"If it's 'transgender' and not 'transsexual' now, why isn't it 'heterogender' instead of 'heterosexual'?"
This was on a message board post and I wasn't sure if the person who posted it was serious or trolling. The people posting replies so far seemed to be treating it as the latter.
But I'm often inclined to consider an idea even when I don't much care for the person who spoke it, and I think this is actually a useful and thought-provoking question.
The difference between gender and sex is usually explained more or less like this: sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears; sex is the physical body, your plumbing, whereas gender is your identity; sex is biological, gender is social.
It's an oversimplification of sorts, because in order for sex to be perceived, it has to be recognized, and that recognition invokes social processes too.
Still, it's a useful starting point and the distinction is a useful one as well. Sex is whatever is embedded in our (mostly) dimorphic physiology as either male or female (or the variants that don't fit the dimorphic dyadic categories), whether we are able to perceive sex without social constructs interfering in our perception or not; and gender is the complex set of concepts, ideas, expectations, roles, rules, behaviors, priorities, personality characteristics, beliefs, and affiliated paraphernalia like clothing and segregated activities and whatnot, all the social stuff that we attach to sex but which isn't intrinsicallly really built in to sex -- whether we can successfully isolate gender from sex or not.
In order to comprehend that a person could have the kind of physical morphology that would cause everyone else to categorize them as "female" but could have an identity as "boy" or "man", and not deem that person factually wrong, we had to recognize gender and realize it wasn't identical to sex.
Not that transgender people were the first or the only people to have this awareness: feminists pointed out that an immense amount of social baggage is attached to the biological sexes, and that nearly all of it is artificially confining, restricting behaviors and expressions of self to narrowly channelled masculinity and femininity, and that it is unfair, in particular stripping women of human self-determination and the opportunities for self-realization, subordinating women to men as an inferior class. That's gender. Feminist analysis gave us an awareness of sexism and patriarchy and male chauvinism and stuck a pry bar between sex and gender. Anything that was OK for one sex should be OK for the other; all double standards were now suspect.
People originally said "transsexual" because of the focus on surgical modification of the body; most people's first encounter with the notion of a person whose body had been categorized as male but who identified as a woman involved solving that discrepancy by modifying the body to bring it into agreement with the gender identity. "Transsexual" was coined from "trans" in the sense of crossing from one thing to another (as in "transfer" or "translate") and "sexual" referring not to sexuality but to the sex of the body. The move towards the more modern term "transgender" took the focus off the sex and emphasized that there had been a discrepancy between the gender that a person was socially categorized and perceived as and the actual gender that that same person had as their identity. Such a person could indeed choose to deal with the situation by opting for surgery, but now we were using an identity term that focused on identity instead of one that reiterated the bond between identity and body.
(It also enabled a wider inclusiveness, reaching out to people who cannot afford a surgical transition, or are quite satisfied with presenting to the world in such a way as to be perceived as the sex they desire to be perceived as without a medical procedure, or whose medical interventions of choice do not involve surgery, or indeed anyone who was originally considered to be of a sex that does not correspond to their current gender identity).
But, as with pronouns (discussed in last week's blog post), our cultural discussions about being transgender continue to treat sex and gender in ways that reduce them to being one and the same. We've shifted the location of that "same" far more to the social and away from the biological in how we conceive of it, but we retain the notion that a person's sex should correspond to their gender. If the individual person is not in error and in need of correction, it must be the surrounding observers, but correspondence is assumed to be the intrinsically desirable outcome. And if we've rejected the reductionist notion that "if you got a dick yer a man, if you have a vag instead yer a woman, end of story", we've supplanted it with "if you identify as a man, you're male, if you identify as a woman, you're female, anything else is misgendering". Not so much because we're philosophically opposed to someone identify as a woman while considering themselves male but more because it hasn't been put out there as a proposition. People just assume they should correspond.
(This is something that I'm in a position to see clearly. I am that person. My physical body is male. My gender identity is girl or woman. I'm a gender invert. My sex and gender are not one of the the expected combinations. This is a concept that has proven intractably difficult to explain to people, despite being very simple at its core).
So what does all this have to do with being--or not being--a lesbian?
Our vocabulary for sexual orientations is, like everything else, rooted in the notion that sex and gender will correspond. Lesbians are women loving women. But by women we mean female people. That's what it has always meant up until now when we say "women" because we assume sex and gender correspond. It's only when they are unbolted from each other and each can vary independent of the other that we are faced with the question: is being a lesbian about attraction on the basis of gender or is it all about attraction on the basis of physical sex?
The same problem, of course, occurs for "heterosexual". A heterosexual male has always been a man who is attracted to women, by which we mean female women of course. Because once again, correspondence between sex and gender is assumed. I'm male but I'm one of the girls. I'm not a man who is attracted to women. It's not just nomenclature, it works completely differently; the mating dance of heterosexuality is an extremely gendered interaction, a game composed of boy moves and girl moves, densely overlaid with gendered assumptions about what he wants and what she wants, what it means if he does this or she says that. This entire mating dance is as far as you can get from gender-blind or gender-neutral. It was, in fact, my failure to successfully negotiate heterosexuality that eventually provoked my coming out as a differently gendered male.
The prospect of a lesbian flirting and courting and dating opportunity certainly has its attractions: to be able to interact with female women who are potentially sexually interested in me and not have to have, imposed on either of us, any assumptions whatsoever about who does what or that it means something different if she does it or I do it based on gender because, hey, we are of the same gender.
