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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Saturday, June 22, 2019
Saturday, June 15, 2019
A JunePride Mea Culpa: My Homophobia
I'm constantly blogging and posting to be recognized, included, understood as a genderqueer person. But acceptance within the MOGII community is a two-way street and I haven't always been the ideal poster child for good and non-judgmental attitudes. I think I am long beyond harboring nasty feelings and thoughts towards gay people but in the interests of fairness I thought it might be appropriate to 'fess up about my past.
First off, you've got to realize I didn't grow up hearing about "LGBTQ" or "MOGII" or any other sense that there was a diverse community of gender-and-sexuality misfits. It was just gay people. That's who "they" were, and who I was widely thought to be. I did not, in fact, have same-sex sexual attraction, and so, yes, "they", and not "we", seemed to be the correct formulation. Gay guys were definitely a category of "them", and not a sense of identity I thought I shared in.
You'd think that wouldn't be much of a big deal -- I mean, I'm also not Russian, or a blue-eyed blonde, or a Muslim or a grandparent. Lots of identities out there that aren't mine, and I don't generally find it important or necessary to define myself as not one of them in conjunction to them. But people weren't assuming I was any of those other things.
And part of the problem was who I actually was -- a feminine sissy boy. This was a problem because people's definition of what it meant to be a gay guy were weirdly twisted up: if you asked for a literal definition you'd probably get "two people of the same sex who have sex with each other instead of with the opposite sex" or some similar formulation, but their behavior towards any mention of sissy-femme characteristics in a male showed how deeply they believed that this, also, meant that the person was gay. That's called equivocation, when more than one meaning is built into a word or phrase and treated as if those two meanings were really the same thing.
Being erroneously thought to be a gay guy didn't work the same way as being incorrectly assumed to be right-handed. People often did assume I was right-handed, but their reaction to being told otherwise, or to seeing me pick up a pen with my left hand and begin writing, was to say "oh!" and make a mental adjustment and that would be the end of it. In contrast to that, I found that trying to convey to people that I was a heterosexual sissy was like explaining that East West Main Street is down up from here, go directly behind in front of you and turn left right at the first last intersection.
I developed hostile and derogatory attitudes against the identity that I was pushing off from. When people said or hinted that they thought I was probably gay, I would express revulsion. Eww, yuck! That's disgusting! No, I'd say, I'm not like them at all, they're crudely promiscuous and they're not interested in forming attachment relationships, if anything they're like typical masculine hetero guys except even more so, they just want to stick it into something and pump. I repeated the most condescending and negative of stereotypes and emphasized how totally and utterly this was not my identity. Not just "nope, you've miscategorized me" but out-and-out hateful stuff. If some bigoted Bible-pounding zealot expressed the opinion that no one is naturally homosexual, that engaging in same-sex erotic behavior is against anyone's nature, I'd nod and agree that it seemed weird and twisted to me too.
With as much reason as I'd had in my life to question any widespread rejection of the Different, I was nevertheless cheerfully joining in with the hate chorus. I was so focused on establishing and defending my own peculiar sense of identity that it didn't occur to me that the things I was saying might be hurtful to the people I was pushing off from.
I came out in 1980, finally recognizing that who I was, how I was, was Different in the same general kind of way that being gay was Different. That even if there wasn't a name for the category, I was in a different identity-category than heterosexual guys were. And that meant that gay guys were potentially my allies.
My relationship with gay guys -- both in the abstract as a topic of discussion and real live ones that I actually encountered, in political discussions of gender and sexuality minority identities and in other contexts -- did not instantaneously clear up and become companionable and smooth. I was clear in my head about my identity, but explaining it, and explaining why it needed to be established in people's heads as an available identity, was complicated and problematic. Lots of gay activists at the time were promoting the position that no one should be going around denying that they were gay, that it was not an identity that their allies needed to be running away from as if it were something horrible. But from my vantage point, my identity was being socially erased by the conflation of sissyhood with homosexuality, and although I was now ashamed of how hatefully I had repulsed gay identity, I still wanted to be seen and recognized for who I was. I had to learn how to explain my situation in ways that weren't experienced as abrasive and politically objectionable to the gay activists I wanted to ally with. (It eventually helped that some gay male activists did not much appreciate being thought of as feminine, and that others, who were, thought the masculine gay guys were looking down on them and regarding them as stereotype-reinforcing. This opened a dialog that I could participate in; we could agree that it was useful and necessary to uncouple the equivocation between being gay and being feminine, and to discuss the political connections between homophobia and sissyphobia).
When I first started hanging around Identity House in Manhattan and attending my first Pride March in 1985, I found it frustrating that I wasn't encountering any similarly-identifying, similar-minded gender activists to speak with. It seemed to me that the mostly male, mostly gay participants were coming to meetings to flirt and connect with potential dating partners, which wasn't entirely untrue, but I could have made more of an effort to communicate, to talk issues and bridge gaps, and to listen and learn and be a better ally myself. I was by then mostly past the worst of my homophobic attitudes but I was still pretty selfishly immersed in my own identity politics. Most of us were, I suppose, and I felt like the people I was encountering mostly only cared about their own identity-situation, and that not much of what they were concerned about applied to me, and there was some truth to that assessment, but that was a description I could have applied to myself just as accurately.
It wasn't until I first encountered the acronym with the "Q" added -- LGBTQ -- that I stopped thinking of the community as potential allies (but still "them") and instead tentatively began to consider the community as "us". GenderQueer was a term I had been introduced to and I read the description and it fit, even if it wasn't highly specific to my circumstances.
We do need to come together, to listen to each other and be supportive of each others' struggles. I will acknowledge that I have not been a model citizen in the LGBTQ-munity, but I recognize the need to consider my own behaviors and the ways in which I have not been a good listener or a sufficiently reliable ally. I will try to do better.
"Community" is simple when it equates to "people who are just like me"; it takes more effort to extend it to "people who are different but with whom I have stuff in common". I invite you to read and listen to folks who occupy a different letter in the acronym. Read the words of bisexual activists, and intersex activists. Pick up something penned by somebody nonbinary. Learn about the experiences of folks of minority gender and orientation identities that you don't have much familiarity with. I will, too.
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First off, you've got to realize I didn't grow up hearing about "LGBTQ" or "MOGII" or any other sense that there was a diverse community of gender-and-sexuality misfits. It was just gay people. That's who "they" were, and who I was widely thought to be. I did not, in fact, have same-sex sexual attraction, and so, yes, "they", and not "we", seemed to be the correct formulation. Gay guys were definitely a category of "them", and not a sense of identity I thought I shared in.
You'd think that wouldn't be much of a big deal -- I mean, I'm also not Russian, or a blue-eyed blonde, or a Muslim or a grandparent. Lots of identities out there that aren't mine, and I don't generally find it important or necessary to define myself as not one of them in conjunction to them. But people weren't assuming I was any of those other things.
And part of the problem was who I actually was -- a feminine sissy boy. This was a problem because people's definition of what it meant to be a gay guy were weirdly twisted up: if you asked for a literal definition you'd probably get "two people of the same sex who have sex with each other instead of with the opposite sex" or some similar formulation, but their behavior towards any mention of sissy-femme characteristics in a male showed how deeply they believed that this, also, meant that the person was gay. That's called equivocation, when more than one meaning is built into a word or phrase and treated as if those two meanings were really the same thing.
Being erroneously thought to be a gay guy didn't work the same way as being incorrectly assumed to be right-handed. People often did assume I was right-handed, but their reaction to being told otherwise, or to seeing me pick up a pen with my left hand and begin writing, was to say "oh!" and make a mental adjustment and that would be the end of it. In contrast to that, I found that trying to convey to people that I was a heterosexual sissy was like explaining that East West Main Street is down up from here, go directly behind in front of you and turn left right at the first last intersection.
I developed hostile and derogatory attitudes against the identity that I was pushing off from. When people said or hinted that they thought I was probably gay, I would express revulsion. Eww, yuck! That's disgusting! No, I'd say, I'm not like them at all, they're crudely promiscuous and they're not interested in forming attachment relationships, if anything they're like typical masculine hetero guys except even more so, they just want to stick it into something and pump. I repeated the most condescending and negative of stereotypes and emphasized how totally and utterly this was not my identity. Not just "nope, you've miscategorized me" but out-and-out hateful stuff. If some bigoted Bible-pounding zealot expressed the opinion that no one is naturally homosexual, that engaging in same-sex erotic behavior is against anyone's nature, I'd nod and agree that it seemed weird and twisted to me too.
