Pam: Innocence and Experience

 

I took a Blake course in college in 1987 and read this. At the time I was still enthralled by the religion of Experience.

This is a painful post to write.

Thinking about living on Ferndale when I was three years old, tiny memories surface. I realized yesterday I had forgotten about Pam.. I remember her last name, which was very distinctive but I'm not going to mention it her as it's not important. 

Pam lived across Furman Drive from us, in a small one-story house similar to ours. Our detached garage looked directly at her house. Maybe it was a duplex like ours. I could check on Zillow but I don't care enough. I came to assume that everyone else lived in a proper "house" but that our family situation confined us to duplexes. 

Pam was the same age as me. I don't have any particular memories of interacting with her. I don't remember being in her house. She was a girl, after all, so that was normal. My sister didn't play with her, as she was just a baby at that point. 

It would not be correct to say that I had a crush on her. I was slightly too young for that. But I do remember her with pleasantness to this day.

That would all I could say about her, and I probably wouldn't even mention her, but for the fact that years later I would encounter Pam again, in seventh grade. She was my social studies class in the afternoon block.  In fact, I think I sat right next to her. I instantly recognized her name as being that of the little girl from Ferndale Avenue. Seventh grade in Ames was the first of junior high school, and thus kids from different elementary schools were poured together again.  I saw kids I had know in other schools again after several years, which is an eternity when you are a child.

Even from that fact alone, of encountering her again ten years later, it would hardly be worth a blog post. What makes her significant in my life is seeing what became of her by then. 

To put it bluntly, Pam had an early physical maturity. At age thirteen, she had already developed an ample chest and the curves of a mature woman. That made her the target of much attention from the boys, and I was not at all immune from that kind of fascination with the girls around me, but I kept it to myself completely and would have died rather than reveal it.

Looking back, I have such empathy, even sorrow, for the girls that had to endure this kind of attention, even, and especially, the ones who might have enjoyed the attention and cultivated it. In an earlier era it might not have made a difference. Teenagers have always fooled around. 

But things had changed. By the mid 1970s society had already gone down the hole of moral decay in terms of sexuality.  Sex was being thrown in our faces everywhere in Pop Culture, in movies and television, especially in the music we listened to, which I now realize had themes that were far too adult in nature for thirteen-year-olds to absorb properly.  Sexuality in teenagers was being normalized, like it was expected. The young adult fiction we read typically included scenes of sexual initiation. I felt left out of it all, which is one of the worst things to feel as teenager.

We never had a chance, with our innocence. Much of it I think was that the Baby Boomers, who demographic weight far eclipsed those of us born after it, had already passed into their adult years and thus the culture had shifted from childhood innocence of the 1950s and early 1960s into one that celebrated sexuality openly.  Before they called our cohort "Generation X", they called us the "Baby Busters". The well-being of children, especially the protection of innocence, increasingly became a cultural afterthought, in the needs for the adults to express and pursue their sexual needs and desires. Protection of children would back in a more limited way only when the Boomers started having their own kids in the 1980s.

So unless one was raised in a strict household with strong guidance, many of us born in the late 1960s and early 1970s were thrown into the meat grinder in the worst possible way with little guidance of how to navigate the raging hormones we were feeling other than make sure not to get pregnant. Everything else was on the table. 

This horrified me at the time. I was not ready for it. I wanted to hit the snooze button on growing up and for all of us to remain innocent. Yet at the same time, knowing I could not stop this, I felt great envy of the things other kids were doing---pairing off into couples. Even if people were doing less risqué things than we might have imagined, the imagination of it was enough. I wanted to participate in it as well. For girls, so long as one was attractive enough in the right way, it was easy to be pulled into it. The boys would do all the work for you of making it happen.

For boys it was different. Some boys knew how to do it, and they were rewarded for their boldness and confidence. Those of us who did not have that, like me, stood on the sidelines as we watched the sweet girls we had grown up with being carried off like trophies after the end of the Trojan War. It was painful, degrading and humiliating. 

I hated the part of me that wanted to do that as well, even as I had spent so much of my childhood trying to learn as much as possible about the adult world, and with the normal curiosity of adult women. 

I knew I could never be like those boys. I was scared to even talk to girls. The only time I talked to girls was when talked to me first. That did in fact happen many times, even from pretty girls. I was after all, handsome and intelligent. I was very noticeable. But when girls talked to me, I pulled back from them out of fear that I might give away the most horrible secret, namely that I thought they were pretty, or had the hots for them. Everything inside me became directed towards assuring them that I was harmless and not like the boys who wanted to paw at their bodies.

It was yet another barrier I constructed to prevent anyone from knowing the real me. I felt so much shame about both my desires as well as my inability to express them. At thirteen this was not truly a problem, because one should be awkward and innocent at that age. I'm glad for this now.

But it stayed with me for years and kept me locked in a stasis of immaturity with women that, when I did act on it, was particularly clumsy and painful for all involved. In high school, I did not a regular girlfriend, although I certainly tried in my own way. That was for other guys.

 I had lots of female friends, and lots of female attention. I got drafted to go to dances, for example,---but I was essentially passive except in a few cases. If a girl wanted to make contact with me, she had to make the first move. Again, I am rather thankful for all this in retrospect. It kept me out of trouble and focussed on the connections of friendships. But I did feel left out.

Even in college, I struggled with "relationships" (uggh, hate that word) out of a sense that my desires, needs, and wants were something to be ashamed over. It wasn't until my last year of college that finally I met a girl who would change all that, and everything felt in perfect balance, but what happened at that point became its own tragedy, in part because I had already corrupted myself so much. I had thrown away too much of my innocence by then, such that my eyes were blinded to what innocence would have let me see. It left me bitter. In the years that followed I degraded myself further with a cynical mindset about sexual relations in which playing by the rules was a sucker's game. I channeled the same kind of energy I ascribed to the confident boys in seventh grade. It took years for me to find the way out of that, to an equilibrium that was in any sense healthy. 

Now that I am old, I can look back on this with detached reflection. My own story is not important. But like many things, my story is the same story as so many others, and of an entire generation. That is why I am bothering to tell you. It's only gotten worse over the years for young people, and as a result sexuality has been turned into a commodified form of slavery. The birth rate---the real indication of healthy adult sexuality---is declining so fast it is threatening to wipe out the human species with in a century. I personally believe we may have reached a cataclysmic cultural moment in regard to this. 

I want to emphasize that in no sense were my "hang-ups" about my sexuality due to a traditional religious upbringing. That's the trope one always hears. In fact, such an upbringing might have helped me greatly to have had more of that. The religion of my youth was Pop Culture, Rock and Roll, Sexual Freedom, and Feminism. It was the religion of experience over innocence. 

I don't know whatever became of Pam. I'm certainly not going to try to find out. I'd like to think she grew up, got married, had a family and became very happy.