Why do I have to set the table if the boys are still playing? Why do I have to go with mom to the supermarket if he isn’t? Why can’t I jump around in the park with a skirt on? Why can’t I play with them? Why can’t I eat more cake? Why can’t I start boxing? Why can’t I stay out as late as those boys do? Why should I have to be nice? Why should I have to be pretty? Why should I leave space between my back and the chair when we’re sitting at restaurants? Why can’t I stay up past my bedtime to watch football? Wait, why do I have to be a girl again?
“He needs to eat more so he can get stronger!”
But who will actually need to fight the most?
At six years old, my most prized possession was a small—and strategically very weak—deck of Pokémon cards, courtesy of my older brother. The Pokémon market was intense in those days, I must say. In my primary school, people were literally biting each other over the ownership of certain cards. At some point, we were forbidden from indulging in such activities, because it started street fights. Just showing your face and asking people to deal you in was quite a risky move. You were potentially laying down the lives of your monster babies.
My preferred team of pocket monsters, as I’ve mentioned previously, had been acquired solely through my older brother. The cards I’d begged for—and eventually obtained—had been selected by yours truly on looks alone. My babies slayed every cuteness competition, but they proved useless during the actual games. Until, I was graced with my very own Gyarados card. At long last, I was able to win some battles and thus grow my deck of Pokémon.
The rules, no matter how cruel they must’ve felt at times, were as follows: if you lost three rounds in a row, your opponent was welcome to take any card they pleased from your deck. If you were going up against trusted friends you could set some boundaries for the cards you were emotionally attached to. It was also common courtesy to let rookies down easy, but usually their cards had very little value anyway.
As my reputation in the Pokémon fight scene was growing, I started to face off with boys from grades above mine. Audacity sometimes comes in the form of scrawny little boys. In this instance, “Audacity the Second” had planned out in his little nut head that stealing my cards was the only legitimate course of action for him, considering I was a girl, and “girls don’t know how to play anyway.”
Oh hell no I wasn’t giving anything to him. It wasn’t even so much the humiliation of the situation in general that I wanted to avoid. It was that, if this little boy succeeded in stealing my cards, my older brother would never let me live it down, ever. Inevitably, “Audacity the Bodacious” started trying to use force to steal my cards from me, so I punched him square in the face—I’d already seen Rocky with my dad, which was educational enough to convince me I could do it too. At this time in my early life, I was a goody two-shoes, so the second his nose started bleeding, I felt like passing out. I ran and hid in the girl’s bathroom for a while. Then the bell rang. I was frozen in place. Shaky hands and all. Had I really broken his nose? How could I know for sure? I’m not a doctor? If I had broken it, did that make me a criminal? Was I going to go to jail? What was mom going to say?
Well, as it turns out, “Audacity the Squirmy Boy” had swallowed what little crimson, salty pride he could, stuffed both his nostrils with toilet paper and mayhaps for the very first time in his life: kept his mouth shut. He didn’t say a word to anyone, he was too ashamed to have been physically hurt by a girl.
So, I got away with it, because really, if you can bet on anything, it would be that a man’s ego goes hand in hand with audacity. Yeah, I got away with it, because I’m a girl.
I wholeheartedly believe that my brother would physically gag if I ever called him a feminist. Little did he know, he contributed immensely to shaping my spirit in that regard.
What’s the ultimate counter-move to mansplaining at bars? Growing up with an older brother who worshiped the PSG and bullied you into knowing offside rules like the back of your hand.