With as much reason as I'd had in my life to question any widespread rejection of the Different, I was nevertheless cheerfully joining in with the hate chorus. I was so focused on establishing and defending my own peculiar sense of identity that it didn't occur to me that the things I was saying might be hurtful to the people I was pushing off from.
I came out in 1980, finally recognizing that who I was, how I was, was Different in the same general kind of way that being gay was Different. That even if there wasn't a name for the category, I was in a different identity-category than heterosexual guys were. And that meant that gay guys were potentially my allies.
My relationship with gay guys -- both in the abstract as a topic of discussion and real live ones that I actually encountered, in political discussions of gender and sexuality minority identities and in other contexts -- did not instantaneously clear up and become companionable and smooth. I was clear in my head about my identity, but explaining it, and explaining why it needed to be established in people's heads as an available identity, was complicated and problematic. Lots of gay activists at the time were promoting the position that no one should be going around denying that they were gay, that it was not an identity that their allies needed to be running away from as if it were something horrible. But from my vantage point, my identity was being socially erased by the conflation of sissyhood with homosexuality, and although I was now ashamed of how hatefully I had repulsed gay identity, I still wanted to be seen and recognized for who I was. I had to learn how to explain my situation in ways that weren't experienced as abrasive and politically objectionable to the gay activists I wanted to ally with. (It eventually helped that some gay male activists did not much appreciate being thought of as feminine, and that others, who were, thought the masculine gay guys were looking down on them and regarding them as stereotype-reinforcing. This opened a dialog that I could participate in; we could agree that it was useful and necessary to uncouple the equivocation between being gay and being feminine, and to discuss the political connections between homophobia and sissyphobia).
When I first started hanging around Identity House in Manhattan and attending my first Pride March in 1985, I found it frustrating that I wasn't encountering any similarly-identifying, similar-minded gender activists to speak with. It seemed to me that the mostly male, mostly gay participants were coming to meetings to flirt and connect with potential dating partners, which wasn't entirely untrue, but I could have made more of an effort to communicate, to talk issues and bridge gaps, and to listen and learn and be a better ally myself. I was by then mostly past the worst of my homophobic attitudes but I was still pretty selfishly immersed in my own identity politics. Most of us were, I suppose, and I felt like the people I was encountering mostly only cared about their own identity-situation, and that not much of what they were concerned about applied to me, and there was some truth to that assessment, but that was a description I could have applied to myself just as accurately.
It wasn't until I first encountered the acronym with the "Q" added -- LGBTQ -- that I stopped thinking of the community as potential allies (but still "them") and instead tentatively began to consider the community as "us". GenderQueer was a term I had been introduced to and I read the description and it fit, even if it wasn't highly specific to my circumstances.
We do need to come together, to listen to each other and be supportive of each others' struggles. I will acknowledge that I have not been a model citizen in the LGBTQ-munity, but I recognize the need to consider my own behaviors and the ways in which I have not been a good listener or a sufficiently reliable ally. I will try to do better.
"Community" is simple when it equates to "people who are just like me"; it takes more effort to extend it to "people who are different but with whom I have stuff in common". I invite you to read and listen to folks who occupy a different letter in the acronym. Read the words of bisexual activists, and intersex activists. Pick up something penned by somebody nonbinary. Learn about the experiences of folks of minority gender and orientation identities that you don't have much familiarity with. I will, too.
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Saturday, June 8, 2019
Split Identity
I suggest we split what we call "identity" into two components. I apologize if I’m repeating myself; my thoughts keep returning to this notion the way a tongue seeks out a sore tooth. I’m talking about a simple split here – not like the myriad aspects of identity portrayed in the Genderbread Person and other such formulations (useful though they may also be at times). I’m suggesting the usefulness of distinguishing simply, between self-chosen identity and identity that is assigned to us by others (which I refer to as altercast identity). I have my reasons for proposing this, which I’d like to go into. You see what you think, OK?
A Lesson from the Workplace
I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.
But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.
On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.
On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).
Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise
A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.
But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"
(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)
I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.
An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude
I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.
I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.
Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.
Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.
In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.
My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.
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A Lesson from the Workplace
I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.
But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.
On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.
On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).
Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise
A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.
But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"
(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)
I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.
An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude
I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.
I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.
Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.
Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.
In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.
My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.
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Saturday, June 1, 2019
Depression
I'm in a dismal mood.
Doesn't happen very often. I'm seldom depressed. When I first obtained a clear sense of my variant identity, I received along with it a political explanation for why I felt pushed aside, why I was so often reviled and hated when I hadn't done anything to hurt anybody, why I didn't make friends, was perennially unpopular, and so on. It was also a political analysis that explained a lot of the worrisome aspects of the larger world to me, things like tyranny and oppression, poverty and inequality, even morality and spiritual meaning in life. So it was very empowering, and gave me optimism, courage, even some modicum of patience.
And you can sort of see why having that kind of understanding in my head made me want to share it, figuring it would offer those things to a lot of other people as well. And why wanting to share it gave me a mission and a purpose in life.
But I do get discouraged and trammeled down sometimes and it's been like that these last couple weeks.
I had a publisher on the line. I had a contract in my hands. There were problems and concerns -- I never quite felt that the editor I was interacting with had a clear understanding of the gender identity thing, either mine or MOGII* identities in general, beyond the average person's mainstream popularized shorthand stuff, and he didn't seem curious or sufficiently intellectually engaged to see what it was that I was trying to say to the world. It was more like "Hey, you write well, this could be an interesting entertaining book with a bit of effort".
I thought maybe I could work with that but the lack of any sense of being on the same channel worried me. He also gave every sign of wanting to be heavy-handed about changes. "I think you should add a scene where you muse about this, and then a scene where you blast out of town and flip off the city limits sign as you drive into the sunset... and I'd get rid of these scenes in this next section..." I got mixed messages about how much of these editorial suggestions I could veto and still have them publish the book. On the one hand, he stipulated that the publisher would not make any changes that the author did not approve, and when I did a preliminary round of edits , adding some scenes he suggested but not deleting material that I wanted to keep, he replied (somewhat sourly, I thought), "Well, do it your way, it's your book, and we don't want you to look back after publication and wish you'd never heard of us". Alongside of these ambivalent-sounding reassurances about my authorial authority, I received periodic comments about how the publisher could not afford to put a book out there that had so many flaws and weaknesses that it simply would not sell, or that would be an embarrassment to the publishing company.
I was sent a document to review and sign, titled "draft contract", and I wanted to modify some clauses to safeguard that the book would come out my way (final word on the book's cover, title, back-cover blurbs, publicity descriptions or synopsis, etc) and also push for a better deal in some places (better % royalties beyond the 2500th copy, because I'd be financing most of the publicity efforts, as tends to be the case with small publishers) -- I figured it did say draft proposal, after all, and that they might say "nope, you can't have that" and if so we'd negotiate to a compromise and then I'd sign and they'd sign and I'd hold my breath and hope we could work together on the edits, right?
Uh uh. I got a reply email stating that the publisher had decided they had too many projects going on and had decided not to publish my book after all, best of luck with it elsewhere, etc. After a day to cool off I wrote a letter of inquiry (and of hubris-acknowledgment). He confirmed that yeah, it was because I'd given them pushback instead of just signing the contract as is. And nope, no room at this point for continuing the discussion, sorry. So that was that.
What are your symptoms when you get down and despondent and mopey?
For me, it's like this:
* I get mad at myself and start blaming myself for the outcome, even though I'm still capable of an intellectual analysis that tells me I didn't do self-destructive things here. I blew it. I had a contract in my hands and managed to drive away the publisher. I must not really want to get my book published, I sabotage myself. Heck, I probably sabotage myself right and left every day, finding ways to not network or communicate, so that I can be a fucking dilettante and keep pretending to be an "activist" or a gender "revolutionary" when I'm really just Walter Mitty and none of this is real.
* I question my beliefs and understandings. Intellectually, I could tell you that it is good for anyone to question what they purport to believe; it makes the beliefs that withstand such questions more valid and sound, and it makes the person who subscribes to them less defensive and more genuinely confident and all that -- but in this mood, the belief-questioning is very dark and takes this form: "My difference probably isn't that I'm differently gendered. That's just an excuse. I'm inferior, there's something fundamentally wrong with me. People mocked and harassed me as a kid because I was pathetic, not because I was a sissy. I have had problems making friends and getting accepted socially because I'm not fun, not friendly, don't remember what is important to other people, and in particular because I don't properly soak up how to be, the little memes and clues, so I am not a part of things. I'm probably impaired neurologically or psychologically. Maybe I'm autistic, or I have some personality deficit so that I'm capable of doing mechanical things like dress myself or do data entry or write term papers for college classes but my brain isn't wired correctly to do people-interaction. Yeah, there's something wrong with me.
