Lydia, who likes playing with the chickens on her family farm, just plain wasn’t interested in the idea of a day at the spa. “It sort of sounds a bit ridiculous,” she told the Globe and Mail. “Some girls do like it, but it’s not really something that’s that interesting. You have to stay inside all the time.” Lydia’s parents decided to sign her up for the boys camp, assuming that organizers would overlook her gender — but they didn’t. “It’s really quite sad at this age to be stereotyped like that,” her mother said. “We’re teaching them there’s boy things and girl things. In 2007, it’s kind of hard to believe.”

Understandably, organizers didn’t feel comfortable letting a girl attend the camp, since it had been heavily advertised as boys only. “Each year we try and do something new and we survey the children and see what they would like,” said Richard Dauphinee, the municipal warden. “The girls wanted to make jewellery and have pedicures and manicures. That was their type of thing. The boys wanted to go fishing and play this par-three golf thing.” He added: “Next year, if girls do like to go fishing and they want to play the golf, there could be a mixture. There’s a very good chance this might never happen again.”

The real question, though: Why were these two day camps gender segregated to begin with? It’s not that gender-segregated camps shouldn’t exist or that they don’t have their merits, of course. But I have a hard time buying the merits of making these daylong camps single sex — this isn’t a two-week-long trip where a gang of boys are holed up in a cabin for some serious boy bonding. Sure, organizers polled the district’s boys and girls and then tailored the programs accordingly. There will always be the girl who’s a little more comfortable slinging mud and a boy who prefers stringing beads, though, so why not leave the programs open to both genders? Not to mention, one might question, based on these exaggeratedly gendered activities, whether this is what the kids really want to do or if it’s what they think they’re supposed to want to do.

Maybe they prefer gender-appropriate play because they’ve never had a shot at giving something else a try.

The recently published study found that toddlers spent more time looking at a video depicting a man or woman adhering to nontraditional gender roles (like a man putting on lipstick) versus footage of stereotypically gendered behavior. They paid more attention to the nontraditional behavior because it was unfamiliar to them, according to the study’s author, Ross Flom. Researchers also found that parents who exhibit strongly gendered behavior will have kids who do the same.

This goes to show what most parents already know all too well: They’re watching you. (Do-do-do-do.) Flom says, “They’re very active — which could be kind of frightening for parents [thinking], ‘Holy cow, our 2-year-old is picking up on these subtleties. Imagine what else they’re picking up on.’”

But here’s my dilemma. For the last seven months, I have renewed a close friendship with Matt, a man who was my best friend in high school. We went to prom together and had a great, platonic relationship with no sexual tension between us (at least, not on my end). He lives in another state, so our conversations have all been on the phone — we have been talking two to three times a week for the past six to seven months, and flirting heavily. He’s sent me pictures of him, and I’ve returned the favor. We were supposed to see each other at Christmas, but he canceled on me at the very last minute, only to call two weeks later to apologize profusely and say he really didn’t know why he backed out.

That was a red flag, but I decided to give him another chance, since I liked him, and I thought maybe he had been nervous. And besides, he kept calling. Finally, I told him that if he was really serious about liking me, he needed to show it and make an effort to come visit. Amazingly, he bought a plane ticket.

(By the way, we hadn’t seen each other in seven years and were both newly single when I contacted him last August.)

So, we had a great three-day weekend in the town where I’m a graduate student. We flirted like crazy, went out with my friends, enjoyed the bars and restaurants — you know, all the dating stuff that people do. And he stayed with me in my studio apartment.

But did anything romantic happen? No. Which is OK, although I was somewhat disappointed, and my friends were baffled. (“Is he gay?” they asked. I said, as that oft-cited book proclaims, “Maybe he’s just not that into me.”)

Actually, we held hands (which I initiated). And I asked him at one point, since things seemed to be going really well, if he wanted to curl up in my bed with me to sleep (believe me, I had no intention of trying to seduce him, but would not have complained if we had made out). He said no. Because I wasn’t getting cues from him that would have made me confident about trying to kiss him, I didn’t attempt to. Holding hands was as far as it went. But I did flirt outrageously with him the whole weekend, and he flirted back.

