Dave and the tortoiseshell analogy
9:04 a.m. -- 2009-05-22
Dave, a good friend of mine, left school as soon as was decently possible, preferring to be apprenticed to a firm of motor mechanics. He was one of those people that doesn't fit terribly well in the school environment.
Nowadays there's always some government initiative about vocational qualifications and such... although there's still a stigma for people who work with their hands instead of their (what? brain?). I dunno... we aren't going to solve that one today.
So Dave began to learn the trade of the motor mechanic. Little realising that by 1995, we'd all be using personal teleportation devices instead, wearing silver jumpsuits and taking entire meals in pill form.
Oh... wait.
It looks like Dave made a pretty smart move after all. He's probably earning pretty good money nowadays, if he's still in the car repair business. Only a less likely car mechanic, you'd have to go a long way to find. Well, maybe Kylie Minogue was one, as Charlene Mitchell in Neighbours. Remember how she used to be seen emerging from beneath some filthy old Holden SUV, in full makeup and with not a hair out of place, but with one cute little blob of grease smeared on her cheek?
Hmm. Thing is, Dave had about as much muscle as Kylie Minogue. And in terms of mechanical know-how, he was about as clued-up as our favourite Aussie soap starlet turned singer. I was the one who was good with machines, and I stayed at school and then went on to do office work, while my good friend toughed it out, wrestling with seized up machinery. I'm not criticising, but it does seem a bit perverse. It's almost as if we should have swapped lives. He was slight, and much shorter than me. Also, he had fair hair. Consequently, I suspect he'd have made a much more effective transvestite than I ever did. (Always assuming that he wasn't, of course! Despite a very touching scene in 'Billy Elliot', I don't believe most teenage guys tell their friends that they're in the habit of raiding their sister's wardrobe...)
Never mind all that. I wanted to talk about the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle bullying that goes on in an all-male environment.
One Friday evening when I met up with him, Dave told me about something that had happened in the pub at lunchtime.
(This is why I don't generally go for a lunchtime drink, perhaps...?)
One of the older mechanics dropped his pay packet onto the table: a week's wages. Then he placed two coins side by side, at the edge of the table. A 10p piece and a 2p piece. He told Dave that he could have his pay; all he had to do was prove that his penis was longer than the dimension marked out by the two coins.
Dave declined. Which was just one of several ways to lose the 'game', of course. And as I agreed with him at the time, I'd have refused, too.
The combined diameters of even the old, larger 10p coin and the 2p coin must only be something like two and a quarter inches, but... in the middle of a pub?
Ladies, it isn't just the cold that can make the male equipment shrivel; being nervous will do the trick just as well. Perhaps it's a gift from the long process of evolution: if you're stressed, an involuntary mechanism causes you to retract the undercarriage, as it were. I'm assuming that being stressed is analogous to being under threat, and if you're about to have to fight for your life, your genes are most likely to survive for another generation if you don't leave anything on display, where it can get... damaged.
Had Dave (small, barely seventeen years old and far from the most butch specimen you ever saw) attempted to win the money - which he assured me never even crossed his mind - he'd probably have been left trying to cover those two coins with something that resembled an acorn. Which, of course, would have been an even worse way to lose the 'game'. Or as he put it, unforgettably, "It would have gone right back into the tortoiseshell, wouldn't it? I thought oooh, no!"
Then there's the fact that we can't be sure the envelope actually contained the money, anyway. Would you risk a week's wages, just to get a look at an adolescent penis? (You can do a lot more than that for a lot less money if you go to the public conveniences on Hampstead Heath, right?) Alternatively, the challenger might well have had a series of side-bets going.
Or maybe he was just repeating a rite of passage that he, himself was put through? These degrading things seem to occur at various points in the male's development, although fortunately they're all over and done with by the time you're about twenty-five. (Unless you join the freemasons, I suppose.)
The thing is, it's bullying. Pure and simple. Establishing the new guy's place in the pecking order, through a series of confrontations and challenges. I find it just a little bit depressing, to see how little we've really progressed. We might wear clothes and use language, and some of us write and share abstract conceptualisations with no thought of profit or reward... but when you put a group of males together, they're still baboons, really. And females do something similar, although less crude and using subtleties that I find extremely alluring for two sets of reasons...
But we're all animals. Sitting on the fence of gender as I do, I can see how ridiculous it is... but I can't change anything.
(Shrug.)
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