* The dark stuff isn't all of the self-blame variety. I have other forms of gloom to wallow in. Why have I gotten so little traction out of forty years of trying to share and explain these ideas? Well it's because I belong to a sexually dimorphic species, and I'm a sissy male, a feminine male, hence a minority and marginalized because of that; and I can try to call that "political" and make an "issue" of it all I want, but my species isn't buying it, there are evolutionary forces that select against it becoming okay for males like me to be accepted and embraced by society. Or (brain switches channels to a different gloomy perspective) it's a conspiracy of sorts, my set of theories and explanations is a potential meme that conflicts in parts with the predominant rising body of thought, which at the moment is the mainstream transgender narrative, What I am saying or trying to say is rejected because the popular social dialog only has room for a few prevailing ideas to proliferate. My notions are no doubt seen as transphobic, or at least they’re seen as incorrect and inaccurate when people compare them with the established transgender explanations. And back in the earlier years, before transgender viewpoints were established, my ideas were probably worrisome to gay people and their supporters, and were perceived as homophobic. So, you see, communication between an individual and the rest of their surrounding culture isn't free exchange; ideas that are not the ones chosen by the consensus get pinched off and blocked because they introduce too much noise, and mine are noise, not the memes that have been embraced and selected for wider audiences. Or (switching channels to one with even less light in it)…
* Ha, so silly to dwell on how poorly I fit as a male, when I should take note of how poorly I fit as a human being. I am not doing this "being a person" thing very well. I was born to a species whose tasks of life and patterns of behavior and interaction and challenges and so forth are a bad fit for me, and not much fun. I am tired of this. Not in the sense of wanting to be dead, not in the sense of craving non-consciousness and non-existence, but, yeesh, if I die and get to come back, I really hope I can come back on some other planet as some other species with a different nature, different characteristics. Or I could come back as a kitty cat, and live in back alleys and prey on mice and if I'm lucky get adopted and taken indoors. Or I could try my hand at being a sycamore tree, or bread mold or something. But this "being a human being" thing doesn't seem to be shaping up to anything like a passing grade. I'm just no damn good at it.
Meh. My way of coping with depression is to ride it out, and to wallow in it self-indulgently and immersively, until I get annoyed and angry and break out of it. I don't think I'm very pleasant company for the duration of these moods (I get even more self-immersed than I usually am, which is admittedly a rather narcissistic threshold to start with); I only listen to the loved ones and important associates and colleagues in my life in a sporadic and distracted way, and I get very forgetful (more spacy than usual, and again I have an embarrassingly bad baseline to start with). And I'm awake much of the time I should be sleeping and dozing off when I should be alert and awake.
But it's not like I don't understand why I would be feeling depressed. I got sufficient reason. So it's normal and natural and part of life for me.
I'll bounce back.
* MOGII = "minority orientations, gender identities, and intersex" -- an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBTQIAA++ acronym
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Doesn't happen very often. I'm seldom depressed. When I first obtained a clear sense of my variant identity, I received along with it a political explanation for why I felt pushed aside, why I was so often reviled and hated when I hadn't done anything to hurt anybody, why I didn't make friends, was perennially unpopular, and so on. It was also a political analysis that explained a lot of the worrisome aspects of the larger world to me, things like tyranny and oppression, poverty and inequality, even morality and spiritual meaning in life. So it was very empowering, and gave me optimism, courage, even some modicum of patience.
And you can sort of see why having that kind of understanding in my head made me want to share it, figuring it would offer those things to a lot of other people as well. And why wanting to share it gave me a mission and a purpose in life.
But I do get discouraged and trammeled down sometimes and it's been like that these last couple weeks.
I had a publisher on the line. I had a contract in my hands. There were problems and concerns -- I never quite felt that the editor I was interacting with had a clear understanding of the gender identity thing, either mine or MOGII* identities in general, beyond the average person's mainstream popularized shorthand stuff, and he didn't seem curious or sufficiently intellectually engaged to see what it was that I was trying to say to the world. It was more like "Hey, you write well, this could be an interesting entertaining book with a bit of effort".
I thought maybe I could work with that but the lack of any sense of being on the same channel worried me. He also gave every sign of wanting to be heavy-handed about changes. "I think you should add a scene where you muse about this, and then a scene where you blast out of town and flip off the city limits sign as you drive into the sunset... and I'd get rid of these scenes in this next section..." I got mixed messages about how much of these editorial suggestions I could veto and still have them publish the book. On the one hand, he stipulated that the publisher would not make any changes that the author did not approve, and when I did a preliminary round of edits , adding some scenes he suggested but not deleting material that I wanted to keep, he replied (somewhat sourly, I thought), "Well, do it your way, it's your book, and we don't want you to look back after publication and wish you'd never heard of us". Alongside of these ambivalent-sounding reassurances about my authorial authority, I received periodic comments about how the publisher could not afford to put a book out there that had so many flaws and weaknesses that it simply would not sell, or that would be an embarrassment to the publishing company.
I was sent a document to review and sign, titled "draft contract", and I wanted to modify some clauses to safeguard that the book would come out my way (final word on the book's cover, title, back-cover blurbs, publicity descriptions or synopsis, etc) and also push for a better deal in some places (better % royalties beyond the 2500th copy, because I'd be financing most of the publicity efforts, as tends to be the case with small publishers) -- I figured it did say draft proposal, after all, and that they might say "nope, you can't have that" and if so we'd negotiate to a compromise and then I'd sign and they'd sign and I'd hold my breath and hope we could work together on the edits, right?
Uh uh. I got a reply email stating that the publisher had decided they had too many projects going on and had decided not to publish my book after all, best of luck with it elsewhere, etc. After a day to cool off I wrote a letter of inquiry (and of hubris-acknowledgment). He confirmed that yeah, it was because I'd given them pushback instead of just signing the contract as is. And nope, no room at this point for continuing the discussion, sorry. So that was that.
What are your symptoms when you get down and despondent and mopey?
For me, it's like this:
* I get mad at myself and start blaming myself for the outcome, even though I'm still capable of an intellectual analysis that tells me I didn't do self-destructive things here. I blew it. I had a contract in my hands and managed to drive away the publisher. I must not really want to get my book published, I sabotage myself. Heck, I probably sabotage myself right and left every day, finding ways to not network or communicate, so that I can be a fucking dilettante and keep pretending to be an "activist" or a gender "revolutionary" when I'm really just Walter Mitty and none of this is real.
* I question my beliefs and understandings. Intellectually, I could tell you that it is good for anyone to question what they purport to believe; it makes the beliefs that withstand such questions more valid and sound, and it makes the person who subscribes to them less defensive and more genuinely confident and all that -- but in this mood, the belief-questioning is very dark and takes this form: "My difference probably isn't that I'm differently gendered. That's just an excuse. I'm inferior, there's something fundamentally wrong with me. People mocked and harassed me as a kid because I was pathetic, not because I was a sissy. I have had problems making friends and getting accepted socially because I'm not fun, not friendly, don't remember what is important to other people, and in particular because I don't properly soak up how to be, the little memes and clues, so I am not a part of things. I'm probably impaired neurologically or psychologically. Maybe I'm autistic, or I have some personality deficit so that I'm capable of doing mechanical things like dress myself or do data entry or write term papers for college classes but my brain isn't wired correctly to do people-interaction. Yeah, there's something wrong with me.
* The dark stuff isn't all of the self-blame variety. I have other forms of gloom to wallow in. Why have I gotten so little traction out of forty years of trying to share and explain these ideas? Well it's because I belong to a sexually dimorphic species, and I'm a sissy male, a feminine male, hence a minority and marginalized because of that; and I can try to call that "political" and make an "issue" of it all I want, but my species isn't buying it, there are evolutionary forces that select against it becoming okay for males like me to be accepted and embraced by society. Or (brain switches channels to a different gloomy perspective) it's a conspiracy of sorts, my set of theories and explanations is a potential meme that conflicts in parts with the predominant rising body of thought, which at the moment is the mainstream transgender narrative, What I am saying or trying to say is rejected because the popular social dialog only has room for a few prevailing ideas to proliferate. My notions are no doubt seen as transphobic, or at least they’re seen as incorrect and inaccurate when people compare them with the established transgender explanations. And back in the earlier years, before transgender viewpoints were established, my ideas were probably worrisome to gay people and their supporters, and were perceived as homophobic. So, you see, communication between an individual and the rest of their surrounding culture isn't free exchange; ideas that are not the ones chosen by the consensus get pinched off and blocked because they introduce too much noise, and mine are noise, not the memes that have been embraced and selected for wider audiences. Or (switching channels to one with even less light in it)…
* Ha, so silly to dwell on how poorly I fit as a male, when I should take note of how poorly I fit as a human being. I am not doing this "being a person" thing very well. I was born to a species whose tasks of life and patterns of behavior and interaction and challenges and so forth are a bad fit for me, and not much fun. I am tired of this. Not in the sense of wanting to be dead, not in the sense of craving non-consciousness and non-existence, but, yeesh, if I die and get to come back, I really hope I can come back on some other planet as some other species with a different nature, different characteristics. Or I could come back as a kitty cat, and live in back alleys and prey on mice and if I'm lucky get adopted and taken indoors. Or I could try my hand at being a sycamore tree, or bread mold or something. But this "being a human being" thing doesn't seem to be shaping up to anything like a passing grade. I'm just no damn good at it.
