I have noticed that women don't seem to slap men very much in the movies anymore. I don't mean in the audience. I mean on the screen.
In my youth, every young male moviegoer relied on films to furnish him with certain insights into the relationship between the sexes. We learned, for example, that:
2. Busty women got into serious danger more often than flat-chested ones.
3. Women who smoked cigarettes were not to be trusted, particularly if they used a cigarette holder.
4. Whenever a woman said of a man: "I hate him! I hate him!" that meant she was in love with him.
5. Women who wore tailored suits were aggressive and bitchy.
But the cinematic truism that had the greatest impact on every high school boy majoring in acne was that if you said anything to a girl that was the least bit suggestive, she would haul off and slap your face.
In one form or another, that scene was repeated in dozens of movies. Joan Crawford, alone, probably slapped more cheeks than an obstetrician.
It was largely for this reason that I became very careful of what I said to girls. This gave my conversations with them an oddly defensive tone.
"Yes," the girl might reply, "but it's a little chilly."
"Oh, yeah. Wow! ‘Chilly’ is right! Boy, I'm practically freezing. Sure is. You bet."
This did nothing to gain me a reputation as a gifted conversationalist, but at the time it seemed a reasonable form of self-protection.
There were a number of reasons why I didn't want to get slapped. The obvious one, of course, is that it hurts.
But I also had learned from the movies that any male who's just been slapped is supposed to keep smiling -- and I wasn't sure I could do that. I was afraid that if I took a hard shot from a good-sized girl, my eyes would begin to water, and standing there with a silly smile while tears ran down my cheeks was not going to impress anybody.
Even worse, a full-handed whomp might actually knock me down, and if you were knocked down by a girl in those days, you had to enter a monastery.
The most bothersome thing about getting slapped by a girl, though, was that you couldn't hit back. If another boy hit you, you just came back with your best shot. Boys never slapped. If I'd ever been slapped by a boy, I probably would have started laughing too hard to respond.
We knew it was against the rules to strike back at a woman because a lot of women told us it was.
Your mother, for example, kept telling you it was "not nice" to raise your hand against a girl. And elementary school teachers - who in those days were mostly women - made it clear that girls were part of some sort of societal game preserve.
"But, teacher, she hit me in the head with a rock!"
"That doesn't make any difference. She's a girl. Shame on you!"
The curious thing about all this, however, is that I never did get slapped by a girl. And as far as I know, neither did any of my buddies.
Maybe the only women who actually spent a lot of time slapping people were movie actresses - and now it seems they have given up the game.
Now they just shoot people.
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