My patriarchy recruitment story

An invitation to evil, with a Texas accent

Sometimes the difference between being accepted or shunned, a member of a group or an outsider, depends on your fluency with a dialect. Sometimes, before you are fluent, the words you hear aren’t the words that are meant. Sometimes you only understand them decades later, realizing you were led wildly astray.

When I was eleven, I was excluded from an entire cultural tradition because of a failure to translate. I was lucky.

My family moved from Boston to Texas when I was six, and we noticed the language barrier right away. Days after we arrived, my mother asked a waitress to “eliminate” a drink she had ordered. The server returned with a lemonade. Pronounced, as it is in San Antonio, “liminade.” I remember my parents laughing as they recounted the story, a trace of panic in their eyes.

I had already imprinted on the urban northeast, so I felt foreign here too. My native habitat was the Boston Pops on public television on a snowy night. Now I lived in a vast asphalt oven. I didn’t recognize some of the chief environmental features, like football and church, and the women in make-up and giant men in boots felt like top predators. Locals sauntered from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned garage to air-conditioned car, a “Don’t Mess With Texas” sticker on the bumper. (If you don’t speak Texan, “car” means “truck.” And “Don’t Mess With Texas” is the slogan for an anti-littering campaign — or at least, it started that way. That’s not what people mean when they put the bumper sticker on their truck.)

We were a verbal family, but fluency means capturing something beyond the words themselves. And here, it seemed that vocabulary was no asset to us, as my parents discovered at the restaurant. Words with more than two syllables seemed to try too hard. Adults in Boston speak like they’re trying to cram the air with information. In San Antonio, voices flowed like syrup, warming the room with sound at times remarkably free of meaning.

I remember my fourth-grade English teacher, a short middle-aged woman with big jewelry and a drawl, using the phrase “might could.” It was jarring, it made no sense to me, but it felt pretty good. Like a hug from a stranger.

I came to trust the women who taught in the classrooms. But the principals and P.E. coaches spoke with a languor threaded with menace. In the baritones of these towering white men, the Texas accent possessed a kind of authority that had no correlate in the north. “Quieten down,” they would bark. The superfluous suffix said, “I make the grammar here.”

Their non-verbal communication baffled me too. Their brows always frowned, but the expression below the eyes was strange; I think they thought they were smiling. They were constantly spitting on the ground. A proud glint in their eye seemed to ask for constant congratulation, as if to say, “I’m not hitting you right now. Why aren’t you thanking me?”

“Quieten down,” the P.E. coaches would bark. The superfluous suffix said, “I make the grammar here.”

By sixth grade a few years later, I had found a posse of local guides: a trio of bright girls in my grade. Aleina, Marion, and Elizabeth Ann were native Texans, but they laughed at the Weird Al lyrics I recited and openly enjoyed learning. They were tall and confident and allowed themselves moods and enthusiasms I recognized. They seemed to speak my language, and I enjoyed theirs. Perhaps Texas could be home after all.

But my posse could not help me in P.E., when boys and girls separated. The gym coach bewildered me. He held a teacher-like position, but did no teaching of any kind. He merely doled out punishment for not already knowing things — specifically, how to play sports. He called us “boy,” pronounced “boa.”

The massive man with the polo shirt held my fate in the whistle around his neck, and everything I did was wrong. The boys picked teams, overlooking short, scrawny, bespectacled me until only I remained to look at (with apparent contempt). I lurked in the outfield; I hid on sidelines avoiding eye contact; I sang Weird Al to myself to remain calm during dodgeball. In sympathy, my mother wrote a number of notes to the coach, claiming I was too asthmatic to run around.

Perhaps I was bewildering to him too. Of what purpose was a boy who could not throw or catch, and didn’t appear to want to? A boy who would not stop talking, who used so many words?

Sometimes an answer to a single question can be a password. Sometimes you don’t realize it until the door closes.

