Acknowledgments

by Becky Lucas

  These boys at the footy seemed like they were letting off a bit of steam, no doubt needing some relief from the pressures of living at home in their parents’ architect-designed mansions while they saved up enough money for a deposit on a house they would buy at age twenty-three.

  I don’t want you to think I’m man-bashing here – I love men. But these aren’t men; they’re Country Road bags running off the fumes of their dads’ Mercedes-Benzes. They’re the sort who start wars in the Middle East, and do nothing but move other people’s money around their whole lives. By age forty, they won’t be able to come unless they’ve paid a woman to crush their scrotum with a high heel. I know it sounds harsh, and I know not all private-school boys are like that, obviously – but, my god, I’ve met so many of them that are like that, I’m happy to piss off a few of the good ones as collateral damage.

  As I sat behind these boys – about fifteen of them – I became fascinated by their dynamic and began watching them instead of the football game. I even began to feel sorry for the few who were not as alpha as the others, and who probably just wanted to watch the game in peace as opposed to being part of this undulating human sea of white skin, sandy-coloured hair and homophobic slurs.

  I quickly figured out that they were not loyal to each other in the slightest and, in fact, would attack each other in order to avoid being a target. To protect themselves from being made fun of or called a ‘pussy’, they had to instead point at someone else and make them the subject of a put-down. It seemed like a very stressful situation to be in.

  ‘You need to go to the toilet? You’re a fucking pussy, mate,’ one said, before surreptitiously looking around to see if he’d pulled it off.

  The boy who had just had this accusation levelled at him hesitated, and another boy a few seats away stepped in on his behalf, either out of solidarity or merely pure self-interest. ‘Why are you so obsessed with him going to the toilet, you gay cunt?’ To which he received a huge laugh and a round of high-fives.

  The boy who initiated the exchange retreated. He would need to gather himself before attempting anything like that again.

  At last, their team scored a try and they all begun bellowing like wild animals into the cold night.

  ‘Fucking yessss, boys, ow ow owwwwww!’ one shouted and the others joined in.

  One boy, getting so excited by all the yelling, started roaring louder and louder until he lost control and was betrayed by his very own vocal cords, which turned his previously manly roar into a high-pitched squeal. His eyes widened and he could tell he was in for it. They all converged on him in a barrage of insults, the loudest coming from the boy who had lost the battle from earlier. This barrage lasted around three minutes. I noticed that the squealer didn’t speak much for the rest of the night.

  In my later schooling years, I went to a public high school that offered placements for kids who displayed academic or sporting excellence, which meant it was considered a selective school and so we competed against private schools. Let me be clear, I was not there for any kind of academic or sporting reasons – I just lived in the catchment area so they had to take me in, much to the chagrin of the more-talented students.

  I went to a few of the rugby games our school played against the private schools. The private-school kids would chant ‘Your dad works for my dad’ at us over and over until the game started. Then the chant would taper off somewhat as they watched their team get destroyed by players who lived in suburbs the private-school kids would never step foot in, like Marsden, Beenleigh and Browns Plains.

  The private-school kids would always cry that it wasn’t fair that they had to compete against our school, because we had players who were genetically more gifted – that is, players who were from places like Tonga and Samoa, and had more natural agility and strength than the chinless private-school boys.

  What was fair to them, though, was that they would all go on to own property and receive jobs from their friends’ dads without having to bother with all that irksome ‘interview process’ stuff.

  Now back to the private-school boys sitting in front of me at the football. Towards the end of the night, the game nearly over, a boy with rat-like features who hadn’t done anything in a while threw his beer up into the air. It landed all over a couple of middle-aged Indian men sitting a few rows in front. The boys began cackling and hitting each other on the back, when the friend I was with, who is truly gargantuan in size, tapped the little rat boy on the shoulder.

  ‘Mate, what the fuck was that?’ my friend said. ‘Go and apologise to those men now.’

  The boy, rolling his eyes cockily to his friends, started to turn around in his seat. ‘What the fuck are y—’ he began, before clocking the entirety of my friend’s stature.

  Without another word, he scuttled off down the concrete steps, profusely apologising to the men he’d spilt beer on, while furtively glancing up at my large friend to make sure he was satisfied.

  Thank you to sport for occasionally being there to facilitate dunking on people who really need to be dunked on.

  Santa

  What I’m about to say is really going to break the mould, but I loved Santa when I was a kid. I spent a lot of time thinking about him and what I’d say if I ever got to meet him. Nothing sycophantic, of course; I wanted him to respect me and see me as an equal – maybe even as a friend?

