Predation

I ran to the gravel driveway in front of our house, distracted from my usual solitary play by the cries of my five-year old brother and the half-dozen older boys who lived near me. The object of their attention was a box turtle, six inches in diameter, isolated where the gravel met the tar.

The boys were assaulting the turtle, assembled in pack formation, pelting it with rocks, trying to crack its shell. They wanted to kill it and the air was full of their excited voices as they encouraged each other to greater savagery. Like a woman caught in a vulnerable spot and therefore deemed responsible for her own rape and/or murder, this turtle had wandered away from the river at the end of the road and had thereby doomed itself to predation by unchecked males.

Instead of “acting” like a girl and begging for the mass of boys to stop their cruelty, I “acted” like a boy. Instinctively, I put myself between the mob and the turtle, protecting it with a dare – something boys understood. When I stepped into the line of fire, even though I was only four-years old, my implicit challenge was for them to throw rocks at me, a challenge that backed them down.

The boys were in their formative years then. A few days later, perhaps as revenge for my intervention, my brother cracked my head with a rake. The good sisters who worked as nurses in the emergency room where I was taken, shaved a swath through my long blond curls to place the half-a-dozen stitches needed to close the wounds. I wonder, now, how many of those boys, like my older brother, were condemned to an escalating cycle of violence in their own lives - terrorizing siblings, spouses and offspring.

For so many years I hated having been born a woman. The reasons for these feelings of hatred for my own gender were not complicated or difficult to understand, I was simply responding to what I had seen befall other females around me. As a child I felt the favoritism bestowed, first upon my father and then, upon my older and younger brothers. I saw the men and boys in my neighborhoods and schools favored for their sex and the women and girls oppressed for theirs. I watched as the little boys emulated their elders and honed their talent for abuse on me and any hapless creature that came their way.

For years this hatred of the treatment of my own gender, combined with pure and simple sexual tension that I felt in the presence of certain women, lead me to believe that I hated women. I now know that what I hated was their powerlessness, the docile accommodation of and deference to men, and the seeming willingness of mothers to abandon their daughters to a fate identical to their own miserable one. I felt so drawn to the baby butches of my childhood, but was angry with them, too, because for somewhat different reasons they had also learned to despise what they considered the feminine.

I have always been, in my own mind, fully female and feminine but it was many years before I was able to learn to love and nurture the feminine within myself. By the time I was five, I had shoulder length blonde hair that fell naturally into perfect ringlets. I was delighted by this, and although I seldom spent time in front of the mirror, the feel of those curls was pure feminine joy for me.

One day when she finished brushing my hair, my mother announced that she was sick and tired of my crying and squirming when she detangled my hair. Holding me by the newly brushed curls she dragged me backwards to the closet where she retrieved her silver sewing shears. The next minute she was holding up my curls like a trophy, smiling. I was shocked, crushed, and humiliated. Even though I would repair myself in future years, at that moment my five-year old heart was broken and my self-concept was permanently, negatively altered.

I wonder if she felt jealous of my curls or threatened by their insipient sexuality. Maybe she had resented my hair to the point that she punished me for it by making me cry when she brushed it rather than finding a more gentle solution. Perhaps the act of cutting it was the ultimate penalty she could levy, a sort of capital punishment. The message seemed to be that she wanted to destroy the beautiful femaleness of me.

Half-a-century later, I find myself wondering (albeit, in a revisionistic impulse) if she was telling me to abandon the feminine, to rid myself of the outward signs that would cause my ultimate demise. Perhaps the message was to loose the curls and therefore the attention of men and as a result I could escape the hell she had so recently found herself condemned to - a life under the thumb of the heteroarchy.

It has been a long journey to regrow those curls, to embrace the femininity that was the pivot point for so much violence against me in prior years. Time has rendered me safe at last, at least as safe as any woman can be from punishment for their femininity. Although I am still a beautiful woman, I am past childbearing and heterosexual men, who have always been the predatory threat for beautiful women, are stalking and predating on women the age of my daughters, now. And, Dear Goddess, protect them…