ODD MAN OUT

The Unitarian Church had a cabin for retreats in Inverness on Tomales Bay. A dozen miles away was secluded McClure’s Beach, which you had to hike to from the parking lot.

When I first went to Inverness with my eighth-grade Sunday school class, we roughhoused on the beach like little kids, playing Red Rover—plunging into each other’s lines and toppling the other team like bowling pins. But two years later there were no more games: everyone was too busy flirting, pairing off, making out. For me this change was painful. As I began hearing dirty jokes and listened to how teenage boys talked about girls, I felt powerfully that, as a female, I was no longer regarded as a person but as merely a sex object. As a child whose chief playmate had been a boy—I’d spent even more time with Wolfy than I had with Kathy—this was difficult to wrap my mind around; it seemed grotesque, and I felt profoundly demeaned. Perhaps I experienced this as keenly as I did because I also overheard my father’s off-color comments about women and absorbed how much he objectified them. A study I heard about recently showed that girls’ I.Q.s drop an average of fifteen points during adolescence—and I can’t help thinking that their internalization at puberty of society’s attitude toward women is one of the reasons.

At the same time I was troubled by the disloyalty and backbiting I began to see among girls my age, as they vied for the attention of boys. In tenth grade, the members of my tribe—plus a new friend, Rianne—started attending the Unitarian Church club for high school kids, but we quickly graduated to the college students’ club, where my friends found boyfriends. Daryl dated Larry, then Stan, Rianne dated Al, and Linda dated Bob, whom she met at one of our church retreats. Only Nikki found a boyfriend elsewhere.

Eventually, I came to feel like the odd man out, and so, for various reasons—because I was painfully shy with boys and felt sexually constrained, because I didn’t feel good about myself and didn’t like the atmosphere of competitiveness—when I was in eleventh grade, I withdrew. (To be sure, I had crushes, intense and long-lasting, but the boys I liked never noticed me.)

And here I should probably also mention how unattractive I thought I was—with my overbite, braces, acne, and “saddlebags”—physical flaws none my girlfriends had. (I remember crying about my bulging thighs one day when I studied my body in the mirror, imagining that I looked like a statue I’d seen of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh whose hips I regarded as grotesque.)