Thinking Like a Girl

Credit for the image: Albion British Comics Database Wiki (https://britishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/School_Friend)

“You learned to think like a girl,” she blurted out with a force I hadn’t expected. Then she gestured toward the wine bottle. 

“Thinking like a girl.” For a second, I thought of “Throwing like a Girl” by Iris Marion Young, which is a response to Erwin Straus’s “The Upright Posture.”

In his essay, Straus writes: “Upright we are, and we experience ourselves in this specific relation to the world.” In her essay, Young writes: “At a more specific level, however, there is a particular style of bodily comportment which is typical of feminine existence, and this style consists of particular modalities of the structures and conditions of the body’s existence in the world.”

“Finish it,” I said. The brand had been new to me, but the wine had been a hit everywhere I’d brought it. I’d picked up a few bottles here and there as I made the rounds on that trip home. People liked it.

She poured from the bottle, starting with my glass.

“All for you. I have to drive,” I said.

She looked at me dubiously with her head half-lowered. “Half and half,” she negotiated.

I nodded assent, and she filled our glasses. Mine was already kind of full, I thought.

What had started this was that she’d asked about scopolamine, and I’d been explaining how important it was to be aware of your drink when you were out around the city. It was common for people to spike your drink with scopolamine to make it easier to rob you. As the stories went, it made you like a zombie—up and moving around but with no real awareness of where you were or what you were doing. In the morning, you’d have no memory of the night before. You learned to keep a close eye on your drink (drinking like a girl?).

“That’s an interesting…” I trailed off. “I was recently reading, well…” I trailed off again, aware that other people at the table were half-listening. I’d started to say that I’d recently reread Chuck Bowden’s “Torch Song,” and he made a similar point there, but I felt pedantic saying it. “These recognizable patterns, they’re….”

I was floundering, and she offered a hand. “Something like that happened the other day when I was showing a guy around the Town Hall. He was there to install something.” 

“Torch Song” is about Bowden’s experience working as a sex crimes reporter. It’s the only essay I’ve ever read like it. I read it after spending two years of my life working at a treatment facility for juvenile sex offenders (i.e., kids who’d assaulted other people, but pretty much all had previously been victims themselves, so you’re as right as you are wrong if you read that clumsy, Orwellian formulation as meaning its opposite).

I took an unintentionally large sip of wine from my glass because I have a tendency of eating and drinking quickly. I surreptitiously scanned the table; attention seemed to have shifted elsewhere as people returned to whatever it was they were talking about with whomever they were talking with. The room looked like it should smell like woodsmoke but actually smelled like food.

She continued: “I was showing him around the top floor, which is kind of like an attic. I realized when I’d walked in that I’d positioned myself so that he was in the door, and there’s only one door. I felt trapped.”

I’d left my work at the treatment facility feeling burned out and cynical after watching wave after wave of kids be perfunctorily shunted through the facility’s shoddy CBT program. The treatment curriculum’s lack of sociological awareness or appreciation for the darker sides of human psychology offered flawed foundations for its already half-assed approach.

Bowden’s is the only account I’ve found that documents the type of psychological unraveling that can follow from exposure to all of that, though my slow-motion breakdown had fewer pyrotechnics than his.

“What did he do?” I said.

“Nothing. We did an awkward little dance getting out, and I took him back downstairs.”  

Virtually every door was locked at the juvenile sex offender treatment facility. Freedom of movement was restricted there. As one astute young resident once noted to me, the place was prison with occasional therapy.

“Was he threatening or creepy?” I asked.

For a long time after I stopped working with JSOs, I would pause imperceptibly before going through doors, as though I had to remind myself that they didn’t need to be unlocked. I stopped doing that after a while.

She shrugged.

Upright we are.