Meh. My way of coping with depression is to ride it out, and to wallow in it self-indulgently and immersively, until I get annoyed and angry and break out of it. I don't think I'm very pleasant company for the duration of these moods (I get even more self-immersed than I usually am, which is admittedly a rather narcissistic threshold to start with); I only listen to the loved ones and important associates and colleagues in my life in a sporadic and distracted way, and I get very forgetful (more spacy than usual, and again I have an embarrassingly bad baseline to start with). And I'm awake much of the time I should be sleeping and dozing off when I should be alert and awake.
But it's not like I don't understand why I would be feeling depressed. I got sufficient reason. So it's normal and natural and part of life for me.
I'll bounce back.
* MOGII = "minority orientations, gender identities, and intersex" -- an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBTQIAA++ acronym
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Friday, May 24, 2019
Compassion and Tenderness
Part of what “femininity” means to many people, not just by association but embedded in the definition, is a capacity and an inclination to care, to be empathic, to listen and to provide supportive efforts, both of the practical variety and in the form of expressions of understanding and concern. When people are discussing male (and/or Assigned Male At Birth) people who are feminine (femmes, sissies, girls, women), the traits and expressions that they focus on may not emphasize compassion and tenderness, but at least for some of us it is it’s pretty central to why and how we think of ourselves as feminine.
“Everyone should”
In the decade after I first came out as a sissy (which was my word for it, specifically as a heterosexual sissy in order to untie the confusion between gender and sexual orientation), I mostly embraced a feminist analysis of sexist polarized gender expectations: there was no damn reason to foist onto male people all that masculine adversarial belligerence and selfishness and emotionally truncated immaturity.
One way of reading that interpretation is that all of us male people possess the same capacity and tendency to be compassionate as female people do, and that as a male feminist (or profeminist or whatever) person I was just being loud about saying so. And during this era of my life, I did tend to de-emphasize the notion that I was inherently different from other males, because I was positioning my own politics to fit within that feminist framework.
Another, more nuanced take on that is that all of us male people could be that way but that male role socialization and the conformity of typical males to those masculine expectations meant that most males did not develop those traits, whereas those of us who rejected sexist roles and rules and embraced healthy traits labeled “feminine” were far more free to develop as compassionate and tender people. That was more the approach I put into words when discussing the matter in those days.
But when I first came out, the central insight was that I was different from men in general, that how and who I was made me not one of the men but instead one of the women, and that that was why my experiences and, in particular, my frustrations with heterosexuality, were as they were. The political analysis that posited that I was actually a surviving, relatively healthy person in an unhealthy sexist world came a bit later. And now, when I am positioning my politics within queer theory and LGBTQ identity frameworks, I’ve returned to that. (If all the other males wish to say that they, too, are not correctly described by “masculinity”, that they, too, are actually far better described by the components that make up “femininity” instead, then they can certainly say so, but these days I speak for myself and, to an extent, for others who identify as I do). So here is the notion that the sissy femme is perhaps inherently inclined to be more compassionate and tender as an expression of innate femininity. I have often described the “differences between the sexes” using the Snow Cone analogy. Hurl a mango snow cone at the wall, then pick up a mint snow cone and throw it against the same wall but make the center of impact a bit to the right of where the mango cone’s center of impact was. You get a spray of colored ice with orange-colored flecks interspersed with green-colored flecks, lots of overlap, and even though as a group the entirety of the mango particles skew to the left of the mint particles, there are individual mango particles even way over on the right where the mint flecks predominate, and likewise for mint ice-flecks on the far left. So being a sissy femme is being one of the exceptions, genuinely different at least in the statistical / generalization sense, and hence, to whatever extent female people in general are innately more compassionate and tender, the feminine sissy may be feminine in exactly that way, among other ways.
Take your pick. Any way you go at it, it’s a set of character and behavioral traits that I claim to exhibit and to which I aspire and which forms a big part of my sense of who I am.
Not Just Selflessness
As with the entire basket of attributes called “femininity”, compassion and tenderness are often not seen as things that benefit the person who has them. Instead, they’re often thought of strictly in terms of the benefit that they accord other people. Feminist analysis has often pointed to how women are placed in a position of providing multiple kinds of service and support to men, and that this is among them, yet one more form of social labor for which women are exploited and from which energies they are alienated, their efforts along these lines appropriated for men’s use. But we have to be careful not to fall into the pattern of devaluing those ways of being in the world that are part of the feminine, of ratifying the patriarchal definition of them as second-tier and inferior.
We can’t really do that without taking a frank look at the benefits to the feminine person of being compassionate and tender.
I first became really and intensely aware of this from experiencing its absence as a child: I was capable of being a caring person, of being a good listener, a sympathetic and supportive friend, but as a boy (or person perceived in those terms) it felt like no one wanted it from me. I was jealous of the kind of emotional sharing and reciprocal connections I saw among girls my age and felt strongly that I could participate in that, would be good at it if given the opportunity, and felt very much left out. Over the years of thinking about this and analyzing it more fully in the years after I came out, I came to think of this flavor of emotional intimacy as something for which we have an appetite, and from which we derive personal pleasure from the connection. Conceptualizing it as some kind of selfless sacrificial service to others denies this; and it’s wrong. It’s the same kind of cognitive mistake that a person would be making if they were to think that no one gets sexual pleasure from pleasuring someone else, or has an appetite prompting them to do so. On an emotional level, we get off on being compassionate to others and making them feel loved and understood and cared for. It is seldom spoken of in this fashion, to be sure, but in order to claim it for myself and to explain that being deprived of it is indeed a deprivation, being blatantly honest about this aspect of the experience seems vital.
Then there is the ancillary social aspect of being perceived as such. It should be easy enough to see why one might wish to be thought of as a compassionate and tender caring person. Alternative gender identities are proliferating, and one fake-tolerant pseudoliberal response to it takes the form “you can identify as whatever the heck you want, hey you can identify as a pine tree if that suits you, and more power to you, as long as you realize that I don’t get it and probably never will”. The problem is that we don’t need anyone’s permission or cooperation to be who we are within the interiors of our own heads or even, to a significant extent, within our everyday behaviors; but like everyone else we receive the identitities projected onto us by everyone else who perceives us, and, again like everyone else we derive some degree of social comfort and satisfaction from being perceived in ways that are congruent with how we perceive ourselves. Cisgender males are generally perceived as men and expected to be masculine, and they are, and they get the received / perceived signals like a warm friendly thumbs-up, a confirmation of identity.
There are specific nice things that come with being seen as compassionate and tender, and woven into them, for us, the confirmation of identity in which we are vested.
Finally, going back to the notion that caregiving is a service that others do benefit from, there are transactional advantages to being the resource to whom other people turn in order to obtain it, being in demand for it. In the interpersonal economy of human interaction, it is definitely to the advantage of a person who has these traits to be appreciated for them, to be sought out for them. Just like being a good cook or being a funny person who can be counted on to tell entertaining stories and jokes, having a capacity to give people something that they benefit from brings them to you and in the resulting interaction it is something of value for which those others may give other benefits and services in exchange.
Against Trivialization
I said up above that when people think or talk about sissy femme male (or AMAB) people, compassion and tenderness isn’t typically what they will choose to emphasize. More often they make it all about lipstick and high heels, being prissy and fabulous, and behaving seductively.
Now, there’s definitely a positive good in fun, frolic and frivolity. Joy and pleasure are among the components of life that have been devalued in favor of anger and seriousness and sacrifice and all that, and I am happy to be in the tradition of Emma Goldman, who said that if she can’t dance at it, then it isn’t her revolution. So let’s not even trivilialize the playful accoutrements of femininity…
But yes, a part of the devalorization of the feminine – as attested to by Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, among other prominent places – takes the form of treating the entire feminine package of traits as if there’s very little of real substance going on there.
