Since I didn’t really feel girly growing up, I often felt more comfortable around boys than girls. I and the other tomboys, nerds, and other non-standard-issue girls had to fish for each other in a sea of judgy suburban chicks whose lives revolved around things — clothes and hair and make-up and gossip and putting down other girls — that I cared nothing about. I tried to care about some of them in high school, blowdrying my bangs straight, shopping at J. Crew and Benetton, and resigning myself to go to prom in a pink vintage dress with a boy my friends set me up with, but only because I felt like I had to to fit in.
Boys, who didn’t have strict rules about any of that, were much easier to befriend — at least, until they weren’t. That whole whiplashy period between girls and boys from age nine to 14 that confused the shit out of me (Like? Hate? Love? Huh????) , and after that, I demanded my boy-girl relationships be extremely well defined. I absolutely didn’t want anyone to like like me who I didn’t like like back, which basically meant, with my entire concept of romance drawn from Hollywood movies, love at first sight. So on the dating front, for all of high school and the first half of college, there was nary even a skirmish, as I went from unobtainable crush to unobtainable crush — or, when they were obtainable, I had no idea how to obtain them (one of my college friends literally tried to teach me how to flirt, a lot of which was just telling me to smile and make eye contact).
But if romance was an ongoing conundrum, being able to befriend boys again in college was a relief. With the guys in my frosh dorm, even the ones who seemed super dude-like were a little unusual. The surfers were also CS geeks (which in 1986 was not cool), the bros were into Bible study, and everyone else was some other kind of dork I could fit right in with. I did have to take an interest in spectator sports, but that seemed like a small price to pay for having friends who liked to joke around like I did, and shared my geeky interest in things like animation, Halloween, and scavenger hunts. My closest friends in college ended up being women who cared more about ideas and connection than how we looked, and with whom I had deeper stuff in common, but because being female meant caring about appearances, it took me longer to get to know them. Plus, I had started to realize that, with the guys, I got a certain kind of pass. Because I was a woman, they would usually be happy to talk to me, and because they often weren’t as good at making conversation (another skill women were expected to have that men weren’t), any woman who made that easy for them was automatically in. Even in my sophomore year dorm, a savannah dominated by roaming packs of dude-bros, I found most of the guys easier to befriend than the women. The compromise this time, though, was that I had to be able to take shit kind of like but not exactly in the way that they gave it to each other. For instance, after I made the mistake of telling one of them that I’d hated being called “Betsy Wetsy” as a kid, I had to be amused when they chose to call me “Wetsy” — a nickname that had obvious other connotations as an 18-year-old. I also had to get used to them either ignoring me or interacting with me in ways that put on the correct show for their male friends when those male friends were around, in a way that I’d traditionally thought of as “very high school,” but proved difficult to grow out of for some. But I still decided, somehow, that it was worth it.
Until it wasn’t. My belief in my ability to be one of the guys equipped me well for the film industry, even as that same belief started to unravel. At some point during my first year of film school, I went to see Goodfellas with a group of new bros I’d befriended, and then out for a beer at McSorley’s (if you know the place, you know exactly the type of bros I’m talking about). As I sat listening to them, I had the realization that I had issues they didn’t seem to be aware of — both with Goodfellas (the beginning of my awakening to the problems with how women are treated in Scorcese films), and with their conversation. They were putting down another woman in the class for sleeping around, when all of them clearly wanted to sleep with her, and one of them actually had. It didn’t seem to occur to them that maybe I wouldn’t want to listen to that, much less join in. And the longer I listened, the more I realized that this wasn’t happening because they considered me one of them, it was because weren’t considering me at all. I started asking myself, Why am I hanging out with these people who don’t seem terribly interested in me? Do I actually like them, or do I just want to be liked by them, because I’m still trying to fit in?
Luckily (maybe because they’d never really noticed my presence in the first place?), I was able to stop hanging out with those guys but stay what I’ll call “setfriends.” This is a type of casual friendship, often but not exclusively among guys, where you’re able to spend all day working together and shooting the shit, but you don’t get close enough that it feels bad if you never see each other again after the job is over. Thanks to having established that relationship with them, I was one of the only women these guys asked to crew on their films, on which I gained a lot of experience, and setfriended more guys. That eventually led to my getting hired on independent films, which were all basically crewed by word of mouth among — you guessed it — more guys. On those sets, I was often the only woman on the shooting crew, and this was where knowing how to setfriend really came in handy. I got that I needed to work a little harder than they did to prove myself early on, and that smiling was a necessary tool rather than an expression of feeling. I knew how to brush off condescension and the occasional harassment with a look or a tone of voice rather than getting pissed off, as long as the crew ultimately treated me with respect — which I knew they would as long as I didn’t hook up with any of them during the shoot. I knew how to avoid that by going out drinking with them but leaving before things got hairy, and, eventually, letting go of any illusions I might have that maybe we could date after the job ended. That took me the longest time to get: in setlife, there would always be another job with more guys around the corner, and there was no point in getting attached. Developing that understanding was probably the closest I ever got to being one of the guys.
Because I realized, ultimately, that the guys would never see me that way. They would always try to “help” me in ways that were not helpful. No matter how many times I swore in front of them, they would still look at me when they swore and apologize. They would always expect me to listen forever while they talked and talked, without ever asking me what I thought or what I was up to, and it was best not to talk about those things anyway, because they probably wouldn’t be interested in them. Of course, “not all men,” as the phrase goes, are “the guys.” Many men my age can make conversation and have close friendships, and have learned quite a bit about issues important to women since they’ve gotten married and had kids, plus, I’m always impressed with how enlightened the millennials and Gen Z men I meet can be. And it should also go without saying (but probably won’t, which is why I’m saying it) that I both like and love the men in my life. It’s just that most of them are used to being at the center of what’s still very much a man’s world.
Maybe that’s why it’s important for me to make it clear that, in my world, it’s never going to be that way. Guys just aren’t the main characters in my life, or, by extension, in what I write. Even if I understand the way they view things — and believe me, I do — I’m always going to see things at least a little bit differently, and sometimes a lot, and that’s a feature, not a bug. Because I like them, but I’m not one of them, and I never will be, and that is something I actually really like about myself. Go figure.
I like the way you put yourself out there and the honesty in your writing
Thanks so much!