All in all it was a great time, and when he left I felt excited about the possibility of seeing him in May when I’m done with school.

Then I didn’t hear from him for two weeks. I even sent him a “thanks for your visit” gift and he never even called to say he got it. When I finally did talk to him (eventually he called), he said that during his weekend here I was way too direct and he felt that I had had an “agenda” that he wasn’t a part of. He said that he thought he was just coming out for a friendly, old-friends-getting-reacquainted type visit … and this after flirting with me for months and telling me many times over the phone that he liked me, couldn’t wait to see me, etc. (By the way, the physical attraction factor is not at issue here.)

I was so shocked I didn’t know how to respond. I replied that naturally I had hoped something romantic might happen, but that a hope is not an expectation, and that I didn’t expect anything from him. I said it’s only human to flirt with someone you like, and I am human, but that I was sorry he found it off-putting. I said I wish he had told me he was feeling that way and I would have toned down the flirting, if not stopped it completely (naturally I don’t want to make people uncomfortable!). But he seems to have great difficulty talking about his feelings and could not bring himself to tell me at the time that he felt pressured.

I am totally confused by his behavior. One of my friends thinks he can’t deal with intimacy, which is why it was all great for him over the phone but not in person. Another says that I probably intimidate him because I’m attractive, smart, successful, independent and direct. Another said that men don’t like it when you show how much you like them (the “hard-to-get” theory, I guess). I think he’s screwed up after his breakup with his ex-girlfriend (they dated for five years and she was with him through his dad’s death from cancer), as he has complained to me many times that he felt he was “manipulated” by her.

Is this man completely crazy? Is he emotionally inept and unable to communicate? That is what I’ve taken from this. I’m disappointed he jilted me, but mostly just angry that I ever could have taken an interest in such a nincompoop.

Can you please explain the male psyche to me? Or at least this male’s psyche?

Hopelessly Confused by Men

Dear Hopelessly Confused,

It is not unusual for me to have nothing useful to say. It is only unusual for me to admit it.

Over the past two days (make that now five days!) I have tried to respond to your letter several times, but each time I found I had produced nothing but small-minded carping, grandiose exposition and theorizing. It sounded as though I were angry with you, a person I have never met.

This happens from time to time. One can publish. Or one can wait. I chose to wait and see what would come.

I waited until I thought I had something wise and useful to say, and then I wrote another column.

That column, too, once read by another, turned out to be full of small-minded carping and grandiose exposition and theorizing. It sounded downright mean this time. Underneath it was this tone — I know this tone; my wife knows this tone — this tone of the old intolerant father, superior and cold and angry at you for not knowing more than you know and for not being more in control and cooler and more measured, angry at you for displaying yourself as you are, real and true and flawed like all of us, like me, like this guy you went to the prom with.

So there I was confronting my own self, my own towering ego, my own fear, my own reluctance to feel, to imagine what you went through.

It’s not that hard, really, just to imagine what you went through, what it felt like. Sometimes one just doesn’t feel like doing it. It would be easier to skate along pretending to have answers.

But we don’t have answers. We just have feelings. For days this went on. And why? What was the source of my reluctance? Did I not really want to help you? Did I want to punish you?

So unbelievably I am trying yet again, and this is what you get to see this time: the actor putting on his makeup, trying out his lines, throwing the script down and starting over.

Having played the part of the imperious, cold-hearted patriarch for days now I am desperately trying to get down to the real. It’s not all that complicated. You got your feelings hurt. Is that so hard to admit? You really were excited about this visit and it was a disappointment.

Perhaps you did not even know how much you wanted something to happen with this person. You thought you knew but your feelings were stronger than you realized. And now you find yourself trying to act in control, looking for an explanation.

Stop looking for an explanation. Search your heart. Get honest. Get so honest it hurts. This was deeply embarrassing. It was painful. It was a bigger disappointment than you realized. You had more invested in it than you thought. But these things happen. People get their wires crossed.

It had been seven years. That’s a long time. You wanted it to be a certain way, the way it had been in high school, only better. And you wanted to show him off to your friends, and have everything be perfect.