You’ll get no traction from me if you devalue compassion and tenderness. There’s absolutely nothing trivial about it. These are among the most noble and important of human characteristics and I have always been proud of being a part of them and them a part of my identity, and never had any sympathy or interest in a masculine identity that seemed founded on disparaging all that, of treating it as weakness or dismissing it as less relevant than winning and triumphing over opponents and whatnot.
I am a proud sissy and I have never for a moment looked across the aisle at conventional masculine males and felt that I was in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN.
———————
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“Everyone should”
In the decade after I first came out as a sissy (which was my word for it, specifically as a heterosexual sissy in order to untie the confusion between gender and sexual orientation), I mostly embraced a feminist analysis of sexist polarized gender expectations: there was no damn reason to foist onto male people all that masculine adversarial belligerence and selfishness and emotionally truncated immaturity.
One way of reading that interpretation is that all of us male people possess the same capacity and tendency to be compassionate as female people do, and that as a male feminist (or profeminist or whatever) person I was just being loud about saying so. And during this era of my life, I did tend to de-emphasize the notion that I was inherently different from other males, because I was positioning my own politics to fit within that feminist framework.
Another, more nuanced take on that is that all of us male people could be that way but that male role socialization and the conformity of typical males to those masculine expectations meant that most males did not develop those traits, whereas those of us who rejected sexist roles and rules and embraced healthy traits labeled “feminine” were far more free to develop as compassionate and tender people. That was more the approach I put into words when discussing the matter in those days.
But when I first came out, the central insight was that I was different from men in general, that how and who I was made me not one of the men but instead one of the women, and that that was why my experiences and, in particular, my frustrations with heterosexuality, were as they were. The political analysis that posited that I was actually a surviving, relatively healthy person in an unhealthy sexist world came a bit later. And now, when I am positioning my politics within queer theory and LGBTQ identity frameworks, I’ve returned to that. (If all the other males wish to say that they, too, are not correctly described by “masculinity”, that they, too, are actually far better described by the components that make up “femininity” instead, then they can certainly say so, but these days I speak for myself and, to an extent, for others who identify as I do). So here is the notion that the sissy femme is perhaps inherently inclined to be more compassionate and tender as an expression of innate femininity. I have often described the “differences between the sexes” using the Snow Cone analogy. Hurl a mango snow cone at the wall, then pick up a mint snow cone and throw it against the same wall but make the center of impact a bit to the right of where the mango cone’s center of impact was. You get a spray of colored ice with orange-colored flecks interspersed with green-colored flecks, lots of overlap, and even though as a group the entirety of the mango particles skew to the left of the mint particles, there are individual mango particles even way over on the right where the mint flecks predominate, and likewise for mint ice-flecks on the far left. So being a sissy femme is being one of the exceptions, genuinely different at least in the statistical / generalization sense, and hence, to whatever extent female people in general are innately more compassionate and tender, the feminine sissy may be feminine in exactly that way, among other ways.
Take your pick. Any way you go at it, it’s a set of character and behavioral traits that I claim to exhibit and to which I aspire and which forms a big part of my sense of who I am.
Not Just Selflessness
As with the entire basket of attributes called “femininity”, compassion and tenderness are often not seen as things that benefit the person who has them. Instead, they’re often thought of strictly in terms of the benefit that they accord other people. Feminist analysis has often pointed to how women are placed in a position of providing multiple kinds of service and support to men, and that this is among them, yet one more form of social labor for which women are exploited and from which energies they are alienated, their efforts along these lines appropriated for men’s use. But we have to be careful not to fall into the pattern of devaluing those ways of being in the world that are part of the feminine, of ratifying the patriarchal definition of them as second-tier and inferior.
We can’t really do that without taking a frank look at the benefits to the feminine person of being compassionate and tender.
I first became really and intensely aware of this from experiencing its absence as a child: I was capable of being a caring person, of being a good listener, a sympathetic and supportive friend, but as a boy (or person perceived in those terms) it felt like no one wanted it from me. I was jealous of the kind of emotional sharing and reciprocal connections I saw among girls my age and felt strongly that I could participate in that, would be good at it if given the opportunity, and felt very much left out. Over the years of thinking about this and analyzing it more fully in the years after I came out, I came to think of this flavor of emotional intimacy as something for which we have an appetite, and from which we derive personal pleasure from the connection. Conceptualizing it as some kind of selfless sacrificial service to others denies this; and it’s wrong. It’s the same kind of cognitive mistake that a person would be making if they were to think that no one gets sexual pleasure from pleasuring someone else, or has an appetite prompting them to do so. On an emotional level, we get off on being compassionate to others and making them feel loved and understood and cared for. It is seldom spoken of in this fashion, to be sure, but in order to claim it for myself and to explain that being deprived of it is indeed a deprivation, being blatantly honest about this aspect of the experience seems vital.
Then there is the ancillary social aspect of being perceived as such. It should be easy enough to see why one might wish to be thought of as a compassionate and tender caring person. Alternative gender identities are proliferating, and one fake-tolerant pseudoliberal response to it takes the form “you can identify as whatever the heck you want, hey you can identify as a pine tree if that suits you, and more power to you, as long as you realize that I don’t get it and probably never will”. The problem is that we don’t need anyone’s permission or cooperation to be who we are within the interiors of our own heads or even, to a significant extent, within our everyday behaviors; but like everyone else we receive the identitities projected onto us by everyone else who perceives us, and, again like everyone else we derive some degree of social comfort and satisfaction from being perceived in ways that are congruent with how we perceive ourselves. Cisgender males are generally perceived as men and expected to be masculine, and they are, and they get the received / perceived signals like a warm friendly thumbs-up, a confirmation of identity.
There are specific nice things that come with being seen as compassionate and tender, and woven into them, for us, the confirmation of identity in which we are vested.
Finally, going back to the notion that caregiving is a service that others do benefit from, there are transactional advantages to being the resource to whom other people turn in order to obtain it, being in demand for it. In the interpersonal economy of human interaction, it is definitely to the advantage of a person who has these traits to be appreciated for them, to be sought out for them. Just like being a good cook or being a funny person who can be counted on to tell entertaining stories and jokes, having a capacity to give people something that they benefit from brings them to you and in the resulting interaction it is something of value for which those others may give other benefits and services in exchange.
Against Trivialization
I said up above that when people think or talk about sissy femme male (or AMAB) people, compassion and tenderness isn’t typically what they will choose to emphasize. More often they make it all about lipstick and high heels, being prissy and fabulous, and behaving seductively.
Now, there’s definitely a positive good in fun, frolic and frivolity. Joy and pleasure are among the components of life that have been devalued in favor of anger and seriousness and sacrifice and all that, and I am happy to be in the tradition of Emma Goldman, who said that if she can’t dance at it, then it isn’t her revolution. So let’s not even trivilialize the playful accoutrements of femininity…
But yes, a part of the devalorization of the feminine – as attested to by Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, among other prominent places – takes the form of treating the entire feminine package of traits as if there’s very little of real substance going on there.
You’ll get no traction from me if you devalue compassion and tenderness. There’s absolutely nothing trivial about it. These are among the most noble and important of human characteristics and I have always been proud of being a part of them and them a part of my identity, and never had any sympathy or interest in a masculine identity that seemed founded on disparaging all that, of treating it as weakness or dismissing it as less relevant than winning and triumphing over opponents and whatnot.
I am a proud sissy and I have never for a moment looked across the aisle at conventional masculine males and felt that I was in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN.
———————
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
Friday, May 17, 2019
The Art of Talking Past Each Other
This sentence is false.
Gender discussions are often paradoxical pretzels of the same order, have you noticed? Have you been there? Does it frustrate you too?
Kim starts off talking about the requirements pushed onto male people, this thing called "masculinity", and provides several examples of what is culturally considered to be masculine, and what it is like to be judged for not measuring up or conforming to that.
Blake gets offended at the sexist notion that the items listed by Kim are somehow "masculine", because seriously, who the heck gets to dictate what is and what is not masculine? Who gets to say that it isn't masculine to be an involved caregiver, an emotionally connected relationship-tender, a gentle sensitive artist and a fine hand with a sewing needle, a peacemaker, a sensuous vulnerable individual? Clearly, Kim is the one brandishing outmoded and reductionistic notions of what is and what is not masculine!
Kim say aww c'mon, get real, are you seriously intending to deny that society does maintain all these notions of masculinity and femininity? And that people do have to contend with those notions?
Blake says what is wrong with you that you need to care so much about what other people think, just be yourself why don't you?
