergraduates. And it isn’t only nineteen-year-olds in shorts; a middle-aged woman told me she’d been catcalled near the school while walking in the rain in a bulky raincoat, oversized hat, and umbrella: “I might as well have been wearing a tent.” And then there’s frat-boy behavior, an example being the section of Brown’s campus that a woman told me she avoided because it was known for rows of guys holding score cards, like Olympic judges, as women walked by.

I’m not alone in my density. The discussion “How common is catcalling?” on the site Democratic Underground begins with a woman’s six-month diary of strangers leering, making passes, and offering offensive comments regardless of weather or dress. A sympathetic reader commented, “Being male, this is not in the realm of my experience—neither as a receiver or a perp. Though I have witnessed catcalling of women on the street, it's not all that common in my neighborhood.” Possibly, but I’m willing to bet it’s more common than his experience would suggest.

What we dismiss in our density is the recognition that such behavior fosters fear in women. Not only are catcalls demeaning, reducing the individual and complete woman to a fraction of herself as a sexual object, when men leer and make suggestive comments, they see women only through male eyes. Few men have experienced how frequently unwanted advances escalate. Women are rightfully afraid of being pawed, stalked, or attacked, however innocuous men might find the leer or whistle. “Almost all women have a defensive strategy for walking alone,” writes Jamie Golden in “Why Just Telling Men No Doesn’t Necessarily Work,” but “almost no men do.” This seems to be true across cultures. “A young woman likes to feel attractive,” one woman told me, “but I think women of all ages feel that implicit threat of physical peril, always.”

Many men, I’m sure, would regard the fear induced by unwanted advances as ludicrous. Most women, I’m equally sure, would find it commonplace. Two women in a single week of October 2015 were murdered after refusing to talk or give their phone number to a man. One was in Detroit, at a funeral of all things, the other on a street in Queens. Margaret Atwood writes that she once asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women. He told her, “They’re afraid women will laugh at them.” She asked a group of women the same question and they said, “We’re afraid of being killed.”

The wolf’s defense is typically to claim that a whistle or call is a compliment. Deep down women like it; why the fuss? Innumerable articles and blog posts argue against this, their titles sufficient: “No, Dudes, It’s Not Flattering”; “Your Catcalls Are Not a Compliment. Ever.” Even Playboy weighed in with a flowchart called “Dudes, It’s Not Flattering”, which concludes that precisely two circumstances make catcalling acceptable: “1) You’ve consensually agreed to shout sexually suggestive comments to each other in public; 2) She is literally a cat.”

Yet in 2014 New York Post writer Doree Lewak caused a stir with an article titled “Hey ladies! Catcalls are flattering! Deal with it” in which she maintains that she loves all the attention from construction crews: "I’ll never forget my first time… I was over the moon…. The mystique and machismo of manly construction workers have always made my heart beat a little faster—and made my sashay a little saucier. It’s as primal as it gets."

Never mind that, as Lauren Bans noted in GQ, Lewak’s editorial “reads like a drunk Carrie Bradshaw after a partial lobotomy.” The point Lewak chooses to ignore is that she’s decided to be pleased by a situation that might turn to violence, and frequently does. It’s not everyone’s option to disregard that fact, nor her place to instruct them how to feel.

This is why when male celebrities complain of being objectified (Robert Redford: “People have been so busy relating to how I look, it's a miracle I didn't become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm”), it’s possible to think they’re sincere without accepting that they really know what they’re talking about. Any fear they associate with the experience involves being professionally trivialized, not made to hate half of humanity for the rest of your life.

It’s why I’ll never really know what I’m talking about, either. In my only example of trading perspectives, I was biking one day and stopped for a water break. A van of teenagers rolled by, and one girl leaned out the window and whooped something about my butt in bike shorts, pretending to be enthused for the benefit of the guy driving and, I’m sure, for her own amusement. It wasn’t about me—any male fifteen to fifty would have served—and there was no physical threat. But it didn’t feel great, because that’s what objectification is: being rendered interchangeable, a category.

The other reflexive defense of this behavior is that it’s timeless, ineradicable, it’s in our DNA. You hear this from men interviewed in the street, including one who let this drop (along with my jaw) in a video: “I understand, you know—I have five sisters. But it’s just, like, a societal thing. It’s the way things roll.” To appeal to someone’s mother or sister might seem a foolproof way to humanize the encounter. (Would you want someone to talk to your daughter that way?) But isn’t that also objectifying, to say a woman is worthy of respect because she’s somebody’s something?

