‘WHAT happened to your knee?” asked an adult in my primary school class as my knee was scraped and filled with wee stones.
“Brian pushed me in the playground,” I answered. “Oh, he must fancy you, boys do that when they want girls’ attention,” they said. I was around age seven, and that sounded stupid and unfair to me that he wouldn’t get in trouble as “boys will be boys”.
I took it in and of course –unknown to me at that time – I was beginning my conditioning to accept that the repressed emotions of men and boys would be expressed by them physically, and that pain might be a by-product of that.
