I think this is an important column for crossdressers to read. Too often I hear middle-aged men who wear women's clothing harp about "feeling like a woman." While I believe that men and women are inherently much more alike than different, I also believe that from the moment of birth boys and girls live by different rules that create a gaping chasm between us. So I always welcome a chance like this to cross that great divide. It's a reminder that no matter how female I look, I can never know what it's like to be a woman in our culture.
- Yvonne
Lips Together
By Jo Page
This first appeared in the Albany weekly newspaper Metroland on June 25, 1998. Jo Page is a local resident and a frequent contributer to that publication. She writes often on the subject of gender.
When I was 13 and away at church camp for my first time alone away from home, the pastor who was in charge tried to kiss me.
No, wait, I've got that all wrong.
What happened was, we had a carnival night on our last evening. There was a kissing booth. I was much too prudish a girl to work the kissing booth, but I had a crush on the pastor. And he was working the kissing booth.
So I went up to buy a kiss.
But first I bought a kiss from another camper. I didn't want to seem overeager. Girls aren't supposed to make the first move.
The camper and I went behind some sort of wall where it was dark and he kissed me. It was the kind of kiss I might have given and gotten from my Uncle Buddy or my Uncle Chuck - chaste, quick, friendly.
But I wanted to kiss the pastor who had made such an impression on me. He had been the director of the play we had performed, and I had been the female lead. I had played Mary, a pregnant teenager, troubled and in need of guidance. The idea that I could be a pregnant teenager seemed alluring to me.
And the pastor seemed so cool. What I remember most was how he told us his wife was on the Pill. That, and I remember his beard and sandals. Plus his age - who isn't wise at 35?
So I wanted to kiss the pastor. And even though I knew that girls don't make the first move, there he was, behind the kissing booth, selling kisses.
I went up to buy a kiss.
If I had ever French kissed before that night, it was not with any skill. And with even less desire. But after I had given my chaste, quick peck - which was plenty to satisfy unschooled desire - he said to me: "Relax. Wait. It's OK." And he put his tongue in my mouth.
You see, it was clear I had done something wrong. I wasn't kissing right. I was wrong to think this was wrong. I was in a kissing booth, for crying out loud. Couldn't I even kiss right? Didn't I even know what I had come for? Was I so incredibly stupid that I didn't even know what to do and was embarrassing myself in front of - oh God, of all people - the pastor I had a student crush on? I felt like a jerk. A jerk who didn't know how to kiss.
It wasn't until seven years later that I told anybody about my kissing-booth humiliation. And the response I got from my friend surprised me: anger at the pastor; a sense of outrage that I'd been wronged; sadness that I'd blamed myself for not being worldly enough, sophisticated enough, a good enough kisser to kiss the married man of the cloth the way he seemed to think I should know how to kiss him.
Anyway, the Supreme Court has decided that school districts do not have to pay damages to students sexually harassed by teachers unless school officials knew about the misconduct and did not try to stop it.
It seems in so many ways like such a modest ruling. All girls have to do is tell, and then the school district is responsible. All they have to do is tell.
It seems so simple.
But when you are a young girl, to give away the integrity of your body - or your mind - in trade for somebody's approval doesn't seem like much. Approval seems like everything. These breasts, this tongue, these legs and all the secrets you don't know yet about yourself - they are an easy currency to dispense if the return is approval. Or safety.
In a culture that teaches girls to devalue their bodies at the same time they are debasing them in the name of beauty, sticking up for the integrity of those bodies seems like a mighty insane thing to expect.
Victoria Alzapiedi directs an advocacy group that works with adolescents on issues involving Title IX, the federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination in education.
"If students have to let school administrators, as opposed to teachers and counselors, know about harassment, they will fear the implications for themselves and the stigma among their peers," she says. "The backlash - subtle or blatant - will be a major disincentive to report a hostile sexual environment."
But the court has ruled, and Title IX takes a body blow.
It's not so easy to tell. Even 27 years after the fact, even though, I myself, am a pastor, it makes me nervous to make public the sexual harassment by a pastor whose reputation my silence preserved.
Even 27 years later, I fear that someone will think that somehow I asked for the tongue-in-the-kiss. That I was too pretty, and so it was my fault. That I should have known that men are like that, and so it was my fault. That he was a pastor and couldn't have meant any harm, so my discomfort was my fault.
But just as I had been told that girls don't make the first move, I'd also been told how wrong it was to kiss and tell.