I was wondering what he meant with this “agenda” business but now I think I know. It’s all the planning you put into this, all the thought. Naturally you wanted everyone to like him and him to like everyone. You wanted him to see your interesting, exciting life and be interested. You wanted your friends to see him and understand, through him, a bit more about who you are and where you come from.

And so what happened with him? Why was he such a dud? He may have been overwhelmed. He may have been annoyed that you had gone to such trouble to arrange things; he may have felt you were displaying him. You deny that you had “expectations.” But something was going on. He felt put on the spot.

And also no doubt he has changed in seven years. He has had experiences with women since then; he has found what he is comfortable with, what works for him. He felt perhaps that you were addressing him as though he were that high school senior you went to the prom with.

He has been through a lot since then. His dad died of cancer. It is a terrible thing to lose your dad early in life, when you’re still young enough to want to show him what you can do, what you can be. And this girl he felt manipulated by: He must be sensitive in that area now. Apparently people are tugging him this way and that. What do people want from him?

Look what has happened. His dad died! His girlfriend left him! He’s trying to heal from big loss. And then he finds himself in a situation full of inner conflict for him, full of the potential for failure and shame, and he lacks sufficient grace and tact to spin it. So he gets hurt and you get hurt. And he lashes out and you lash back.

And why, if he didn’t want romance, was he flirting with you so in the first place? Maybe he doesn’t even know what he wants. Maybe flirting with you just feels good and it’s safe and familiar. He’s hurt and lonely and it feels good to flirt. But he’s wounded. It’s not just that he can’t handle intimacy. That’s a little unkind of your friend to say.

He’s been hurt. The wound may have limited his capacity for intimacy; he may have closed down protectively around the wound. But is it wrong to have been hurt, to not be at the top of your game, to be grieving for your father, and grieving for your girlfriend, who not only is gone but who left you with a bad taste in your mouth?

So as we empathize with him we get a fuller picture of a real person who may have had all kinds of real feelings that perhaps he wanted to share but did not feel safe or comfortable sharing, who felt that he was being asked to perform some other role he was not quite prepared to perform, out of his realm, out of his comfort zone, staying in your apartment, unsure what to do. And so now he is angry and hurt and you are angry and hurt.

Call him. Tell him that your friendship is valuable to you and you feel it’s in jeopardy and you want to save it. Admit your disappointment, your shame, your anger. Admit that you were hoping something would happen but it didn’t happen but that’s OK. Why pretend? It was a disaster. These things happen. Let it go. Try to save the friendship.

To be quite frank, I think if there were chemistry between you it would have been there in high school. I think you are destined to be only friends. If you handle this well, perhaps you can be the best of friends for life.

In consolation for this dismaying and uncomfortable event, however, I suggest you find an actual lover. It is not that hard to do. An actual lover is someone who takes your clothes off. He unbuttons them or unzips them or unsnaps them or unties them.

Just find yourself a lover who will unbutton your dress. Do it as medicine to heal these recent wounds.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

What? You want more?

Generally, jobs that have traditionally been the province of women –
hair care, cooking, teaching — are all occupied by men at the top levels.
When a man does your hair, cooks your dinner or teaches you, you know that you are getting the best service available. You are being tended by a stylist, chef or professor.

This is changing, of course. Many women have infiltrated the top
ranks of their traditional professions, but that doesn’t mean that many men have been eager to don a pink collar. (Although Southwest Airlines’ show tunes-belting male flight attendants do come to mind.) Visit any teaching supply store on a Saturday and you’ll see what I mean. When we go, my husband, Josh, is usually the only guy in there. But he’s the one who’s shopping; I am carrying the
stuff. When it’s revealed that he’s the teacher, most people jump to this conclusion: “Wow, that must be a really good school.”