But as the poet Robert Frost once said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Lesbians do not take me in. They wish for female people to date and court and connect with. I can hardly complain about the unfairness and injustice of that when I am attracted exclusively to female people myself. I'm not heterogender, sexually attracted to women on the basis of their gender identity; I'm heterosexual, if by heterosexual we mean the attaction is on the basis of physical morphology. As a matter of fact, I have a bit of a preference for female people whose gender characteristics would get them considered masculine or butch at times.
Neither "lesbian" nor "heterosexual" works for me as an identifier in this world because of the correspondence issue though. Instead, I'm left reiterating what has become my slogan: "It's something else".
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, April 27, 2019
Saturday, April 20, 2019
My Pronouns
They ask me what my pronouns are. It's a respectful and appropriate question. I have no easy answers.
I was born with a physical configuration that was assigned the value 'male', and I've always been one of the girls from as far back as I can remember. I was pressured to adopt and embrace masculinity, to become one of the boys, all throughout childhood, but I wasn't so inclined. Later, I was repeatedly invited to transition or to present as female, so that I would not get misgendered, but the price of not getting misgendered was to be mis-SEXED. You see, the body I was born in isn't wrong, and the historical fact of being perceived and treated by others as a male is a lifelong part of who I am, and I have no wish to discard it. I'm not female, I'm a girl. Gender isn't sex. I'm a male girl. Get used to it.
So, pronouns, huh? You want the pronouns that would appropriately reference my gender, or the pronouns that would designate my sex?
Yeah, exactly. Here we are, all woke and conscious and liberated from the gender binary and all that it evokes, and yet we still posit that one syllable is sufficient to designate our sex and our gender, regardless of the combination thereof. What's the pronoun most commonly used for a male girl?
I do get misappraised quite often. People treat me as a brother, a guy, one of the boys, another man, the identity that (normally) goes with a male body. In my case, that's misgendering. Occasionally people get my gender correct -- most often when I'm on the phone and they start calling me "ma'am" and assuming me to be feminine; it also happens sometimes when I'm approached from behind, especially if I'm at a table with other women, and they see the long hair and hear my voice and make assumptions. Problem is, they also assume female along with feminine person, and thus they mis-sex me. So I'm used to being gotten wrong. Doesn't mean I like it.
Pronouns are not among the most egregious of the aspects of misassignments like these. Think about it. If they're addressing me directly, they're going to use the pronoun you. The gender-specific pronouns are pretty much limited to third-person references, when someone is talking to a second person and says something about me. He, him, his; or she, her, hers. I don't spend a lot of my day overhearing people refer to me in the third person. So why (you may ask) do gender activists make such a big deal about pronouns? Because it's an opportunity to do public education. It's a learning moment. Getting people to rethink how they think of us. The pronouns themselves are a symptom of that thinking, but it's the thinking that the activists want to change.
We care how other people think about us. It affects how they treat us. It shapes their behavior towards us, ranging from big conscious stuff to tiny subtle subliminal stuff that they may not be aware of.
Conceptualizing me as "she" doesn't really fix any more problems for me than it causes.
In my case I don't particularly crave having people think of me as female. In particular, I do not crave the sexual attentions of people whose attraction is towards female people. I would think that would make compelling common everyday sense to people, insofar as I do not in fact have female morphology, and also because people whose attraction is towards folks with male morphology would also be assuming me to be female and would therefore not be giving me attention.
Upon expressing this, I have on a couple occasions been informed that I've expressed a homophobic attitude. Seriously? Gay males are attracted to males, why would presenting as female (or being altercast by other people as a female person) expose me to uncomfortable gay male attention? I've also been told that this attitude on my part is somehow transphobic. I don't see that either. I don't wish to be taken for a binary transitioning transgender woman, that's true, but not because that would be insulting or anything. Just that it isn't accurate in my case.
Back to the pronouns. I could reasonably tell people "Please use he/his/him when you're thinking in terms of my physical structure, and use she/her/hers when you're dwelling on my gender". Use them situationally, you know?
I could embrace "they/their/them" of course. Why don't I? Well, there's no specificity. The use of that pronoun indicates that I'm non-mainstream, but it doesn't elaborate on how. It definitely doesn't say "male girl" to people. Admittedly that's true of "genderqueer" as well, and I've embraced that term.
Well, OK, I could also come up with my own pronouns, I suppose. Other people do. "Hi, my pronouns are 'nee, ner, ners'. I've decided that that's the pronoun for a male gender invert".
But if my intent is to do consciousness-raising and public education, I think anywhere that people are savvy enough to ask about my pronouns is a place where I can accomplish more public education by saying "none of the above, they're all wrong", and explaining why.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I was born with a physical configuration that was assigned the value 'male', and I've always been one of the girls from as far back as I can remember. I was pressured to adopt and embrace masculinity, to become one of the boys, all throughout childhood, but I wasn't so inclined. Later, I was repeatedly invited to transition or to present as female, so that I would not get misgendered, but the price of not getting misgendered was to be mis-SEXED. You see, the body I was born in isn't wrong, and the historical fact of being perceived and treated by others as a male is a lifelong part of who I am, and I have no wish to discard it. I'm not female, I'm a girl. Gender isn't sex. I'm a male girl. Get used to it.
So, pronouns, huh? You want the pronouns that would appropriately reference my gender, or the pronouns that would designate my sex?
Yeah, exactly. Here we are, all woke and conscious and liberated from the gender binary and all that it evokes, and yet we still posit that one syllable is sufficient to designate our sex and our gender, regardless of the combination thereof. What's the pronoun most commonly used for a male girl?
I do get misappraised quite often. People treat me as a brother, a guy, one of the boys, another man, the identity that (normally) goes with a male body. In my case, that's misgendering. Occasionally people get my gender correct -- most often when I'm on the phone and they start calling me "ma'am" and assuming me to be feminine; it also happens sometimes when I'm approached from behind, especially if I'm at a table with other women, and they see the long hair and hear my voice and make assumptions. Problem is, they also assume female along with feminine person, and thus they mis-sex me. So I'm used to being gotten wrong. Doesn't mean I like it.
