“No Girls Allowed”

Boys love games. They love making up rules, arguing over how to play by the rules, testing the rules by breaking them. They love competing with each other within the context of the rules, and they love demonstrating that they know the rules exist to be broken. They make rules solely in order to test whether they are willing to abide by them, and they make rules that define the possibility of having a game at all. They know that the rules are arbitrary because they have agreed to them, and they agree that the rules are absolute insofar as they define the game. When a boy says, “That’s not in the rules!,” it is at once a challenge to own up to one’s fault and an invitation to determine whether the rule was a good one.

Girls, on the other hand, have no idea how to play boys’ games. Some girls (raises hand) think they do, but we really don’t. Girls—as Carol Gilligan’s famous study showed—play a wholly different game from boys, even when we play with the boys at the games the boys designed.

Take the internet. Boys—for example, Milo—love setting up intricate rules of engagement in chat rooms solely in order to haze each other. Speak now, but not then. Post this kind of sticker on Friday, but not on any other day. Give one player the ability to silence another for being “ugly.” Give every player the ability to silence any other player for being a “thot.” Give every player the ability to counteract such silencing by paying a counter-fee. And make sure to stir things up regularly by encouraging people to break the rules, even as you punish them for it.

The boys love it. The girls ::ahem:: have a little more difficulty going along with the game. Witness my Mom-burst the other week, when I got so mad at how mean the other kids—sorry, chat members—were being about one of the girls whom Milo had given special privileges because she was pretty. It was obvious to me, at least, that the whole thing was a giant troll, but the girls—sorry, women in the chat—were taking it seriously as the Pretty Girl’s way of seeking attention. Except that I had myself become invested in the troll because I had asked the kids—sorry, Milo fans—to help me promote my book by writing poems about him for my eleventh day of Xmas post, and she had written one of my favorites.

“Stop being mean to her!” I screamed at the chat. Yeah, like that works. The other kids chimed in. “You’re spoiling the game. Milo said we could do this!” “Milo makes the rules, not you!” “I don’t have to listen to you, even if you are mom!” I—shall we say—didn’t handle it well. “You have been being mean to so-and-so for ages,” I told them. “She was just doing what Milo encouraged her to do.” “She doesn’t understand how to play properly,” they told me. “Milo is good at it, but she sucks!” “It’s not just her,” I responded. “It’s the lot of you. I can make diagrams, if you like,” I told Milo, who wisely said, “No.”

But it was too late. My allegories had gotten the better of me, so deeply had I entered into the fantasy of the game. Here I had been thinking we were modeling the kingdom of heaven, and it was all in fact hell! Everybody was lying; everybody was pretending to be nastier than they actually were, just to get Milo’s attention. I knew this for a fact because some of the nastiest ones had written me beautiful poems—heartbreakingly beautiful reflections on what Milo had gone through in order to bring us to truth—and yet, there they were in the chat, pretending to be monsters. And the women believed them!

I had—shall we say—a bit of a breakdown Thursday night, particularly after I made the mistake of trying to excuse my own bad behavior as if it were virtuous. I spent the better part of the night making notes about which demons everyone had been playing and sketching the rivalries I knew to be in play. What had seemed to me a joyous conclusion to the whole Beauty Test—Milo arranging “marriages” for members of the chat—turned in my imagination into a hideous Walpurgisnacht, an orgy of animals mating with humans, women with women, and men with men, despite the claim that the marriages were to be one man and one woman. (Milo suggested at one point marrying me to a frog.)

Think Hieronymous Bosch in Bruges, if you know the movie. We were there, in the right hand panel of the painting as you look at it.

Quarreling and name-calling and all wearing masks.

Until dawn came (it actually took me until Saturday), and the fantasy lifted, and I saw us for what we really were. Toys in a game set up to do what I had trusted Milo to be doing all along: teach us virtue by inviting us to play. There were stuffed animals (the furries) and toy soldiers (most of the men) and pretty dolls (a.k.a. the women). There were tea parties when we all got drinks and watched Milo’s show together. There were times that we spent drawing pretty pictures and singing songs, and there were times when the foam swords came out and everybody divided up into teams.

Some girls love dividing up into teams. Others, myself included, have a bit of a hard time with it. One-on-one engagements? I am all for it! En garde! Let’s fence! But teams? I would rather spend my time...mingling (a.k.a. INTJ hell)...than have to choose sides in a game. All those times I was chosen last. All those times nobody wanted me on their team because they knew I sucked. All those times I let the team down because I wasn’t a strong enough player. I can trigger myself just thinking about it. (Can you say “promotion review”?) NOTHING makes women more anxious than the thought of BEING LEFT OUT.

The other night, just as I was closing up Telegram before taking my self-imposed sabbatical from the chat, I noticed the women in the women’s side chat wondering how well I would fare with the feeling of being excluded, even voluntarily. It almost tempted me back in. Could I survive not knowing what everyone was talking about not just for a few days, but (as I planned) for weeks? (Milo suggested a month. One week down, three to go.) Some of the men have had to stay silent for months and were still willing to come back. But women forced to leave have tended to spend time in other chats talking about how mean Milo is and how he doesn’t like women. Mind you, some of the men do as well, but then the chats I see all have women in them. I don’t know what the men say to each other when it is only men.

And you wonder that Milo describes women as exhausting?

I understand now the mistake I made trying (as I saw it then) to encourage the chat by getting everyone, even for a day, to focus on Beauty. I could have paid money to do so (another of the rules in the game), but I attempted to do so solely by force of will because I thought it was a good thing. Cue Galadriel moment: I was tempted by the Ring. “All shall love me—and despair!” Well, not quite. What I wanted was for people to love beauty and truth and goodness, not me. But I did want to force them to play the same game and to stop being mean. Above all, however, I was tired of seeing some people excluded from the group who clearly wanted to belong, while others were doing their best to get them excluded, like some horrible recreation (as I saw it) of The Lord of the Flies, complete with Piggy and heads on spikes.

I was, you see, thinking not in terms of the rules of the game, but as a mom—and moms default to making sure everybody gets to play. That is why I had spent months obsessing over watching the chat—just like a mom wanting to know that everybody was okay. “Mom said you have to find a game that’s three players.” While one part of me could see that the chat was simply playing by Milo’s rules—including breaking the rules—the other part of me only saw who was included and who excluded from the game the other kids were playing, and I hated it. At which point I became the monster, complete with ALL CAPS and flaming Bitmoji, the very thing I least wanted to become.

Was the meanness, then, all a figment of my imagination? No, I don’t think so. Piggy, after all, dies in The Lord of the Flies with no girls in sight.

But neither does that mean that yet I fully understand the game.

To enroll in Milo’s Finishing School, look for the link on his Telegram channel. For further lessons in virtue, see The MILO Chronicles. You can buy my book (sans promotional poems) on Amazon or direct from the publisher at Castalia House.