PatrickG
04-13-2009, 06:58 PM
Does anyone have childhood memories of an "Ew! Girls!" (or "Ew! Guys!") phase...? Ever have a clubhouse that was gender exclusive...?
I played more with girls than guys for my first few years. I had hand-me-down toys from my cousin Trish and my first three or four friends were girls. The first bully who ever picked on me was a girl as well.
But I never "dated" in middle school or primary school the way that a lot of kids did.
I remember feeling very trapped by one of my early playmates, a girl named Jennifer. She always wanted to play house... and I'd always heard my grandmother insist that Jennifer and I would get married someday. I was confounded because I felt as though I didn't *love* Jennifer. I liked her. I liked having anyone around who would play with me since it was hard to get a lot of adults to really play with action figures and toys.
But it struck me as deeply wrong that other kids used the word "love" so casually. Heck, I didn't even use the word "friend" casually and was very insistent from about age 3 or 4 on that most other children were "acquaintances", NOT "friends".
I remember having a very vague crush at age 5. There was a girl who was a year older than me (I think) who sung at my kindergarten graduation. I think her name was Liz. She was tall and she had dark hair and a lovely singing voice and I blushed whenever I saw her. I didn't really have any overt romantic feelings at that age but I do remember thinking that she was really quite beautiful and exactly the type of girl I'd want to meet when I did have romantic feelings, which I was in no hurry for because it only seemed to result in lots of pushing and fights and best friends turning on eachother and people acting stupid.
And I didn't want to be stupid. I wanted to be smart. Like my heroes: King Solomon, Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein.
Anyway... I kept running into situations where a girl would declare herself my girlfriend or start acting funny around me and I would just get infuriated because I didn't have any feelings for them. It was even more embarrassing because every so often there would be a girl I did have the faintest hint of an admiration for and the LAST thing I wanted was to be saddled with someone who forced themselves on me just to be cool and have a play girlfriend like everyone else. I felt that love, when it happens, shouldn't be sought after but should come as the result of mutual respect and admiration and it should be 100% real and true before anyone makes a move of any kind. And I didn't think it could be real or true at that age.
But because I had no gender preference in toys or cartoons (I LOVED girly cartoons, in fact) and because I refused to participate in false "play relationships" and maybe because my rants on the subject were one of the many topics I chose to speak on when I'd ascend the monkey bars and delivering a loud, rebuking address to my classmates (that was definitely a phase I went through for most of primary school; standing on platforms and delivering angry speeches to crowds of listeners)... Well, eventually, people started saying that I liked boys. Which wasn't true at all and it was embarrassing because there were girls that I liked, just not ENOUGH yet and I didn't want the right girl seeing me with the wrong girl or thinking I liked boys.
So I established that I thought girls were icky and that guys were ickier but tolerable only because we were the same kind. If I HAD to kiss somebody, I'd kiss a girl but girls were gross and I hated them.
I remember that the closer I got to middle school, this sortof blossomed into a phase where I found myself attracted to girls who I could have an intelligent debate with. And it's one of those cases where, in retrospect, that might have been a viable life strategy for romance except for two things:
1) I had zero attraction to 99% of girls and maybe that's in part because few people are great debaters and in part because I set my threshold for even a basic level attraction fairly high before puberty and it stayed there. Unless I melted at first sight for a girl, I not only didn't get any pleasure from holding hands or proximity but most people in general skeeved me out, boy or girl. If a girl doesn't interface with me emotionally and intellectually within a short span of time after meeting them, I have zero libido for them.
2) That other 1%? My god. I had trouble forming words around them. And it isn't that the other 1% are necessarily models or anything. All backgrounds, races and bodytypes have been in that 1% so I'm not sure exactly what it is that makes these people different but it's just overwhelming. Even now as an adult, my brain freezes up and I start speaking entirely in movie quotes or stuttering like Porky Pig.
