"I was born this way", he says. "I know some of you think there must have been some event, or situation or whatever that made me like this, but honestly I've always been into dicks since before I knew what sex was".
I can relate; I can recall knowing the biological facts of life about how babies get made, but not knowing diddly about sexual appetite and sexual attraction. My understanding at the time was that the only time people did this behavior was when they wanted to have a baby. I had no idea that it felt good or that there was a hunger for it.
And at that age I had definite feelings for female contours, I mean yeah specifically there where they're different from male people. Their different architecture makes everything shaped differently down there, so that when they wear pants it makes shapes that are specific to their anatomy. And I liked to look at it, I liked the way it felt when I did. And oh! *blush* Was this ever kinky and perverted or what?! I mean, that's where you pee from, so I had to keep this secret lest I be mocked mercilessly by the other kids.
So anyway, yeah, I too seem to have been born this way.
In pretty much any discussion of what floats your boat and gets your motor running, sooner or later someone's likely to say that it's shallow and wrong to have the hots for slender blond people with seductive eyelashes. Or perky green-eyes freckle-faced redheads for that matter. Someone is going to say that you should care about who the person is, not what they look like, all that superficial stuff.
And now, added to that, we sometimes encounter the notion that it's shallow and wrong (and transphobic too) to care that someone has a penis instead of a clitoris, or vice versa or some other variation on that theme. We should accept someone as being of the gender with which they identify, and that goes all the way down to not imposing binary intolerant attitudes about what body parts a person has inside their underwear.
Well, I'm not without some limited experience. I've tried participating sexually with someone who had a penis. I didn't care for it. Call me shallow if you wish, judge me and find me wrong if you must, but I seem to have my sexuality wired to the physical architecture that's traditionally dubbed female.
Meanwhile, some folks don't much care to encounter people who find their physical morphology sexy. Or who find the combination of their physical morphology and their overall gender identity and expression sexy. "Chasers are disgusting. They have a fetish and that means they aren't interested in us as people. We want to be accepted as ordinary members of our gender. What's in my underwear is really nobody's business and I don't want to get involved with somebody who has a thing for that, that's creepy".
I don't mean to discredit that feeling or that attitude. Those who find chasers creepy shouldn't have to step back from saying so.
And there are people who don't opt for medical transitioning. And people who can't afford it. I'm totally on board with their gender identity not being any less valid.
But one size does not necessarily fit all. Some of us find the notion of being chased for the specific combo of our gendered self-expression and our physical morphology quite appealing. I do. I'm a girlish femme, of the starched crinolined variety, a good girl with only a modest naughty streak. I happen to be a male girlish sort, a person with physically male morphology. I present as male, expecting to be perceived as male, in hopes that those people who are attracted to feminine male people will take notice of me. The female folks among them are people I'm potentially going to enjoy connecting with.
There are intersex people who kind of like being appreciated, not merely tolerated in a non-judgmental way, for their variances, for the specifics of their physically unusual selves. Author Hida Viloria, for example, describes her own enjoyment of being able to penetrate her partners with her clitoris, and mentions several people who were pleased to find her to be a person with something extra to offer.
Is it shallow and venal? I don't know. I feel like I don't want someone to reward me for being a nice admirable person by handing out sexual access like a door prize. I feel like I want to be lusted after. I want someone to have the hots for my bod and appreciate that I'm a nice person. I get the hots for people because of their physical contours and I crave reciprocal hots for mine.
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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).
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Showing posts with label good girls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good girls. Show all posts
Friday, February 7, 2020
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Seventh Grade
My book effectively starts with eighth grade, but I covered my earlier life in my initial autobiography, the tome from which my book was taken. I've done blog posts about earlier segments in my life -- third grade; sixth grade.
I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.
Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.
The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.
It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.
Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.
Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.
"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"
"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".
"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"
That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).
"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".
I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.
"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"
I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"
"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"
"Eww"
"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"
"Umm no, yuck"
"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".
"Umm, no, no thanks".
After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.
I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.
I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.
The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.
Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.
———————
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I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.
Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.
The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.
It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.
Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.
Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.
"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"
"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".
"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"
That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).
"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".
I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.
"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"
I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"
"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"
"Eww"
"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"
"Umm no, yuck"
"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".
"Umm, no, no thanks".
After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.
I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.
I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.
The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.
Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.
———————
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Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Betwixt the Clergy and the Sissy-Femme Males
In this society, morality is gender-specific. Good and evil (or good and bad, which are the words actually used) have different flavors and dynamics, as well as different manifestations, depending on sex.
You see, for little girls, good is an active state, a condition of maintaining self-control and being true to one's primal nice nature. Bad is passive, relaxing sinfully into a weak uncontrolled state, like wetting your pants instead of keeping a tight grip on things. Thus, the bad girl is remonstrated and told in one way or another to discipline herself or else lose social approval and be held in contempt.
Meanwhile, for little boys, good is a passive state, where one refrains from this or that, does not do those things that little boys are inclined by nature to do, and bad is actively taking control of the situation, insisting on being true to your nasty little-boy nature, like reaching down, unzipping your fly, and taking a piss against the side of the building. Bad boys are intimidated into acquiescence and told, in essence, to surrender or be punished with considerable wrath.
— from The Amazon's Brother, my 1982-vintage attempt to put these thoughts in writing. (unpublished)
It is not necessary, if you happen to be male, to think of yourself as a girl, or as someone who is like the girls, etc, in order to develop and maintain a sense of yourself as actively, affirmatively good. After all, that's not the chronological order in which it happened for me! But if you do so, you would tend to find that you've largely joined the company of girls, as far as this attitude and outlook are concerned, while differentiating yourself from the majority of boys.
