Please, Don’t Wear Your School Sweatshirt

Remember, lads, when we were about thirteen or fourteen?  As I wrote in “Respectful Breast-Man”, this is around that time when girls start becoming women and little boys become, well, mostly they stay as little boys, but they start paying attention.  And what I noticed around this time was that, seemingly all of a sudden, certain girls discovered the over-sized, school sweatshirt.  I think, on some level, they were getting away with it as an academic rationalization, as though we were all very impressed at how seriously they were starting to take their future scholarship.

But of course it was bullshit.  Kate was the girl that really sent this home for me.  She was beautiful, if not a bit awkward in general, which I believe is something of the perfect combination in a girl for any boy, at any age.  Kate got boobs; that’s what happened.  We all knew she had them.  In fact, for her age, they were really something.  You could almost tell, too, on those rare moments when she accidentally sat up straight or needed to otherwise stretch out of her newly developed habbit of slouching.  And that’s about the time she got interested in USC.  Like super interested, apparently.  Like, every day, I’m gonna support my school with this sweatshirt, even though I’m in 8th grade and have no business caring about college, interested.  It became such a regularity that you could catch sight of her, from way off in the distance, in that giant, obvious, red and gold sweatshirt, even with a hundred other kids around her, like how easy spotting a parrot would be if it decided to live amongst sea gulls.

She wasn’t the only girl suddenly interested in supporting schools through their sweatshirts.  It’s like they formed a club, like they’d all call each other the night before and decide that for the next year there would be a fashion ceasefire.  It was as though they were mourning the loss of their childhood innocence with their postures at half-mast.

And of course we lads noticed this, though perhaps not consciously, how so many of them suddenly took on such a pillowy, unappealing shape.  We were so damned curious.  What the hell was going on under there?  I, for one, was pretty sure that there were all kinds of amazing and noteworthy changes happening, right in front of me.  It was all quite frustrating.

A more optimistic review of the situation might lead me to liken the sweatshirt to a cocoon.  For a few years, the girls hibernate in these things, growing, changing, becoming something else and, one after another, say sophomore year, the butterflies are born as the sweatshirts give way to tube-tops.  But there was no grand celebration like that.  Instead, the awkward years of trying to sort out what a female was left many of us young men stunted, inexperienced, and untrained for how to be respectful to a lady.  This is the feeling seeing a sweatshirt on a girl recalls for me, one of mild resentment.

Now, of course I understand the whole, ad-nauseum perspective of a girl not wanting to be gawked at, and, likely, I’m wide open for all kinds of you’re-an-asshole critiques.  (Just so long as we’re clear, asshole, sure, misogynist, no.  I like women very much, thank you.)  My point is that, as a curious bystander, interested in the shape of girls, and especially at a young, sensitive time when I really needed accurate information, I was finding it less and less available.  To this day, when I see a girl wearing the big, comfy sweatshirt, I have to hold my snap resentment back.  I have to consider that she is not dressing for me, that everyone is comfortable in a sweatshirt, that life does not revolve around my particular tastes in clothing.  Inevitably, though, I judge…what a waste of a perfectly good girl, all covered up like a sack of potatoes.

Related posts:

1. “A Respectful Breast-Man”
2. Trust My Four-Year-Old
3. What Makes a Bad Kisser?