Sooey Says

My book club met at my place last night. We were supposed to discuss "Dead Girls" (my pick) but we didn't really get around to it. Much. We commented on a few of the stories, how sad they were. Figured out a couple of connecting motifs. Decided on the main theme, that sex and low self-esteem do not mix.

Lesson: If you are a girl and you have low selt-esteem, do not have sex.

Also, if you are a girl with high self-esteem, do not have sex because sex will destroy your self-esteem. You only have self-esteem because you have not had sex. Because the only boys and men who want to have sex with girls are icky. Some, are even - serial killers.

So stay away from men, girls. Especially you girls with low self-esteem. Girls with low self-esteem only attract creeps. You should know this already, of course, if you have low self-esteem - that you will only attract creeps.

Oh - and if some guy says he wants to take you to a party and you are 15 and he is 30? DO NOT GO!!! Your self-esteem will end up in a trash can along with your dead body.

The big thing that I had missed when I read "Dead Girls", however, is the "disappearing" thread running through all the stories. That a girl disappears in each short story, that the main drag in all the stories is Vancouver, and that the victims are all girls with low self-esteem who go on to be involved in the sex trade.

It's true. I don't read the newspapers. And the odd time when I do read a Saturday Globe, I don't read the news. Just book reviews, fashion articles and opinion pieces. So I didn't really get it until our book club meeting last night when one of our members who DOES read the newspapers said, "It's loosely based on the Picton victims, I think."

Oh. Well. That is sad. And then I really didn't feel like discussing the book. None of us did. We commented a bit about one story where the girl, a little girl, has an extra tooth behind her front teeth that itches her sometimes and she gets in the habit of asking her father to rub it. Which he does. Then he realizes, that she realizes, at least one of them is enjoying the rubbing in a sexual sense.

Of course, she being the little girl, she is blamed. He never speaks to her again.

That story, the father, reminded me of a lot of middle-aged men when I was growing up. They'd interact with little girls, playfully, of course, but let me tell you, having been one, little girls are sexual beings by age 8. We know what feels good. We just don't know why, how to make it happen consistently, and that we probably shouldn't get too overt about it.

At some point, we must show signs of being overt about it, though, because suddenly, middle-aged men react differently to our little girlness. They start reacting to us like they react to feminists in the news.

Like they really, really, really don't much care for us at all.

At least, that's what the culture I'm from was like. W.A.S.P. culture. It's different now, though. That's because women today know perfectly well, in spite of Macleans and Ken Whyte and all of these middle-aged men on the right who think modern society has sexualized little girls in some way - that it has been ever thus. Except, this time around, we make sure nobody blames our daughters for what are perfectly natural feelings of sexuality. Whenever they start noticing them. There really is no specific age.

But, I'm leading up to speaking, of course, about the Conrad Black, then Asper boys years in which everything old isn't new again because everything old is sacred and everything new is trash. The neo-con blowhard years which are now in retreat but not before we were graced with a Maclean's cover story a couple of months ago featuring a twelve-year-old girl supposedly tarted up by her mother to look like a middle-aged man's fantasy with the accompanying headline: Why are we dressing our daughters like skanks?"

Or something. I forget the exact wording. Although I do remember the word "skanks" jumping out at me. And not in a good way, either.

I don't really know what the point of the cover was. To titillate the paedophile readership of Macleans? To point a wagging finger at the feminist readership of Macleans - all two of them? Who knows? All I know is that if Ken Whyte et al don't know that twelve year old girls are sexual beings who dress themselves the way they want, then I guess he doesn't spend much time with twelve year old girls.

Which is probably for the best.

Myself, I remember wearing the shortest mini I could when I was in grade five and nine years old because I wanted to attract the attention of our teacher, the lucky Mr. Goodbar. It took some doing, too, because he didn't seem to care or notice the pretty ruffled panties I wore which I hoped he would appreciate when I raised my hand to write on the board.

Sadly, all he noticed was that I had spelled "embarassed" wrong. "Not, 'embareassed'," he chuckled. "Embarassed." God. It was so humiliating. A classroom of ten year old boys taunting me at recess: "Let's see Sooey bare-assed. Let's see Sooey bare-assed. Let's see Soeey bare-assed."

Retarded dorks.

I dunno. Is it possible one of them grew up to be Ken Whyte?