Manhandled

I started a fight in my family once when I got fed up with my younger brother always calling my littlest brother "a girl" when he wanted to really zing him, hit him with a verbal punch that was almost below the belt...you know where it would really hurt a guy.
"You throw like a girl."
"What are you gonna do, cry, like a girl?"
"You're such a girl, Sally."
And although I feel like I'm losing the war--to this day, my littlest brother is Sally--I won a battle that day when my mom sided with me.
"Well, you know," she hemmed and hawed in her most placating tone, "she does have a point."
The menfolk wouldn't allow that there was anything inherently sexist in their use of "girl" as a derogatory term; we were surrounded, but at least I knew my Mom and I were in it together.

When I signed up to get braces through the University of Minnesota orthodontics program, I guess, without even realizing it, I assumed my doctor would be a man. But she wasn't. She was a woman about my age, but there the similarities stopped. She was petite, blonde, and didn't run into things. Plus, when people addressed her, they said "doctor" before her name without laughing. I wondered at the vast differences in what we each had to show for roughly the same amount of time spent on the planet. She used words like "malocclusion," "infradentale," and "radiographic imaging." I used words like "dude." She wore a lab coat, surgical mask, and latex gloves to work. I barely wear shoes anymore. She was pleasant and talked about her husband and dogs like I might talk about my extensive collection of TV on DVD; sure, they took up a lot of time she should have spent reading, but they were happy together.

Well, my lady doctor graduated this month, and today was my first appointment with my new would-be orthodontist, a young man who wouldn't be at all out of place on the sales floor of a car dealership. His ultra-firm handshake should have been a red flag. "I'm not as gentle as your last doctor," he warned. "Oh, that's all right," I joked, "do your worst."
And he did. My wisp of a lady dentist had flitted about her work like a hummingbird, her thin and nimble fingers barely pressing against my teeth. This guy made me feel like one of those people who try to break the record for most hot dogs shoved in a mouth at once. At one point, grunting as he leaned into his effort to ram the metal wire into one of the brackets on my teeth, he said without much concern, "I don't know how this is going to work."

My torturer was singing along with the piped-in music ("I can't drive 55") when I recognized the voice of a friend from work in the next cubicle over. Pinned to the dentist's chair, the mirrored light shining bright in my eyes, a mouth full of manhands, I felt like I was in a war movie--you know that scene where the good guy has gone in search of his captured friend, but he's been captured himself, and now the bad guys with sinister accents have strapped him down in the interrogation room.
"I'd be careful if I were you, my American friend. I'm not as gentle as your last torturer."
"That's okay," our hero says. "Do your worst."
They smack him around a little, but, of course, he doesn't talk. In the end, the baddies decide to give him time to think about what he's going to say when they come back, and then they leave him alone in the room. He hears a voice in the next room, faint and feeble but familiar.
Our hero calls to the next cell. "Murphy! Murphy, is that you? I've been looking for you."
Murphy rasps, "Get out of here, man. You got to get out while you can."
"I'm not leaving without you."

When Dr. Manly McManning had finished, I took a tongue tally and accounted for all my teeth. Despite his best efforts to jar them from my head, they were still there. I left through the next cubicle, stopping at the chair where those bastards had my friend.
"Aw, Murph, what have they done to you?"
We joked about how we were supposed to be at work and how we'd both be eating pudding tonight. But our laughter was hollow, our jokes a ruse to throw our captors off the scent of our fear and woe.

I looked down at my friend, reclined in the dentist's chair. "Come on," I said, "We gotta get out of here." But his doctor wasn't done with him yet.

"No, you go on without me. Ladies first."

I cringed against the sounds of whirring dental machinery as I walked away, and I thought about my gentle female dentist of yore. The highest compliment for any of these dental students, I thought, would be to say they practiced orthodontics like a girl.