Pigs 'R us

Which will indicate why I am so on plussed when a counselor nudges me one day and says he's heard that Laura Loessing--a girl/woman with a fully developed bust and what used to be known as bedroom eyes--is interested in me. But also why, a week later, on a camp outing on a sultry evening to Tanglewood, I so readily comply when Laura invites me to share her blanket on the vast lawn outside the concert pavilion. After a few minutes, when she stretches out beside me and begins to wrap the blanket around us, I find myself torn between astonishment and confusion. What to do now? Try kissing her? Nah, better not risk it. So for the next two hours we lie there clasped together, motionless, the music wafting over us, my heart leaping: Here I am, with a real girlfriend.

Until, that is, the next morning when, utility waiting outside her cabin to walk her to breakfast, I watch in confusion as she wordlessly brushes by me.

Eight years after that. I'm in Paris, where, armed with a journalism degree and passable French, I'm freelancing for a couple of papers back home. Which is to say, I'm doing very well, thank you, at passing for grown up; and, God knows, having gone through college in the late Sixties, I've hardly remained wholly inexperienced. I do at least as well with women as the next guy--and when the next guy is as big a jerk as some guys, I do a whole lot better.

Why is it, then, that for almost two months I've been assiduously courting a young Swedish woman I met at the American Cathedral book fair and, though we have a wonderful time, the evening always ends with nothing more that a chaste kiss? Finally I put it to her directly.

"Well...," she answered, obviously having dreaded this moment, "I really do like you. But just as a friend."

I couldn't believe it. Not that she felt that way, but that anyone past the age of 14 would actually use those words. Then, again, maybe it wasn't cliche in Sweden. "Look," I said huffily, "I've got plenty of friends already."

"Well," she said with particular Scandinavian cool, "actually, I've got another boyfriend. So if you're hoping to sleep with me, you can forget it."

I make no claim that any of this is remarkable. Male coming-of age stories are a venerable form, and lots of guys can come up with far better ones than these. A friend of mine spent his 16th summer in the South of France where, one evening at a kids' hangout, he caught a spectacularly gorgeous young woman looking his way. In short order, he was informed by one of her friends that she wanted to meet him; but you know how it is, he was shy, and had to come up with precisely the right way of making his move. By the time he finally did, she'd found other company. The girl's name was Candice Bergen.

And yet--getting to the point at hand--it is the very persistence of such tales, with their inevitable emphasis on hesitancy, insecurity, and an almost comic inability to read the opposite sex, that in the current social context makes them so meaningful. For, though most men are more than passingly aware of those qualities in themselves, in almost everything we've heard and read lately about "how men are," what we mainly hear about is our insensitivity, selfishness, and aggression.

Indeed, since the long-simmering gender conflict moved in such spectacular ashion from the checkout-counter magazines to the world's front pages, the average, garden-variety guy is apt to find himself described not merely as entirely out of touch with his emotions, but as a potential monster. Take the following, on "the mind of the rapist," which appeared in the New York Times this past December as the William Kennedy Smith trial was playing itself out in Palm Beach: "The new research suggests that only a small minority of rapists are sexual renegades driven by sadistic fantasies or hatred of women, and that far more common are men with a normal sexual orientation who rape impulsively as the opportunity presents itself, often while on a date."