The behavior is certainly old, so I guess the excuses have to be. References to whistling at women date to at least 200 B.C., when the Roman playwright Plautus mentions a young woman who, "when she passes through the streets, all the men would look at her, leer, nod and wink and whistle." He has a father say this to his son, creepily enough, about a slave girl they both covet. But old isn’t the same as natural—and what does that matter anyway? We tamp down or prohibit all kinds of things that are arguably natural. Evolutionarily speaking, indiscriminate rape is an efficient way to spread one’s genes. Civilized people don’t practice it. And there’s the slippery slope problem: assaults and rape are worse than whistling, but are they categorically different or just on a continuum? If whistling is hard-wired, as some would have it, and thus a cousin of “real” violence, wouldn’t rape be just as hard to eradicate, just as exempt from the attempt?

I hope not, because I enjoy connecting with people, not objects or opposites. Maybe I’m fooling myself and a sexual agenda lurks under all our veneers. But maybe not. I like giving directions to strangers, though I’m awful at it, and I even like seeing other people do it—both looking the same direction, arms outstretched like an invitation to dance. And I like eyes. While I can’t look at the world through someone else’s, I can look into them, and what I see there often saddens me.

Girls are taught early not to talk to strange men, not to make eye contact. That’s what I see in women’s eyes when they’re alone. Asked what she does to protect herself from street harassment, a woman in Jessica Williams’s Late Show segment on catcalling replies, “My normal response is to put on my bitch face.” The other women nod. I pass them on the sidewalk, morning and evening, walking and running, in suits and dresses and gym clothes. Their eyes say I’ve heard it before, asshole, or Go ahead and look—I’m not even here. 

Those expressions aren’t haughty, just defensive or middle-distance vacant, born of long practice deflecting all the muttered invitations and “Damn, girls.” Instead of thinking about the spring air or a project at work or a drink with friends, she's spending mental energy sorting men into a box (guys, jerks) like the one she's been in since middle school (tits, ass). Wouldn’t it be nice to imagine a brighter world to breathe in, one where our fleeting chance of connection didn’t come so freighted with fear?

I’ll never know exactly what another person thinks or feels. I’m not even sure how well I understand myself. But half a life later, I know what that sparrow saw.

David Raney is a writer and editor in Atlanta. His pieces have appeared in several dozen journals, books and newspapers. The latest good fortune was being listed in Best American Essays 2018 and 2019.

Becoming a Real Girl

by Pam Munter

I was never much good at becoming a girl and I loathed every bit of the relentless indoctrination.

Early family photos either show me looking uncomfortable in frilly girl’s clothing or smiling broadly while wearing my preferred dirty jeans and tee shirt. My mother offered to teach me to cook, but I had no interest. Sewing was completely a non-starter. I wanted to be outside, hitting a tennis ball against the wall or riding my bike around the neighborhood. When my mother decided I had earned too many Girl Scout merit badges, she refused to sew anymore on the sash “because it might hurt the other girls’ feelings.” When I was in the first grade, I wanted to be called Phil. An outlier at an early age.

All this is coming up now because I’ve been having phone conversations with my junior high school Homemaking teacher. We first met over sixty years ago, a time when becoming a paragon of the socially acceptable female was a more urgent matter than it is today.

In the 1950s, girls were expected to learn the gender-based domestic arts to train for their foreordained positions of wife and mother. The only women I knew with a real job were my teachers and all of them were married. I felt as if I were living in a parallel universe. I didn’t want to sit around and gossip over coffee every morning, make fun of men’s foibles, or mold a rug rat into some better version of myself. So I went my own way, not an easy road in that unforgiving sex-role stereotyped era.

Contrary to conventional expectation, however, junior high provided a sense of freedom and worth, an oasis of achievement and recognition. I thrived in band and drama, excelled in English and social studies, and looked forward to PE every single day. Eighth grade would have been just about perfect if it hadn’t been for that dumb requirement all girls had to take Homemaking.

I walked into the Homemaking class that first day to a noisy room of eighth grade girls, spotless kitchen appliances adorning every wall, and a youthful-looking teacher smiling at us in optimistic expectation.

“Welcome to Homemaking class, girls. I’m Mrs. Potts.”

I laughed derisively.

“Is she kidding?” I asked my best friend Jacquie Weiss sitting next to me. Jacquie never took her eyes off the teacher. I could see she was transfixed.

“She’s so pretty,” Jacquie cooed. I hadn’t noticed, but I saw how perky and animated she seemed, her long dark brown ponytail bobbing around with every movement. She didn’t look that much older than we were.