  My faith in Santa was tested again and again by my cousins, who would regularly taunt, ‘If he’s real, then how is he “everywhere at once”?’ Which never made sense to me. I wasn’t there believing in a normal man who could do all of these incredible things – I believed in a real man who possessed magical qualities, obviously. And who could trust their cousins anyway? Especially after finding out that they also had cousins on their other side who you’d never met. I always found that fact shocking – you’d be hanging out with your cousins on Christmas Day or whatever, and the next day they’d all be off to do the same song and dance with a whole different bunch of kids.

  My cousins weren’t the only ones trying to sow seeds of doubt. I’d heard the playground rumours, but my desire to feel that there was some magical world running parallel to mine kept me true to my beliefs.

  Then, one Christmas, I saw my mum using the same ribbon as the one that was on Santa’s gifts, and I decided to confront her. Frankly, I was furious that she’d made such an obvious gaffe. I may have only been five, but, come on, it’s like she wanted to be caught.

  The surprising thing was that she actually crumbled and gave a full confession almost straight away. I started crying. I didn’t actually want to know! I wanted her to give me some counterargument that could explain the ribbon away. Who gives in to pressure from a five-year-old?

  It was an important lesson for me: never ask a question you don’t actually want the answer to. For example, when you ask a friend if you were too drunk the night before, you really need to be okay with them telling you that, yes, you were. And maybe you shouldn’t put your friend in the position where they have to lie and say, ‘No, no, you were fine.’

  I must admit that once I learnt the truth from my mum, it took me a few years to admit to my dad that I knew Santa wasn’t real. Because of my parents’ divorce, I often got to be two different versions of myself and play out two different realities. With my mum, I was the smug know-it-all who had figured out the truth, and with my dad, I was the naïve innocent who could once again get to experience the magic of Christmas and Santa. I also thought that if I told my dad I didn’t believe in Santa, our special time would be ruined, and I wouldn’t get to watch the one-man show he would perform just for me, where he would make footprints in talcum powder and put out biscuits and carrots for Santa and his reindeers. I gave some truly Oscar-winning performances pretending to believe it all.

  I have found myself doing similar performances with men I’m dating, where I’ll go along with something I know is a lie, because I worry that if I tell them the truth, I’ll embarrass them and break the magic. />
  As an adult, I love asking other people what their relationship to Santa was like when they were younger and how they found out he wasn’t real. I think these questions can reveal a lot about someone’s character and early home life.

  I’ve noticed that every time I ask these questions, I get one of two reactions: either they politely laugh, assuming I’m just being frivolous, or they claim that they don’t really remember.

  To get the ball rolling, I’ll start talking about my own fascination with the concept of Santa and how I feel it relates to my family dynamic, specifically how I think it helped shape my idea of authority. Because, for me, Santa provided an important stepping stone to learning how to gather evidence, put forward my case, and question people in charge. I think it’s good for kids to realise that there are some things that don’t add up, and they should feel comfortable to prod and push their parents when they think something’s awry. It’s also important for parents to assess just how well the kids have done their research and reward them with the truth. I suppose you could say working out the truth about Santa is a kid’s first piece of investigative journalism.

  Also, Santa was the first man I loved and trusted who would turn out to betray me. I’ve come to believe that you learn a lot from the men who hurt you, and I’d like to think that my experience with Santa made me wise to the fact that a man in a powerful position might not be all he’s cracked up to be, and that his status could be a part of a power structure that simply isn’t real. Because of this, I think I’ve managed to sidestep a lot of unwanted male attention in my industry. I don’t think I possess the ability to reflect the love and importance a lot of men in power feel for themselves back at them, which means, in terms of sex pests, I’ve mostly been left alone.

  Once I’m about halfway through this often stoned and drunken spiel, I can see the other person start to realise that I am actually giving them full permission to tell a long, self-involved story about their childhood. This is of course unless we’ve all been doing cocaine, in which case I didn’t really have to probe in the first place.

  When they realise I genuinely want to know their answer, they start to recall their childhood Santa story with exceptional clarity, despite having previously laughed it off. It’s my belief that my insistence that I will actually listen gives them the energy to truly engage with the question.

  This belief was initially sparked by a revelation I conceived of one night after a particularly bad dinner party. There was a girl in attendance who I could tell was impressed by her own ability to ask great questions. The problem was, she wasn’t particularly interested in the answers.

  One particular exchange left an impression on me.

  ‘Do you think having a background in social work has been helpful or detrimental for your new project?’ she’d asked someone, eyes flashing with self-congratulation for having remembered the person’s background in social work.

  ‘I’m not sure if I’ve consciously made that connection,’ replied the other person, looking a bit bamboozled by her sudden interest in their work, ‘but I think fundamentally coming from a field you’re more aware of—’

  ‘I’d love to do social work; we’re thinking of volunteering over Christmas,’ the girl sang out, having in her mind just completed a perfect back-and-forth.

  I watched on, amazed at how oblivious she was to this downfall in her personality, which was by every other standard quite dazzling.