I must admit, I never had thought much about teaching before Josh entered
graduate school to get his master’s degree in education. This was when I got my
first taste of my unique role, and he, of his. He was a man in a woman’s
world. His fellow students were boy-crazy and cute, in a junior-high kind of way. They took it as their mission to edify him on a number of topics: Why “girl butt” is the worst thing ever on a guy; the relative merits of cold, sweet, frothy, coffee-flavored beverages from Starbucks and the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf; and the latest plot twist on “Party of Five.” Josh perfected one line for the latter topic, which he rendered in the uneven tones and incorrect emphases of someone practicing colloquial business English: “Julia is such a bitch.”

Teachers tend to congregate at mediocre Mexican restaurants. Take a look
around next time you’re at an El Whatever. You will know them by their
cardigan sweaters, large blended drinks and air of wholesome bad-assery. I
mean that as a compliment: Many teachers deal daily with children whose
families have been destroyed by poverty, drugs and violence, while often teaching in facilities far worse than prisons. Yet, they soldier on and try to remain
upbeat for the sake of these small, forgotten people.

Whenever I agree to join Josh for a night out with his fellow teachers, Josh is always the only person at the table who isn’t saying, “Oh really, I shouldn’t,” while scarfing down basket after basket of delightfully greasy tortilla chips. One time, several of my husband’s colleagues took advantage of their margarita-induced drunkenness to guiltily admit their still-passionate love of Sanrio products. These are Josh’s friends?

Being the wife of a grade-school teacher is like being Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Ol’ What’s-his-name. Whenever I find myself confronted with a group of women on the other side of Josh — be they classmates, colleagues or parents — I tend to shy away.

Groups of women make me nervous: I feel that they are acting out social
scripts that I never received. I am the master of blurting out the wrong
thing in unmixed company. At my own bridal shower, I declared that, rather
than be there, I’d prefer to have bamboo shoved under all ten of my
toenails, in what I thought was a conspiratorial tone, just as the room went completely silent, as rooms tend to do at such moments.

On a recent Saturday, I was at a school picnic talking to some parents
of Josh’s students. I stumbled into a sentence where I was about to
say, “I was totally screwed.” But then I took in the scene — children
everywhere, frolicking on the field, hanging off of monkey bars, skipping,
singing — and me, with an audience of three nice ladies. I stammered, “I was,
I was, I was …” and took a moment to come up with the appropriate phrase.
The moms were watching me intently. “Rather inconvenienced” for the save!

I took this as a sign that it was time for me to clean up my verbal
lexicon. Josh has taken to grade-school teacher swearing, which includes
such classic phrases as “Feldercarp!” “Cheese and crackers!” “Sugar!”
Now that our once-robust expletives have become flaccid and watery through overuse, alternative swear words actually seem to make sense. We’ve invented some new ones (feel free to adopt at will): “Manilow!” “Crust!” “Cruise control!”

For me, the problem was not merely a matter of changing four-letter words. My entire vocabulary — which suggested that I was still hanging out in the Beverly Center, circa 1985 — needed some serious revision. It was long past time to retire the words “sucks,” “blows,” “totally,” “rad” and, of course, “awesome,” from my quotidian speech. After all, I am almost 30, for the love of, for the love of, uh, dogs.

Picnics, parent conferences, faculty meetings — like many things that women
do, teaching comes with all kinds of extra work. For example, before the
school year started, Josh and I once spent an entire day cutting out bubble
letters and construction-paper decorations for his bulletin boards — a fascinating part of the grade-school teacher’s cosmology.

Have you ever wondered why all school bulletin boards have those scalloped
edges, and why the bubble letters? It’s simply practical. Bubble letters are
easier to cut out. And as for the scalloped edges, well, it’s quite difficult to get the background paper aligned to the edge exactly. So you slap some corrugated scalloped stuff on the ragged edges. Voila! Attractive and educational.

Looking around my husband’s classroom — at the wee chairs and the bins filled
with crayons and markers, the picture books and stuffed animals, the fat
pencils waiting for little hands — I had a wash of emotions. First, maudlin
sentimentality of the kind that overcomes adults when they are greeted with
evidence of how many years have passed since they were themselves runny-nosed and losing teeth. Then, I felt sympathy for the children who are entering the system. What can you say to a beginning first-grader? “Chin up, kiddo, you’ve only got 12 years to go?”