Jacquie and I had been friends since the fourth grade when we met as we walked to school. We were an odd pair from the start. Jacquie was gawky with frizzy hair and a big nose. I was chunky, already a victim of persistent acne and my blonde hair always seem to go in its own malevolent direction. Mrs. Potts was perpetually pulled together, dauntingly so. I was not happy to be in there at all and, as the days wore on, I began to look at her as a daily reminder of the woman I could never be. I was both repulsed by the assigned meaningless tasks and yet fascinated by the teacher expecting me to do them. My way of dealing was passive-aggressive resistance. When we had projects like baking cookies, I leaned on my baking partner to make the decisions. I became the flamboyant official taster. As the students were entering the room each day, I wrote a mordant aphorism on the board or some sarcastic comment I had cadged from a joke book. I quoted H. L. Mencken: “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” Or, “If you can smile when everything is going wrong, you’ve found someone else to blame.” A thirteen-year-old wisecracking iconoclast is hard to stop.

Jacquie’s approach was more direct. She hung around after class as long as possible, asking her questions.

“I saw an E in your signature. What does that stand for?” This was a cheeky question in this era, a time when there was a strict wall between student and teacher. Knowing a teacher’s first name was pure gold even if moot, as we never would and never could use it.

“My first name is Elizabeth but my friends call me Liddy.”

This was a major coup for Jacquie. We had always been competitive, at least I was. But this was a contest I didn’t think I wanted to win. I let Jacquie do the reconnaissance and continued to hide behind sarcasm and trenchancy, my go-to demeanor in adolescence. And yet I wondered who this alien being might be. Liddy Potts? Really?

To her credit, Mrs. Potts never stopped my blackboard protests. I knew I was pushing the limits of convention but she treated me as she did all the other girls, with warmth and friendliness. It was confusing.

I had already found two strong female role models among my teachers who were much more to my liking: my drama teacher, who good-naturedly challenged me at every turn, and my band teacher, whose warmth was exceeded only by her wry sense of humor. Mrs. Potts was running a distant third. I decided to cede her to Jacquie. While I made it eminently clear who I did not want to be, Jacquie had long ago decided her fondest dream was to be a wife and mother, a sort of Mrs. Potts without the professional career.

I had thought of Mrs. Potts from time to time—on my wedding day; when lecturing on the role of sex-role stereotypes while teaching a class on the Psychology of Women; and, oddly enough, as I walked to the podium to deliver my keynote address before 2000 people at an International Women’s Day conference in the 1970s. I didn’t understand the reasons for these flashbacks but they were surely there.

The years and decades passed. Jacquie and I reconnected on Facebook. She had, indeed, become a housewife and mother, living in a small town in Northwest Washington. I became a collector of college degrees on my way toward becoming a clinical psychologist and a writer, among other things. I did marry and have a son. A year after the divorce, I met a woman with whom I shared my life for three decades.

With the passage of time and a senescent sense of responsibility, I decided to contact those few teachers who had impacted me so I could thank them. The older I grew, the more aware I had become of their overarching influence. My band teacher had tragically died of diseases related to alcoholism and Alzheimer’s; my drama teacher and I exchanged a few emails, had dinner once, but she died soon afterwards. I Googled Mrs. Potts and found she was teaching ballet in Oregon. I emailed her and she answered almost immediately, asking me to call her.

Unexpectedly, I felt the flush of that familiar adolescent anxiety. Call my Homemaking teacher on the phone? The formality of the past clung like cobwebs inside my head. But I did make the call, and she sounded happy to hear from me.

“Mrs. Potts? Um. Liddie? It’s hard for me to call you that.”

She laughed. “It’s OK. Call me what you wish.”

“I am surprised you remembered me. It has been, what, well over five or six decades, right?”

“That long? Of course, I remembered you. Really, you’re the one I do remember from all my years of teaching.”

I paused to take that in and inhaled deeper than necessary. I was afraid to ask, but I did.

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. There was something about you. I could tell you needed something from me, but I didn’t know what it was.”

Of course, she was right. I needed her acceptance, her reassurance that I was OK as I was, that it was perfectly fine if I didn’t fit the feminine stereotype. It was more important coming from her because, as a teacher of the “feminine arts,” she was the avatar of the cliché I was expected to approximate.

We chatted for a few more minutes, then she told me she was coming to stay with her cousin just a few miles from where I lived in Palm Desert, California. Would I be up for a visit?