One day after P.E., two of my classmates saw me hanging back in the locker room. They were pale mop-headed boys, with the height ratio of C-3P0 and R2-D2 and the aggressively normal names Matt and Jim. I knew they were bright, if not friendly. Perhaps they wanted to hear a Weird Al lyric?

No, they told me they had a question for me. “That girl Elizabeth Anne. You like her, right?” said Matt, the taller one. (Still shorter than Elizabeth Anne.)

I stiffened. I had not gotten my shirt on, and my bare upper body suddenly felt like a black hole of vulnerability. I knew there was a language about “liking” and girls, which I didn’t yet speak. This was the era when adults on TV would say “I find you very attractive,” and I would shake my head inside. Nope, no idea what that means.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, trying to smile like a tourist. “I like her! She’s really nice! Jim laughed, with a whirr like R2-D2.

“But would you fuck her?” said Matt.

I held my breath. They were throwing a ball at me. I lacked not only the skill to catch or dodge it, but even the basic instructions for the game they were playing.

This was the era when adults on TV would say “I find you very attractive,” and I would shake my head inside. Nope, no idea what that means.

I remember turning inward to assess the logic of the inquiry. They could tell, couldn’t they, that I was pre-pubescent? The high pitch of my voice rang in the room; my chest was scrawny and hairless and exposed. It is not biologically possible for me to do so, Matt and Jim, as you well know! But I knew that those long words would fail their test. As would any words native to me.

“No, I guess not,” I said to the floor, trying to will my shirt to put itself on.

I heard a sound like air escaping a ball, and looked up to see Matt and Jim wide-eyed, smiling in a grimacing way I could not translate. They made eye contact with each other, then looked wildly around like they could not believe their good fortune.

“Well,” said Matt slowly, “whatever reputation you once had at this school is over!” They laughed, and left.

I did not speak this language, but I knew what that meant.

This week, I listened to a grown man named Brett telling the world that his reputation had been ruined. He raged that his good name had been dragged through the mud, that his life had been turned upside down, that his suffering demanded recompense.

But this man did not lose his reputation because he refused to sexualize a woman. He lost it — if it is indeed lost — because, when other boys cornered him and asked if he would fuck somebody, he said yes.

And there those boys were, in the stories I heard about him this month, laughing uproariously as the man proved his membership, again and again. Acting it out with a struggling girl named Christine as one of them watched. Boasting about an oblivious girl named Renate in his yearbook. Obscenely performing for an incapacitated girl named Deborah in college. Did Mark and Squi and P.J. guarantee Brett a great reputation in exchange for these assaults? Did it work?

Is he angry now because, after all this time studying and mastering the language of entitled men, he finds the definitions suddenly changed?

Around the time that Brett said yes, I said no. And in the end, I acclimated to Texas. I came to like the heat, and learned to use smaller words (not a bad skill), and . By high school I had found a posse of both boys and girls (and some who may have identified as neither) who, with the leadership of Texan teachers, defied stereotypes of all kinds and built inclusive communities I still draw on today. I visit San Antonio now and marvel at its joyful hybrid culture — the Tex Mex festivals in the W.P.A.-era Riverwalk much more 21st-century than Boston’s hostile, segregated tribes linked by a red brick “Freedom Trail.”

So my reputation was not destroyed. But part of me was. That conversation infected me, placed an asterisk next to every thought, a caveat at the bottom of the page of every relationship. Mastering this idiom required not just saying “y’all” and “yes ma’am” and “might could;” not just throwing and catching and spitting. It required frowning, and keeping the rules secret, and saying you would fuck her. It required finding smaller boys and making them say it too.

For decades, when I would meet a woman, I would see the eyes of those boys looking at me, checking to see how I was looking at her. I would feel shirtless and skinny, judged. I would feel the urge to project that vulnerability onto her, knowing that I had the power to do that, and that other boys would be proud of me.

I would ask myself:

Would I fuck her?

Did I still have a reputation?

I know now what these words mean. But I wish I could make them foreign again.