My Misspent Youth (10 page)

T
OY
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HILDREN

Though I had a stuffed-animal collection that rivaled the inventory of a Toys “R” Us, I was a child who hated dolls. By “hate,” I’m not talking about a cool indifference. I’m talking about a palpable loathing, a dislike so intense that my salient memory of doll ownership concerns a plastic baby whose duty among my playthings consisted solely of being thrown against the wall repeatedly and then smudged with a combination of red lipstick, purple Crayola, and, when available, spaghetti sauce. This was done in an effort to simulate severe injury, possibly even internal bleeding, and this doll, who, if I recall correctly, had eyes that opened and shut and therefore had come preassigned with the name Baby Drowsy, spent most of her time in a shoe box in my closet. This was the intensive care unit, the place where, when I could no longer stand the sight of Baby Drowsy’s fat, contusion-ridden face, I would Scotch-tape a folded Kleenex to her forehead and announce to my mother that Baby Drowsy had been in yet another massive car wreck. I would then proceed to tend with painstaking care to my thirty-plus animals, all of whom I had personally christened with names like Excellent Eagle, Mr. Nice, and Soft Koala, and who, I was entirely certain, could communicate with both myself and each other through a complex telepathy. I say complex because, even at five, I had the ability to convey my thoughts to individual animals and then conference-in others should the discussion be relevant. They could do the same when they talked amongst themselves. Eyeore could discuss the events of the day with Squiffy. Peter Panda could alert Bunny Rabbit that he had fallen behind the bed. Everyone knew about Baby Drowsy’s frequent mishaps. And none of us really cared. In the social hierarchy of my bedroom, animals ranked highest. Dolls were somewhere between dust balls and cockroaches. They were uninvited guests that gathered in the corners, something to be stomped on.

But since I was a girl, I had dolls. People gave them to me, though Baby Drowsy was unquestionably subject to the most abuse. Something about the word “drowsy” struck me as flaccid, even masochistic; it was as if drowsy was baby talk for “drown me,” and the beatings seemed to emerge out of a sense that she was asking for it. The handful of other dolls had the luck of being simply ignored. I had a Raggedy Ann, whose stuffed-animal-like properties redeemed her enough so that she would occasionally be placed next to—though never in the pile with—the dogs and bears. My mother, perhaps worried about whatever maternal instincts were failing to develop in me, spent several years trying to find a doll I might actually like. With chubby baby dolls clearly out of the question, she tried to introduce me to more sophisticated dolls, older girls in higher quality plastic, dolls with hair to be brushed and tasteful clothes to be changed. Nothing amused me. I loved my animals, furry, long-tongued creatures who were safe from the hair-braiding, cradle-rocking proclivities of playmates, some of whom had the hubris, not to mention the bad sense, to bring their own dolls with them when visiting my house. By the time I was old enough to enter into the world of Barbies, my mother’s quest to make a nurturer of me was subsumed by her feminist impulses. I was given no Barbies and received stuffed animals every Christmas until I was approximately twenty-seven.

While it might seem that my intense dislike for dolls is simply a dramatic manifestation of my intense affection for animals, I suspect that the whole doll issue is part of a larger semiotic equation, an entire genre of girlhood—and childhood in general—that I could just never get with. While I can’t say that I had an unhappy childhood, I was unhappy being a child. Just as there has not been a morning of my adult life when I don’t wake up and thank the gods that I am no longer a kid, there was hardly a day between the ages of three and eighteen that I didn’t yearn for the time when I would be grown-up. Aside from the usual headaches of being a kid—the restricted freedoms, the semi-citizenship—what really ailed me were the trappings of kid-dom: the mandatory hopscotch, the inane cartoons, the cutesy names ascribed to daycare centers and recreation programs, like Little Rascals Preschool and Tiny Tot Tumbling. Why was a simple burger and fries called The Lone Ranger? Why did something as basic as food have to be repackaged to resemble a toy? Even as a child I resented this lowbrow aesthetic—the alphabet-block designs on everything, the music-box soundtrack, the relentless kitsch of it all.

