“SKEE-YOU!”: The Mating Call of Boyhood
We thought yelling at girls from park railings was peak cool. We were just mimicking a century-old failure of boyhood.
Her figure appeared in the distance.
Ordinary. Not as in unremarkable, but I couldn’t distinguish her features well enough to know if she was extraordinary.
No matter. I still craned my neck.
I sat perched on a railing about 40 yards away, peacocking, perhaps, proper behavior to accompany my bright orange shirt.
“Ooooh!”
“Who is that?” my friend Skooter asked.
His tone carried the kind of enthusiasm only an adolescent boy marveling at a girl could muster.
Perhaps his two eyes saw something my four didn’t. I’d just have to trust his vision.
My two friends and I were buzzing with that first-day-of-school energy after a girl-less summer. We’d just walked home from our first day of middle school and were kicking it near a park in our neighborhood.
Before the girl could take another five paces, we caucused briefly and determined none of us knew her.
Then I leaned back and let it out.
“SKEE-YOU!”
I cupped my hands around my mouth, I suppose to amplify the sound, and repeated myself.
“SKEE-YOU!”
Nobody flinched. Why would they?
This was standard.
Some distorted hood mating call.
Somewhere in the history of nigga-dom, some man, teenager or young boy apparently decided this was an appropriate way to get the attention of a girl standing too far away for conversation.
She turned her head toward us, or at least toward the high-pitched sound.
“Go holla at her, Tay! Go holla at her!” Skooter said, punctuating his encouragement with enthusiastic backhand taps to my shoulder.
I didn’t budge. And eventually, she walked out of our eyesight.
Nothing happened.
Still, I felt cool.
At 10 years old, getting a girl’s phone number felt like an accomplishment. Apparently, getting one to turn around after I yelled at her from 40 yards away did, too.
I could blame my friends or the pressure to fit in, but decades later, that feels dishonest. The simple truth is: I did it because I wanted to.
Or maybe it was some sliver of chauvinism tucked into my Y chromosome, passed down from generations of hunters and gatherers.
Either way, the more interesting question is how I knew to do it in the first place.
I don’t remember anyone teaching me to catcall. There was no lesson. No older boy pulled me aside and explained the proper technique. I’d simply seen boys do it enough times that, when my opportunity came, I knew the ritual.
I made a sound. She turned around. My friends told me to go talk to her. Somehow, in my 10-year-old mind, this constituted success.
What strikes me now is how little I remember about her.
I don’t remember her face. I don’t remember what she wore. I don’t remember whether she looked annoyed, amused or frightened. But the adult me sincerely hopes she was OK.
But I remember my friends. I remember the railing. I remember my bright orange shirt. And I damn sure remember:
“SKEE-YOU!”
For something supposedly directed at a girl, an awful lot of the performance was about us boys.
Somewhere around that age, girls had become part of the scoreboard. Getting a phone number made you cool. Getting a girl’s attention counted for something. And doing either in front of your boys counted for even more.
I was embarrassed to learn recently just how banal our little performance was.
More than a century ago, men who accosted women in public were known as “mashers.” Women organized against them, demanding the freedom to move through public spaces without harassment.
Here we were, three boys trying to be cool, unknowingly mimicking behavior women had spent generations asking men to stop.
In 1903, Harriet Hubbard Ayer, writing for the New York World, advised young men that a proper introduction to a woman should be obtained in an “honest, manly way.”
Manly.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t my last catcall.
There was no sudden moral awakening that afternoon. I didn’t watch her disappear into the distance and contemplate my burgeoning chauvinism.
I was 10. I thought I was cool.
Eventually, I graduated to a more civilized approach.
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“What’s your name?”
These days, as I’m on the precipice of fatherhood, I’ve found myself rummaging through memories from my own boyhood. Some make me laugh. Others make me cringe. A few, like this one, make me wonder where the hell I learned certain things in the first place.
There are lessons I want to teach my son, especially about how he treats women. But I’ve also started thinking about all the lessons he’ll learn without me.
Because nobody sat 10-year-old me down and taught me to catcall girls.
Nobody had to.
By the time that girl appeared in the distance, somehow, I already knew.