Anatomically Incorrect

As an elementary schooler, I loved to draw. Girls. I loved to draw girls. My magic markers and I had a pretty rigid "no boys allowed" policy. There were several reasons for this:

1. Boys. Grody. (Okay, okay, so hating boys was just a front. Really I loooooooved the boys, but sometimes a girl has to save face in front of her USA co-Crushers.)
2. Because I was so accustomed to drawing girls, on the rare occasion that I did try to conjure the male form, dude usually ended up looking like a lady.
3. Even when I managed to sketch a passably boyish boy, he'd end up looking like this:

Bo-bo?! On top of drawing them, it seems I had a problem naming boys too.

Bo-bo here—I don't even want to hazard a guess as to how that's short for Timothy, lest my gray matter implode—may be wearing super-cool sneaks and a mildly obscene sweater (don't try to tell me that dog isn't exposing itself to me!), but you guys? Where is his crotch? WHERE IS BO-BO'S CROTCH? Wherever it is, I hope his forehead is there too. If there's an opposite of the Tyra Banks fivehead, then our pal Bo-bo has it:

One-and-a-half-head?

And on top of that (literally), I gave him a Three Stooges haircut. I was not doing Bo-bo any favors.

But this was not an isolated incident. Take a look at some more boy wreckage:

No, that's not a fat suit.

Yes, I know it looks like one.

Jimmy Ray is all, "Bo-bo? I see your vacant stare and hillbilly moniker, and I MOTHERFUCKING RAISE YOU." Also, I submit that the only way Jimmy Ray could be more froglike is if he changed his name to friggin' Kermit—and come to think of it, that might be an improvement.

"But," you say, "maybe we should take the boy out of the sweatpants [ew!] and find out what a cool guy would look like." Well, you asked for it.

The face of cool. No, that's not lipstick.

Shut up! He's just a pretty boy.

I mean, the only thing that could make him cooler is a half-shirt.

Brief aside: My sister & I used to coerce our mother into making us paper dolls drawn to our precise specifications, and one of them was a "hot boy" named Chris (because Chris was my go-to cool boy name circa 1988) who's wearing a motherloving half shirt. Think I'm joking?

Dude. I don't joke about half-shirts. Well, not this time, anyway.

But back to A. Tanner. Once again we have a boy with lifeless Orphan Annie eyes. Once again he has a bizarrely shortened midsection that makes me question his ability to digest food sans medical intervention. And once again his name is printed with an enormous lack of subtlety across his clothing (though I think that's justified in Jimmy Ray's case—he looks like the type who'd forget his own name). So just what makes A. Tanner one-and-a-half-head and shoulders above the rest? Two things (and no, his stylish baby blue smock isn't one of them):

1. The hair. Behold the magnificently spiky hair!
2. The earring, a sparkling beacon of awesome in a sea of otherwise humdrum earlobes.

Yes, men with solo earrings were so widespread in 1986 that I felt comfortable co-opting this look for a third grader. But! There were very strict guidelines for male ear piercing in the '80s. The golden rule was this: If the earring was in the left ear, the guy was straight; if it was in the right ear, he was gay, gay, a thousand times gay! Because in the '80s sexual preference had to do with which earlobe a dude punctured, not which gender he wanted to put his penis in. And God for-freaking-bid someone might think you wanted to make out with another dude.

So, because Aaron Tanner was the cutest, most heterosexualest boy in town he had his earring in the... oh, FUDGE.

The right—and simultaneously, wrong—earlobe.

But hey, this wasn't exactly a science. Right, George Michael?

Earring in the left ear = STRAIGHT?!

[Image found here.]

I rest my case. Anyone care to Google Chad Allen's earlobes?

NEXT TIME: If pencils could talk... apparently they'd be quite cynical.