Kim gets exasperated and says I am most certainly not conforming to what other people expect, but you make it sound trivially easy to just not care how other people treat you and that's not realistic, but I'm not saying these are things one should conform to, I'm saying it's a social problem that these pressures and expectations exist like this.
Kim goes on to say it is a revolutionary thing when males bail out on the idea of being "men".
Blake says what do you mean they aren't men? Are you saying they have to be belligerent and emotionally stunted or they don't quality as men? That is so sexist of you!
Kim describes what is considered in our culture to be "a man" and how it is projected and imposed on males, and why it is therefore important to be able to get out from under that.
Blake says a male person should just be a man and not let someone else define what it means to be a man and push them out of the definition. Why surrender the definition to a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes? You're advising people to think of themselves as inadequate or insufficient to be a man just because they don't subscribe to your reductionistic notion of what it means to be one!
I'm not a neutral nonpartisan observer on the sidelines, to be honest. There is no real Kim or Blake (they're fictional characters, albeit based on lots of real-life folks I've encountered); Kim and Blake represent factions I've encountered in these conversations and debates often enough to caricature them, but if truth be told my allegiances are with Kim's perspective. In my opinion they aren't equally valid viewpoints, not really; Blake's gender-blind approach is very reminiscent of people who claim to "not see race" -- very convenient if you're in a situation where the social situation doesn't directly affect you, personally, but for most people that's not realistic when it comes to gender. It's one thing to go forth unbothered by what other people think, but you can't get a job with an employer, go on a date, or deal with the police and the neighbors and the school psychiatrist without having to concern yourself with what other people think, because you do have to deal with those other people.
Having said that, yeah, there are positive take-aways from the Blake perspective. It is empowering to bracket off other people's opinions and reactions and emphasize your own, to be brave and self-defined enough to do that. I do recommend that attitude. It's just that it has its limits. Society is still there and it, along with its entrenched attitudes, is still something we all have to contend with. And so we need to be able to refer to those entrenched attitudes, to generalize about them.
If you wish to see a real-life discussion of the Kim vs Blake variety, I offer you " 'Toxic masculinity' and 'toxic femininity'. Real things or sexist mumbo-jumbo.", a currently active message board thread on the Straight Dope Message Board. Although, honestly, in doing so I feel like I've pointed out a dandelion. These conversations recur everywhere, don't they?
———————
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
Gender discussions are often paradoxical pretzels of the same order, have you noticed? Have you been there? Does it frustrate you too?
Kim starts off talking about the requirements pushed onto male people, this thing called "masculinity", and provides several examples of what is culturally considered to be masculine, and what it is like to be judged for not measuring up or conforming to that.
Blake gets offended at the sexist notion that the items listed by Kim are somehow "masculine", because seriously, who the heck gets to dictate what is and what is not masculine? Who gets to say that it isn't masculine to be an involved caregiver, an emotionally connected relationship-tender, a gentle sensitive artist and a fine hand with a sewing needle, a peacemaker, a sensuous vulnerable individual? Clearly, Kim is the one brandishing outmoded and reductionistic notions of what is and what is not masculine!
Kim say aww c'mon, get real, are you seriously intending to deny that society does maintain all these notions of masculinity and femininity? And that people do have to contend with those notions?
Blake says what is wrong with you that you need to care so much about what other people think, just be yourself why don't you?
Kim gets exasperated and says I am most certainly not conforming to what other people expect, but you make it sound trivially easy to just not care how other people treat you and that's not realistic, but I'm not saying these are things one should conform to, I'm saying it's a social problem that these pressures and expectations exist like this.
Kim goes on to say it is a revolutionary thing when males bail out on the idea of being "men".
Blake says what do you mean they aren't men? Are you saying they have to be belligerent and emotionally stunted or they don't quality as men? That is so sexist of you!
Kim describes what is considered in our culture to be "a man" and how it is projected and imposed on males, and why it is therefore important to be able to get out from under that.
Blake says a male person should just be a man and not let someone else define what it means to be a man and push them out of the definition. Why surrender the definition to a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes? You're advising people to think of themselves as inadequate or insufficient to be a man just because they don't subscribe to your reductionistic notion of what it means to be one!
I'm not a neutral nonpartisan observer on the sidelines, to be honest. There is no real Kim or Blake (they're fictional characters, albeit based on lots of real-life folks I've encountered); Kim and Blake represent factions I've encountered in these conversations and debates often enough to caricature them, but if truth be told my allegiances are with Kim's perspective. In my opinion they aren't equally valid viewpoints, not really; Blake's gender-blind approach is very reminiscent of people who claim to "not see race" -- very convenient if you're in a situation where the social situation doesn't directly affect you, personally, but for most people that's not realistic when it comes to gender. It's one thing to go forth unbothered by what other people think, but you can't get a job with an employer, go on a date, or deal with the police and the neighbors and the school psychiatrist without having to concern yourself with what other people think, because you do have to deal with those other people.
Having said that, yeah, there are positive take-aways from the Blake perspective. It is empowering to bracket off other people's opinions and reactions and emphasize your own, to be brave and self-defined enough to do that. I do recommend that attitude. It's just that it has its limits. Society is still there and it, along with its entrenched attitudes, is still something we all have to contend with. And so we need to be able to refer to those entrenched attitudes, to generalize about them.
If you wish to see a real-life discussion of the Kim vs Blake variety, I offer you " 'Toxic masculinity' and 'toxic femininity'. Real things or sexist mumbo-jumbo.", a currently active message board thread on the Straight Dope Message Board. Although, honestly, in doing so I feel like I've pointed out a dandelion. These conversations recur everywhere, don't they?
———————
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, May 11, 2019
Church and Sunday School
You’d think a place associated with being nice (kind, sweet, gentle, good) would be appealing to sissy femme males. Their mascot sported long hair in an era when males in general did not. But no, I didn’t find it so.
In my book, woven into the section about growing up, I describe how I tried to fit in and find friends and acceptance among three cliques or groups – Boy Scouts, the choir, and the countercultural mellow potheads. I mention church in passing, as a place through which I’d met this or that person or as the sponsor of this or that event, but I don’t develop a story-theme about trying to find friends and fit in among the others in the church congregation where we attended. That’s mostly because it would have been redundant, wouldn’t have added much to the story. (Three examples are enough).
But I have sometimes thought (and blogged) about the possible affinities between the clergy and the phenomenon of being a feminine male, so lately I’ve been musing about what church was, and wasn’t, to me growing up.
First of all, church wasn’t a place where boys and girls of a certain interest or disposition chose to go, so that those were the kinds of people your own age that you’d encounter there. Instead, church was a place to which children were taken – dragged, if necessary – by their parents. My childhood prior to 8th grade was mostly in south Georgia, and starting with 8th grade (which is when the book’s story gets underway) we lived in Los Alamos, a small and insular community that was also very churchy, populated as it was with scientists recruited from small and often conservative towns. So it was something that people of my parents’ generation did – you took your family to church on Sundays. To whatever extent your children didn’t seem enthusiastic, it was thought to be true to at least that same extent that they therefore needed it all the more. That meant that the other children my age were often there under duress or, at a minimum, would not have picked this as the place to be on one of their weekend days.
For the long span of years from early elementary to junior high, the boys I encountered in our church’s Sunday school classes were full of misbehaviors, being rambunctious, destructive of materials, noisy, crude, and belligerent. Sunday school – for the benefit of any who weren’t raised in a Protestant Christian churchgoing family – is an hour’s worth of time before the church service, and is divided up and, at least for children, age-specific (so it parallels the kind of divisions that define elementary school classrooms); adult classes might be focused on some theme or general topic of discussion, while children’s classes were taught by an adult Sunday school teacher who would come in armed with lesson plans and songs and construction paper and crayons and scissors and whatnot. The adult leaders teaching us (usually women) tended towards condescension and our classes were geared towards absorbing and regurgitating religious-content facts or memorizing verses or learning lots of trite children’s religious songs.
As usual, the girls were better behaved and were generally more willing to get immersed in the purpose of whatever lesson was being dumped on us, and their interaction with each other was nicer and I respected them more for that. There were girls I liked that I saw there and encountered in classes over the years, but since Sunday school wasn’t a discussion format for us, this wasn’t really a place where I made many friends with them either.
I liked the church service better, with its formality and ritual, and the quiet and serious solemnity. Reintegrated with the adults, I wasn’t forced to be among boys my age. I liked the hymns and I particularly liked the choir.