Pronouns are not among the most egregious of the aspects of misassignments like these. Think about it. If they're addressing me directly, they're going to use the pronoun you. The gender-specific pronouns are pretty much limited to third-person references, when someone is talking to a second person and says something about me. He, him, his; or she, her, hers. I don't spend a lot of my day overhearing people refer to me in the third person. So why (you may ask) do gender activists make such a big deal about pronouns? Because it's an opportunity to do public education. It's a learning moment. Getting people to rethink how they think of us. The pronouns themselves are a symptom of that thinking, but it's the thinking that the activists want to change.
We care how other people think about us. It affects how they treat us. It shapes their behavior towards us, ranging from big conscious stuff to tiny subtle subliminal stuff that they may not be aware of.
Conceptualizing me as "she" doesn't really fix any more problems for me than it causes.
In my case I don't particularly crave having people think of me as female. In particular, I do not crave the sexual attentions of people whose attraction is towards female people. I would think that would make compelling common everyday sense to people, insofar as I do not in fact have female morphology, and also because people whose attraction is towards folks with male morphology would also be assuming me to be female and would therefore not be giving me attention.
Upon expressing this, I have on a couple occasions been informed that I've expressed a homophobic attitude. Seriously? Gay males are attracted to males, why would presenting as female (or being altercast by other people as a female person) expose me to uncomfortable gay male attention? I've also been told that this attitude on my part is somehow transphobic. I don't see that either. I don't wish to be taken for a binary transitioning transgender woman, that's true, but not because that would be insulting or anything. Just that it isn't accurate in my case.
Back to the pronouns. I could reasonably tell people "Please use he/his/him when you're thinking in terms of my physical structure, and use she/her/hers when you're dwelling on my gender". Use them situationally, you know?
I could embrace "they/their/them" of course. Why don't I? Well, there's no specificity. The use of that pronoun indicates that I'm non-mainstream, but it doesn't elaborate on how. It definitely doesn't say "male girl" to people. Admittedly that's true of "genderqueer" as well, and I've embraced that term.
Well, OK, I could also come up with my own pronouns, I suppose. Other people do. "Hi, my pronouns are 'nee, ner, ners'. I've decided that that's the pronoun for a male gender invert".
But if my intent is to do consciousness-raising and public education, I think anywhere that people are savvy enough to ask about my pronouns is a place where I can accomplish more public education by saying "none of the above, they're all wrong", and explaining why.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, April 7, 2019
REVIEW -- Britten & Crozier's ALBERT HERRING, performed by Utopia Opera
The premise of this opera lured me to think it might have edgy things to say about gender. A small town wants to anoint a May Queen but has issues with the lax morals of the female residents who would otherwise be the candidates for the position, and they decide to select a chaste and virginal male and dub him May King instead.
The tale is based on "Le Rosier de Madame Husson" by Guy de Maupassant, and the opera itself was written in 1947, which is generally not an era from which sharp-edged points on the subject of gender inequities and unduly gendered assumptions tended to emanate, but I was still curious.
I regretfully have to report that the tale tends to bolster and recapitulate traditional views on gender considerably more than it brings them into question. The eponymous Albert Herring [Cory Gross], the beforementioned chaste and virginal fellow, turns out to be an object of pity and condescending scorn from the more sexually experienced people of his age within the village (represented by Sid [Luke MacMillan], the butcher's son and Nancy [Stephanie Feigenbaum], who works at the bakery, who are in the process of flirting and fooling around a bit) and the village's children (in the form of Emmie, Cis, and Harry [Hannah Madeline Goodman, Zoe Marie Hart, and Jen Wu, respectively], who are prone to singing mocking children's songs about Albert within earshot). The doyenne of Loxford, Lady Billows [Marie Masters Webb], admires him, as does her housemaid Florence Pike [Caroline Tye], but they themselves are more than a little bit set up within the opera as targets for our ridicule. Somewhere in the middle are the various village leaders and authorities (Miss Wordsworth, schoolteacher [Rebecca Richardson], Mayor Upfold [Ethan Fran], Vicar Gedge [Glenn Friedman], and Police Superintendent Budd [Jonathan Harris] who do not dare to contradict Lady Billows in any affair but may or may not share her perspective on all things until they learn what her perspective is. They suggest one female candidate after another, for instance, before bowing to her assessment that none of them is suitable.
Basically the upshot of the plot is that Sid and Nancy (no resemblance to any latter-day punk rockers, just a coincidence) decide it would be cute to impinge a bit upon Albert's spotless moral fibre by slipping some rum into his beverage at the acceptance dinner, and once inebriated by it Albert rebels and, fortified by his drunkenness, goes into the town to revel, perchance to fornicate. This frees him from the apron strings of his domineering controlling Freudian mommy, Mrs Herring [Sarah Marvel Bleasdale], whose strict control, rather than any intrinsic moral backbone, is the real reason that Albert is as pure as he is. The experience permanently changes him and empowers him to seek his own course, while offending and dismaying Lady Billows and Mrs. Herring and Florence Pike.
In short, as is so often the case where males exhibiting characteristics more commonly associated with females are depicted at all, Albert is presented to us as pathetic and controlled by emasculating female people, and the remedy is a big dose of coarse crude masculinity to cure him of his feminine maladies.