“Absolutely,” I quickly responded. Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted that to happen. Did I want to be reminded of my obstreperous past? A time that was painful, poignant and uncertain? And yet, maybe I could learn more about myself and answer a few leftover questions I had about her.

Twenty years earlier, I had written an autobiography and more recently, recorded a CD at Capitol Records. I sent both of them to her with trepidation. She was not mentioned in the book in favor of the other two role models and I hoped her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. It turned out she didn’t read much of it. I wondered why.

I had quickly decided not to serve lunch because the mere thought of preparing something to eat for my former Homemaking teacher was too fraught with anxiety. It was bad enough that she would inspect my interior decorating. I could still remember the lecture about how to file one’s nails (in only one direction) but I knew I had missed other more relevant Homemaking tips. I had a fear of being graded again.

A few weeks later, the doorbell rang. I opened it and saw an older Mrs. Potts, but the same bubbly elfin woman I had observed so long ago—and still wearing the ponytail, now completely gray. We hugged and she sat down on the couch. I brought her up to date, briefly outlining the past fifty years or so, and she did the same. Her husband had died many years earlier, leaving her with three children. They had lived in a remodeled schoolhouse, where she was now teaching classes in bodywork and providing an occasional B&B retreat for groups wanting a bucolic place to meet. At a pause in the conversation, she looked down at her lap.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

Her big brown eyes met mine like a laser. “Why were you so angry back then?”
          It was the ghost of Jacob Marley coming back to haunt me for my misdeeds. But, needless to say, she had nailed it. I thought I was being funny and clever and hadn’t experienced it as anger.

I gave her a perfunctory, abbreviated answer but knew I’d have to think more about this. Whatever I told her was enough, apparently. We moved on to more casual conversation and she left, promising to write.

Over the next ten years or so she sent me her Xeroxed Christmas letter, adding a few personal sentences. I wrote back, telling her what I was doing. Then last December in her annual note, she said she wanted to call me and asked for my phone number.

Two months passed and I wondered if she had become ill or even had died. By now she would be eighty-seven or so, living alone in that big schoolhouse. Then the night of the Oscars, I was preparing for bed about ten o’clock when the phone rang. The caller ID told me it was E. Potts. Liddie.

“I’m so glad to hear from you. How are you?”

She told me she had been ill for more than a year, lacking energy and losing lots of weight. It didn’t sound good.

“I read your book finally and listened to the CD, trying to hear what you were trying to do with each song.”

This was a different Liddie than the one I had entertained in my living room years before. When she referred to my book, she didn’t seem to realize it had been over thirty years since it was published. She was confused. Her thoughts wandered.

“I was such a young teacher then. We aren’t so far apart in age, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be seventy-four next month.”

“That’s young!” we both laughed and then she added. “You’re the only student I’ve ever talked with outside of class. I have thought about you through the years.”

I was stunned. “Oh, yeah? Why is that?” I kept my tone of voice casual but steeled myself, afraid to hear what she might say.

Her voice grew louder. “You made it clear: ‘I don’t want to be here.’”

That made me laugh again. I guess an adolescent is no expert in subtlety. She continued, “I didn’t know what to do with you. I had taken classes in education and psychology, but I wasn’t prepared for that. Or for you.”

“Looking back on it now, I was intimidated, I think. You were pretty, effervescent, accomplished in the areas in which I had no interest or aptitude, and feminine—everything I wasn’t.”

She seemed surprised at this characterization. While I had sensed her openness to conversations like this, she didn’t seem a habitually reflective person. Then I realized she was seeking information about who she was then, just as I had been.

“You know, I told you I’m finishing up a degree in creative writing. In fact, I just had an essay published about that time in my life. I don’t mention you by name but it mentions what went on for me then. I’d be happy to send it to you, if you’d like.”

“Yeah, I would. I remember you saying when we met that you felt unattractive and fat back then but the photos in your book show you looking thin.”

“Well,” I chuckled, “Do you think I’d show the reader a photo that wasn’t flattering? But my body did change a lot, up and down. My weight was part of the power struggle between my parents. You’ll read about it when I send the essay. Maybe it’ll help answer the question you asked back then about my anger.”

Another pause, this one a little longer.

“I admire the fact you’ve found meaning in these years. I wish I could.” She went on to tell me that she never read a newspaper or watched TV and didn’t keep up with what was happening in the world because it was too distressing. I could hear the sadness in her voice.

