Sometimes, when I have a moment alone with the boys, I’ll be overcome by the impulse to tell them I love them, to which my younger son Scotty might reply, “You say that, but you always tease us.” Scotty is six, and to his mind the ideas of teasing and loving are mutually exclusive. To me they go hand in hand, which is why I tease Scotty and his older brother endlessly.
My teasing of the children meets various outcomes, the best of which is their laughter. When Scotty is overly choosy about what will suffice for lunch, I might put on a little one man show in the kitchen. “Sir, the small child protests. It refuses our offerings with much whining and yelling,” I’ll say to an imaginary superior. “Ply the child with eggs and fruit,” he replies. “If this does not quiet it, then we are in perilous straits indeed.” Then, after a few giggles, Scotty’s eating a breakfast burrito. For whatever reason, the kids particularly enjoy when my teasing takes the form of me talking to myself.
After laughter, embarrassment is the next best result. When Cartter attempts to impose his will on movie night and force Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules through the selection process, I read the description (which includes a bit about the wimpy kid’s love interest), turn to him and say, “Wait, this is a kissy movie!” A stifled laugh, blushing, and 90 minutes of indulgence follow.
Depending on their mood, the boys will sometimes pass through laughter and embarrassment before landing upon the worst of their reactions to my teasing: indignation. When Scotty learns his Saturday will not include a sleepover with his friend, he whines that it’s the worst day ever and inspires me to an impromptu composition on the piano. As I loop through the resulting eight bars and sing with real feeling its titular complaint, “It’s the Worst Day Ever” Scotty fights back laughter, covers his face in embarrassment, and then proceeds to scream at me to “STOOOOOOP!” He can scream all he wants, though. I’m not stopping.
Some might think my relentlessness cruel, but, faced with a child’s stubborn complaining, what’s a better alternative? Should I coddle him? Chasten him? Punish him? Ignore him? Offer him a bribe? Done properly, teasing is the clear best choice, at once sympathetic to a problem (hunger, guilty pleasure, boredom) and dismissive of it. In some ways it is the opposite of envy. Whereas to envy is to shoulder a heavy burden and hope that someone else is crushed, to tease is to be above it all, to laugh, and to invite the one being teased to join. Envy springs from pride and vanity. Proper teasing vanquishes them. It’s done without a chip on one’s shoulder and holds a mirror up to a person’s flaws in the gentlest way possible, i.e. with humorous intent. What better place to raise a child than one filled with this sort of teasing? When Scotty insists it’s the worst day ever, I could give him a lecture about how fortunate he is, to what effect I know not, or I could sing a song that sends him over the edge the first time but evokes a sheepish grin ever after. When I see that face as I strike the opening chord, and when Danyelle tells me she caught Scotty singing the song to himself in his room, I’m completely hardened against the hypothetical argument that my teasing is cruelty. To the contrary, it’s the greatest gift I can give my sometimes whiny son.
My boys are the easiest targets of my teasing, and it’s not because they’re naïve or near at hand. It’s because of all the people in the world, I love them the most completely, and I’m sure as I can be that I don’t have some secret ill intent. My goal is not to hurt their feelings; it’s to get them to laugh. Moreover, I’m secure in my role as their father. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t fear losing their friendship as I might less intimate acquaintances’. As a result, the question, “Was that too far?” and all its accompanying doubt and angst just don’t often arise.
I’m not immune to second guessing myself in lesser relationships. When I greet a temporarily displaced neighbor whose remodel is overschedule and no doubt overbudget with a teasing, “Moving back in next week?” his fake laugh and concurrent middle finger prompt me to worry just a bit. Teasing might be the enemy of vanity, but it doesn’t always triumph, and when I’m rebuffed, I can feel uncomfortable with the idea of being thought a jerk. Still, I have plenty to be ashamed of without adding attempts at good-natured teasing to the list, and after decades spent honing my skill, I’m inclined to believe that if I offend, that’s someone else’s problem.