A prolonged glance at Nancy gives us--if not the play itself--some perspective. If you examine Nancy's own attitudes, behaviors and feelings, especially drawing on the timeframe when she's feeling remorseful about her role in setting up Albert (which, incidentally, consisted entirely of going along with Sid's initiative) and combining that with her behavior when Sid is trying to kiss her while she demurs because "the windows have eyes," you end up with a Nancy who has a whole lot in common with Albert; both of them would be virginal and pure except that Nancy has Sid in her life, and Sid (as Albert himself later observed) gets what he wants by being direct and going after what he wants. Sid pressures Nancy and doesn't readily take "no" for an answer (he gets the kiss he seeks, windows and their eyes be damned). So Nancy is neither blessed nor cursed by the spectre (or mantle) of the chastity for which Albert is being recognized by Lady Billows and taunted and pranked by Sid, Nancy herself, and the children.
The opera isn't actually titled "The Deflowering of Albert Herring," nor is it explicitly stated that he comes home a nonvirgin. This garners points from me, albeit reluctantly, on the basis of accuracy, insofar as I once wanted to loosen up and let nice naughty things happen as they would, and to that end did attend parties and consume intoxicants, only to find that just as behaving more or less like Nancy doesn't result in a Nancy-like fate when you're male, going forth and consuming substances that lower inhibitions doesn't conjure up the people who would take advantage of your uninhibited receptivities. But if the tale doesn't say so, it equivocates and presents an overall message that if Albert is to loosen up and avail himself of less corseted ways of being in the world, sexual favors as well as the gutter of drunkenness will, in some undisclosed fashion, be his. The crown of flowers with which he is coronated is found before he is, trammeled and abandoned during the course of his escapades, leaving the villagers to think he's dead. You can't symbolize defloration much more directly than that.
The show displays Utopia Opera's usual strengths: there's no wasted investment in glitzy state-of-the-art pyrotechnics of the stage (they've been known to use flashlights with colored cellophane for some special effects); what you get instead is an assortment of spectacular voices singing at you from such close range that if you had a bouquet in hand to present to one of the singers, you could throw it from where you sit in the audience and whack the performer in the head. They convey an exuberant delight at what they're doing, along with a somewhat conspiratorial sense of fun, a company of outstanding opera singers who clearly enjoy doing what they're doing. William Remmers, the person who makes all this happen, is a show unto himself, great entertainment as a conductor and master of ceremonies. The pocket-sized orchestra is very impressive; I'd buy solo albums from either last night's french horn or bassoon player.
A true review of the operatic delivery of the Utopia Opera cast is beyond my level of sufficiently educated assessment. They deserve one and I hope someone better situated than I am will provide it. Benjamin Britten's score does not give the performers equal opportunity to show off their vocal acumen, but, having said that, I'll attest to the rafter-bending power exhibited by Marie Masters Webb as Lady Billows, as well as that of Caroline Tye in her role as housemaid Florence Pike, and Hannah Madeleine Goodman gets off some impressive prolonged shouts as the juvenile Emmie.
There's a nine-part complex vocal tableaux late in the piece, in Act III, that's just mind-blowing. Benjamin Britten is one of those composers who don't stay confined to the conventional restrictions of major and minor and augmented seventh and whatnot, while at the same time managing not to sound like pretentious random clashy white noise; his harmonies and entertwined melodies and countermelodies have a history and a destination, a sense of direction and resolution that one's ears can follow and appreciate, but the individual intervals and chords represent significant obstacles. This ensemble performance would challenge any vocal group.
The show has lots of delightful lighter moments that are well-carried by the Utopia team. You don't want to miss the three schoolchildren being tutored on their choral arrangement by Miss Wordsworth during a rehearsal; Florence the maid practically steals the show with a repertoire of small funny deadpan behaviors; and you'll love the mayor as he takes the opportunity, while ostensibly praising Albert at the award ceremony, to remind us all of his own civic accomplishments.
The pacing and delivery overall is spot-on, as is typical of Utopia's offerings. They know how to tell a tale and keep you involved.
Utopia Opera presents Albert Herring, an opera by Benjamin Britten & Eric Crozier, at Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, NY
(the south side of Park Ave between Park and Lex, 4th floor).
Remaining performances April 12th and 13th, 2019.
Tickets and other inquiries: info@utopiaopera.org
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
The tale is based on "Le Rosier de Madame Husson" by Guy de Maupassant, and the opera itself was written in 1947, which is generally not an era from which sharp-edged points on the subject of gender inequities and unduly gendered assumptions tended to emanate, but I was still curious.
I regretfully have to report that the tale tends to bolster and recapitulate traditional views on gender considerably more than it brings them into question. The eponymous Albert Herring [Cory Gross], the beforementioned chaste and virginal fellow, turns out to be an object of pity and condescending scorn from the more sexually experienced people of his age within the village (represented by Sid [Luke MacMillan], the butcher's son and Nancy [Stephanie Feigenbaum], who works at the bakery, who are in the process of flirting and fooling around a bit) and the village's children (in the form of Emmie, Cis, and Harry [Hannah Madeline Goodman, Zoe Marie Hart, and Jen Wu, respectively], who are prone to singing mocking children's songs about Albert within earshot). The doyenne of Loxford, Lady Billows [Marie Masters Webb], admires him, as does her housemaid Florence Pike [Caroline Tye], but they themselves are more than a little bit set up within the opera as targets for our ridicule. Somewhere in the middle are the various village leaders and authorities (Miss Wordsworth, schoolteacher [Rebecca Richardson], Mayor Upfold [Ethan Fran], Vicar Gedge [Glenn Friedman], and Police Superintendent Budd [Jonathan Harris] who do not dare to contradict Lady Billows in any affair but may or may not share her perspective on all things until they learn what her perspective is. They suggest one female candidate after another, for instance, before bowing to her assessment that none of them is suitable.
