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there are two He-Man dolls. action figures, actually. if you aren't a boy who grew up in the 1980's, you might not know this. you see, He-Man, doer of good, avenger of the unavenged, led two lives. he was, for all appearances, an unassuming prince of some fantastic kingdom. but when the time came, he revealed his true identity as He-Man, a powerful, scantily clad neanderthal of a man, carrying a big sword and dressed in only a loincloth, a pair of big boots and leather wrist cuffs. who thought this stuff up? as a boy, somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5, i refused to play with the He-Man doll, insisting that any He-Man figures that i owned must be the prince action figure. the clothed one. the He-Man figure, that ripped, hyper-masculine hunk of plastic that he was, inspired in me some unidentified emotion, one that i felt certain should avoided at all costs. so it filled my heart with dread the day my mother sat me down to talk to me about my He-Man doll. why don't you like the other He-Man doll? she asked. i felt a rush that i might have later recognized as panic. at that moment, i only knew it as the feeling i got the time i shit my pants. my tiny brain scrambled for a logical explanation. "i just don't," i grumbled, staring at the floor. at which point i may as well have pulled out a rainbow flag and joined a parade. that was the moment, really, that i first knew. i wasn't articulate enough to know what i had just discovered about myself. but i knew, as i sat there staring at the carpet, nodding my way through my mother's series of increasingly probing questions about my feelings about the He-Man doll, that the strange feeling i felt when i played with the buffed out doll was not the same one that other boys my age were having. my mother stopped just short of asking the question, maybe even short of realizing what she was seeing. instead, she decided that it was some emerging body issue (close mom, but not quite) and called off the hounds. but from that moment on, more or less, i knew. and she did too. # | 5 comments « save pbs, npr | main index | archive index | shakey shakey » |
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