And last, I felt awe at what my husband does. I had a glimmer of the feeling
that men must have when and if they confront what pregnancy and childbirth
actually entail: I could never do that.

Josh is the Zen master of children. He exerts an almost unworldly calm and
civilizing influence on the little ones. “They are people first,” he says.
“You just have to trust them.”

His children have a 15-minute period in the beginning of the day, when
they are coming in, and allowed to do whatever they want. Lately, this has
meant playing their own version of live-action Pokémon: They chase each other around while screaming nonsense words from the game. It is annoying. But it’s also their own time. Josh wasn’t going to tell them that they couldn’t play the game. “They’ll sort it out for themselves,” he said, philosophically.

And he was right.

During circle time, one girl, with a thoughtful expression on her face, piped up, “I don’t think we should play Pokémon in the morning anymore. I think we get too excited and silly and it’s hard to calm down. I think we should only play it on the playground.” Another boy raised his hand. “I don’t know what Pokémon is, I don’t have it, and when everyone’s playing it, I can’t play.”

Hearing this story brought an unconscious truth to the surface. When I met
Josh, I was running around and shouting nonsense words metaphorically, and,
well, literally. Under his patient tutelage of love and trust, I too have
begun to make positive decisions about my own behavior.

Josh gets called Mrs. Valle a lot at the beginning of the school year. He’s always the only man at ladies’ birthday brunches. A mother of one of his students nervously asked him what she should get him for Christmas. While shopping for his school clothes, we joke that perhaps he should just start wearing corduroy jumpers with wooden apple pins on them. At night, when he tells me about the day’s activities — making Napoleon hats out of paper, listening to jazz, writing spontaneous poems and cutting up vegetable sushi with safety scissors — I feel contact exhaustion. I sit on a chair all day and type and talk on the phone and feel like I’m working really hard. It’s hard to believe that some people don’t consider teaching a real job. I can’t imagine anything more real.

To hear the male activists tell it today, the anti-war movement also brought
about women’s liberation. But the women tell a very different story.
They say that as radical politics tore up the streets, sexual politics heated up the kitchen.

Jahanara Romney remembers sitting in her converted school bus in front of
the Bureau of Land Management headquarters in Washington, D.C., that winter
while a posse of Native American protesters, led by Russell Means, was barricaded inside.

The Romneys had come to D.C. in a convoy with their communal family, the
Hog Farm, to take part in the demonstration. Every able-bodied Hog Farm man
was inside the B.L.M. Romney held her newborn baby in her arms. Beside her
lay her husband, Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy, immobilized
in a full-body cast after back surgery. When word went down that the
police were going to tear gas, Romney had to get them out of there. But she
didn’t know how to drive the bus.

When the Hog Farm went on the road, it was the men who tinkered with the
aging engines. The line was, “If you can’t repair ‘em, you can’t drive
‘em.”

“I had to go in through the barricades, convince Russell Means that I had a
life-threatening emergency, so he’d let me in to find a member of our
family who was in there, and get him to come out and start up the bus and drive it two blocks down the road,” recalls Romney, now co-director of a children’s performing arts camp in Northern California.

“I said, ‘This is never happening to me again.’ I decided to make this my
personal revolution.” Romney and some of the other women got books and taught
themselves to fix the buses. Then, they taught themselves to drive them.

Things got dicey when the hippie chicks became discontented with the freedoms assigned to them by their male counterparts. They wanted the kinds of freedoms that looked
like male privilege. The men loved the sexual equality part. After all, the more
women who felt free to have sex, the more sex there was for men.

“In the ’50s, it was, ‘Nice girls don’t screw,’” says Trina Robbins, a
San Francisco writer and illustrator. “In the ’60s, it was ‘Nice girls
don’t say no.’ If you said no, it meant you were frigid and, if the guy
wasn’t white, it meant you were prejudiced.”

“The ideal chick just had a good time. Whatever he did, she went along with
it. If he moved in, you took care of him, but you got nothing in return. If
he wanted to dump you, it was, ‘Well, babe, the road calls.’”

And while women were expected to comfort their men in bed, the favor was
frequently not returned.

