Do Ya Think I'm Sexy
(Stewart, Rod / Hitchings, Duane / Appice, Carmine Jr.) Performed by Rod Stewart
Sugar, sugar
She sits alone waiting for suggestions
He's so nervous, avoiding all the questions
His lips are dry, her heart is gently pounding
Don't you just know exactly what they're thinking
If you want my body and you think I'm sexy
Come on, sugar, let me know
If you really need me, just reach out and touch me
Come on, honey, tell me so, tell me so, baby
He's acting shy, looking for an answer
Come on honey, let's spend the night together
Now hold on a minute before we go much further
Give me a dime so I can phone my mother
They catch a cab to his high rise apartment
At last he can tell her exactly what his heart meant
If you want my body and you think I'm sexy
Come on honey, tell me so
If you really need me, just reach out and touch me
Come on sugar, let me know
His heart's beating like a drum
'Cause at last he's got this girl home
Relax baby, now we are alone
They wake at dawn 'cause all the birds are singin'
Two total strangers but that ain't what they're thinkin'
Outside it's cold, misty and it's rainin'
They got each other, neither one's complainin'
He say's, "I sorry but I'm out of milk and coffee
Never mind sugar we can watch the early movie"
If you want my body and you think I'm sexy
Come on sugar, let me know
If you really need me, just reach out and touch me
Come on honey, tell me so
Sugar
If you really need me, just reach out and touch me
Come on, sugar, let me know
If you really, really, really, really need me
Just let me know, just reach out and touch me
If you really want me, just reach out and touch me
Come on, sugar, let me know
If you really need me, just reach out and touch me
Come on, sugar, let me know
If you, if you, if you really need me, just come on and tell me so
Just reach out and tell me so
Do Ya Think I'm Sexy was a new kind of song: for the first time that I remember, the lyrics are about a guy who is nervous and questioning his own desirability instead of just confidently hitting on the girl, like in every other song ever. This had a strange effect on the guys at school: for the first time, they would go around singing a song from the radio, provocatively swivelling their hips like burlesque dancers, and while they primarily did this dance amongst themselves, it was performed in groups to some of us girls, too. It was a weird scene as the guys tried to act sexy and expected an honest answer as to whether or not we thought they were sexy. And we were twelve, thirteen.
It was especially weird because of the Rod Stewart urban legend that appeared at the same time as this hit song: As we heard it, apparently Rod Stewart was on an airplane and when he landed, he was immediately rushed to the hospital with intense stomach pains. They needed to pump his stomach when they got to the ER and the doctors were stunned to discover that Stewart had pints of semen in his stomach. That's the whole story, but it raised so many questions: How does one get pints of semen in their stomach? Is that a normal or outrageous amount? Will semen in the stomach always require a trip to the ER or was something else happening here? And who would we ask these questions of? Not our teachers or parents -- we'd have been pretty certain that they wouldn't have been as culturally informed as we were and wouldn't know what we were talking about. And we didn't talk to each other about our questions -- who wanted to be the only one who didn't understand the story? So, this added layer of presumed homosexuality -- unless this was somehow Stewart's own semen that had migrated along crossed tubes within his own body?? -- made for an added layer of surreality when the guys would be dancing and hip thrusting amongst themselves: Boi Power!
Thinking and writing about the guys from school over the past couple of weeks, I think I need to tell this following story, which I didn't intend to.
As I've said before, we lived in a farming community and most of the kids took the bus to school. Among the walking kids, I was the only girl in our class who lived in the neighbourhood, and while that meant that hanging out with my girl friends generally meant a sleepover on the weekend, it also meant that I hung out with the guys during the week. There was often "after school sports" -- usually floor hockey, supervised by my most and least favourite teachers -- and I would play along with my brothers and the guys from the neighbourhood: Ronald, Donny, Ricky, and Glen. (If there were guys from other grades there, I don't even remember them -- but I do know I was the only girl.) Having only brothers, I considered myself a tomboy, and for the longest time that we lived in Stouffville, I thought of myself as one of the guys.
As we got older, sometimes we remembered that I wasn't a guy -- Glen asked me to go to a dance with him once (grade six?) and I said yes because I didn't know how to say no (a dating phenomenon that plagued me throughout high school) and we had a strange and awkward time, and Donny's Dad offered me a job in his variety store, which I found to be totally out of left field until I started working there and realised it was a ruse to get me and Donny together (and I never could figure out if that was quiet Donny's dream or his Dad's...)
