Nora Ephron wrote that. Can you imagine? One of the most successful women of the 20th/21st century, and she claimed to have been clueless for the first two-thirds of her life. She interned in the Kennedy White House, wrote for newspapers and magazines, wrote novels, wrote and directed movies, and who even knows what else. And she thought she was clueless. Where does that leave the rest of us?
*****
I just finished reading Anna Burns’ Milkman, about which I will have much more to say. I’m just getting started here. At the beginning of Milkman, the first-person narrator explains her first encounters with a stalker named Milkman. We know that she’s 18, and that he is much older than she--probably in his mid 30s or so. She is an ordinary Belfast girl (Burns never names her character’s city, but we know that it’s Belfast in the 1970s). Milkman shows up at odd hours and places; when the girl is running, or walking along reading (one of the many quirks that places her among her neighborhood’s “beyond the pale” near-untouchables) or as she’s leaving her place of work or coming home from her evening French class. He makes her feel threatened and she begins curtailing her movements so as to avoid further harassment. She knows that he has plans for her that she wants no part of, but what’s she going to do? Report him? Complain to her family? She knows that according to the established rules of her time and place, she has no real, legitimate case against him; and she has a hard time even articulating her own feelings about the matter. "At eighteen,” she writes, “I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment."
*****
When I was 17, a young man in my neighborhood stopped his car in the street as I was walking by. He said hello and asked me my name and said that he knew my parents. He probably did know my parents; everyone in my neighborhood did. And I knew his family, too; one of his sisters was two years ahead of me in school. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him, like an idiot, like a 17-year-old idiot who has been taught never to offend men or to come across as stuck-up or standoffish. But of course we were also taught to be careful with ourselves, not to do or say anything that would give even the slightest impression that we would welcome any untoward behavior or inappropriate advances. It went without saying, of course, that if such inappropriate advances occurred, then it would be 100 percent our fault.
The young man (he was in his mid twenties) harassed me for a few weeks. He called me all the time, and asked what I’d been doing and who I’d been doing it with and where I’d been; and he demanded in a whiny yet vaguely threatening way to know why I didn’t seem as interested in him as he was in me. Was I frigid? Was I dating someone else? Was I a lesbian? Did I think I was so hot that I could do better than him? I stopped walking around the neighborhood for fear that he’d pull up beside me in his car, as he sometimes did. He never overtly threatened me. He never did anything to me other than to bother and embarrass me. I didn’t know why I was embarrassed but I was. I didn’t know why I felt so uncomfortable and even scared about him, but I did. I was 17, and clueless. Clueless.
A girl of 17 today, asked by a near-stranger what she’d been doing and why and where and when, would probably stand up for herself. She would think, and rightly so, that nobody outside of her own family had any right whatsoever to monitor her movements, or comment on her behavior, or insert themselves in any way into her business. But in working-class Philadelphia in the early 1980s, young girls were fair game for comment from everyone and anyone.
Adults, especially male adults, had very clear ideas for how girls should conduct themselves and how they should look, and they didn't hesitate to call out any girl who didn't measure up. But it wasn't just the men. Women tried to manage their daughters and other young girls, with kind or critical advice on dress, demeanor, deportment, to make sure we knew where the lines were, and that we stayed within them.
Maybe lines isn't the best word. Maybe circles would be better. Think of a Venn diagram.
 |
| Sluts on the left. Stuck-up prigs on the right. Click to enlarge (I hope that works). |
One of the overlapping circles is for the goody-goody girls, while the other is for the sluts. There is a very narrow tolerance, a very small pointed oval, between those two undesirable categories. That small pointed oval represents the acceptable range of behaviors for 17-year-old girls in 1982. Adults, especially men, but women too, considered it their right and their duty to make sure that we all understood how easily a girl could end up on the wrong side of the little oval and how fast she could veer to one side into prudishness and to the other side into whorishness.
I'd like to think that we resisted this very specialized form of oppression, but most of us didn't. We accepted it without much complaint. We sought approval and validation. I was a hospital volunteer when I was in high school and several retired men who worked at the hospital as security guards made sure that I knew that I met their standards for nice young girls, and that one or two of the other candystripers definitely did not meet those standards. And I smiled at their praise and never thought even once about asking them to please go and fuck themselves. I was clueless.
Let me clarify--I don’t wish that I had been the type of girl who’d tell a 70-year-old man to go fuck himself. But I do wish that I’d been the type of girl who thought about it.
*****
That wasn’t a book review at all, was it?
I never realized until recently how really clueless, how blissfully ignorant, I was for most of my life, but especially my teenage and early 20s life. At eighteen, I had no proper understanding of the ways that constitute encroachment because at eighteen, no girl does. But I get it now. The fog has lifted, and much is illuminated. Not all, but much. I know better now. It only took 50 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment