In the late 1950's the YMCA held swimming classes for boys. Nude. Not the girls, not the adults, they wore bathing suits. But the boys swam nude. I hated that and the second floor picture window looking out over the pool didn't help. I could see the faces of Mothers up there, smiling and laughing. Why did they make us do that? I recently Googled it...the claim was that the “Y” wanted to keep the fibers and dyes out of the pool. If that doesn't sound like a load of bullshit I don't know what does. I mean, didn't the suits of women, girls, and grown men have the same fibers and dyes? But they made us boys strip before entering the pool. They thought we didn't care. Boys aren't modest, right? They’ll hardly notice.
My mother would drop me
off at the front entrance and I would walk straight through the building and
exit the back. One hour and fifteen minutes later I reversed my steps. Back
door to front to car. “How was swim class?” “It was good.” I lied, my hair wet
from the drinking fountain.
In Summer camp, boys
were treated with the same kind of heavy handed disrespect. Camp Waywayonda had
a large central bathroom and showers. Toilets lined the wall in a concrete room
the size of a basketball court. Twenty toilets in a row, side by side with no
dividers between them. My feelings were of no consequence, like I didn't
matter. The attitude seemed to be that boys were on par with dogs. Oblivious to
social norms, little more than dirt magnets living for a baseball diamond or a
football field, mindless rough play, worms and gross stuff. Shoats.
I could care less about
team sports and I thought the nude swimming, the lack of privacy and ganged
toilets were the first step toward marching us into fake showers. Totally
dehumanizing. I despised it. But I was just a little boy who had no voice and
didn’t matter much.
One step often leads to
another, so every morning, when the camp counselor at Waywayonda had all the
boys in our cabin line up in front of him and strip, it didn't set off any
alarms. He sat in a chair, facing us at the head of the line. One by one he
told us to step up to him as he fondled our genitals and told us of his plans
to become a doctor. I thought it was weird, but I was getting used to weird
stuff, after all, I was just a boy in a system that treated us like goats. We
weren’t protected like someone who mattered, girls or adults.
The attitude is still
out there, for grown men too. We don't care, they think. Men can pee anywhere,
like cattle. I went into a service station rest room that was set up to
accommodate several men at the same time with a toilet, a urinal, and a sink, all
in a row, no dividers. Who does that? Is someone really going to sit on that
nasty public toilet while another guy splashes into the urinal next to his
face? Please. But men just want a beer and a big game on a wide screen TV,
right? Maybe a night out at Dave & Busters? They have lots of games with
balls that mesmerize grown men in the same way my neighbor’s terrier is single
mindedly obsessed with a stolen golf ball. Even the ads portray men as overgrown boys,
unable to make a meal or wash clothes, we couldn't possibly read and follow a
recipe...clueless oafs, stupid as a stone...but we love them. The wife, wise
and all knowing, just smiles and shakes her head when dad tries to cook a
turkey, still in the wrapper.
Men can't change a
diaper or cradle our own child in our arms without mom hovering nearby waiting
for us to become distracted in the ninth inning and just drop them. No
gardening, no housecleaning, no meal planning...we are big stupid lumps of
insensitivity in a home where Mom knows best.
I'm tired of it. It's
time to grow some balls and fight back. My gender is only one part of who I am.
Women aren’t alone in their battle to prove that their brains, not their twin
globes of adipose tissue, are their most important assets.
Are you listening you gonads?
Are you listening you gonads?
