Super

When I was 5, I was Wonder Woman for Halloween.

My Daddy didn't like the Wonder Woman thing back in 1979. That was when the TV show was so popular, and I watched it religiously, before Bo and Luke Duke would soon come along.

In the store, she asked me if I was sure. I was.

My Mom's always been sort of iconoclastic, and she was confident in letting me explore my own imagination. And she always, always wins.



To me, the idea of Wonder Woman was all about the bracelets that would repel bullets, the tiara that was a potent boomerang, the lasso that made people tell the truth and that cool way Lynda Carter would spin around and magically have all her super-hero gear on, just like that, ready for action. Even more efficient than Clark Kent and his phone booth.

Sexuality is interesting at age 5. You're aware of the opposite sex. Women are provacative to you, conspicuous. Women, with their shiny long hair and their legs where the light reflect just so off their shin bones.

You have crushes on your kindergarten teachers.

You don't understand exactly why a woman is so fascinating. Wonder Woman had a deep-seated feminine appeal to my mind's eye that I wanted to emulate. When I was 5, girls weren't gross, nor did it seem that they necessarily had cooties. In fact, I kept multiple girlfriends all at once.

I had a fascination with gender. I was attracted to women at an early age. I saw them as these exotic creatures to ponder and explore, so thoroughly that I became one of them, I suppose. I truly didn't understand exactly what it meant to be a woman, or for that matter yet, a boy. I just knew I wasn't a girl.

Kindergartners have no concept of vagaries like intercourse. You just knew that pee-pees are strange things that you use to go potty, and that girls have to sit down to do it and that must really suck by comparison.

They say that there is a time in the womb where we are all proto-female; we are nothing more than human, before our code is set. The youngest of us are so close to that unspeakable wisdom, that oneness, of ceaseless curiousity, the benefit of just not knowing.

Perhaps my mom was wise in the ways of social and cultural development. Or she thought it was adorable and cute and sweet and all those things women like to say about kids that men cringe at. Or maybe she just wanted a laugh with her friends at my expense, which she was prone to do.

I think it was probably a little of all of them.

In any case, thanks for making it simple, guys.

You're super.