It’s an attitude that got me into hot water more often when I was younger and less proficient at teasing. In high school, when I was fond of throwing around the term “pussy,” I once told a friend I was “just kidding.” “Yeah,” he said, “but you shouldn’t have to say that.” Not having to say you’re kidding – a good rule of thumb for testing teasing’s level of appropriateness.
Another classmate was less delicate about telling me I’d gone too far. It was during the latter half of my senior year at a party, and, unamused by my teasing, he wrestled me to the ground and promptly knocked me unconscious with one blow. This he accomplished quite easily since he was a good deal bigger than I was, and much less intoxicated. Once he had me lying lifeless on the ground, he went ahead and took a few more shots at my head, bruising my face and busting my lip before my friends pulled him off me. The lesson here is, of course, that guys with really small penises can’t handle being teased.
I may not have pulled it off all that well as a high schooler, but even then, my intentions were to disarm, not to inflame. I wanted friends, not enemies. My problem was that my teasing was marred by anger and bluntness, overcompensations for insecurity that so often characterize childish attempts. Take, for example, the sexually frustrated twenty-something who recently lectured me on the housing market while he was for some reason in attendance at a toddler’s birthday party. The man boy was angry about not being able to afford a house here in Charleston and explaining that he planned to move. Already tired of his schtick, I expressed my support and offered that I cannot so easily move owing to my having a wife and kids, to which he replied, “Yeah, I’m looking for a place to start my life, not trying to find a place to end it . . . Like you are.” With that, I told him, “Ok. You have a good night.” Sure enough, as I walked away, I heard him call after me, “I was just kidding!” Not long afterwards he skulked off to his den of bitter celibacy while I played cornhole with three other middle-aged married homeowners with kids. I might have liked to have pierced him with some little verbal barb, but just like insecurity is a bad progenitor of teasing, so too is disgust.
Manly teasing is not angry, insecure, or disgusted. Rather, it is playful. Unsurprisingly, a great place to find it is on the field of play. In my early twenties, I played a frustrating round of golf with my friend Matt and his father in which my slice was so bad that hitting driver was the equivalent of taking a penalty stroke. “Why don’t you hit an iron?” Matt said. I ignored him, and about midway through the back nine, he and his father started calling me “Captain Tee Shot,” a moniker that brings a smile to my face as I write it.
My father is no stranger to this kind of teasing. Despite his admonitions to “Be sweet,” when I was a child, I distinctly remember being called “Weiner Boy” and “Spaz” to his great amusement. Now, whenever he answers my phone calls, I greet him with the words, “Old Man,” spoken in the accent of an ancient, toothless Vietnamese man whose company I once enjoyed in an ESL class I taught nearly twenty years ago. At age seventy-one in the year 2024, Dad still doesn’t have a cell phone or caller ID, which makes opening our phone conversations this way particularly satisfying.
Clearly a man of ample penis, Dad is not easily offended by my teasing. When he regales me with the tale of his latest round at the club, I ask him if he’s the only guy there who plays from the ladies’ tees. Battling neuropathy in his legs and the resulting loss of power in his game, he recently “moved up” from the golds. “They’re called the front tees now,” he tells me and goes on to a story about how as a gag he showed up to the course wearing a skirt, a size twelve that may have been too big. “I think I could be a size ten,” he says. Not unimpressed, I ask him, “Did you turn yourself on a little bit?” Whatever pain these little insults cause is tantamount to the stick of a needle that precedes the inflow of a powerful inoculation, the targeted disease in this case being one of boredom, humorlessness, and despair. Dad and I take the good with the bad, because we’re men, and what’s more, men who love each other.
Where there’s no love lost, teasing quickly becomes bullying or harassment or a plain old shouting match. Two people repelled by one another aren’t capable of playful teasing. Playful teasing is a game of “I showed you yours, now you show me mine,” and nobody wants to be exposed by someone they hate. There has to be some kind of attraction between the players, which is probably why teasing across gender lines is trickier than manly teasing. Being attractive to the opposite sex is more important (to most people), so teasing’s natural enemies vanity and pride are primed.