But I was happy when it was over and the rest of the day was available to me. Part of it was the damn clothes. Since I’m a sissy femme, that may seem odd, that I didn’t care for dressing up in the fanciness of Sunday clothes. Was it because, like the rest of the experience, it was imposed on me and not something I chose for myself? I’m not sure, but I hated the suit coat and the collared shirt and the tie, and the cut of the dress pants. Everything had a way of hanging on the body like a set of curtains, loose in places I preferred clothes to be tight yet bunched up and distracting in other places where I preferred to be unencumbered. Little boy dresswear is adult male dressware scaled down to size and I think maybe it just doesn’t fit as well because it wasn’t designed with a child’s body in mind in the first place. Part of it may also have been the gender disparity of it all, too, although I wasn’t conscious of being annoyed by it at that point. People made a fuss over the cuteness of the girls and the prettiness of their Sunday dresses, and the girls seemed to enjoy their garments a lot more. Certainly what they were wearing was quite different from what I was wearing. That wasn’t so true for everyday wear – I would go to elementary school in pants not particularly different from girls’ pants (and they did wear pants as often as they wore skirts and dresses), shirts not particularly different from girls’ shirts. Male formal wear is far more of a costume, all composed of clothes quite different from our everyday clothes but the same for every male except for minor variations in cut and color. It was a uniform. I hated it and wanted out of it as soon as possible.
In later years, in New Mexico as an older kid, the Sunday experience continued to involve the same nasty bullying classmates I was already at odds with from school. There did start to be a shift towards discussion of moral issues and socially relevant topics, and I liked that, at least. I think the church scene could have ended up being an outlet for me. Yet, by sheer luck of the draw, our church congregation consisted of a lot of boys my age but no girls, and a similar concentration of girls a few years younger who were therefore in a different youth group. I do make reference in my book to some church-sponsored activities that gave me opportunities to socialize and mingle, or to discuss important things like sexuality and the possibility of having a girlfriend and being able to date.
But mostly the church scene was not much of a resource for me.
For the purposes of the book, I had a better example with the Boy Scouts; it, too, was an organization that was affiliated with the notion of Doing Right and Being A Good Boy; and although there was considerably more self-selection and I did make better connections there, it, too, was eventually a venue where I didn't have enough in common to keep me from feeling like an outsider. I placed a scene in the book where the Scouts are telling dirty jokes that become increasingly crude about sex and misogynistic towards women. I think it makes my point sufficiently.
———————
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
In my book, woven into the section about growing up, I describe how I tried to fit in and find friends and acceptance among three cliques or groups – Boy Scouts, the choir, and the countercultural mellow potheads. I mention church in passing, as a place through which I’d met this or that person or as the sponsor of this or that event, but I don’t develop a story-theme about trying to find friends and fit in among the others in the church congregation where we attended. That’s mostly because it would have been redundant, wouldn’t have added much to the story. (Three examples are enough).
But I have sometimes thought (and blogged) about the possible affinities between the clergy and the phenomenon of being a feminine male, so lately I’ve been musing about what church was, and wasn’t, to me growing up.
First of all, church wasn’t a place where boys and girls of a certain interest or disposition chose to go, so that those were the kinds of people your own age that you’d encounter there. Instead, church was a place to which children were taken – dragged, if necessary – by their parents. My childhood prior to 8th grade was mostly in south Georgia, and starting with 8th grade (which is when the book’s story gets underway) we lived in Los Alamos, a small and insular community that was also very churchy, populated as it was with scientists recruited from small and often conservative towns. So it was something that people of my parents’ generation did – you took your family to church on Sundays. To whatever extent your children didn’t seem enthusiastic, it was thought to be true to at least that same extent that they therefore needed it all the more. That meant that the other children my age were often there under duress or, at a minimum, would not have picked this as the place to be on one of their weekend days.
For the long span of years from early elementary to junior high, the boys I encountered in our church’s Sunday school classes were full of misbehaviors, being rambunctious, destructive of materials, noisy, crude, and belligerent. Sunday school – for the benefit of any who weren’t raised in a Protestant Christian churchgoing family – is an hour’s worth of time before the church service, and is divided up and, at least for children, age-specific (so it parallels the kind of divisions that define elementary school classrooms); adult classes might be focused on some theme or general topic of discussion, while children’s classes were taught by an adult Sunday school teacher who would come in armed with lesson plans and songs and construction paper and crayons and scissors and whatnot. The adult leaders teaching us (usually women) tended towards condescension and our classes were geared towards absorbing and regurgitating religious-content facts or memorizing verses or learning lots of trite children’s religious songs.
As usual, the girls were better behaved and were generally more willing to get immersed in the purpose of whatever lesson was being dumped on us, and their interaction with each other was nicer and I respected them more for that. There were girls I liked that I saw there and encountered in classes over the years, but since Sunday school wasn’t a discussion format for us, this wasn’t really a place where I made many friends with them either.
I liked the church service better, with its formality and ritual, and the quiet and serious solemnity. Reintegrated with the adults, I wasn’t forced to be among boys my age. I liked the hymns and I particularly liked the choir.
But I was happy when it was over and the rest of the day was available to me. Part of it was the damn clothes. Since I’m a sissy femme, that may seem odd, that I didn’t care for dressing up in the fanciness of Sunday clothes. Was it because, like the rest of the experience, it was imposed on me and not something I chose for myself? I’m not sure, but I hated the suit coat and the collared shirt and the tie, and the cut of the dress pants. Everything had a way of hanging on the body like a set of curtains, loose in places I preferred clothes to be tight yet bunched up and distracting in other places where I preferred to be unencumbered. Little boy dresswear is adult male dressware scaled down to size and I think maybe it just doesn’t fit as well because it wasn’t designed with a child’s body in mind in the first place. Part of it may also have been the gender disparity of it all, too, although I wasn’t conscious of being annoyed by it at that point. People made a fuss over the cuteness of the girls and the prettiness of their Sunday dresses, and the girls seemed to enjoy their garments a lot more. Certainly what they were wearing was quite different from what I was wearing. That wasn’t so true for everyday wear – I would go to elementary school in pants not particularly different from girls’ pants (and they did wear pants as often as they wore skirts and dresses), shirts not particularly different from girls’ shirts. Male formal wear is far more of a costume, all composed of clothes quite different from our everyday clothes but the same for every male except for minor variations in cut and color. It was a uniform. I hated it and wanted out of it as soon as possible.
In later years, in New Mexico as an older kid, the Sunday experience continued to involve the same nasty bullying classmates I was already at odds with from school. There did start to be a shift towards discussion of moral issues and socially relevant topics, and I liked that, at least. I think the church scene could have ended up being an outlet for me. Yet, by sheer luck of the draw, our church congregation consisted of a lot of boys my age but no girls, and a similar concentration of girls a few years younger who were therefore in a different youth group. I do make reference in my book to some church-sponsored activities that gave me opportunities to socialize and mingle, or to discuss important things like sexuality and the possibility of having a girlfriend and being able to date.
But mostly the church scene was not much of a resource for me.
For the purposes of the book, I had a better example with the Boy Scouts; it, too, was an organization that was affiliated with the notion of Doing Right and Being A Good Boy; and although there was considerably more self-selection and I did make better connections there, it, too, was eventually a venue where I didn't have enough in common to keep me from feeling like an outsider. I placed a scene in the book where the Scouts are telling dirty jokes that become increasingly crude about sex and misogynistic towards women. I think it makes my point sufficiently.
———————
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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, May 4, 2019
Skirting the Issue
Let me describe what I like to call the "skirt trick".
An author named Ami Polonsky wrote a Young Adults book titled Gracefully Grayson about a tween-aged boy who, in essence, is one of the girls. To illustrate and convey to us, the readers, that Grayson is like this, she describes how the character wears an overly-long nightshirt and spins in it and imagines that it's a skirt or a dress and wishing for the opportunity to wear a real one.
Just this spring, Jacob Tobia came out with Sissy, a book that mine will probably be compared to quite a bit, since Sissy is the first real genderqueer coming-out / coming-of-age story. Jacob, too, presents the fact that despite being male they were "one of the girls" by recounting how they would dress in their mom's clothes and put on her makeup in secret and wish they could go forth into the world adorned that way.
The problem with using the skirt trick is that whatever the heck it may mean to "be a girl" or to "be feminine", it doesn't mean your brain is somehow hardwired to make you want to wear a skirt (or high heels or put on makeup, etc). Trust me, there is no shortage of cisgender women who have never had the faintest interest in adorning themselves in ankle-torturing high-heeled devices, Revlon and Avon gels and creams and powders, or nylon hosiery, and considerably more who don’t necessary hate the stuff but resent having it imposed on them as part of gender-specific “office standards”. Skirts and dresses blow up in the breeze and threaten to show your underpants to the world, often lack sufficient pockets for your keys and wallet and lip balm, and catch on the velvet ropes when you try to step over them at the bank instead of zigzagging your way back and forth down empty lanes during non-busy banking hours – and many women recall, unfondly, having them imposed at a young age and finding them a hindrance to riding bikes and climbing trees *.
