Scouting For Boys,
by Lord Baden-Powell himself. It was one of those good gift/bad gift choices.
Good for a twelve-year-old boy just entering the age of independence, written
to teach him all sorts of useless but time-consuming and distracting life
skills great for a war fought long ago in South Africa, and to create a narrative to
ease him out of childhood on the promise of competence in adventurous outdoor
situations of all sorts. A book to stimulate the imagination.
Bad because it was, after all, a book for BOYS. The
narrative spoke of courtly, gentlemanly standards of a time long gone—if it had
ever been. And it didn’t say anything useful about the kinds of stimulation
going on as puberty set in. Oh, there were some deeply coded warnings about
being clean in thought, word, and deed, and resisting temptations to self-abuse
or self-defilement, or some such activity. Nothing about his testicles,
wrestling like rambunctious puppies in his nut sac. Nothing about the dazzling
procession of erections that kept getting twisted up in his shorts. In Math
class. In Science class. In Music class. In Literature class. In Sunday School.
On the bus. On the street. On his paper route. While thinking about red-headed
Nancy. While not thinking about red-headed Nancy. No help from Lord BP himself
on that aspect of becoming fit for adulthood.
And no way to reconcile all that advice on courtesy and
clean thinking and respect for women when all his hormones were urging “Go for
it, Cowboy.” Whatever “it” might be. That was the worst part. Not having much
of a clue what “it” was, other than sniggering acknowledgement it was something
only bad girls did with bad boys. Older boys. Something older boys only smirked
about. Something to do with that live animal in his pants. He knew that much
because once, when some embarrassing story about teen pregnancies came up on
the tv, his dad—the guy who had given him Scouting
For Boys—had said, “Let that be a lesson to you. Keep it in your pants.”
By that time, it wasn’t so much the contents of his own
pants that concerned him. Not so exclusively. It was the mysterious contents of red-headed Nancy’s
pants. But Nancy was a good girl. At least, none of the bigger, older boys had
told any sniggering stories about her—not in his hearing. Not like they told
about Rachel. Rachel who missed a lot of school. Rachel who, it was
whispered—especially by the good girls-- missed a lot of school to go riding in
cars with older boys chasing something called “tail” (which seemed to refer to something way different from what it referred to in Scouting for Boys). There was something not
quite right here. Rachel who was so open and friendly and funny? Rachel who got
pretty good marks in school as easily as she seemed to have acquired a pretty
bad reputation outside of it? How could the two things be possible in one
person? Nothing about that in Scouting
For Boys.
It took rather a long time before he figured out Scouting For Boys had been written to
keep the red-headed Nancys of the world safe from ignorantly stimulated
adolescent thoughts like his had been. And the Rachels safe from the pollution
of unclean words about unproven deeds. And by then, the two of them lived in a different
city from him--the surest socio-sexual counter-stimulant of all.
No compass bearing, star-reading, track-reading boyhood skills
could close that gap.
