Pretty little heads … and other parts

by David Benjamin

“Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.” ―Ambrose Bierce

MADISON, Wis.—There must be studies about this. Trouble is, I haven’t seen any. But there has to be a moment in childhood when boys and girls depart the bliss of androgyny and realize that, beyond how parents dress them and the toys they play with, there’s a defining, physical difference between male and female.

I’m pretty sure I was slow on this significant uptake. I attribute this perceptual delay to the excuse that my juvenile mind tended precociously toward the abstract and theoretical. So, it came as a mild shock one day when I found myself facing—and curiously regarding—a grown woman’s, um … behind. I have no idea who this woman was, except I know it was not Mom, whose bodily appearance never occurred to me. But, whoever this woman, it hit me.

“Wait a minute!”

My world changed. It became binary and confusing. Suddenly, all those parts absent from my own scrawny figure became objects of curiosity and discovery, fascination, taboo and incipient terror. Suddenly, all the priestly (and subtly prurient) admonitions from Fathers Rourke and Finucan were made manifest in the progeny, all around me, of the temptress Eve. Suddenly, all the dire strictures against nakedness (even my own, in the bathtub) that had been hammered into my psyche by the Dominican nuns of St. Mary’s acquired an alarming, bewildering urgency. Suddenly, Beatrice Dwyer, the smartest and one of the cutest girls in my class at St. Mary’s, became a near occasion of sin.

Suddenly, Beatrice Dwyer—although still absent any “secondary sexual characteristics”—was Gina Lollobrigida … theoretically, anyway.
Of course, before this moment, I was not entirely dim to a certain boy-girl gap. Girls let their hair grow. Boys didn’t wear dresses. Boys were messy. Girls were clean. Boys played marbles, for keeps, Girls played jacks, for no reason I could figure out. Before my epiphany with that bent-over woman, I had always understood that girls were a distinct human variety. Without a choice in the matter. I was glad to be a boy. But I didn’t think my big sister Peg or the suddenly alluring Beatrice Dwyer had any reason to lament their girlhood. Both Peg and Bebe, in fact, struck me as a little scary.

The nuns were always making a bigger deal of this guy-gal disparity than I did. especially in their references to exposed flesh. We learned, especially from the obsessive Sister Mary Ann, that the uncovered (or scantily clad) female body was a vessel of sin with scant social value. There was no counterpoint available. In Catholic school, there is never mention of the classic—and anatomically instructive—nude in art, nor is there much mention of art at all.

In the small town where I grew up, the only “art” I encountered were Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers and Millet’s painting—hung in the majority of German Catholic homes—of the Angelus. No Venus de Milo, no Aphrodite by Botticelli, not even Diana the huntress shooting an arrow with one of her boobs exposed. Sister Mary Ann’s revulsion over the deshabille female was reinforced by the two main sources in town where a kid could sneak a peek. You had the nudie-cutie magazines on the top shelf of the racks at Miller’s Walgreen Drugs, or you could bike out to the Monroe County fairgrounds for the smutty graffiti on the wall of the men’s outhouse.

Fortunately, I moved to a university city, where art was abundant and a naked woman—or even a guy—could be art. Thanks to crazy Roy Liddicoat, my high-school art teacher, I discovered Ingre’s odalisques and Rubens’ fat girls. I gazed into the eyes of Modigliani’s lovers and peeked with Degas at women taking baths. I developed a prejudice, which I’ve never shaken, that the female, aesthetically—with her smooth curves and delicate features—is more beautiful than the male. I know this feeling is objectively dubious. Over centuries, countless male artists, most with an erotic interest in their models, have fostered this ideal. If women had ruled the art world since Phidias, the male figure might have ended up as the epitome of human beauty. I can’t argue the point convincingly that men are lovelier than women. I’m not sure anyone can argue either position, or even try.

However, my childhood epiphany, triggered by the sight of that bent-over woman, still bespeaks the inescapable proof of difference between women and men. But even before that moment, having studied my parents and the other grownups around me, I couldn’t spot anything innately superior in one gender or the other. Mom and Dad, for example, were still busy growing up. They were angry, bewildered, erratic and directionless. They offered no discernible model for either masculine strength, feminine frailty or vice versa. At best, I saw in them equal measures of both. Dad’s parents, Annie and Archie—whom I called Papa—were better guides. Annie was the boss, Papa was the breadwinner. Annie was sharp, demanding, disciplined and stoic. Papa was easygoing and compliant, a charmer who gossiped, socialized and spun stories like a girl—from beginning to end in digressive chronology, dense with detail.

Papa was a railroad machinist whose aspect was no more virile than a hairdresser. Annie was a housewife who could stare down an attack dog and send him scurrying off with his tail between his legs.

From the first glint in her eye, Annie commanded respect and instilled a tingle of fear. She possessed that innate power that smart women, seemingly the weaker sex, exert over men who blunder through life convinced that muscle and bluster are their defining virtues. Papa, a gentle man with little interest in masculine display, was largely immune to Annie’s withering will. They were as equal a pair, thanks to their differences, as ever I’ve known.

It would have been alien to Papa’s nature to tout his physical strength compared to Annie or note that his wages were the family’s economic foundation. When they argued, which they did often, it was over trivia and the quarrel was brief. It was never a test of Papa’s virility. Indeed, Annie always won and Papa retreated philosophically into an easy chair to watch TV and doze.
Recently, our foremost manque of machismo, running to rule America, made a pitch to women, promising to be their “protector,” to cocoon them forever from the big old problems that men were put on earth to solve. He was saying, as men like him have always said, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head, honey.”

What he’s saying is that muscle and bluster are still the sole measure of manhood in an era during which sex, gender, manhood and the feminine have finally proven too complicated, variable and richly diverse to cubbyhole, especially for someone who has spoken publicly about the dimensions of his penis.

What he’s saying, although oblivious to his message, is that he has never graduated from the dirty magazines in the drug store to the Venus de Milo, from the prurient to the aesthetic. What he’s admitting, without possessing the intellectual depth to appreciate his actual meaning, is that the power he fears most is those pretty little heads, wherein resides the power to muddle his mind and mock his manhood, to exploit his every vulnerability and to reduce him to the spoiled and whiny fauntleroy that he never outgrew.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but strain my memory, and wonder:

Who was that woman?