Some would no doubt call me unhip or even bigoted, but I confess to not having evolved too far beyond the belief that gender is for all practical intents and purposes binary, that despite much political fervor to the contrary, men and women are not exactly equal, and that the inequality between genders is not something we can or should force into submission. Teasing is one small example of what I mean. Take the phrase, “one of the guys.” Adeptness at teasing and being teased in the sense I’m writing about here (not in the striptease sense of the word) is probably one of the chief qualifications for a woman becoming “one of the guys.” As such, it’s a title that’s rarely doled out, much less often than, say, “ball buster.” I think it’s still much overused.
I’ve never known a woman whom I’d consider one of the guys. In fact, the whole idea seems more than a bit unrealistic, like Cameron Diaz asking a pimply Ben Stiller to the prom in the movie There’s Something About Mary and then choosing him over Brett Favre in the end because, “she’s a niners fan.” A big part of the film’s comedic charm is the absurdity of Cameron Diaz being one of the guys, a down-to-earth, football-loving, female buddy, who says things like, “I’m fucking with you,” a supermodel who prefers homely, regular dudes. Her character is a fantasy, one to which any woman would be a fool to aspire. The “something” about Mary isn’t really her easygoing, sports-watching, teasing nature. As my father said after seeing the movie, “I think it’s her body.”
Demi Moore plays a fantasy on the other end of the spectrum in the film A Few Good Men, a buttoned-up ball buster who can’t help but succumb to the charm of Tom Cruise’s relentless witty teasing. The cherry on top – she’s his superior officer in the navy. As Colonel Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, puts it, “There is nothing on this earth sexier, believe me gentlemen, than a woman that you have to salute in the morning,” or as Tom Cruise’s character remarks after being dressed down by Moore’s, “Wow. I’m sexually aroused, Commander.” A line that must have been deeply satisfying to deliver, and not one I ever would have tried.
Ultimately, Jessup gets arrested, and Moore and Cruise end up dating, as do Diaz and Stiller. The moral of these stories of teasing across gender lines: If you don’t plan on getting romantically involved, tread lightly.
There has to be some shred of flirtatiousness in teasing delivered between opposite genders, some allowance for the attractiveness of the recipient. Otherwise, it’s stripped of playfulness and becomes mean. Rather than enliven a conversation, it deflates it, leaving its target effectively neutered. Consider the woman who injected herself into a conversation between a trainer and me at the Pilates studio where I am one of the very few male clients. I was on a machine with four resistance levels, talking my way down to the third, when this woman said coldly, “Real men do four.” The awkwardness was palpable. I can only imagine how things might have escalated had I calmly turned to her, a woman easily into her sixties, and replied, “Real women get their periods.” Marlon Brando’s Apocalypse Now monologue comes to mind: “It is impossible to describe through words what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends,” or, as I’m sure a human resources professional once said, “Don’t tease women about menopause . . . or else.”
To be clear, I’m in no way against women entering the fray. In fact, if all parties manage to stay between the lines, teasing between men and women can be just as rewarding as it is between men. For instance, in the studio where I was once gelded, I have developed a friendly rapport with the trainers (all of them are women), especially my instructor, with whom I enjoy the occasional repartee. When I come into the gym after a meeting, dressed in business casual (an anomaly), badly in need of a haircut (not an anomaly) and ask, “Does this outfit make me look like a serious person? Or does the hair ruin it?” she looks up from her seat for a second and comments, “You got a little lettuce in the back.” At once grateful for her casual air and disappointed to realize how much I care about the appearance of “lettuce” on my neck, I’m eager to return the favor. Looking at the plate of food in her lap, I say, “Having tuna in the office again?” A week later I’d have a fresh haircut, and she’d be preoccupied with her breath following yet another presession tuna sandwich. As another trainer in the studio said, “One smart ass for another.” My Tuesday/Thursday Pilates sessions are not among the lowlights of my weekly schedule.