Dolls are the ultimate symbol of childhood; they are toy children. Though I realize that playing with dolls is supposed to mimic the adult act of caring for children, playing with dolls always struck me as nothing more but childhood squared, a child doing a childish thing with a simulacrum of a child. It was like some hideous vortex. Adults think it’s cute when girls burp their dolls. We buy them dolls that cry, and dolls that pee. I think there’s even a doll that spits up. Most people see this as endearing, even healthy in a biological imperative sense. I see it as an exercise in narcissism. But I suppose that says more about me than about the doll-buying public or the doll-diapering girls who are supposedly doing the thing that comes naturally to them but just didn’t to me.

I read somewhere that women who choose not to have children are more likely to have grown up preferring stuffed animals to dolls. Though I’m probably still too young to make pronouncements about my wish to forgo motherhood, I must say that, at thirty, my desire for children is all but nil. Though it’s not impossible for me to enjoy other people’s kids, my biological clock seems to reside permanently in a time zone to my west. Babies amuse me only mildly, toddlers not at all, and children of the talking, television-watching, Happy-Meal-eating variety fill me with a kind of queasy empathy. When I see a mother with her child, I identify not with the adult but with the small person who, in my mind, seems trapped in a world governed by romanticized, consumer-driven notions of childhood. I see a kid and I think to myself, “I’m sorry you have to be a kid right now. I’m sorry you have to play with Legos. I’m sorry you have to ride in the back seat.”

A psychiatrist would see this as regressive. A lot of other people would argue that childhood is about as pure as anything gets, that the preadolescent mind enjoys some kind of blissful exemption from adult concerns, and that little girls and, when given the opportunity, little boys, gravitate naturally towards dolls. Dolls, say the experts, are merely objects on which to practice the care-giving skills we need to survive as a species.

Though I can understand that, I still can’t relate to it. To me, a child with a doll is a child who has been railroaded by the trappings of childhood. She has already acquired her first accessory, an inanimate version of herself, one that possibly even requires batteries. She has already tied up one hand, already spent more time looking down than looking around. You might ask how I make a distinction between the dreaded doll and the adored stuffed animal. Why is it that I can smile at the child with a bear but always end up pitying the child with a doll? Perhaps it’s because animals are more closely connected with the imaginative world than dolls are. They are ageless, genderless, and come in colors that defy nature. To play with a stuffed panda, or, in my case, to telepathically communicate with one, is a creative act. To play with a doll is to stare yourself in the face, to gaze at an object that is forever trapped in infancy. Maybe that’s why dolls frighten me so much. Forever trapped in babyhood, they threaten the very essence of life’s possibilities. They’re my greatest nightmare come true. They never, ever grow up.

A
CCORDING TO THE
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AIRLY
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RETTY

I have always had a problem with science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. Of all the subcultures that, for various neurotic reasons, provoke my disdain, none seem to bridle me quite as much as those comprised of people who appear to have forfeited real life for something they’re likely to characterize as “a quest.” Granted, my scope is limited. My associations with people involved in fantasy games and other pagan-oriented pursuits are confined to certain members of the high school science-fiction club who wore “Question Reality” buttons and the Society for Creative Anachronism types at my college who reenacted medieval battles on the grass outside the dormitories. These groups provide what is perhaps the only example of social harassment that actually gets worse as you get older. In the high school lunch room we merely laughed behind the sci-fi kids’ backs. In college, I once stood idly by as someone poured beer out a fourth-floor dormitory window onto the velvet cape of a jouster who called himself “Leaf Blackthorn” and felt no guilt.

This wasn’t supposed to be a story about geek love. This was supposed to be a story about a group of people in northern California who practice a way of life known as “polyamory.” As any seventh grade Latin student could probably infer, polyamory means “many loves.” Polyamorous people, or “polys,” as they call themselves, love many, many people. And a poly doesn’t just love those people, he or she has sex with them, even when some of those people live in the same house and are married to still other people in that house, many of whom the aforementioned poly is already having sex with anyway.

