“I’ve read this script and the costume fits, so I’ll play my part…”
This line from one of my favorite Lumineers song haunts me. There are so many amazing things about the openness that the Internet has brought to our lives. But yet, many of us still stepped into roles that were handed to us. Not custom designed. Optional, but not easy to avoid. Writing your own script requires a lot of energy, and to some degree, a significant amount of charm, talent or privilege.
The song is set in the past, but it is still true today, in 2021, that avoiding the “normal route” is not a simple matter. I am absolutely delighted to see more openness about sexuality, from self-defining identities, to parsing out sexual versus romantic attraction, and the broadening of gendered constructs. But the “script” many of us were handed looked like this:
{Girl, at school}
Random nosy person: “Hey, which boy do you like?”
Girl: “huh? I guess Adam, because he lets me borrow his eraser all the time and is nice about it.”
“Well, do you want me to tell him you like him?”
Girl: “I dunno, why?”
“Well, because then he could be your boyfriend?”
Girl: “What’s that for?”
“Well, you want boys to like you, so that one day you can marry one of them.”
“It’s important to get a good one, and you’re smart and not terrible to look at and skinny so…probably should get started.”
Girl: “What if I don’t like any boys that much? What if I’d rather read?”
“You will want a boy. And if you don’t pick one early, all the good ones will be gone. And if you don’t get married, what will your life be about? You want to have a family, right?”
Girl: {ponders loneliness without a family, the only thing she’s ever known} “Yeah, I do.”
“Let’s tell Adam you like him, because even if he doesn’t like you, maybe someone else will and this could make them jealous.”
{End scene, but oh the other variations on this we could script — the competitiveness of women for perceived good male scarcity, the idea that everyone…