Now we were entering the well-trod territory I had once occupied in my role as a clinical psychologist. The next comment I would make could launch me into a different type of relationship with her—helping to guide the last part of my junior high school Homemaking teacher’s life. Almost sixty years ago, she wanted so much to teach me how to be a real girl. Now, in one of life’s many ironies, I was capable of helping her learn the essential skills she would need in her final years. As I carefully chose my words, I thought of it as paying it backwards.

Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (Nicholas Lawrence Press, 2005) and Almost Famous: In and Out of Show Biz (Westgate Press, 1986). She’s a retired clinical psychologist, former performer, and film historian. Her many lengthy retrospectives on the lives of often-forgotten Hollywood performers and others have appeared in Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age. More recently, her essays and short stories have been published in The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, The Coachella Review, Lady Literary Review, NoiseMedium, The Creative Truth, Adelaide, Litro, Canyon Voices, Open Thought Vortex, Fourth and Sycamore, Nixes Mate, Scarlet Leaf Review, Cold Creek Review, Communicators League, I Come From The World, Switchback, The Legendary, Scarlet Leaf, Down in the Dirt and others. Her play “Life Without” was a semi-finalist in the Ebell of Los Angeles Playwriting Competition. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California at Riverside/Palm Desert. 

The Name My Parents Didn't Use

by KJ Hannah Greenberg

“Ken” was a boy’s name, was an appellation, which I also associated, in the 1960s, with a male doll. It was, as well, the means I had of summoning my partner, in the 1970s, on my high school’s debate team.

Such a name lacks frills. The name possesses no soft-edged phonemes, no feminine prefix or suffix, en total, no petticoat wisdom at all. As evidenced by my debate partner, that particular means of calling up a soul was commonplace back in the day. Had I worn a different configuration of stuff between my legs, that name would likely have been mine.

However, I was born a girl.

I grew up in a household of women whose lone male resident, my father, was wheelchair bound. There was no talk of sports in my home. No toilet seat was ever left raised. Machismo, in my childhood, was found only on my family’s TV. The fashionable contemporary social belief of the time, in the supremacy of men over women, only made itself manifest when my sister and I played chess or sought to wear pants. On such occasions, we wondered, aloud, how boys did such things.

I knew that “boys” existed. “Sons” appeared in high school literature homework assignments. “Brothers” were bothersome creatures that constantly interrupted my girlfriends’ lives. It was my family, alone, that seemed to hold little that was virile, brave, or strong. Simply, my family lacked a man, in the conventional sense of such things.

Since our nucleus was deficient of any able-bodied male, as defined by dint of genetics, we got by with fulfilling that social need via inventing a man. My parents assigned that social portion, which was ordinarily assumed by fathers or brothers, to me. I became my family’s male surrogate. During my formative years, I was forced to operate as a boy.

It was my job, for instance, to lift and to dress my father. My chores almost always also included: doing yard work, taking out the trash, and bringing in the groceries.

Likewise, in keeping with the social order of the age, it was expected of me to be accomplished academically. “Girls” were cared for; “boys” found means, first in school, and later, in jobs, to provide sustenance. As the latter was my destiny, any grades that I brought home that were less than supreme cost me my allowance. Any high marks I earned raised my parents’ expectations for my future performances. 99+s, the highest score possible on standardized tests, were lambasted by my mother and father because they were not 100s. When I wanted to write for my high school newspaper as a lifestyle columnist, they coerced me to campaign for editor, instead.

I hated my assigned job. I hated being the heavy. I hated being the star. I wanted to wear ornamented clothing and to sing in a chorus of modest achievers. I wanted to experiment with opalescent eye shadow, to laze about with romance novels, and to study baton twirling. Instead, I was pushed to try for the lead in a school play, to excel at weightlifting, and to win my state forensics tournament. My built up biceps and triceps not withstanding, I was and would always be a girl.

I’m not sure how I would have responded, during that part of my life, to being treated as inferior to males, as was the fate of girls with normal social function. I’d like to think that I would have appreciated being noticed and fawned over by boys. I had no confusion as to who I was. As it is, I’ll never know.

I was biologically a girl. I had a woman’s secondary sexual characteristics. Plus, I liked boys. I considered their fledgling facial hair and other manifestations of masculinity’s relatively more hirsute nature, down right sexy. My synapses fired whenever a locker room-scented young man walked past or sat next to me. My endocrine system went into overdrive if one of them, even if he was among the group with whom I competed in classes, in intramurals, or in interscholastic math or writing tournaments, so much as looked in my direction. I had no problem discerning for which team I batted.

I didn’t want to be like boys; I wanted to be liked by boys.