The most public polyamorous family in the United States is called Ravenheart. They took the name Ravenheart three years ago when they were living on a remote California ranch surrounded by ravens. They also invented the word “polyamory,” combining the Greek and Latin roots for “many loves,” and it has since been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. None of the Ravenhearts are related by birth. In polyamorous terminology, they are known as “a nest,” a chosen family. Today they occupy a large house and an adjacent smaller house (which has four apartment units and often houses friends and other lovers) in Sonoma County, about forty-five miles north of San Francisco. There are three men, all heterosexual, and three women, all bisexual. They have an age range spanning over thirty years. As members of the Church of All Worlds, a neo-pagan religion based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel
Stranger in a Strange Land,
which the eldest family member, Oberon Zell Ravenheart, founded back in 1962, they are allowed to marry more than one partner via a pagan ritual called a hand fasting. And although their coupling arrangements are best outlined with a map or flowchart, a description of whom sleeps with who goes something like this.

Oberon, fifty-seven, has been legally married to his wife Morning Glory, fifty-three, for twenty-six years. In 1996, they celebrated a hand fasting with a man named Wolf, thirty-six, who just this past August formally married a woman named Wynter, twenty-one. Though Oberon and Wolf refer to themselves as each other’s husbands—“I can’t imagine life without my husband Wolf,” Oberon says—and Morning Glory and Wynter consider themselves each other’s wives, only Morning Glory and Wynter have sex with each other, although Morning Glory also has sex with Oberon and Wolf. When Wynter became an official Ravenheart three years ago, she had a brief sexual relationship with Oberon, which has since moved into what Oberon describes as a “mentor/apprentice” dynamic. Oberon also has sex at least twice a week with Liza, forty-six, who is also the lover of Jon, twenty-one. The Ravenhearts get regular tests for STDs and the most enforced house rule is that any sex occurring outside the family must involve the use of condoms.

Before I met the Ravenhearts, my knowledge of them was limited mostly to the above information. Oberon sent me biographical sketches of each family member, which explained more or less who is partnered with whom. I knew that they belonged to the Church of All Worlds, but, as my assignment involved gaining an understanding of polyamory and exploring the feasibility or non-feasibility of open multiple partnerships for the vast majority of us, I more or less ignored the pagan stuff.

But when I meet Oberon, who opens the gate to the privacy fence and greets me with a hug, I see his black T-shirt reading “Never Thirst” (one of the big tropes from
Stranger in a Strange Land
) and realize that I have stepped into that realm that has long elicited my deepest repulsion. I have stepped into an intersection of science fiction geeks and velvet-caped jousters. And there is absolutely no separating the family’s prolific sexual activity with the fact that they attend ritual events with names like Eleusinian Mysteries and have culled the bulk of their personal philosophies from science fiction novels.

“I never had the slightest glimmerings of monogamy as a personal value,” says Oberon, who grew up in the 1940s and 50s in what he calls an “Ozzie and Harriet” family in the suburbs of Chicago. Oberon talks like Timothy Leary and looks like Papa Smurf. He has long gray hair, a long gray beard, and tends to pepper his philosophical musings with references to popular movies and Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. He says that a lyric from David Crosby’s “Triad”—“sisters, lovers, water brothers, and in time, maybe others”—pretty much sums up his and Morning Glory’s marriage vows. And of course there’s an implicit poly message in “Love the One You’re With.”

“Did you see the movie
Pleasantville?
” Oberon asks. “I thought it was really excellent. My childhood was very much in that era. But my models were characters in stories, in myths. In science fiction there were all these models, all these alternatives, and all you had to do was choose to live that way. I imprinted my ideas of romance and sexuality not from popular romance and literature, but from science fiction and fantasy, where you could do anything you wanted to.”

“I probably have more sex than your average porn star,” says Wolf Ravenheart. “But it’s not that our drive is higher. Our availability of sexual partners is probably pretty high. Right now there are probably a dozen people who I could go out and have a fling with. My biggest problem that I have is how to say no gracefully. Because according to the women I’m fairly pretty. I get a lot of offers.”