Submissive Forever

To understand why I felt this way, I tried to see the world through the eyes of myself as a young boy growing up in a big city in the 1950's. I came up with an astonishing conclusion. Females, at least in that era, dominated the world of children.

The most obvious dominant female in a young boy's life is, of course, mom. Leaving all the Freudian bullcrap behind, it's fair to say that mom was the more visible parent. She was there during the child's waking hours. Dad went off to do this thing called "work" and was there during the few hours between dinner and bedtime.

If you were lucky enough as a boy to have a dad who had a blue collar job, you could at least identify with what he did especially if it were something exciting as construction, or driving a truck. If dad worked in an office, whatever he did was probably beyond your comprehension and therefore unimportant even if he were the CEO of the company.

What was important was what went on in your universe, and by and large, that meant the house. Mom ruled the house. As far as any young boy knows, existence would cease without mom. Without mom, there would be no warm clothing. She bought it, she washed it, and she sewed it when it got ripped.

Without mom, we would starve to death. Gone are the days when the men of the tribe went out, clubbed a Woolly Mastodon to death, carved it up and dragged it home. The hunter-gatherer of the 1950's was mom! Not only did she procure our sustenance, she prepared it. She magically knew when we were hungry and fed us.

Without mom, we would have probably perished in the wilderness known as the street. It was cold out there and she clothed us. It was hostile out there and she protected us. We sustained wounds in our battles with playground equipment, and she healed us.

I don't know how this scenario plays out in today's world where mom is a lot less visible, and dad is often not visible at all.

The rest of a boy's world is also female dominated. I cannot recall ever having a male babysitter. I've never even heard of such a creature until my own boys were growing up. It was a lot easier to convince them that he was there to "hang out with" than to watch them. Nonetheless, most of the childcare today is still done by females, either the local high school girl or grown women in a daycare center.

My large city background also leant itself to female domination. I lived on a block full of tenements. There were easily 400 or more children living on the same acre as me. In those days, everyone played in the street, and although moms were poking their heads out windows like prairie dogs in a vertically flipped world, most of the immediate leadership and supervision of the children playing was done by girls.

Play groups typically consisted of close to two dozen children of various ages from toddler to pre-teen. There was something about middle school age that caused kids to leave the group to be with friends in far away places like the park three blocks away. For some reason, boys migrated out of the pack earlier than girls. This is true in all mammals that herd. The females and juveniles stay with the main body of the herd, and the young males and bucks take up defensive positions on the perimeter.

So, the older children in the group were girls about 12-13 years old. They seemed to like being in charge and telling all the younger kids what to do. These girls determined what games the group played, and being girls picked games based on their gender. Stickball and basketball were for boys who were old enough to leave the group.

We kids played tag and hide-and-seek (two of the few active games), but had a fair amount of playing house, and doing a lot more sedate activities like drawing pictures with chalk on the street, playing "red light - green light," "Simon says," and other well-regulated games. Very often we just watched the girls jump rope (sometimes we were convinced to turn the rope) or watch them bounce a ball back and forth.

This is probably one reason why boys tended to leave the group as soon as their independence allowed it. There were more fun things to do.

Moms approved of their (or other's) daughters being in charge. They could delegate some of the maternal duties to these girls so they could do housework or watch soap operas. So, the girls had almost as much power as mom did. You minded the girls and your mom backed them up.

The female dominance in the group was self-reinforcing. Girls are more sociable (clannish) than boys, and when there was delegation of a task, they usually sided with their own gender and told another girl to do it. In this way, younger girls were trained in leadership, and prepared to take over the group when they got older.

One task, which was as close to a sexual experience as any of us got at that age, was to take younger boys to the bathroom. Nobody wanted to take a break from playing to go inside to the bathroom. Girls didn't have a choice; boys had an option. The option was an alleyway (about 18 inches wide between two buildings). If a boy "had to go," usually one of the lead girls would appoint an older girl to take the child to the alleyway. Quite often the boy's kid sister or other girls who were interested, would accompany him.

This wasn't really an erotic experience. Between toddlerhood and grade school, kids have little sense of modesty. I think adults teach us to be ashamed of our bodies. Older boys, who did not have to be escorted, made more discrete use of the alleyway, but didn't much mind that there were girls playing at the entrance who could be looking in. The girls for their part, were pretty much OK with the situation. Every one of them knew what boys looked like before she got to grade school, so that curiosity was satisfied.

I can vaguely remember my sister (2 years older) and my cousin (6 months younger) taking me to the alley once. Both girls watched me pee, and that was it. I thought nothing of it at the time, and it still doesn't do anything for me. The impressions came later as I started to develop my own sense of modesty. I was not personally embarrassed, but I felt shame on behalf of the little boys who still underwent this "indignity." The two most impressive parts of these events were that it was all accepted as the way things were by both the boys and the girls, and that the girls knew what we looked like and we didn't know what they looked like. They knew something we didn't know, and "I know something you don't know," is the childhood equivalent of "Knowledge is power."

However all this pales to insignificance when it comes to school. School is the be all and end all of a child's existence. Again, the authority figures were all women. Men in primary education were practically unheard of in the 1950's. Teaching at this level is still primarily a female occupation. For some of us, we had those dominatrices-in-black: nuns. Not only did these women have authority over us kids by virtue of age, position and our parents' consent; they had no less backing than God himself. "Sister said," had almost as much authority as a papal edict. What sister said was law and indisputable.

I will not argue whether female teachers show any favoritism towards girls. I just don't have the data to do it. What I will argue is that the institution of education is biased in favor of girls. Think about it. What skills are most important in grade school?

Girls excel at language skills - reading and spelling is highly valued. Girls excel at fine motor coordination - penmanship and art is important at the lower grade levels. Girls excel at cooperation - playing nicely with other children is part of "conduct."

Boys excel at large motor coordination, but are penalized if they use it in the classroom. Boys excel at recess, but that subject isn't graded. Boys are physically stronger in the gym, but girls are judged by a different standard. They have separate sports and are rated against other girls and do no compete with the boys in this one area where they are temporarily inferior. I say temporarily since most girls have their growth spurt two to three years sooner than boys, so for a while they are also physically superior to boys as well.

Boys are more competitive than girls, but this is seen as being aggressive, and "bad" conduct.

Before you cite mathematics as a boy-dominated subject, let me remind you that in the lower grades, it's not mathematics; it's arithmetic. Girls excel at rote memorization tasks such as learning addition and multiplication tables.

So for the better part of their waking day, boys and girls are incarcerated in an institution that says "good girl" or "good boy" for doing girl-like things, and sends you to the principal's office for doing boy-like things. It's fairly easy to come up with the concept of "Girl = Good. Boy = Bad."

From my discussions with other males who claim life-long submissiveness, I found that we all shared one common feature: a strong sense of inductive reasoning as a child. We could all make a picture out of apparently unrelated pieces. Perhaps all of these "clues" went over the heads of other boys.

The female advantage disappears by the time boys and girls get to high school. There, it matters that a boy can throw a football, or hit a baseball. Admittedly, boys' athletics gets better funding and better press at this level. There are more male teachers at the high school level. The abstract things that dad does at work are now becoming more understandable. Children become more materialistic at this age: have to have the clothes, have to have the status symbols. Dad makes the big bucks that make this possible; mom doesn't. If she works at all, it's for the "extras" around the house.

Before you send off a flaming email, telling me how far off the target I am, remember that I am talking history here - please grant me that some things have changed in 50 years.

That the adult world is male dominated is undeniably true. However, by the time a child attains adult status, the formative years are over.