I Became “One of the Boys” for One Saturday Night, and Here Is How I Felt

One moment, he hesitated when I told him I’d come along to his “boy’s night” the in the heat of one early summer Saturday night. I was baffled and fascinated: “why not?” In my mind, I was going to meet his friends and share some good times together.

“It’s ‘boy’s night’ you know? It’s Saturday!” Fists were thrown in the air.

He shrugged, and his old letterman jacket hugged his shoulders tighter. Some of his friends walked toward us and we waved and smiled. I was soon to be the only woman in the room, and I am eager for an unknown reason that stirred my stomach.

He shook his head slightly and said with a chuckle: “I am not fully responsible on any shocking factors you might experience, you know.”

Walking fast, I followed his steps: “Well, I am just curious. I’m sure it’ll be fun.”

The next moment I was in a room with his friends where people downed cans of beer and sang with a guitar. I sat down, listening intently, and noticed that there was a dildo on the floor and started laughing. Every boy laughed with and suggested that we invent a game where we throw it toward the ceiling where we will stick. There were howling, laughing, and a lot of indistinguishable sounds that made my head spin.

This is so much fun, I thought. I participated in the game and noticed that I was no good. The dildo sprung downward as it touched the ceiling and landed back onto my hands, the shaft was bent over. We all burst into laughter and he said: “she’s never going to talk to me again after this night, but it’s cool, we’re cool.”

I wondered why.

“… and do you ever realize that it’s much harder for boys to transition into girls because they must tape their dicks back like that, instead of just adding a new one?” He pointed at the dildo and imitated a knife with his hand. A wave of unrestricted laughter took me out of my element.

“it’s just easier to be a sissy guy than a manly girl, because it bet it fucking hurts to have to do that.” His friend chimed in.

I froze, and I did not know what to say. So, my words trickled to the back of my head, silenced, in the form of stream of consciousness. Maybe I was out of place. Maybe they are being insensitive. Maybe they are using insensitivity to de-stress from the week, today, a Saturday, during nighttime, as their minds roam and their thoughts come out to play. But I could not imagine riding that high as every other boy in this room, because I had no idea what that high felt like to begin with. The dildo slowly sprung back into shape and the game resumed.

The rest of the night was filled with brotherhood, comraderies, and gut-spilling in various forms. We lounged around and watched vines, stand-up comedy, and recordings of people doing dumb things on the internet. Transphobic comments persisted, and stories of their sex lives were told crudely. This was the night that they counted their conquest in a way that affirmed their masculinity and solidified their feelings of togetherness.

They were rough, hearty, unfiltered, and daring. I took his hand as I lounged closer to him and he shook mine off. I suddenly realized that I was in no place to break his image for the night. The image of toughness and championship. The image of being one of the boys and no one else.

I pulled him aside, and to his surprise I said: “I really enjoyed boys night, it really taught me a lot.” What I didn’t expose to him were the knots in my heart that continued to bother me in the coming days, leading up to him and I’s ultimate falling out.

I retained and recorded my feelings. Feelings that Saturday night was an insulated space for decompressing emotions and thoughts, for these men who felt that their shared norms were silenced daily. Sharing was not only a sport, but a form of pinpointing their identities and expressing them to people who relate, or appear like they relate.

And by infiltrating in this process, I was able to feel even more out of place from the whole concept, and I saw that as a good thing. I’d rather that Saturday existed for the boys as a place where they can be honest, than cutting it all off altogether, because being upfront is the only way we could bring about change in our own daily actions.

Or is “Saturday’s For the Boys” an inherently problematic and harmful tradition that should be done away altogether?

“I take no responsibility in any of the shocking factors you may experience” and I marked his words.

The boys felt like their accountability and responsibility were waived and shoved aside on Saturday nights, and that was enough for people to keep recycling it as a persisting tradition, without realizing that their male privilege inherently gave them the opportunity to do so on normal weekdays, too. Saturday nights are for the boys, and so what? How do we make Saturday nights a time of helpful growth while letting out stress, and how do we hold one another accountable by examining the problems in our language, biases, and “boyhood”?