My male personality

You know, this sounds very weird, but I was little, I used to dream about having a male personality or alter ego. I was a scrappy kind of tomboy with a lot of brothers and male relatives and no sisters. I was often regularly asked by friends if I was a boy or girl.

His name was something like Chris (a masculinized version of my own name) and he was always my age but he was big, strong, at least a head taller than the other boys. He was a baseball player (a star pitcher, of course) and he was also a master fencer, skilled at the bow and arrow, knew how to hack computers, and he was friends with wolves. While I was an overweight little girl, he was extremely good looking and strong: he was Cuban, like me (in some versions), with these hypnotic kind of green eyes and very dark mocha skin.

I made up several mutually contradictory backstories for Chris. In one of them he grew up in Alaska by his arctic explorer father that left him under mysterious circumstances. In another version (which I made up after I saw HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME) he was a gypsy boy from India who lost his memory.

He would always do things like wrestle velociraptors that attacked Prospect Park in Brooklyn, leaping from a fire escape to wrangle a one, or defiantly swallowing a key while being held hostage by gangsters. He was like Jonny Quest, except he didn't need a Race Bannon, as he could scrap like a tiger and pilot any kind of plane or submarine. He was another part Marty McFly, a boy next door on a skateboard who would do things like follow smugglers by holding on and riding atop the roof of their car. He never used firearms, but he had (at various points) a boomerang and a gun that shot needles coated in poison.

I recall creating a few archenemies for him to fight, the sort of things you're only capable of when you're a kid: one of them was a carnivorous, bright orange gelatinous cube.

I guess there's a theory in here that the reason I created this sort of daydream alter ego was the exact same reasons other girls daydream about horses and ponies: as a way of safely expressing pre-pubescent and pubescent sexual feelings, with a figure of fascination that is a repository of male virile qualities, freedom and masculinity. In my case, a strong, athletic boy instead of the usual horse or pony. This, by the way, is also closely related to why women are afraid of bugs: the fear of bugs is closely connected to the fear of rape, because bugs crawl and touch all over and get into secret places.

What's interesting too is Chris was never "my" boyfriend. He did, however, catch the eye of many other girls, including a Radio City Music Hall Rockette and a few female teachers, and a few cartoon characters; I always imagined him dating Sabrina the Teenaged Witch from the Archie comics. There's an argument to be made here that the creation of a male personality represented a "safe" way to express some of my same-sex desires. It wasn't "me" that had a crush on Angie or wondered what it was like to kiss her, but rather "Chris."

Anyway, eventually Chris and his many adventures disappeared the same age I started wearing lipstick. I was thinking about him in passing the other day, and if Chris had aged right along with me, he probably would have become a muscle stud. I always imagined him having a brawny build, rather like Richard Sandrak: already having well defined pecs. For some reason, I also thought of him having especially big legs in proportion to the rest of his body, with giant calves like a cannonball stuffed behind his shin, or thighs that stood out in tight jeans. He would certainly have become a hunk if he got older, no question. Even as a girl, I imagined him winning these competitions by a mile where boys flex their arms to see who's the biggest.

I can just imagine him now: shoulders as big as a doorway, but with the gliding grace of a male gymnast, a waist so narrow he could inhale and create a hollow under his ribcage. Still the same old hypnotic green eyes that glow in the dark like a cat's, and the same dark skin. His natural strength, enviable genetics and massive frame would have led to him being an easygainer: pumping up muscles quickly. He would have been a handsome track star and football player, but he would have been brilliant enough to make even the nerds nervous to play Chess with him.

I'm curious to see how Chris would have handled the two big obsessions of teen boys: girls and cars. I doubt he would have had as ruthless and angsty an adolescence as I did, with my functional anorexia/bulimia and general overachieving oddness that got me labeled "Queen of the Nerds."

I can imagine quite a few very dashing career choices he would ultimately have taken: He-Man scientist/explorer (he'd probably be in the middle of his Masters degree, just like me, but he'd have already studied biology/ecology in the Amazon and Gobi desert, and no doubt wrestled a Yeti in Tibet), or Air Force pilot.