Scouting not for Boys

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.