The Patriarchy of Siblings

This is a story about my brother and me.

Boys will be boys is not an adequate defense. I have never had the patience for it. In early elementary school, I used to get teased quite a bit. Most of my peers (and some adults) would reassure me by saying that it was because the boys liked me. I believed it, but I believed it mostly because I thought I was the coolest person in the school so why wouldn’t they like me. However, I also had the radical thought that if these boys actually like liked me, they would treat me better. They like liked me, but they didn’t respect me. So from then on I set out to demand respect in the only way that an eight year-old could: violently.

I distinctly remember the first time I kicked a kid in the balls. He had come up behind me in the hallway and placed his hands on my shoulders. Then he started jumping, using my shoulders to propel himself. I think I remember telling him to stop. He didn’t. So I whirled around and gave him one swift kick. He went down with a groan, and my posse’s eyes widened with the magnitude of what I had done. I was stunned. I knew it was extreme and probably more than he deserved, but I was still annoyed so I turned around and strode away to the playground.

My teacher was very angry, and found me on the playground skipping rope with a level of concentration I usually reserved for Carmen Sandiego games. She demanded that I apologize to the boy, and I refused.

“He wouldn’t stop when I asked him to,” I said.

That phrase became my mantra. From that suspended recess time onward, the phrase was imprinted on my tongue. It stayed there through the move to a new school that housed a bully hell bent on pushing all of my buttons, and through years of ugly, all-out fights with my younger brother.

It was my experience that asking a boy to stop led to no reaction other than glee, as the boy quickly realized that whatever they were doing to annoy me was working better than they could’ve hoped. I certainly didn’t accept that I was just meant to live with this harassment. Most girls around me lived symbiotically with this harassment by creating girls-only social structures that simultaneously excluded boys and almost seemed to worship their presence. I never really understood the paradigm. I understood that boys were untouchable, and I both respected that and wanted it for myself. I had enough pride to only seek out adult assistance in extreme circumstances, and none of the charisma for emotional manipulation, so I turned to violence.

Especially with my brother. We are on good terms today, mostly because of a personal internet line in my bedroom starting in high school. There I stayed for four years, then moved on for four years in college 4,000 miles away, until old wounds healed and we found ourselves in something that I am willing to call a sibling relationship. Before that were about four years of non-stop fighting. Everyone around us looked on in desperation as we punched, smacked and rolled our way through the early 2000s. Birthdays were ruined. Holidays soured. All by the phrase: He wouldn’t stop when I asked him to.

I usually find it really hard to find fault in my mom and dad’s parenting. But in this case my parents; my liberal, educator parents would fly to defend their son, sending their old-enough-to-know-better daughter to her room. My brother would be let off with a sigh, and a plea to ‘stop provoking your sister.’ This happened over and over and over again. So what if he is just being annoying and I responded the way I did. I was dealing with the reality that my brother had no respect for me, or the word stop.

I didn’t think about my interactions with the boys who teased me or my fights with my brother in terms of a larger societal acceptance that boys will be boys. I thought I was the only one who was getting treated unfairly, instead of it being systemic. Every time I sat in my room seething, I would tell myself that next time would be different. Next time my parents would hear my repeated requests for my brother to stop poking me, or bouncing on the seat, or flicking small pieces of paper. They would get as angry with him as they got with me, and I would be the one comforted and reassured in the end.

A couple months ago my brother, my mom, and I were sitting in the living room and our years of fighting came up. My mother shook her head as the exhaustion of all of the fights came back to her. But after a moment of silence she turned to my brother and said, “Well you weren’t entirely innocent. You really knew how to push your sister’s buttons.”

In that moment my thirteen year-old self tore at the seams of the box I had stored her in. Her anxious, hormonal, angry self wanted to pour out all of the injustice I felt every time I got sent to my room in the middle of my birthday party or yelled at by my father in front of a crowd, and my brother was left to walk free with a smirk on his face. He played you hardcore! I wanted to say. This is the mother-effing patriarchy. He was your only boy child so you shielded him and you refused to protect your daughter. In teaching him that he was not at fault for refusing to leave me alone what kind of man were you raising him to be? He is part of a generation of boys that were raised to disregard the word no, raised alongside a generation of girls that learned that no was never enough. We had to become manipulative; shyly or coyly rejecting that catcall that made us feel violated as we walked to work in the morning. Or as violence against other was condemned, we turned the violence against ourselves. How could you do that to him? To me?

At the age of thirteen I couldnt’ve said all of those things. In all likelihood it would have come out as a whiney “It’s not fair” monologue. But in that moment I just swallowed up that thirteen year-old girl and instead laughed and looked meaningfully at my brother while he sputtered. Now that we’re older I think he gets it.