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2
Women’s Studies 3F: Our Bodies, Ourselves
Shortly after dinner, I sat on a couch in the sunroom and waited for the house meeting to begin. As women sauntered in and took seats, I ogled them and categorized each one into one of two groups: Group A, women that I wanted to sleep with, and Group B, women I wanted to have sex with. There is a difference.
I did not find it odd that no men had come into the room. Women at my high school were always in the forefront of student government.
As I classed them using my secret genus and species nomenclature (for instance, mammary gigantica or oral seductus), I discovered there were subcategories of women grouped by lifestyle choices or fashion statements. I wasn’t sure which, since this was new to me.
I soon discovered that Cloyne Court’s largest group of women was the earth mother type. Women like Becky, Bonnie and Mary Jewell, who wore long flowing sundresses or peasant skirts, granny glasses and Birkenstocks with home-knit toe socks. They were the Berkeley natural granola women, who cared about what food they ingested but went to Grateful Dead concerts smoking and snorting or dropping whatever drugs they could get free, cheap or barter. I saw them as anachronisms of the flower children, sixties holdovers refusing to accept the double-knit, polyester disco styles in vogue.
Mary Jewell put a slide projector on the table at the front of the room while Becky moved a clunky, portable movie screen into place. I assumed tonight’s house meeting would use audio-visuals to give us an idea of what type sauna the house should install.
Bonnie was talking to Jill, who from her rapid speaking cadence and harsh nasal voice and mordant syntax (“Smart, he isn’t!”), I assumed was Jewish. Like Lisa, who I had met earlier as she polished her toenails, Jill had a distinctive large nose and spoke like a New Yorker. I couldn’t figure out whether her dialect was regional or cultural. I was not attracted to the disguised derision in her innocent questions (“I should be happy for him with such a small shmeckle?”). She acted distant and aloof.
Sitting next to me on the couch was Cindy from the telephone switchboard. She was a punker dressed in black with pale-white skin, her hair dyed an orange DayGlo color. She sported pierced jewelry in several visible body locations. Cindy liked wearing leather jackets and studded neck chokers and fingerless gloves when she went out, but tonight she was dressed casually in a black Buzzcocks T-shirt, Army Surplus pants and black combat boots. She looked darned hot to me. I just couldn't get past the pierced nose ring. I kept staring at it when I talked to her instead of looking at her eyes.
Nonetheless, I was an equal opportunity hound dog. I had only two criteria in dating women. First, they had to be intelligent. One reason I never attempted to date Jeanette, my best friend from high school, was that she wasn’t on the same intellectual plane as I was. She didn’t know who Paul McCartney’s first band was before Wings1], and she didn’t care.
It's not that I use cultural literacy as a bellwether of intelligence, but if people don't know general history, science, art and literature, what good are they at Trivial Pursuit® parties?
That criterion was easily met at Berkeley. Everyone was intelligent, many to the point of being obnoxiously erudite. They had to be to get accepted to the University.
Second, and the harder of the two criteria was that they had to want to go out with me.
While I vowed to remain open-minded and unprejudiced, the infinite possibilities of women I wanted to lose my virginity to was growing smaller by the second. I was crossing women off my list for later liaisons for all the wrong reasons or maybe for the right reason. I was not attracted to them as a person.
Then, to my disappointment, I saw a group of women that halved my list. They were the butch-biker chicks sitting on the next couch with their lesbian lovers. They were giving me dirty looks.
These women lived at Cloyne Court with a festering blister on their shoulders. It seemed that there were a lot of them. At least, I thought so. This was the first time I had ever encountered lesbians in quantity (more than one) and quality (giving each other tongue as they sat on the couch with their arms around each other).My first impression was as stereotyped as the misogynistic, libido-driven, dumb asses they thought men were.
Why did they hate men in general? Why did they see any man’s attempt to have a friendly conversation to be a sexual come-on?
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This episode is based on a true story.
Although seventy-five percent of this memoir is factual, liberties were taken with the other twenty-five percent for plot purposes. That is where scenes were recreated from memory when they were not clearly defined in the journals written by the author from 1976 to 1980.
Individual characters are composites of several people and do not represent any one person, and the names have been changed to protect innocent people that may be guilty of indiscretions in their youth.
[1] And while I will accept The Beatles as the correct answer, the history purists among us will point out the more correct answer is The Quarryman.