  I do think people forget how exhausting it can be to answer a question truthfully and well – so if you’re going to ask one, make sure, for your sake and theirs, that you really want the answer. I often try to remind myself that when you ask someone a question, be it an interesting one or not, you’re asking them to be vulnerable and to expend energy in answering it, so the least you can do is listen to the answer.

  I’m sorry to harp on about this, but this also plays into another theory I have about celebrity interviews, which I personally believe are terrible nowadays. I think that this is due in part to the fact that the person conducting interviews in the modern media landscape is more on a quest for fame themselves and not so much interested in their interview subject as they are in their own fledgling (or flailing) career.

  I have another friend, who unfortunately wasn’t at that dinner party, but who is incredible at bringing out the gold in anyone. She can get to the most interesting thing about anybody within five minutes, and that person will leave the interaction feeling like they’re the greatest storyteller of all time. (They’re not. My friend is just great at asking questions and then listening to the reply.)

  I think that’s what great interviewers used to do. They were so good at making curiosity look easy that other people saw it and thought, This looks like a good way to become famous, not realising that we watched those interviews for what they could bring out in the celebrity, not just for the interviewer’s proximity to fame.

  So when people initially back away from engaging in my Santa chat, I completely understand why. But excitingly for them, I’m actually very interested in Santa. Once I convince them of this, I’m often rewarded with an insightful story from their childhood.

  I have a friend who is Jewish and she claims that, having not grown up being told about Santa, she was always intrigued by her friends at school who believed in him. She remembers feeling very adult and like she had an important role to play by not spoiling it for them by exposing the secret. There was also a sense of benevolence that came from this responsibility.

  Because of this early experience, she feels strangely protective when she sees a group of people who believe in something she can’t identify with. Even now, if she senses a group of people strongly believe in something, she feels like the kindest thing to do is to let them go ahead and believe it. She’s been like that for as long as she can remember, and up until I asked her about Santa, she’d never made the connection.

  Thank you to Santa, for being a great topic of discussion between me and others, and for being one of the main reasons I try to listen to people’s answers rather than pat myself on the back for having asked a good question – something I was definitely guilty of for many years.

  crazyhorny64

  Years ago, I stumbled on a YouTube comment left on one of my videos by a man with the username ‘crazyhorny64’. He’d commented, ‘you are a very bad woman’.

  It piqued my interest – because I am, but how did he know?

  In general, I don’t read online comments. I know people say that, and often they’re lying, but I don’t. There’s something so shocking about seeing something mean written about you – it’s the same feeling you get when you hear a friend has said something nasty about you behind your back. I don’t know why it’s shocking. Everyone bad-mouths another person at least once in a while. There has to be some coping mechanism in your brain that convinces you that, even though you might talk shit about others, no one else is doing the same to you. Mean comments are proof that people do talk about you, and not in a nice way, and that’s very confronting no matter how evolved you might be.

  But that’s not the only reason I don’t like to look at comments. I am also repelled by the nice ones, which often have the effect of embarrassing me. Sometimes I feel waves of shame about forcing my face and voice out into the public and pretty much begging for acceptance and praise. I’ve had moments onstage where the crowd are laughing and enjoying themselves, and I have this overwhelming feeling of guilt, almost like an out-of-body experience, where I realise how ridiculous it is that I’ve insisted people gather into a dark room to watch me spout off under the spotlight.

  However, despite my natural aversion to looking at online comments, sometimes it’s unavoidable. Maybe the comment has popped up on my screen and I haven’t been able to cancel out of it quickly enough; or I’m drunk and alone in a hotel room at 3 am, looking to have my feelings hurt. And there it is: a perfect stranger’s opinion about me. And suddenly I have to know everything about them.

 
After I read crazyhorny64’s comment, I typed his username into Google and very easily found an identical one being used on a forum that was primarily populated by men who are in relationships with sex dolls. After a bit more sleuthing, I confirmed it was the same man, and then spent hours looking at his sordid little love life.

  I want to interject here and acknowledge that I understand there are some men who benefit greatly from owning a sex doll. For example, there are men with physical disabilities or behavioural disorders who, due to a lack of confidence, often find it difficult to meet women or be in relationships. And then there are men who wear T-shirts with funny slogans, who have a lot of confidence, but are also unable to meet women.

  Perusing this forum, I was struck by the fact that these men weren’t using these dolls simply as a receptacle, but were forming loving, meaningful relationships with them. As a woman who lacks the typical measurements considered sexually desirable, I’ve always taken comfort in the idea that a woman with a nice personality or a good sense of humour is just as likely to find a mate as a woman who is conventionally attractive. So it was disheartening to see these men were all completely in love with what are essentially women they can rinse out. I also noted that nearly all the dolls had names like ‘Crystal’, ‘Tami’ or ‘Delilah’, which made me nostalgic for the old days where a man wouldn’t be in charge of naming anything except his boat.