In college, nonetheless, I dutifully studied for a science degree. Thereafter, I sought to fulfill the destiny that had been artificially created for me: I followed the route to becoming a professor.

As an academic, I reached for professionally normative accolades. I engaged in a rigorous program of research, taught a variety of upper and lower level classes, and participated in academic discussions at the national and international levels. I could have been a wonderful good ‘ol boy had I not been a girl.

The older that I got the more I failed to experience the social equilibrium that my family imagined for me. I could never be “one among men.” as long as tenured sorts, who were twenty or thirty years my senior, noticed my female attributes and found no reason not to comment on them. It didn’t matter to those more senior faculty members whether or not I could shoot baskets from court keyholes with regular precision, whether or not I could swim an hour’s worth of laps, or whether or not I exploded with footnotes faster than most of those trussed thinkers. To my surprise, shortly after taking my terminal degree, I found myself litigating against a bunch of boys, i.e. male colleagues, who acted on their articulated hatred for accomplished women.

My experience of gender identity changed further when my sister and I each got married. My husband was a dutiful son. Her husband was a man of means. At last, the male void in my family was filled. I was no longer needed to take up that position.

Shortly after my sister married, I got pregnant, a very female thing to do. Gestating, nursing and fostering helped me to redefine myself. My burgeoning belly, my leaking breasts, and my years spent away from my career, surrounded by diapers, larking at museums and playgrounds, and cooking all manners of child-sized treats, yielded, for me, a different sort of understanding of myself than the one I had been forced to endure earlier.

Accordingly, I invited myself to study herbal medicine and basket weaving, intentionally picking endeavors that I associated with female traditions (few folks, Yours Truly included, realize that basket weaving, among indigenous people, is a male art). What’s more, I again embraced creative writing, intentionally endowing most of my narratives with a woman’s point of view. I learned how to belly dance. I wore dresses and skirts and I grew my hair past my shoulders.

Interestingly, in the face of those facts of my working so hard to reclaim my living as a girl, I was not willing to release all I had gained when I had lived as a boy. I still enjoy weightlifting, landscaping, and all manners of academic challenge. Whereas I have become convinced that the world of women ought to be celebrated as such, I have never been entirely willing to leave the world of men.

My father passed away years ago. During the span from the onset of his illness to the time of his death, my sister, my mother, and I experimented with integrating male and female social purposes and with appreciating and encouraging a mixture of those traits in the people in our lives.

To wit, my older son, who trained as an army sniper, remains one of my family’s best cooks. My younger daughter wears braids and ribbons, colorful nail polish, and other female-assigned artifacts, but insists she’s going to use her interpersonal robustness to become a criminal lawyer. My older daughter dresses in traditional female garb, but is among the most respected teachers in her all boys’ school. My younger son, the family member who is physically larger than any of the rest of us, is also the first to offer hugs when siblings or parents feel down. My husband, a software architect of the highest caliber, can sigh or cry as well as any lady and considers his comfort with expressing his feelings to be the hallmark of a true man.

Ironically, these days, the complaints I had as a child, as a teen, and as a young adult about my ill-fitting social responsibilities would attract as much attention as would any other literary detritus; no one would care. As a culture, we are, at least superficially, able to accept women in men’s roles. At present, it’s no big deal if a lady is an athlete, a nerd, a breadwinner, or an emotional toughie.

Regretfully, our civilization continues to fail to likewise celebrate women’s roles, whether those roles are assumed by girls or boys. Until such time, we will lack authentic social success.

As for me, in particular, as I ride through midlife, I remain aware that I can like perfume and disdain body powder, wear hoodies, but stay far away from camouflage prints, and expect respect from my university students, but insist that my own sons and daughters continue to regard me as both cuddly and fallible. As such, I am no longer a token male. I live the life that my female body parts and inclinations had always prescribed for me. I am still not the name my parents didn’t use.

Faithfully constructive in her epistemology, KJ Hannah Greenberg channels gelatinous monsters and two-headed wildebeests. As such, she helps out as an Associate Editor at Bound Off! and at Bewildering Stories. Her most recent books include: The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles (Bards and Sages Publishing, 2013), Citrus-Inspired Ceramics (Aldrich Press, 2013), Intelligence’s Vast Bonfires (Lazarus Media, 2012), Supernal Factors (The Camel Saloon Books on Blog, 2012), Fluid & Crystallized (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things (Bards and Sages Publishing, 2012), A Bank Robber’s Bad Luck with His Ex-Girlfriend (Unbound CONTENT, 2011), and Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting (French Creek Press, 2010).