Basically the upshot of the plot is that Sid and Nancy (no resemblance to any latter-day punk rockers, just a coincidence) decide it would be cute to impinge a bit upon Albert's spotless moral fibre by slipping some rum into his beverage at the acceptance dinner, and once inebriated by it Albert rebels and, fortified by his drunkenness, goes into the town to revel, perchance to fornicate. This frees him from the apron strings of his domineering controlling Freudian mommy, Mrs Herring [Sarah Marvel Bleasdale], whose strict control, rather than any intrinsic moral backbone, is the real reason that Albert is as pure as he is. The experience permanently changes him and empowers him to seek his own course, while offending and dismaying Lady Billows and Mrs. Herring and Florence Pike.
In short, as is so often the case where males exhibiting characteristics more commonly associated with females are depicted at all, Albert is presented to us as pathetic and controlled by emasculating female people, and the remedy is a big dose of coarse crude masculinity to cure him of his feminine maladies.
A prolonged glance at Nancy gives us--if not the play itself--some perspective. If you examine Nancy's own attitudes, behaviors and feelings, especially drawing on the timeframe when she's feeling remorseful about her role in setting up Albert (which, incidentally, consisted entirely of going along with Sid's initiative) and combining that with her behavior when Sid is trying to kiss her while she demurs because "the windows have eyes," you end up with a Nancy who has a whole lot in common with Albert; both of them would be virginal and pure except that Nancy has Sid in her life, and Sid (as Albert himself later observed) gets what he wants by being direct and going after what he wants. Sid pressures Nancy and doesn't readily take "no" for an answer (he gets the kiss he seeks, windows and their eyes be damned). So Nancy is neither blessed nor cursed by the spectre (or mantle) of the chastity for which Albert is being recognized by Lady Billows and taunted and pranked by Sid, Nancy herself, and the children.
The opera isn't actually titled "The Deflowering of Albert Herring," nor is it explicitly stated that he comes home a nonvirgin. This garners points from me, albeit reluctantly, on the basis of accuracy, insofar as I once wanted to loosen up and let nice naughty things happen as they would, and to that end did attend parties and consume intoxicants, only to find that just as behaving more or less like Nancy doesn't result in a Nancy-like fate when you're male, going forth and consuming substances that lower inhibitions doesn't conjure up the people who would take advantage of your uninhibited receptivities. But if the tale doesn't say so, it equivocates and presents an overall message that if Albert is to loosen up and avail himself of less corseted ways of being in the world, sexual favors as well as the gutter of drunkenness will, in some undisclosed fashion, be his. The crown of flowers with which he is coronated is found before he is, trammeled and abandoned during the course of his escapades, leaving the villagers to think he's dead. You can't symbolize defloration much more directly than that.
The show displays Utopia Opera's usual strengths: there's no wasted investment in glitzy state-of-the-art pyrotechnics of the stage (they've been known to use flashlights with colored cellophane for some special effects); what you get instead is an assortment of spectacular voices singing at you from such close range that if you had a bouquet in hand to present to one of the singers, you could throw it from where you sit in the audience and whack the performer in the head. They convey an exuberant delight at what they're doing, along with a somewhat conspiratorial sense of fun, a company of outstanding opera singers who clearly enjoy doing what they're doing. William Remmers, the person who makes all this happen, is a show unto himself, great entertainment as a conductor and master of ceremonies. The pocket-sized orchestra is very impressive; I'd buy solo albums from either last night's french horn or bassoon player.
A true review of the operatic delivery of the Utopia Opera cast is beyond my level of sufficiently educated assessment. They deserve one and I hope someone better situated than I am will provide it. Benjamin Britten's score does not give the performers equal opportunity to show off their vocal acumen, but, having said that, I'll attest to the rafter-bending power exhibited by Marie Masters Webb as Lady Billows, as well as that of Caroline Tye in her role as housemaid Florence Pike, and Hannah Madeleine Goodman gets off some impressive prolonged shouts as the juvenile Emmie.
There's a nine-part complex vocal tableaux late in the piece, in Act III, that's just mind-blowing. Benjamin Britten is one of those composers who don't stay confined to the conventional restrictions of major and minor and augmented seventh and whatnot, while at the same time managing not to sound like pretentious random clashy white noise; his harmonies and entertwined melodies and countermelodies have a history and a destination, a sense of direction and resolution that one's ears can follow and appreciate, but the individual intervals and chords represent significant obstacles. This ensemble performance would challenge any vocal group.
The show has lots of delightful lighter moments that are well-carried by the Utopia team. You don't want to miss the three schoolchildren being tutored on their choral arrangement by Miss Wordsworth during a rehearsal; Florence the maid practically steals the show with a repertoire of small funny deadpan behaviors; and you'll love the mayor as he takes the opportunity, while ostensibly praising Albert at the award ceremony, to remind us all of his own civic accomplishments.
The pacing and delivery overall is spot-on, as is typical of Utopia's offerings. They know how to tell a tale and keep you involved.
Utopia Opera presents Albert Herring, an opera by Benjamin Britten & Eric Crozier, at Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, NY
(the south side of Park Ave between Park and Lex, 4th floor).
Remaining performances April 12th and 13th, 2019.
Tickets and other inquiries: info@utopiaopera.org
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, April 6, 2019
Sexual Feelings, and How They Affect Interaction
Today I want to talk about sexual feelings. Surprisingly, we don't do that often. We discuss sexual orientation, and gender identity; but our thoughts and attitudes about sexuality itself are often the same as the ones held by the prevailing culture and we're prone to repeating them, unexamined.
