Inauspicious Introductions to the All-Male Peer
Group

      First impressions can be lasting. Often they set the stage for a
person's future orientations toward a particular person or situation. This
would certainly appear to be the case as far as the all-male peer group
is concerned. The following interview segment can be considered
representative:

     "Before I started school I don't remember ever being lonely. I usually
     had companions, but they were usually girls. I didn't think anything
     of it actually. There was this one little girl I used to play with all the
     time when I was three and four years old. In fact, I guess I played
     with her until we were both about ready to start school. She was
     the same age as I was, and we enjoyed being together. But our
     mothers were beginning to get rather nervous that we should be
     with kids of our own sex. I know my mother was really nervous
     about my being with this girl all the time. So one day about a week
     before I was supposed to start kindergarten she takes me to this
     house a few blocks from where we lived. And I remember there
     were a lot of boys my age there. I remember they were running
     around on the lawn, screaming at each other and knocking each
     other down. One of the kids had a football, and he threw it at me
     hard. I was just standing there with my mother, and I practically
     shit in my pants! She was pushing me to join in, and she was saying
     things like 'Doesn't that look like fun!' and 'Isn't that fun?' and 'Why
     don't you run after them and join in?' and 'See, Billy is here! Why
     don't you join him?'

     Well, I was just five years old at the time. And I had never known
     fear before. But boy! I really felt fear watching these kids! In retro-
     spect, I guess what really bothered me was this idea that what I was
     watching was supposed to be fun! Jesus! I mean I might just as well
     have been watching a pack of wild tigers at play! I mean it was like
     I was watching a totally different species of animal! That's how
     detached I felt. Even though I was only five I realized right then
     and there that I was a different breed of animal than these kids I
     was watching. And I didn't know how to convey to my mother that
     this stuff they were doing didn't look anything like what I believed
     to be fun! My mother started to get really angry that I didn't want
     to join in. And it took several of the other mothers there to convince
     her not to force me--that I wasn't ready.

     And I wasn't holding on to my mother's hand either. Even at that
     age I wasn't comfortable with my mother. I remember I reacted by
     backing farther and farther away from both my mother and the kids
     who were kicking each other and knocking one another down. I just
     wanted to go off by myself and find my girlfriend to play with.

     Actually I was looking forward to starting school because I thought
     the kids at school would play nicely--you know, games like hide-
     and-seek, and hopscotch, and other games I played with my girl-
     friend. When I finally did start school I realized the very opposite
     was true. And I became more and more envious of the girls with
     each passing day because I felt I belonged with them. They were
     doing the things I liked to do while every minute with the boys was
     like bloody hell." (20-year old love-shy man.)

      The foregoing can be considered quite representative of the early
peer group experiences of love-shy men. American society expects boys
to play with boys, and girls to play with girls. And it expects the two
different gender-segregated peer groups to engage in entirely different
constellations of play activities. It further expects children to pursue
their "gender-appropriate" play activities with gusto and enthusiasm.
For boys especially, "rough and tumble" play is expected to be viewed
as "fun".
      The problem, of course, is rooted in the untenable assumption that
children of a particular gender can and should be encouraged to fall into
the same mold. Simply put, most parents and educators believe in forc-
ing square pegs into round holes, and in standardizing human person-
ality into two different categories: male and female. I believe that chronic
love-shyness along with a lifetime of loneliness and social isolation con-
stitute part of the price that is intrinsic in this traditional and unchal-
lenged way of doing things.
      As a case in point, each of the 500 men studied for this research
was asked to react to the following statement:

      "When I was six or seven years old, just watching boys partake in
      "rough and tumble" type play activities scared me to death; I resented
      any expectation that I try to join in; I wanted just one or two close
      friends who would play gently and with no chance of anyone getting
      knocked down or hurt in any way."

      Among the older love-shy men, fully 79 percent indicated that the
statement had been true for themselves. Among the younger love-shy
men the analogous figure was 67 percent. On the other hand, nobody
among the ranks of the self-confident non-shys felt that the statement
had ever been in any way true for themselves.
      In a related question I asked for reactions to the statement: "When
I was a child in elementary school, being knocked down by one of my
peers was one of my greatest fears." And here again, fully 87 percent
of the older love-shy men indicated "yes, this was true". And among
the younger love-shys, 73 percent similarly indicated that the statement
had been true for them. In contrast, only 19 percent of the non-shys
said that the statement held any truth for themselves.
      In sum, the research data I obtained for this book strongly suggest
that there is a strong and direct relationship between (1) extent of fear
and apprehension upon first coming face-to-face in early childhood with
an all-male peer group, and (2) degree or severity of love-shyness in
adulthood. Some children take to the all-male peer group and the "rough
and tumble" almost immediately, as soon as they are introduced to it.
For these fortunate souls it is a matter very much like that of introducing
a duck to water. The all-male peer group together with the "rough and
tumble" is their "natural" mileau. For other youngsters this mileau is
foreign and unnatural. Because this latter group of youngsters represents
nonconformity from the "mainstream" expected course, there is a tend-
ency to "see" them as being "homosexual" or "sick" or "neurotic" or
just plain negative and uncooperative. In most cases such "nonmascu-
line" boys are none of these things! Homosexuality, for example, has to
do with erotic and romantic directionality; it has nothing at all to do
with recreational play interests and proclivities. And as for neuroticism,
there is mounting evidence that society creates neurotics as a result of
its insistence that all people of a particular category (e.g., boys) must fit
into a certain interest and activity mold.
     I believe that to the extent that we create options for children--to
the extent that we afford them a choice of more than just one type of peer
group, to that extent we are likely to begin observing a sharp dropping
off in the incidence of incipient neuroticism, and probably in homosex-
uality as well.
     I think one further point may be in order pertinent to the above
case interview segment. Throughout my years of conducting interviews
for this book I observed that love-shy men appear to have unusually
rich and detailed memories of their early and middle childhood years.
In fact, love-shy men are often able to recount in considerable detail
incidents that had transpired long before they had even entered
kindergarten.
     In stark contrast, non-shy men do not appear to have anywhere
nearly such rich and detailed memories of early childhood events. Many
of the non-shys had difficulty recalling events as recent as their junior
high school days, much less events of early childhood. In essence, the
unusually sharp and detailed memories of the love-shy may be due in
part to their unusually high degree of introspectiveness. But more impor-
tantly, such detailed memories may simply reflect their very low inborn
anxiety threshold. Again, Eysenck's work has shown that introverts and
low anxiety threshold people tend to condition (learn) responses far
more deeply, thoroughly, and intractably than more advantaged people.
Thus, the fact of not forgetting early childhood memories might simply
be a reflection of this tendency on the part of inhibited people to con-
dition deeply and permanently. Indeed, it probably also reflects their
inability to "shake off" bad memories.