It’s worth noting here that setting is a crucial factor when it comes to teasing’s acceptability. I remember waiting in the ready room of an outpatient clinic before a procedure that included anesthesia and a camera being snaked down my throat. Lying anxiously in a hospital gown with an IV coming out of my arm, I heard uproarious whooping laughter emanating from the nearby OR. I might not have been in the mood for a teasing exchange, but the medical staff felt right at home. The flow of teasing is smoothest where all parties enjoy home field advantage, and as I’m sure the employees at Palmetto Digestive Disease and Endoscopy Center would attest, a well-functioning workplace can provide such an environment.
Most of my enduring relationships that began at work are with men; however, working as a year round club swim coach has brought me in contact with women whom I would classify as strong, and I mean that not at all in the “strong woman” sense (Identifying oneself as a “strong woman” seems to me a little . . . weak.); I mean that during my many years patrolling the deck, I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside women who can take a light ribbing, my current colleague included. When she pretends to admonish a swimmer that makeup is not allowed, and I look her up and down and say, “Yeah, but tattoos and piercings are cool, right?” (She is well tatted and pierced), she simply concurs with a wry smile. The rewards of this teasing are great. Rapport among the coaching staff is a major benefit to the team, including and especially the kids. Safe as my colleague and I may feel, however, we’re still of opposite gender, and our teasing therefore happens on delicate ground that requires heightened vigilance, especially on my part. An eye must always be kept on the limits lest feelings get hurt, wrong ideas had, and homefield advantage destroyed for teasing’s recipient and then, in turn, its perpetrator. Going too far with another guy and getting punched in the face is bad, but it’s a lot rarer than accidentally overstepping with a woman and having to face more drawn-out consequences. You should never, for example, teasingly address your mother-in-law by her mother’s name. It will complicate your life in ways you couldn’t possibly foresee. Likewise, don’t hit on Demi Moore unless you’re certain you’re the good guy.
Maybe if I weren’t married, then I’d view teasing between genders in a more permissive light. Teasing is, after all, a kind of intimacy, and until humans become asexual beings, sex will continue to be a sticking point, however pronounced or slight, in intimate relationships between men and women. Marriage didn’t create this distinction in my mind; rather, it better attuned me to it, and as a result it has caused me to approach my female peers with just a little more caution. At the same time, I find that marriage itself deals with this tricky bit about intimacy quite nicely. It is a glowing exception to the rules of extra restraint that surround teasing between genders.
Since romantic involvement is not a potentiality but a commitment in marriage, my wife Danyelle is subject to a steady barrage of teasing, a barrage which she somewhat frustratingly ignores. She’ll have her face in a laundry basket or a sink full of dishes, thereby tilting the balance of household chore credit even further in her favor, and I’ll hit her with my favorite line, “You think you’re better than me?” Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she’ll remain speechless or offer a simple, straight-faced, “No.” Still, I keep trying, because there’s always that one-in-a-hundred chance that I’ll see her face spread into a wicked grin and hear her say with delight, “Yes.”
It wouldn’t be satisfying if there weren’t any truth to it. It would take some serious cajoling to get Danyelle to admit it in earnest, but part of what she’s doing when she shoulders the lion’s share of the chores is storing up reserves. If ever she wants to get away for a weekend or stick me with some inconvenient duty, I can’t honestly begrudge her, but even weightier than the prospect of her cashing in her built up goodwill is the general sense that she’s contributing more to the functioning of our household. I’m not complaining, but in this way, Danyelle is a bit of a martyr, which is why the line, “You think you’re better than me” works. It’s a little bit true, and, just as importantly, it’s a little bit derogatory.
Derogatory truth is a fundamental component to the fun of playful teasing. My kids are whiny and dramatic. I am weak off the tee (sometimes). My dad is old and quite possibly a tiny bit attracted to himself. (Aren’t we all?) Whether the message is delivered straight a la “Old Man,” or sarcastically (Captain Tee Shot) doesn’t matter. What matters is the truth that underlies the tease. Without it, all that’s left is a worthless instance of “just kidding,” or, if there’s no derogatory element, flattery.
