Tomfoolery

"Boys will be boys." Girls grow up hearing this. We also hear that boys are better in science and math and called on more often than girls in class, and also they can sleep with everyone and are studs whereas girls should major in English and shut up and look pretty and save it for marriage.

Girls are also generally raised to not call boys, or ask boys out, or ever ever ever be the first to say I love you to a boy who called you first and asked you out first. Now, if you are a Gen X girl (and technically you bitches aren't really "girls" anymore), this lesson learned in youth at your mother's knee may have gone caterwampus as you hit your late teens and were told--by boys, in fact--that it is actually cool to be a girl who asks boys out cause hey, why should the guys have to do all the work, and hey, dudes fear rejection too, and hey it's actually sexy when a girl asks a boy out, and hey, jumping his bones is also always welcome even if no dates are involved so go for it chiquita!

Feminists also confuse this for GXers because woman-power, and Sex and the City, and take back the night and all make it seem like you should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen where you cook as well as have hot countertop sex after you get home from your big-shot 6-figure job and post-work workout and slip off your Jimmy Choos. This is actually not what happens in real life but it is confusing, because we are the generation raised to think we can have it all but really we don't seem to actually want it all.

But really does it all stem from who asks out whom in the first place for us girls? Which brings me to my point.

Does anyone actually ASK anyone out nowadays? In my small experience, no. I have never in my adult life been on a date. At least not what I would refer to as a proper date. Defined not the least as one in where the guy pays. I have had boyfriends. I had a faux-husband. I have had boys I liked take liberties with me. I have made out on a pleather couch for 3 hours to be polite. But I have never been on a nice dinner date early on in a relationship--one that I knew unequivocably was a date (my early years wrought much "uh-oh he thinks this is a date?" confusions) and one where a gentleman planned a nice evening just for me, and to make that evening happen actually ASKED ME TO GO OUT WITH HIM ON A DATE.

Here is what has happened to me. Drunken (and sadly, me not the drunk one) protestations of liking. Random smoochfests and then some that one knows are but what they are. And once or twice some nice dancing build-up of sexual tension while getting to know each other as friends before spontaneously combusting like fireworks on a hot summer night. Nothing wrong with any of these persay. Sometimes these guys become unlikely lovers. But the thing that seems most prevalent in my list of boys who like me and are wrong, especially in my dotage, is the gray area I am not going to actually do anything but flirt (i.e. annoy the shit out of you) and then get angry when you do not want to marry me or shag me or let me do any of the above with you even though I have not actually done anything proper in my advances toward you like say hey, I would like to take you on a date.

A supporting tale from the archives: One summer my bestie and I unwittingly found ourselves in committed relationships with two such gentlemen. Now in everyone's defense we were babydoll-dressed, Docs-wearing kinderwhore jailbait no doubt, but we were nice girls. We weren't "fast" and we weren't "teases" and we had jobs and money and cars (after a fashion.) So we met this down-on-his-luck-with-woman dude, and he had a friend in a similar predicament, and we thought we'd make a rollicking single people having fun of the non-sexy variety foursome. And for a time we were,

We thought they were fun to hang out with at late night diners and once on a boat. We listened sympathetically to their girl problems and maybe even offered some war stories of our own. Then as the summer waned we got our own boyfriends, or the makings of boyfriends, and oh the wrath that was ours to behold from these two guys! We are talking scenes, tears, recriminations, phone call hang-ups. Interchangeably, which made it even odder because we were never certain even in the maelstrom of what apparently was a hideous 4-way breakup which one thought he was dating which one of us.

Not to mention the hanging out times I spoke of with these gents really could be counted on one hand, and involved no hanky panky, and never delve dinto us thinking for two seconds that anyone like-liked anyone else.

And now that I think back it was maybe less that we got actual boyfriends who were not this dynamic duo but more maybe we told them a story we found highly amusing about one night of meeting Andres of Puerto Rico who dinered with us one late night at Mother's Milk Kitchen Diner and picked up the tab with a flourishing "where I come from, the ladies never pay." Ah, Andres. Ah, machismo. Little did I know how much I would long for this virile quality in a mate in the years to follow.

TBC