But usually, no matter what was happening at school that started to divide us into the boys' and the girls' camps, I thought of these neighbourhood guys as my friends. Because I usually stayed after school, I was never expected at home right away, and sometimes we would go to Glen's house (the only one whose parents both worked) and drink from his Dad's bar liquor -- we were twelve, thirteen, and it didn't take much to get us tipsy -- and sometimes someone would have some cigarettes and we'd smoke them 'til I turned green. This happened many times without any of us getting caught (even Glen's Dad didn't notice the evaporating bottles) and it seemed like harmless fun.
One day in grade eight, we went to Glen's house after school, and a casual friend of my brother Ken's (a guy named Kirk who didn't even go to our school) came along. Kirk had slept over at our house before and I knew him well enough, and even though it was unusual for him to be with us, he wasn't a stranger to me, and curiously, I didn't even worry about him telling Ken about the drinking that we soon got down to. After a little while, some prearranged look passed between the guys, and they jumped me. Four of my friends held down my bucking arms and legs while Kirk sat on my stomach and undid the buttons of my plaid flannel shirt (I remember this like it happened yesterday). No one touched me, but they all had a good look at my tiny breasts as Kirk said, "Shit, I knew you wouldn't be wearing a bra."
I was struggling and yelling, but totally helpless, when the phone rang. Glen had to go answer it, and he kept waving over at us to keep quiet and mouthing that it was his Mom, and when I hoarsely screamed, the guys let me up. I quickly did up my shirt, ran up the stairs, and hightailed it home, never to return.
Okay, worse could have happened to me that day, but beyond being humiliated, I also lost the only friends I had in the neighbourhood and my near isolation became complete. I had no one to play ball with at the park, I stopped going to after school sports, and I walked home from school alone. One day as I was walking home, I saw Glen up ahead of me, also walking alone, and I began trashtalking him, saying he wasn't such a big man when he was by himself. I hadn't told anyone about being attacked, hadn't talked to any of my so-called friends again, and I guess I just needed to regain some power by proving I wasn't afraid of these guys one-on-one. Glen turned around and I could see that he was crying and he told me to just shut up.
"What's wrong with you?" I yelled.
"My parents are getting divorced, okay?"
How did it happen that I now felt sorry for Glen? I didn't know many divorced couples -- the only broken families I was familiar with were from After School Specials, where it looked hard and miserable -- but there was no way I was going to catch up with Glen and help him talk it through. I was done with these guys, and when high school started the next fall, Ronald, Donny, Ricky and Glen all went to the local school instead of catching the bus to the Catholic school with me and Ken. I have no memory of even seeing any of them again after grade eight, no matter how small the neighbourhood.
Two footnotes:
I was walking through the park the next summer and some guy I had never seen before called out to me, "Hey, are you Ken's little sister?"
I answered a wary yes and he said (loudly, still calling across the park), "That asshole Kirk was bragging about what he did to you so I broke his arm."
"Um, thanks?"
The guy waved and walked off and I cringed with shame. Did that mean that Ken knew and never talked to me about it? I shuddered at the idea. I totally understand why sexual assaults are under-reported -- I was humiliated by the knowledge that people were talking about what happened to me, and if I had had to tell anyone in a position of authority about what happened, I would have had to admit to the months of drinking, too. Had I asked for this? Was I at least partly to blame? Even at the time I knew that the answers to those questions was no, but I also never told anyone about what happened.
When we were living in Lethbridge years later, in a letter from Cora, I learned that one night Glen had put on a ski mask, and with a sawed-off shotgun, had held up Donny's family's variety store. Did he really think that they wouldn't know it was him under the mask? They called the cops right away, and Glen, the dimwitted product of a broken family, had gone straight home and hidden the gun under his mattress, where the cops found it easily. Upon reading this letter, I was conflicted between feeling the glee of karma gone right and the pity that I had felt as Glen, red-eyed and miserable, had bitterly confessed, "My parents are getting divorced, okay?" Glen was always a bit of a loser -- dumpy looking with receding, curly hair even as a kid -- and the unlikeliest of criminals, and even though he bartered his Dad's liquor for friendship once upon a time, I didn't ever think that he was the mastermind behind the attack on me. Dangit, it's so much easier to hate than empathise.
The only good result of this experience was that it made me wary of guys -- especially in situations where I was outnumbered -- and I never put myself in danger again. And honestly, if I had to pinpoint a time when I should have seen that things were changing between me and the neighbourhood guys, it would have been around the time of this song. With the guys gyrating and having pop culture justification for teasingly using words like "sexy" and "semen", I should have known we weren't experiencing the song the same way: Do Ya Think I'm Sexy must have been a powerful watershed moment for them -- they were pleading with us to tell them that they were becoming desirable, but with the (likely confusing) gay overlay of the group dancing and the urban legend -- and we girls just giggled at the buffoonery, not understanding a bit of what they were really asking.