Consider this paragraph:
-- John Holt p 71-72, Escape from Childhood (Dutton 1974)
We immediately giggle about the fragile defensiveness of the homophobic guys getting all upset at having momentarily entertained a fantasy of this nature, and we're all quite familiar with the notion that the loudest and most emphatically heterosexual males are the ones least secure in their sexual orientation. But quite aside from all that, why is it or why should it be so disconcerting to make a cognitive or behavioral error that involves our sexuality? It isn't solely due to the historically disparaged status of gay sexuality, although that certainly plays a role in this example.
Consider a woman on the subway and a passenger with a camera on an extension stick who photographs her body from under her skirt, and then masturbates later to the image. If she were aware of it at the time it was happening, it's obvious why that would be experienced as creepy and invasive, but what's interesting is to pose the question to women about how they'd feel about it if they did not realize it at the time and that it wasn't made public in any fashion, so no one else would ever know about it either, but that it did in fact occur and they somehow learned of it later. People I've asked say it's still horribly invasive, a violation of their boundaries, one that makes them angry and creeped out to contemplate.
We can mistake a stranger on the sidewalk for a friend or colleague and generally not offend, even if during our confusion we interact with them physically and/or say things of a personal nature out loud -- as long as none of it has sexual overtones. We can slip into a packed elevator and end up brushing up against body parts and the question of whether or not it's offensive hinges mostly on whether or not there's an interpretaton of sexual intention in it. So it's not a matter of boundaries per se, so much as it's that boundaries work differently when it comes to sexual interaction, we tend to be a lot more sensitive and triggery about it than most other matters. I doubt that I'm saying anything you don't already know, but we don't tend to theorize about that and what it means; we tend instead to discuss sexual interaction as if all reasonable attitudes and thoughts about it could be derived from general principles of human interaction and autonomy.
-- Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism
Ignoring the heterocentricity of Beneke's language (he himself acknowledges it) -- I am reminded of thoughts I've had about butch people, as a person who is not butch, that in part what I think of as butch is a openness and confidence about their sexual lusts, that who they are to themselves and to the world at large is a person who sexually covets people, who do not avoid the perception that they are sexually predatory (for better or worse, with or without a leavening of some degree of respect for others' boundaries). Now, I think those things as a non-butch person, and perhaps am obliviously opaque to what butch experiences are truly like. What I know more about are the feelings of many people who are not butch in this sense, who, however post-prudish we may be in our current lives, still have residual carryover fears that whenever we are perceived as sexual, as having sexual desires, we will be thought invasive, dirty, even disgusting:
Melanie, from the inside cover of the album Gather Me
Another locus where we see the vulnerability of sexual feelings on display is the matter of sexual exclusivity and monogamy. I myself am polyamorous and hence I don't take it for granted as inherently normative and natural, but it's certainly a trend and perhaps not entirely attributable to the history of patriarchal marriage and property and inheritance, although once again, yeah, those matters do play a role here. Polyamorous people often point out to other folks that we form friendships and don't feel a need to require our friend to not have any other friends; people who are parents can love multiple children and not feel like they're being unfaithful. But sexual-romantic love is probably more frightening, its attractiveness being part of what makes it so frightening, and that high-stakes high-vulnerability situation is probably also a factor in why so many people feel safer if they are their partner's only partner. Or think they do, at any rate.
A corollary of that much vulnerability is the possibility of great power, of having a form of emotional dominion over the other person's vulnerability. The kink scene (BDSM) is one where power play is recognized as a factor and overtly played with, negotiated, discussed. It's obvious when it's on display in the form of bondage restraints and punitive devices like whips and floggers or reflected in the language of domme and submissive, sadist and masochist, master and slave; but whether it is out in front like that and recognized as a component of intimacy or not, power inequities are present in intimacies that involve so much vulnerability. It need not be permanently ensconced in such a way that one partner always hold power over the other, or in such a way that the player identified by sex or gender or role is always the one in whom the balance of power is vested -- in fact, the spark of excitement in a sexual relationship may depend quite a bit on the vulnerability shifting and trading. But that's a different thing than a hypothetical situation in which the participants are never invasive, always consenting, balanced in autonomy and self-determined authority at every second. And that's part of what frightens us. It's risky and there's a threat of being deprived of our agency and our sense of integrity and personal balance. To the devoted advocate of total equality and the elimination of all oppression, as well as to the fearful conqueror who needs to always be the winner, love is not a safe endeavor.
We do try to hammer out some rules for boundaries, and establish them so that we share the same notions of them, so that we can expect of each other that these notions have been established and agreed upon:
• No one gets the right to have sex with someone. You aren't intrinsically entitled to it. The intensity of your lust for it doesn't entitle you to it. People get to say no and you don't get to smash through that.
• No one gets the right to be found attractive by someone either, though. You aren't entitled to be flirted with, not by someone who has been observed to flirt with someone else, not by someone you wish would notice you.
• Everyone does have the right to like who you like, sexually speaking, though. It may be long lanky freckled longhaired guys with long curly eyelashes, or women with big butts and plump faces and wide shoulders. You have the right to be attracted to people in part because they have a penis, or a clitoris. Or skin of a certain hue. That's not to say that our sexual tastes are 100% free of being politically and socially problematic, mind you; we may harbor biases and we may have eroticized certain things as an outcome of contextual discriminations or ongoing oppressions, and perhaps we would all benefit from challenging those things within ourselves, especially when our sexual tastes appear to reinforce and mimic existing social stratifications. But be that as it may, this is not a venue in which "should" gets to intrude and supplant our inclinations. We don't tolerate being told that we aren't allowed to like what we like.
• It's not a meritocracy, where you get rewarded for your socially desirable good-citizen / good-person characteristics. You don't get to earn a high sexual desirability score by getting checkmarks on a list of admirable traits. I say this as an actual Nice Guy™. You don't get to earn sex.