But if you try to write a book where you're introducing a character and stating "this person is male but how he is, who he is, the way he is, is more like one of the girls than it's like the other boys", you’re expected to show, not tell, your reading audience that this is true; but no matter what specific behavior you describe, no matter what thinking processes you reveal your character engaging in, you run the significant risk of people saying “Aww, c’mon, that doesn’t make this fellow a girl, I’m not like that, my daughter is not like that” or “How does that make this dude any different from me and a million other guys, lots of boys have feelings like that”.
There is no single behavior that all the girls engage in and none of the other boys do; and if there was, then our main character could not be engaging in it, by definition, unless he was absolutely the only one like that, in which case his story would be the story of an anomaly, not a representative story that explains what it's like to be one of those boys who is essentially a girl despite being male. To complicate matters, the female population has among them some gender-variant individuals too, whose existence dilutes the universality of what girls do and what girls are like. So on the one hand the author needs to show the reader that this character is basically a girl, but on the other, there's no obvious and compelling way to do that.
The difficulty of navigating that complexity and still bringing the reader along, accepting and not contradicting my premise, is a challenge that makes me grudgingly appreciate the skirt trick. But my tale is a memoir, a work of nonfiction, and I did not, in fact, spend my childhood and teenage years donning dresses and skirts and stockings and lace, or applying cosmetics to my face.
There is no single vegetable, meat, or spice that all by itself makes a dish a part of Italian cuisine or Mexican or German or Indian. But I still know the difference between them. I recognize it when I taste it, when I smell it. There’s no single note, chord, or chord progression that is unique to Baroque music, but it sounds a certain way, has a certain feel to it. I think gender is like that, too – we grew up in a social backdrop and absorbed the component notions of it. To borrow the famous aphorism of Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. People also know when they don’t see what they expect to encounter, which is why outliers, gender-variant exceptions, are so often noticeable to other people and not just aware of it themselves. I didn’t have to wear a sign that said I was a sissy femme in order for the kids in eighth grade to start calling me out for it.
In my book, I’m trying to put a feast of samples in front of the reader, little vignettes and selected events, some mental processes and interior dialogs that I recall, some choices that I made, some behaviors and whatnot. The book has a blatant title and it has an explicit three-page flyover of my early childhood, both of which promise the reader that this book is going to feature a genderqueer person, specifically a boy who is basically one of the girls. But once the book gets started, I’m depending on the reader to react to the samples provided and to reach their own realizations without me pointing to each occurrence and saying “See? See? A conventional boy would not have done that. See? Just like a girl would have!” None of the individual scenes or events is definitive in and of itself, and I don’t lay down any definitions to start with (to the annoyance of at least a couple potential publishers, who insisted that readers are as dumb as a box of rocks and need that).
Ultimately, to make this work, I have to rely on the readers’ independent perception. I’m not going to be able to argue them into seeing it. The experiences are going to have to speak for themselves.
But I’m confident that I’m a pretty damn good cook and that I've prepared some evocative morsels.
* Skirts are so much more comfortable than pants on a humid or hot day, there's something fun about the way they swish around when you move, and you can find them with usable pockets and with belt loops as well. And they take up less room in your suitcase than pants. And unlike pants they don't chafe or bind on you when you're sitting down. Also, they're great if you have nice legs and consider them among your best features and don't want to keep them covered up all the time.
———————
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
An author named Ami Polonsky wrote a Young Adults book titled Gracefully Grayson about a tween-aged boy who, in essence, is one of the girls. To illustrate and convey to us, the readers, that Grayson is like this, she describes how the character wears an overly-long nightshirt and spins in it and imagines that it's a skirt or a dress and wishing for the opportunity to wear a real one.
Just this spring, Jacob Tobia came out with Sissy, a book that mine will probably be compared to quite a bit, since Sissy is the first real genderqueer coming-out / coming-of-age story. Jacob, too, presents the fact that despite being male they were "one of the girls" by recounting how they would dress in their mom's clothes and put on her makeup in secret and wish they could go forth into the world adorned that way.
The problem with using the skirt trick is that whatever the heck it may mean to "be a girl" or to "be feminine", it doesn't mean your brain is somehow hardwired to make you want to wear a skirt (or high heels or put on makeup, etc). Trust me, there is no shortage of cisgender women who have never had the faintest interest in adorning themselves in ankle-torturing high-heeled devices, Revlon and Avon gels and creams and powders, or nylon hosiery, and considerably more who don’t necessary hate the stuff but resent having it imposed on them as part of gender-specific “office standards”. Skirts and dresses blow up in the breeze and threaten to show your underpants to the world, often lack sufficient pockets for your keys and wallet and lip balm, and catch on the velvet ropes when you try to step over them at the bank instead of zigzagging your way back and forth down empty lanes during non-busy banking hours – and many women recall, unfondly, having them imposed at a young age and finding them a hindrance to riding bikes and climbing trees *.
But if you try to write a book where you're introducing a character and stating "this person is male but how he is, who he is, the way he is, is more like one of the girls than it's like the other boys", you’re expected to show, not tell, your reading audience that this is true; but no matter what specific behavior you describe, no matter what thinking processes you reveal your character engaging in, you run the significant risk of people saying “Aww, c’mon, that doesn’t make this fellow a girl, I’m not like that, my daughter is not like that” or “How does that make this dude any different from me and a million other guys, lots of boys have feelings like that”.
There is no single behavior that all the girls engage in and none of the other boys do; and if there was, then our main character could not be engaging in it, by definition, unless he was absolutely the only one like that, in which case his story would be the story of an anomaly, not a representative story that explains what it's like to be one of those boys who is essentially a girl despite being male. To complicate matters, the female population has among them some gender-variant individuals too, whose existence dilutes the universality of what girls do and what girls are like. So on the one hand the author needs to show the reader that this character is basically a girl, but on the other, there's no obvious and compelling way to do that.
The difficulty of navigating that complexity and still bringing the reader along, accepting and not contradicting my premise, is a challenge that makes me grudgingly appreciate the skirt trick. But my tale is a memoir, a work of nonfiction, and I did not, in fact, spend my childhood and teenage years donning dresses and skirts and stockings and lace, or applying cosmetics to my face.
There is no single vegetable, meat, or spice that all by itself makes a dish a part of Italian cuisine or Mexican or German or Indian. But I still know the difference between them. I recognize it when I taste it, when I smell it. There’s no single note, chord, or chord progression that is unique to Baroque music, but it sounds a certain way, has a certain feel to it. I think gender is like that, too – we grew up in a social backdrop and absorbed the component notions of it. To borrow the famous aphorism of Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. People also know when they don’t see what they expect to encounter, which is why outliers, gender-variant exceptions, are so often noticeable to other people and not just aware of it themselves. I didn’t have to wear a sign that said I was a sissy femme in order for the kids in eighth grade to start calling me out for it.
In my book, I’m trying to put a feast of samples in front of the reader, little vignettes and selected events, some mental processes and interior dialogs that I recall, some choices that I made, some behaviors and whatnot. The book has a blatant title and it has an explicit three-page flyover of my early childhood, both of which promise the reader that this book is going to feature a genderqueer person, specifically a boy who is basically one of the girls. But once the book gets started, I’m depending on the reader to react to the samples provided and to reach their own realizations without me pointing to each occurrence and saying “See? See? A conventional boy would not have done that. See? Just like a girl would have!” None of the individual scenes or events is definitive in and of itself, and I don’t lay down any definitions to start with (to the annoyance of at least a couple potential publishers, who insisted that readers are as dumb as a box of rocks and need that).
Ultimately, to make this work, I have to rely on the readers’ independent perception. I’m not going to be able to argue them into seeing it. The experiences are going to have to speak for themselves.
But I’m confident that I’m a pretty damn good cook and that I've prepared some evocative morsels.
* Skirts are so much more comfortable than pants on a humid or hot day, there's something fun about the way they swish around when you move, and you can find them with usable pockets and with belt loops as well. And they take up less room in your suitcase than pants. And unlike pants they don't chafe or bind on you when you're sitting down. Also, they're great if you have nice legs and consider them among your best features and don't want to keep them covered up all the time.
———————
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
Why I'm Not a Lesbian
"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
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 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.
————————
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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.
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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
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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
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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?
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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?
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