Sometimes, the truth beneath the tease is harder to find. When my female coaching colleague comes to me on deck unable to fix a swimmer’s piece of malfunctioning equipment, I quickly set it right and tease, “Just needed the male brain, huh?” It’s a risky play. Leaning into chauvinistic stereotypes with a woman is almost as dangerous as joking about her weight or going after a man’s thinning hairline (these subjects are all but taboo), but I have confidence in my colleague that she’ll see through to the underlying truth of the matter, which is simply that, being much older and more experienced, I know more than she does. She doesn’t disappoint, taking the repaired snorkel in her hand and commenting, “You know, I’m gonna give this to the kid and get all the credit.”
With my wife the risky plays involve infidelity. When Danyelle asks me who I was on the phone with, I might say, “Just one of my girlfriends.” Lots of times, she’s as frustratingly inattentive to these teases as she is to my mocking questions about her sense of superiority. Other times, she’ll just make a little pout. Occasionally, she’ll get mad at me, but once in a while, she’ll come out with something like, “That’s fine. You don’t know who I’m having over while you’re gone this weekend,” which is what I really want to hear. The truth isn’t that I’m cheating on Danyelle. I’m not, and I don’t plan to. When I tease about being unfaithful, what I’m really saying is, “You’re more insecure than I am,” and when she gives it back to me, she isn’t admitting to her own infidelity (I hope); she’s saying, “Think again.” To me, this is a gift. How can you know the extent of your insecurities without testing them? And is there a safer way to do so than a playful tease? It’s certainly a lot cheaper than seeing a therapist.
Teasing’s success often turns on the resistance it meets in the form of insecurities, and that resistance can either solidify or soften depending on the skill of both the teaser and the teasee. Danyelle pretends to lack the necessary skill. She likes to claim that she’d prefer to bask in loving words of reassurance and skip being teased. To me, the idea sounds like choosing to live in a bubble – not much fun. Besides, coddling insecurities doesn’t necessarily make them go away so much as it does mask them for vanity’s sake. A little teasing here and there helps prevent the ego growing fat and lazy. Admittedly, I could mix in more syrupy sweetness, but Danyelle doesn’t give teasing or herself enough credit. Despite her frequent reluctance, teasing has been a key enabler of the closeness we share. After nearly a decade and a half of whittling away at each other’s insecurities, what might look like risky plays to people in less intimate relationships are more certain connections for us. I remember a time not too long ago when my alma mater’s football team was blessed with a seemingly endless line of unstoppable wide receivers, and the Head Coach claimed that passes other teams called “50/50 balls” were “90/10 balls” for his team, such was his faith in his quarterbacks’ and receivers’ ability to connect. I have similar faith in my marriage and in the teasing therein.
Whether or not it’s within my marriage, I like to believe that I’m equally good at passing and catching when it comes to the teasing game. I’m not immune to overshooting a receiver, and at times I’m caught off guard by a ball in the dirt, e.g. “Real men do four,” but I’m confident that completion rates are above average no matter what position I’m playing. My children are not quite there yet, but they’re learning. Sibling teasing is difficult, probably because of the natural rivalry that exists in such relationships. Even after half a lifetime’s worth of practice, teasing between my sister and me can lead to fights, this despite the fact that teasing is a regular stand-in for the unspoken words, “I love you.” With Cartter and Scotty at the tender ages of eight and six, their teasing breaks down even more quickly than does Betsey’s and mine. Likewise, they’re not always as tolerant of my teasing as a more experienced player (like their mother) would be. If they were wide receivers, other quarterbacks might grow tired of all the dropped balls and look for other targets. Not me, though. I’m locked in on them.
For now, the boys are much more comfortable delivering than receiving, and I relish when they zero in on me. I enjoy seeing their eyes burn with glee as they zing me with such barbs as, “I know who Daddy’s girlfriend is . . . Mommy,” or “If I make this shot, then Daddy goes to jail and gets burned on the dick,” although the latter was uttered with a touch of malice. Their wit is not exactly razor sharp, but it’s the effort that counts. I welcome their attempts to tease me for the same reason that I tease them: because I love them, and I have no intention of ever stopping.
The Raging Elitist 