Walking After Midnight

When I was a teenager, I wanted to go hang out in the pool hall like the “bad boys” did. I wanted to learn to shoot pool – and I also wanted to just be in that kind of space – but it was made pretty clear that girls weren’t allowed.

I didn’t want to hang out in the pool hall because I was sexually attracted to bad boys. I wasn’t. It wasn’t sex I was after; it was the freedom to do something like hanging out and shooting pool.

(Learning some years later that my father was something of a pool shark and could have taught me to play well made this fantasy more poignant. I could have worked my way through school shooting pool instead of making pizzas and loading trucks.)

In the chapter “Walking After Midnight” in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust,  she quotes Sylvia Plath writing in her journal at 19:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, synonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

That sums up exactly how I felt. While I read Plath back in the day, I don’t remember stumbling across this observation or realizing that she, too, understood this need, but I suspect this explains some of the tragedy of her life.

We didn’t want a romance with the likes of Jack Kerouac. We wanted to have adventures like he had. Of course, those adventures were all like the boys’ clubs in the funnies – “no girls allowed,” except, of course, as sex objects.

For me, the most frustrating thing was the idea that the only way to be a “bad girl” back in those days was sexual. And sexual wasn’t what I was looking for. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend of “The Leader of the Pack”; I wanted to just be part of the pack.

I wanted to shoot pool. I wanted to walk on my own, free. I wanted to travel.

I did end up doing some of those things.

My sister and I hitchhiked across the west, so I did some of the adventuring. We had a couple of uncomfortable rides, but it was a good trip and nothing awful happened. I’m glad we did it.

I took up martial arts. I’ve driven across the country by myself a number of times. I walk in my neighborhood alone at night.

I often say I want to do many things coded male, but not to be a man. That’s an important distinction for me.

I know some women who, dealing with the same frustrations that Plath wrote about, wanted to be boys back when they were kids, but I never felt that way. I wanted to be a girl who got to do what the boys got to do.

This is why I don’t think that all the women throughout history who dressed and even lived as men were trans men. While I’m sure some of them were, I suspect others were women like me who wanted the freedom men had and could find no other way of getting it.

While a lot of the women I know who shared my desire to do things supposedly limited to the boys were lesbians, many of us were also straight. This desire for certain kinds of freedom has little to do with sexuality, though of course part of the freedom accorded to men has allowed them to indulge in casual sex while forbidding the same to “good girls.”

I’m pretty sure that a lot of things that people want to do in life have nothing to do with their sexuality or their gender assigned at birth.

I so clearly remember the ache I felt when I realized that I’d never get to be a teenager hanging out in a pool hall. It was very different from the mix of sexual desire and romantic fantasy I felt about a couple of boys I knew in high school.

It wasn’t about love or sex or romance; it was about who I wanted to be in the world.

It still is.