Teenage boys may feel that girls are aliens, because they seem different, but in Neil Gaiman’s short Sci-Fi story, “How to talk to girls at parties”, the girls really are from another planet. The author humorously recounts the experience of two teenage boys, Vic and Enn, whose lack of experience around girls and nascent sexuality, cause them to ignore the visible signs that the girls they meet at a party are not from this world. Throughout the story, Enn, from whose perspective the story is told, is so focused on trying to talk to the girls he meets that he ignores their strange conversation, and he does not realize it. Vic is more at ease around girls, and forms a love bond with Stella, a girl he meets at the party, but he seems to understand who the teenagers at the party really are when trying to engage in sexual activities with the girl. This paper argues that the story shows how powerful the physical attraction between men and women can become, blinding to reality and potential danger. The present paper will first look at the way the main characters are constructed, it will then focus on the description of the search for romantic adventures as a quintessential part of adolescence and finally, it will consider the role of comedy in the story, and how it relates to the atmosphere that the writer is trying to create, that of a time when teenagers were still innocent.
Perhaps the most compelling idea which emerges from this story is that Vic and Enn are almost tragically ignorant about girls. In the construction of the main characters, and particularly Enn, the author’s own teenage years represented a source of inspiration for the main conflicts in the story. In the story, Vic and Enn are two 15-year-old boys, who go to a party in order to meet girls. While Vic is somewhat more mature and at ease around them, Enn is painfully shy and inexperienced. In the story, he recounts that, he went to a boys’ school, and consequently, he did not have the chance to meet many girls. Besides, his parents were stricter than Vic’s, because “I merely had two sisters, both younger than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely” (Gaiman). This corresponds to the Gaiman’s own biography. In a short biographical description, Wagner, Golden and Bissette explain that “Neil was born November 10, 1960, in Porchester, New Hampshire, and was followed by two sisters” (9). Not only Gaiman had two sisters, but he reached adolescence in the 1970s, when the action takes place in the short story. Therefore, Gaiman borrows his own possible experiences to Enn, in the construction of whom a type of nostalgia from the past is heard. While the story is narrated from Enn’s perspective, it is an older “Enn” who recounts it, one who still does not know why Vic run away so scared at the end of the evening, and allows the readers to assume it saw something terrible at Stella.
In the construction of the main character, Neil Gaiman used his own sense of otherness, as a man of Jewish and Polish descent living in Great Britain. As shown in one article, “his Jewish identity certainly made him an "outsider" in his Anglican educational environment” (Camus 78). Likewise, Gaiman created Enn as an outsider both because he is unable to interact with girls, and as a representative of mankind in the space inhabited by aliens. In the story, Enn felt unable to talk to girls because he did not understand them. He explains that, “girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they know all about everything, and they have periods and breasts and makeup and God-only-knew-what-else -- for I certainly didn't” (Gaiman). This shows that Enn was completely outside the female universe. From a gender point of view, it is at this point in Enn’s life that the differences between men and women are felt for the first time, because it seems that, once they enter adolescence, boys and girls have completely different worldviews, and different topics of conversation. In the story, this idea is taken to extreme, as each of the girls Enn talks to discusses about strange things like different galaxies, interstellar travelling, a species contained in a poem, all of which are incomprehensible for Enn.
Furthermore, the girls are not only strange, but also scary for adolescent boys. In Gaiman’s works, women and girls are described from a postfeminist perspective, which suggests that equality once achieved, it is no longer needed (Parsons, Dawers and McInally 376). This means that, while not focusing on girls’ empowerment, it suggests that girls do hold a lot of power, especially on adolescent boys, not only because of the sexual attraction they exercise upon them, but also because of the fact that they mature more quickly. One author explains in her work that one of “the very qualities that his work also became known for [is] the characterization of strong women” (Prescott 74). In this story, girls are truly strong, being able to lure boys in their ‘net’ as it happens to Vic.
Vic’s fear and his escape from the arms of Stella can also be interpreted from a psychological perspective as a fear of losing one’s masculinity, which encompasses such characteristics as independence, freedom to experiment and overconfidence, or arrogance. As explained in a work on adolescent development, “boys’ increase in castration anxiety, specifically linked to preoedipal fantasies of attack by the phallic mother, as the universal hallmark of male entry in preadolescence” (Gilmore and Meersand 134). Symbolically, the fear of castration as represented in the story by the boy’s frightened escape from the aliens’ party represents the fear of the revenge that the alien women would exert, once their advances are refused. As Enn looks back, he sees Stella looking at them extremely angry. He comments, “I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that” (Gaiman). Stella’s anger justifies the fear and the rushed escape, and it is suggested that the anger was caused by the fact that Vic refused her sexual advances. As suggested by Wilkie-Stibbs(39), Gaiman drew in his works upon a rich luggage of psychoanalytical knowledge, and used Freudian theories to illustrate the psychological depths of his characters . Consequently, the boy’s adolescent sexuality, and their romantic feelings caused them to ignore all the warning ‘signals’ and to drop their guard, with almost fatal consequences. The view of gender in this work, while exposed from the perspective of a teenager, illustrates the masculine awe and fear of the female “other”.
