Member-only story
I Once Kicked a Boy in the Balls, and I Had No Regrets
If I were in the same situation now, I might even do it again
At first, I found the attention flattering.
Like most girls of my generation, I’d been told that when boys were mean to me, I should take it as a compliment. It meant they secretly “liked” me, but they lacked the emotional maturity to express their true feelings. Poor things.
Of course, it was up to us girls to do the emotional labor of interpreting the taunts and insults as unrequited love.
Even though I was a seventh-grader and the two boys who were taunting and insulting me were lowly sixth-graders, they were popular lowly sixth-graders. The fact that they had singled me out, that they had dedicated sequential recess periods to following me around the yard — well, as I said, at first I found it flattering.
The boys, whom I’ll call Jake and Matt, had heard through the grapevine that a friend of a friend had fallen for me — hard. We had met at my friend’s birthday party, then again one Sunday morning when I accompanied her to church. He asked for my phone number, and then, to my horror, proceeded to leave a message on my family answering machine asking if I would like to accompany him to the comic book store.
Luckily, my grandparents were taking care of me that week, which spared me the humiliation of a parental interrogation. My grandma just said, “He sounds like a nice boy.”
He did indeed seem nice. I found the attention flattering, just as I would later find the attention from Jake and Matt flattering, just as I found any and all attention from boys flattering. At 12 years old, I was already using male attention as a barometer by which to measure my own self-worth.
And unlike Jake and Matt, the boy in question actually had the maturity and confidence to openly express his affections.
But truth be told, I wasn’t really all that into him. He had blonde hair and freckles, just like me, which struck me as oddly incestuous. I never did end up accompanying him to the comic book store.
Still, word got around. In our small, insulated middle school, it was a Big Deal that an outside boy, an unknown entity…