But anyway, that's my personal story of girls being icky. I never really thought it all out but I guess it has shaped my interactions in puberty and beyond. Kinda funny though.
I played more with girls than guys for my first few years. I had hand-me-down toys from my cousin Trish and my first three or four friends were girls. The first bully who ever picked on me was a girl as well.
But I never "dated" in middle school or primary school the way that a lot of kids did.
I remember feeling very trapped by one of my early playmates, a girl named Jennifer. She always wanted to play house... and I'd always heard my grandmother insist that Jennifer and I would get married someday. I was confounded because I felt as though I didn't *love* Jennifer. I liked her. I liked having anyone around who would play with me since it was hard to get a lot of adults to really play with action figures and toys.
But it struck me as deeply wrong that other kids used the word "love" so casually. Heck, I didn't even use the word "friend" casually and was very insistent from about age 3 or 4 on that most other children were "acquaintances", NOT "friends".
I remember having a very vague crush at age 5. There was a girl who was a year older than me (I think) who sung at my kindergarten graduation. I think her name was Liz. She was tall and she had dark hair and a lovely singing voice and I blushed whenever I saw her. I didn't really have any overt romantic feelings at that age but I do remember thinking that she was really quite beautiful and exactly the type of girl I'd want to meet when I did have romantic feelings, which I was in no hurry for because it only seemed to result in lots of pushing and fights and best friends turning on eachother and people acting stupid.
And I didn't want to be stupid. I wanted to be smart. Like my heroes: King Solomon, Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein.
Anyway... I kept running into situations where a girl would declare herself my girlfriend or start acting funny around me and I would just get infuriated because I didn't have any feelings for them. It was even more embarrassing because every so often there would be a girl I did have the faintest hint of an admiration for and the LAST thing I wanted was to be saddled with someone who forced themselves on me just to be cool and have a play girlfriend like everyone else. I felt that love, when it happens, shouldn't be sought after but should come as the result of mutual respect and admiration and it should be 100% real and true before anyone makes a move of any kind. And I didn't think it could be real or true at that age.
But because I had no gender preference in toys or cartoons (I LOVED girly cartoons, in fact) and because I refused to participate in false "play relationships" and maybe because my rants on the subject were one of the many topics I chose to speak on when I'd ascend the monkey bars and delivering a loud, rebuking address to my classmates (that was definitely a phase I went through for most of primary school; standing on platforms and delivering angry speeches to crowds of listeners)... Well, eventually, people started saying that I liked boys. Which wasn't true at all and it was embarrassing because there were girls that I liked, just not ENOUGH yet and I didn't want the right girl seeing me with the wrong girl or thinking I liked boys.
So I established that I thought girls were icky and that guys were ickier but tolerable only because we were the same kind. If I HAD to kiss somebody, I'd kiss a girl but girls were gross and I hated them.
I remember that the closer I got to middle school, this sortof blossomed into a phase where I found myself attracted to girls who I could have an intelligent debate with. And it's one of those cases where, in retrospect, that might have been a viable life strategy for romance except for two things:
1) I had zero attraction to 99% of girls and maybe that's in part because few people are great debaters and in part because I set my threshold for even a basic level attraction fairly high before puberty and it stayed there. Unless I melted at first sight for a girl, I not only didn't get any pleasure from holding hands or proximity but most people in general skeeved me out, boy or girl. If a girl doesn't interface with me emotionally and intellectually within a short span of time after meeting them, I have zero libido for them.
2) That other 1%? My god. I had trouble forming words around them. And it isn't that the other 1% are necessarily models or anything. All backgrounds, races and bodytypes have been in that 1% so I'm not sure exactly what it is that makes these people different but it's just overwhelming. Even now as an adult, my brain freezes up and I start speaking entirely in movie quotes or stuttering like Porky Pig.
But anyway, that's my personal story of girls being icky. I never really thought it all out but I guess it has shaped my interactions in puberty and beyond. Kinda funny though.