The story also reveals the older narrator’s nostalgia and amusement, as he looks back to his teenage years, and the atmosphere of the 1970s. From a sociological perspective, the interactions that the boy has with the girls in the house demonstrates the set of beliefs and values that young people in London had in those times, and how they regarded foreigners, and this creates humor. Thus, Enn’s attitude towards the party shows that he is more focused on impressing his friend Vic as a competitive male act, than actually wanting to go to this party to actually talk to girls and maybe engage in sexual acts with them. Enn seems to have his focus on other aspects of his life such as school instead of Vic who has his interests wrapped around girls. Enn, who has grown up with two sisters, wishes he had a brother that he could bond with like he does with Vic to show him the ropes of the social aspect of talking to girls and passing the rule book down to a younger generation as if he knew everything about the social interaction with the other sex.
As Enn fails to engage in the kind of random and shallow conversations that young people usually use as a preliminary introduction before the romantic encounter, “the story becomes a humorous liminal fantasy (or liminal science fiction when the narrator constantly misinterprets his conversations with the girls, identifying the foreign- accented extraterrestrials with Americans” (Klapcsik 65). As Klapcsik (65) shows in the previous quote, the boys and girls in this story fail to connect because they speak ‘different languages’ and they have different interests and experiences. This creates humor, particularly because the boys could not care less about the fact that they cannot understand the girls, and are only concerned about the romantic process. The social conventions at teenage parties seem to oblige boys to flirt with girls, and not respecting this convention, would cause Enn to become even more of an outsider.
Apart from the concern over social conventions, the ‘tourist’ status of the girls is also humorous. Enn understands correctly that the girls must be from a different place, because of their strange accent and their topics of discussion. However, when discussing with Wain’s Wain for example, he supposes that she is from America, as if this would explain her strange words. Furthermore, the boys associate the kind of tourism practiced by their new friends with their own experiences abroad. For example, Vic says, “hey're all tourists here anyway. It's a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany” (Gaiman). This explanation also made the boys feel confident about their own chances and about crashing the party, because they felt empowered by their own status as Englishmen, and consequently, “insiders”. However, once they learn what kind of tourists the girls actually were, they lose their confidence, and feel frightened by the ‘otherness’ of the girls from another world. This is a comic twist, not only because of the strange monologues of the girls, but also, because of the fact Enn does not manage to comprehend them, and it may be inferred, that the thirty –years older narrator who recounts the story, may still not understand what actually happened back then.
Finally, the nostalgia regarding the 1970s is perceived in the way that the narrator discusses the music and the attitude of the characters. The 1970s was not a particularly interesting era, according to some witnesses. For example, Chancellor explains that this era left no impression on him as if he had skipped it. However, the narrator does feel nostalgic, describing the girls’ hairstyle, as well as the music. In his description of a 1970’s themed party, Chancellor also acknowledges the costumes of the girls present, their wavy hairstyle, and the music, as waking the nostalgia of these years in him. The narrator’s perspective is that of a man who acknowledges the changes in the society and remembers the days when teenagers were more innocent in their romantic initiation, more strictly raised, and less bold in their approach. In regards to the behavior of teenagers today, one author explains that early adolescents and even children have “more sexual experience than their counterparts in earlier generations had” (Best and Bogle 4). By describing such practices as sexting, and rainbow parties, where very young teenagers engage in sexual frenzies, the author shows that promiscuity seems to be the new order among teenagers today. However, teenagers behaved very differently in the 1970s, and the narrator who lives in the contemporary American society, but nostalgically depicts the customs of teenagers in 1970s, in England, feels obliged to explain that 8 in the evening was rather late for a 15-year-old boy who received strict upbringing, and that he had only kissed three of his sister’s friends, thus being rather inexperienced. Thus, the nostalgic remembrance of the 1970s, from the perspective of a man who lives in a very different world, creates the feeling that teenagers were still innocent back then, and this is perhaps why, Vic’s attempt to have a sexual encounter fails lamentably, and his innocence is preserved.
In Gaiman’s story, the idea that boys and girls are from different planets is given a new meaning, because Vic and Enn actual meet, and engage in romantic pursuit, with girls from a different planet. However, the author suggests that boys are so distracted by their own sexual yearnings, that they completely ignore the signals sent by the girls. Furthermore, the social pressure they are subject to, as they need to prove that they are dominant males, also stop them from engaging in any meaningful conversation with the girls, or to actually listen to them, so they do not recognize the girls’ otherness until it is almost too late. Through the lens of five different critical perspective, namely biographical criticism, gender criticism, psychological criticism, sociological criticism and historical criticism, this paper tried to explain the author’s choices and to understand his meanings and messages. This sci-fi story about two teenagers having one of their first romantic adventures reflects the author’s nostalgia for a time when 15-year-old boys were still innocent, and girls were still both mysterious and scary for them.
Works Cited
Best, Joel & Bogle, Kathleen. Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex. New York: New York University Press. 2014. Print.
Camus, Cyril. The “Outsider”: Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament. Shofar 29.2(2011): 77-111.
Chancellor, Alexander. How Strange to Feel Nostalgic for the 1970s. The Spectator. N.d. Web. http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/07/how-strange-to-feel-nostalgic-for-the-1970s/
Gaiman, Neil. “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”. 2006. Web.
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Klapsick, Sandor. Liminality in fantastic fiction: a poststructuralist approach. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. 2012. Print.
Parsons, Elizabeth and Sawers, Naarah. “The Other Mother: Neil Gaiman’s Postfeminist Fairytales. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33.4(2008):371-289.
Prescott, Tarra. “It’s Pretty Graphic: Sexual Violence and the Issue of “Calliope”. Feminism in the worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. Ed. Tara Prescott, Aaron, Drucker. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. 2012. Print. 64-81.
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Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine: “Inside the Worlds of Neil Gaiman (an Anti-Oedipal Reading)”. The Lion and the Unicorn 37(1):37-53.