“One of the myths [about the '60s] was that people were doing it all
the time,” says Margo Adler author of “Heretic’s Heart”
(Beacon Press, 1997), a book that recounts ’60s sexual experiences that were less than transcendental. “They weren’t — and when they did, they definitely weren’t doing it
well.”

Adler, who was a Berkeley student from 1964 to 1968, and an anti-war
activist, is now New York bureau chief for National Public Radio. She
writes, “In the Berkeley of the mid-sixties there was an extraordinary
amount of experimentation with sex and drugs, but that doesn’t mean that
love filled the streets. There was as much sadness, tension and anger as
there was love. Many of us were simply too young to love well.”

There was a similar ineptness about dealing with gender roles. Although
women were comrades in theory, in fact they usually were expected to handle
all the homemaking, just like their mothers. It was the women who cooked
the brown rice, tended the garden, made the candles, took care of the kids.

For two or three years, the Hog Farm lived in the hills outside Los
Angeles. Romney says, “We had a dart board with an arrow in the center.
Each day we’d spin it to see who would be in charge. We called it
‘Dancemaster of the Day.’ We all thought it was very far out.”

“But it was only the men’s names on the board. So another woman and I got
together, and — this is telling — our big deal was that we made a separate
one for Dancemistress. But it was for being in charge of the lesser chores,
cooking, taking phone messages. It wasn’t for quite a while that we decided
we were going to have one wheel.”

As a seamstress of such hip and outrageous clothes as jackets made from
American flags, Trina Robbins was “the ideal hippie chick.” Yet she found she
had to stop designing clothing, a traditionally feminine occupation, in order to get respect as a cartoonist. But when she entered the field, she got a rude awakening.

“I found myself in a field that was all guys and me,” Robbins says, “and I
discovered I wasn’t welcome. As long as I made clothes everything was cool,
but when I tried to do what they the men were doing, suddenly I was persona non
grata.”

Robbins was shut out of a major cartoon art show in New York, and
couldn’t penetrate the underground cartoonists’ network.

“They’d call each other up and say, ‘I’m doing a comic, do you want to be
in it?’ But they wouldn’t call me. At parties, they’d still introduce me as
a seamstress. I finally had to stop making clothes, so I could insist they
call me a cartoonist.”

Robbins retaliated by publishing the first all-women’s comic book, “It Ain’t
Me, Babe,” then helping to found the Wimmen’s Comix Collective.

Adler, too, was determined to emphasize her intellectual and political roles
instead of her sex, becoming “a left-wing nun in the Summer of Love.” Today, she
believes that the women’s liberation movement was not a part of, but rather
a reaction to, the radical politics of the ’60s.

“A lot of the women’s movement came specifically from how women were
treated in Students for a Democratic Society,” she insists.

As a reporter for the Boston Globe and a freelance journalist covering
counterculture for magazines such as Harper’s, Sara Davidson says she
saw herself as “a spy between the lines.” Now an author and television
producer in Santa Monica, Davidson agrees that “there was tremendous
hostility to women in the movement. [At political rallies], if a woman got
up to the microphone, people would yell, ‘Take her off the stage and fuck
her.’”

Davidson’s 1977 book, “Loose Change,” was reissued by University of
California Press this year. It’s a personal chronicle of the impact of the
anti-war movement and the counterculture on Davidson and two of her friends
who arrived at UC-Berkeley in 1960.

“The notion of women’s freedom was the last frontier,” Davidson says. “It
was resisted from top to bottom in society, by the straight world and just
as vigorously and adamantly by the counterculture.”

She believes, however, that it was the idealism and utopian goals of the
counterculture that allowed the women’s movement to flower.

“It was out of that spirit,” she says, “that women began looking at their
own lives. The ideal was a society where every human being would have
value, worth and equality, where every human being would have a voice. So
it was a natural outgrowth of that to ask, ‘Well, what about women?’”

Despite the fight, none of these women has the least regret for their
participation in the counterculture.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t have a lot of fun,” Davidson reminds us, “because
we did. There was a lot of dancing and playing and frolicking in the
woods — they were wonderful, heady and giddy days. A good time was had by
most.”