But even that is not necessarily going to provoke you into identifying with the girls, although I did. It is not necessarily going to cause you to react with defiant pride if taunted about behaving like a girl or for holding viewpoints and priorities that they hear the girls giving voice to. Maybe instead you will get defensive and angry and toss back a litany of things you've said or done that girls don't, or recite a list of masculine traits and accomplishments.
But that doesn't mean it isn't gender-polarized territory. It is.
As a student in the early elementary grades, I was taunted by the other boys for apparently being afraid of the authorities, the teachers and parents whose rules and approval were the operating definition of "good". They were wrong about it being driven by fear, but it was certainly true that "good", at that time in my life, mostly had to do with allegiance to adult standards and definitions of what is desirable and approval-worthy.
That didn't last. I outgrew the blind loyalty to the system and its authorities soon enough, but instead of discarding all interest in the "good", I began to question what was good, continuing to take it all quite seriously, pondering moral and ethical and spiritual matters, seeking insights and answers.
Does doing, this, does pursing "good" make a person a better kind of person that someone who doesn't? Well, if I'd remained at the level of blind loyalty to the established powers that be and the people who were nominally in charge of things, continuing to define "good" in terms of obedience to them, I would like to think that most of you reading this would say "no, in fact it could make you a dangerous person, an obedient little Nazi who never questions what you're told". So, given that, does the entire situation get fully rescued by abandoning that blind loyalty and becoming invested in discerning a sense of what is "good" for one's self? Does pursuing "good" mostly equate to putting a lot of energy into formulating an excuse to think of one's self as better than others? It's undeniably wrapped up in wanting to think of ourselves as good; do we end up with a vested interest in thinking of ourselves as better people than others?
If it's worth our time to contemplate what "good" actually is, it seems worthwhile to also ask whether going around being one of the "actively good" is itself an intrinsically good thing. I would like to think it is at least an "OK thing", since I have a lifelong sense of identity wrapped up in it, but I do agree that we're a mixed bag and often do socially destructive things, and at a minimum we should abandon any attitudes that we as "actively good" individuals may still harbor about being better than others, and just accept that it's our way of being in the world and, if it makes us happy, it is its own reward.
Yes, obviously this whole business of pursing the "good" is a preoccupation that has an occupation—the clergy—associated with it.
To what extent is there a tie-in between sissy femme girlish males, on the one hand, and males of the clergy, on the other? Well, the clergy is not exactly a repository for males who identify openly and specifically as being "like the women and girls", as feminine people, that's obvious too. But by this point you should be wondering why it isn't, or why it isn't more of one than it is.
• Other males who aspired to being actively good in this fashion may have juxtaposed themselves against what other males were doing or what they were like, and not compared themselves to girls and women, even if they did perceive that a lot of girls and women had the same interest in being actively good.
• I've encountered a widespread attitude in theological and philosophical thinking that girls' and women's goodness somehow does not "count". Sometimes this is expressed in terms of lack of temptation or lack of opportunity and power; sometimes it is expressed more as women having a "nature" that automatically makes them good, as if female people were on moral autopilot and that this kind of goodness doesn't quality as a character attribute. And there's a somewhat dismissive lack of interest in what they do anyhow.
• Surrounding the clergy is the church, of course, and the congregation of our churches tends to have a strong female spine, with more enthusiastic female participation. It would be a rather thin church if the female people all dropped out. But the official church leadership has generally been male.
I should confess something from childhood days: in aspiring to exhibit the characteristics that adults valued and to constrain my own behavior to be in accordance with the rules that the adults set, I was expecting to get ahead. I was demonstrating maturity, I was being a good citizen, and it was implicitly promised if not quite spelled out in writing that the reins of society would be placed in our hands, whereas the kids who misbehaved and were disruptive and who constituted a discipline problem, they'd be left behind. I bring this up here because I think the same implicit promise was held out to the girls. But long before adulthood, girls and women may come to perceive themselves as having been sold a bill of goods on this whole "being good" thing, and hence they are no longer expecting a payoff. (If and when they end up "in charge" and "holding the reins", it tends to taste and feel a lot more like responsibility and duty than power and privilege). But the males may be more inclined to still be expecting a reward for their goodness, and the clergy offers some social prestige and stature.
• Masculinizing the good. Picture Mel Gibson being all self-righteous and oozing as much divine testosterone as possible, being authoritarian and aggressive as he embodies the active good. The allegiance of the males who get to the point of exercising some authority as clergy is harnessed to the conventional male world, with a lot of reward made available for throwing the girls, women, and feminine traits themselves under the bus and ignoring female people's conventional and loyal orientation towards the active good.
• Vindictiveness! I've seen strong strands of this poison too, actively retaliatory attitudes towards women from male clergy. A lot of it has the same contours as bitterness of the Nice Guys™, and I can't help but suspect that the accusations of being evil temptresses and vile oozing soul-sucking repositories of wickedness and all that tie back to the heterosexual sissy-femme dismay at discovering that the actively good girls often prefer the actively bad boys.
Hence, when we think of males in the clergy, we're often more likely to think first of Cotton Mather condemning witches than to conjure up an image of a gentle male who is trying to be good and whose personality and behaviors are diametrically offset from masculinity.
But I suspect a lot of us end up there, although damn few are inclined to speak from the pulpit about gender, masculinity, and their personal trajectories that took them there.
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