Run Jane, Here Comes Dick

 @copyright 2020/Mike Consol

Boys scare me.

My body tells me that I want them. My mind tells me something very different, that they’ll hurt me. Perhaps badly.

I shouldn’t say boys, because most of them are full-grown young men — at least physically. I’m a sophomore at Villanova University studying history. I picked Villanova partly because it’s in Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital, home to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

I’m a very observant person and I’ve noticed this about men: Even the ones who want be good men have passions that overwhelm them, and it makes them do indiscriminate or short-term things. The history-lover in me thinks about Jack Kennedy and the parade of women secretly spirited into the White House. He was a great man in many ways, but the history books tell how President Kennedy made a travesty of his marriage and dishonored his wife.

I don’t believe President Kennedy was a bad man, but he did bad things when it came to women, and that’s the problem. Many of the males on campus are good men who are capable of doing hideous things. Sometimes its because of the drugs. Sometimes too much alcohol. Mostly it’s hormones. The girls take drugs and drink too much also, but they don’t lose physical control like the boys. It the testosterone thing.

The girl next door has a boyfriend and I can hear them through the wall. She’s in there whimpering, and not in a good way. It sounds like she’s trying to withstand the pain, trying to make him happy at her own expense. It’s a full-on assault. Whenever it sounds like she can’t take it anymore he tells her some breathless lies about being in love with her. I feel like calling the campus police.

The next morning she looks bedraggled and slow-walks to class.

Even so, my body keeps ripening and wanting.

I have a friend, her name is Laura, and she took birth control pills but didn’t use any condoms during sex with her “boyfriend,” who she thought was being monogamous. Now Laura has herpes.

Mother wasn’t much of a help either, handing off anti-sex newsletters throughout my high school years. “Shut the front door,” mother repeatedly warned. “No home invasions. Boys have got that thing they always want to use. Don’t be doing things that put an angle on that dangle, young lady.”

“Mother, I want to have children someday.”

She sat back in her chair and relaxed slightly. Then she pointed a finger at me and gave me an anticipatory scolding: “You date a boy at least five times before touching one another’s body parts, because a boy won’t wait that long unless he is really interested in something more than your body.”

I was losing my will to procreate.

Don’t get me wrong, the boys aren’t exactly circling. I’m a small, talkative woman with a husky voice and a flat chest. Not exactly a stud magnet. I’m sure they call me a spinner, though not to my face. That just makes me a spinner who came along right about the time all the boys got hot-blooded for Kim Kardashian booties.

I mean, I’m not a virgin, I lost that a few days after my senior prom and burned like a hot spike and things got really messy too. The boy on top of me had become possessed and seemed to be having a non-stop grand mal seizure, so empathy was the last thing on his mind. By the time he was done there was cherries jubilee in my bed.

My mom would die if she knew.

I dated a boy for a while. He was in one of my classes and we studied together and kissed. This kid was tall and had an Adam’s Apple straight out of the Garden of Eden. It didn’t last long because I kept resisting his sexual advances, and he didn’t like that. He accused me of being frigid, and then he told me I was being selfish. He even tried to convince me that my vagina would permanently close-up if it wasn’t used.

“I’ll finger myself,” I told him.

Another guy I tried dating started kissing too aggressively, the kind of kissing that signaled the next step would soon follow, and sure enough I caught one of his hands as it moved toward a breast. It scared me so badly it took hours before my face returned to its normal color. I was afraid he was going to be banging at my door again that night.

I got along well with one boy in particular. He had oddly narrow shoulders and compensated for that by being a good conversationalist and quite a gentleman. He was patient and didn’t push. Then it became obvious to my friends, before it ever truly dawned on me, that he was gay. We are still good friends and we talk about all the same things that my girlfriends and I talk about, but the dating has ended.

I want to find a man who is capable of being in love just once in his life, a man whose love is reserved for me and no other. I don’t want a bighorn, just a man of goodwill, listening heart and whistling wind. Someone who considers his marriage sacrosanct. Someone I can count on until the hour of my death. I know that sounds quixotic. My girlfriends say I’m unrealistic. Some don’t even want to be with the same man for life.

I’ve overheard the boys on their dates, and all they do is talk about themselves, never asking the girl any questions, completely lacking in curiosity. What do boys find so interesting about themselves? I have yet to hear one speak a good memoir.

There are lot of easy girls on campus, and they get all the boys’ attention. One of them spent the night with a pre-med student who claimed he was doing a sleep study.

It’s not that I am especially religious, and I’m obviously not saving myself for marriage, I just want to honor my body. The idea of male classmates comparing notes about my body and scent and performance absolutely sickens me. Becoming a girl with a reputation is another risk factor. I don’t want my eventual husband to get leftovers.

Why does it seem so difficult and unnatural?

Every time I start to get comfortable with the whole boy/girl thing, something comes along to scare me. Last week it was an article in the campus newspaper, The Villanovan, that reported that as many as 27 percent of girls are sexually assaulted during their college years.

Boys scare me.

@copyright 2020/Mike Consol