In midlife, I became a beer drinker. This choice approved of by both my health-conscious children and even my gynecologist: “After all, it’s fermented!” But after years of pints, I explained to my children that there were some nights when I just didn’t want a beer; it was too heavy.  I wondered if a glass of wine might do the trick instead. In response, for my birthday, they bought me a six-bottle wine cooler, a significant expense given their modest incomes.

I started to tell this story to the sommelier at Liquorama, my local wine and beer store. But before I finished, he interrupted me. “Six bottles! My cellar holds 480 bottles!”

Well, yes, I had to admit that his penis was bigger than mine. In fact, from all accounts and my own self-inspection, I don’t even have one.

*

My brother and I are Irish twins, and when we were little, to conserve both parental energy and money, my parents often dumped us in the bathtub together. Our tub was small and in order to make us both fit, we had to sit facing each other and scrunch up our knees which gave me a clear view of his little dingle dongle, that strangely awkward and fragile looking appendage that hung limply from the base of his stomach. 

What do you do with it, I wondered? 

How exposed and defenseless it looked! Where would he put it when he put on his pants? Because I wore his hand-me-downs, I knew there was no pocket for it. Was it possible to push it back behind him somehow so it wouldn’t get hurt when he played? 

How inconvenient, I murmured quietly to myself, as I admired my more shapely groin area in the mirror.

*

Many years after those baths, while in college, I learned that in 1908, Sigmund Freud, one of the most creative and influential physicians of the modern era, introduced an idea that caught on like wildfire. It was called “penis envy,” and it goes something like this: when a girl realizes that she does not have a penis, she experiences deep psychic anguish, a mortifying, nearly debilitating jealousy of the thing, and this envy accounts for women’s inherent moral inferiority. (Should you detect a logical leap there, you’re not alone.) The only way a woman might overcome this humiliating envy, explained Freud, was to have a child, a male child. In such a way, the woman’s dream of having a penis would be won, sort of. However, because the thing was not hers, her multiple deficiencies would be maintained.

(Told you he was creative. He also used to go on and on about how women’s lives were dominated by their sexual reproductive functions. In 1925, he wrote that “women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.” That’s another good Freud story, but I’ll save that one for another time.)

*

As my brother and I got older, I watched as he became the privileged child in the house. This social realignment happened insidiously, subtly. There were no rituals to mark his growing prestige and position in the family. No one said that of the two of us, he had greater claim to moral authority. It just seemed to happen. One of us could do no wrong, the other was always deficient. One was Chrysostom (“golden mouth,” a high school Latin word I have never forgotten); the other was often accused of lying and exaggerating. One shot straight to Supreme Court Judge Kavanaugh-like heights; the other was threatened with the loony bin.

*

People sometimes ask why I am so passionate about women’s inequality and sexual violence against girls and women. I tend to be a thoughtful person, but that’s one question I’ve never had to think about; the answer just shoots right out of my mouth.

I write for revenge against reality.

*

Growing up, girls get pushed to the side and treated as less important in all kinds of obvious and enigmatic ways. If you have a story like mine, I hope you’ll share it.