Sexuality is historically something we've regulated maybe more than anything else in human life, maybe even more than reproduction. At the same time, we don't trust regulating it and rebel almost immediately against any attempt to restrict and channel it. But we fear unregulated sexuality too.
There has been pushback against structuring consent into a formal and overtly spoken package, and there have been people who have spoken or written fondly of how much more "natural" and less clinically oppressive "animal" sex was or would have been before we tried to tame it and shame it and channel it with our institutions and regulations. I myself vividly remember being very unhappy at the age of 19 when it seemed to me that I was attending the university to get a degree and become economically successful in order to qualify for a female partner who "would then let me do it to her", and wanting very much instead to be found desirable for who I was. I also remember reading a description of a commune in California which was attempting to unravel middle-class sexual mores and create something egalitarian, and their approach was to set up a sleeping-with schedule in which all the women would rotate through all the men, a different one each night. I could readily imagine a group of people who knew each other and loved each other deciding to embrace a group marriage that worked that way, but to walk in and join up as an interested stranger? Being assigned by schedule to a sequence of beds felt instantly oppressive, invasive, degrading. If some people wanted that kind of system, and consented to that, fine for them, but if such a thing were imposed on people? Hell no!
I knew a self-identified witch, a woman of indeterminate middle age back when I was barely out of my teens, who once told me "The problem a lot of people have is that they believe that they are their minds and that they have a sexuality. The truth is, you are a sexuality and you have a mind." I've come to see the wisdom of that viewpoint. We tend to have a very limited and nastily derogatory notion of sexuality. Gutter crude and selfish and focused on immediate nerve endings and their satiation and all that. But if that's all sexuality was, we'd simply masturbate and be done with it, why involve other people? Whereas suppose that what the sexual urge really leads us to do is not merely to get our rocks off, or even find someone cute and sexy with whom to get our rocks off, but instead to seek out and find, or if necessary create, the truly ideal context in which to connect, get our rocks off, and raise the resulting children, all with safety and comfort and with the maximum integration of all that we wish to bring into that intimacy. When you start thinking of it that way, it starts looking vibrant and noble and socially progressive; and if that is who we are, and our highly intelligent human minds tools of that, hey, that's a pretty good deal, yes?
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Consider this paragraph:
The habit of using women as sex objects may explain why seeing other men with long hair used to make, or still makes, some men so irrationally angry... Why was it so important for those men to be able to tell at a glance the boys from the girls? One reason may be that only in this way could they be sure with whom they might be free to have fantasy sex. Otherwise they might be daydreaming about having a great time in bed with some girl only to find out suddenly that "she" was a boy.
-- John Holt p 71-72, Escape from Childhood (Dutton 1974)
We immediately giggle about the fragile defensiveness of the homophobic guys getting all upset at having momentarily entertained a fantasy of this nature, and we're all quite familiar with the notion that the loudest and most emphatically heterosexual males are the ones least secure in their sexual orientation. But quite aside from all that, why is it or why should it be so disconcerting to make a cognitive or behavioral error that involves our sexuality? It isn't solely due to the historically disparaged status of gay sexuality, although that certainly plays a role in this example.
Consider a woman on the subway and a passenger with a camera on an extension stick who photographs her body from under her skirt, and then masturbates later to the image. If she were aware of it at the time it was happening, it's obvious why that would be experienced as creepy and invasive, but what's interesting is to pose the question to women about how they'd feel about it if they did not realize it at the time and that it wasn't made public in any fashion, so no one else would ever know about it either, but that it did in fact occur and they somehow learned of it later. People I've asked say it's still horribly invasive, a violation of their boundaries, one that makes them angry and creeped out to contemplate.
We can mistake a stranger on the sidewalk for a friend or colleague and generally not offend, even if during our confusion we interact with them physically and/or say things of a personal nature out loud -- as long as none of it has sexual overtones. We can slip into a packed elevator and end up brushing up against body parts and the question of whether or not it's offensive hinges mostly on whether or not there's an interpretaton of sexual intention in it. So it's not a matter of boundaries per se, so much as it's that boundaries work differently when it comes to sexual interaction, we tend to be a lot more sensitive and triggery about it than most other matters. I doubt that I'm saying anything you don't already know, but we don't tend to theorize about that and what it means; we tend instead to discuss sexual interaction as if all reasonable attitudes and thoughts about it could be derived from general principles of human interaction and autonomy.
If a man stares at the crotch of a nude statue or painting, or at the breast of a woman during a social interaction... the image becomes stolen. Notice that stolen images come in two forms: looking at something one is not authorized to look at and looking lustfully at what one is authorized to look at...
Stealing images of women's bodies is a troubled activity that pervades many heterosexual men's adolescent and postadolescent social experience...
-- Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism
Ignoring the heterocentricity of Beneke's language (he himself acknowledges it) -- I am reminded of thoughts I've had about butch people, as a person who is not butch, that in part what I think of as butch is a openness and confidence about their sexual lusts, that who they are to themselves and to the world at large is a person who sexually covets people, who do not avoid the perception that they are sexually predatory (for better or worse, with or without a leavening of some degree of respect for others' boundaries). Now, I think those things as a non-butch person, and perhaps am obliviously opaque to what butch experiences are truly like. What I know more about are the feelings of many people who are not butch in this sense, who, however post-prudish we may be in our current lives, still have residual carryover fears that whenever we are perceived as sexual, as having sexual desires, we will be thought invasive, dirty, even disgusting:
Gather on a hill of wildflowers
A certain kind of piney tree
Hot sweet piney tea
Oh Gather Me
And on a hill of wildflowers
Oh Gather Me
A writer who's in need of sleep
A lady who's in loving need
Don't hold the sprout against the seed
Don't hold this need against me
Melanie, from the inside cover of the album Gather Me
Another locus where we see the vulnerability of sexual feelings on display is the matter of sexual exclusivity and monogamy. I myself am polyamorous and hence I don't take it for granted as inherently normative and natural, but it's certainly a trend and perhaps not entirely attributable to the history of patriarchal marriage and property and inheritance, although once again, yeah, those matters do play a role here. Polyamorous people often point out to other folks that we form friendships and don't feel a need to require our friend to not have any other friends; people who are parents can love multiple children and not feel like they're being unfaithful. But sexual-romantic love is probably more frightening, its attractiveness being part of what makes it so frightening, and that high-stakes high-vulnerability situation is probably also a factor in why so many people feel safer if they are their partner's only partner. Or think they do, at any rate.
A corollary of that much vulnerability is the possibility of great power, of having a form of emotional dominion over the other person's vulnerability. The kink scene (BDSM) is one where power play is recognized as a factor and overtly played with, negotiated, discussed. It's obvious when it's on display in the form of bondage restraints and punitive devices like whips and floggers or reflected in the language of domme and submissive, sadist and masochist, master and slave; but whether it is out in front like that and recognized as a component of intimacy or not, power inequities are present in intimacies that involve so much vulnerability. It need not be permanently ensconced in such a way that one partner always hold power over the other, or in such a way that the player identified by sex or gender or role is always the one in whom the balance of power is vested -- in fact, the spark of excitement in a sexual relationship may depend quite a bit on the vulnerability shifting and trading. But that's a different thing than a hypothetical situation in which the participants are never invasive, always consenting, balanced in autonomy and self-determined authority at every second. And that's part of what frightens us. It's risky and there's a threat of being deprived of our agency and our sense of integrity and personal balance. To the devoted advocate of total equality and the elimination of all oppression, as well as to the fearful conqueror who needs to always be the winner, love is not a safe endeavor.
We do try to hammer out some rules for boundaries, and establish them so that we share the same notions of them, so that we can expect of each other that these notions have been established and agreed upon:
• No one gets the right to have sex with someone. You aren't intrinsically entitled to it. The intensity of your lust for it doesn't entitle you to it. People get to say no and you don't get to smash through that.
• No one gets the right to be found attractive by someone either, though. You aren't entitled to be flirted with, not by someone who has been observed to flirt with someone else, not by someone you wish would notice you.
• Everyone does have the right to like who you like, sexually speaking, though. It may be long lanky freckled longhaired guys with long curly eyelashes, or women with big butts and plump faces and wide shoulders. You have the right to be attracted to people in part because they have a penis, or a clitoris. Or skin of a certain hue. That's not to say that our sexual tastes are 100% free of being politically and socially problematic, mind you; we may harbor biases and we may have eroticized certain things as an outcome of contextual discriminations or ongoing oppressions, and perhaps we would all benefit from challenging those things within ourselves, especially when our sexual tastes appear to reinforce and mimic existing social stratifications. But be that as it may, this is not a venue in which "should" gets to intrude and supplant our inclinations. We don't tolerate being told that we aren't allowed to like what we like.
• It's not a meritocracy, where you get rewarded for your socially desirable good-citizen / good-person characteristics. You don't get to earn a high sexual desirability score by getting checkmarks on a list of admirable traits. I say this as an actual Nice Guy™. You don't get to earn sex.
Sexuality is historically something we've regulated maybe more than anything else in human life, maybe even more than reproduction. At the same time, we don't trust regulating it and rebel almost immediately against any attempt to restrict and channel it. But we fear unregulated sexuality too.
There has been pushback against structuring consent into a formal and overtly spoken package, and there have been people who have spoken or written fondly of how much more "natural" and less clinically oppressive "animal" sex was or would have been before we tried to tame it and shame it and channel it with our institutions and regulations. I myself vividly remember being very unhappy at the age of 19 when it seemed to me that I was attending the university to get a degree and become economically successful in order to qualify for a female partner who "would then let me do it to her", and wanting very much instead to be found desirable for who I was. I also remember reading a description of a commune in California which was attempting to unravel middle-class sexual mores and create something egalitarian, and their approach was to set up a sleeping-with schedule in which all the women would rotate through all the men, a different one each night. I could readily imagine a group of people who knew each other and loved each other deciding to embrace a group marriage that worked that way, but to walk in and join up as an interested stranger? Being assigned by schedule to a sequence of beds felt instantly oppressive, invasive, degrading. If some people wanted that kind of system, and consented to that, fine for them, but if such a thing were imposed on people? Hell no!
I knew a self-identified witch, a woman of indeterminate middle age back when I was barely out of my teens, who once told me "The problem a lot of people have is that they believe that they are their minds and that they have a sexuality. The truth is, you are a sexuality and you have a mind." I've come to see the wisdom of that viewpoint. We tend to have a very limited and nastily derogatory notion of sexuality. Gutter crude and selfish and focused on immediate nerve endings and their satiation and all that. But if that's all sexuality was, we'd simply masturbate and be done with it, why involve other people? Whereas suppose that what the sexual urge really leads us to do is not merely to get our rocks off, or even find someone cute and sexy with whom to get our rocks off, but instead to seek out and find, or if necessary create, the truly ideal context in which to connect, get our rocks off, and raise the resulting children, all with safety and comfort and with the maximum integration of all that we wish to bring into that intimacy. When you start thinking of it that way, it starts looking vibrant and noble and socially progressive; and if that is who we are, and our highly intelligent human minds tools of that, hey, that's a pretty good deal, yes?
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)