Guest post by Josh Spokes.
I have some thoughts on femininity, women, and my relationship to these as a gay man. For months I’ve stewed on this topic wondering how to express it. This may or may not be an elegant exposition. It’s also full of “I” statements, which is tedious and unfortunate. I know no other way to make it clear my subject is my own impressions, not generalizing statements about what other people ought to do or be motivated by.
Caveats:
1. As a man I’m never going to grok what it is to live as a woman. Please know that nothing I write is meant to suggest or imply that.
2. This is not a cookie-seeking project; I’m not going for Best Man Feminist merit badges.
Violence against and denigration of women has always been viscerally emotional for me. It affects me in nearly the same way that my horror of homophobia and anti-gay violence does. Misogyny so upsets me that I worry I sometimes look like that guy who’s SUPER INTO FEMINISM in a way that’s annoying or invites skepticism.
Conversely, I trust women and feel emotional connections to them far more easily than I ever will with most men. (Those of you men who are my friends or lovers don’t need to get anxious about this, ‘kay? I love you and trust you, but you are an exception). Given a choice during an end of the world scenario, I’d choose to survive the apocalypse with all women before I’d even think of wanting men around. I’m completely serious about that. It has been that way since I can remember being a person with thoughts. Men have always been a danger to be carefully watched, tiptoed around, and never to be behind one’s back. Yes, one of the obvious roots of this was growing up in a house with a wife/child beater and rapist.
But that is not nearly all of it. From the point of sentience I gravitated toward things “for girls.” Girls’ games. Fashion. Jewelry, make-up. Female-driven literature. Girl heroines in stories were far more likely to make me think, “I get that, I so understand that” than the boy heroes I was supposed to like. Grumpy, cynical Harriet the Spy? When I say I identified with her, it’s not strong enough. I really got her.
My fantasy game-playing always had me as a female character. I was Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie. Or Malificent from Sleeping Beauty. Or a witch. Or a genie. Yes, there was a decided bias toward villainous and magical characters. At the time I thought it was just because they were so obviously fabulous and had better clothes, which is true. Looking back I suspect it was an unconscious identification with a character who was smart, passionate, but constricted by a society that characterized everything interesting about her as a threat to be neutralized.
I was tormented with the idea that I was born a mistake. That I was “supposed to be a girl.” There was literally no framework for me to understand gender in any other way. I didn’t think I wanted to be a girl (although I still don’t know exactly what that meant), but I was sure I wasn’t right and something was seriously broken.
Though I came out as a gay man at a very young age and used bravado as an effective tactic, I was haunted for a long time by the belief that there was something ontologically wrong with me.
This is the toxicity of gender.
As you guessed, I was read as an effeminate boy, starting before I went to kindergarten. You can fill in the many instances of gender policing and attempts to circumscribe my activities.
The price was ostracization, vicious bullying, beatings, whisper campaigns, teachers with barely a passing interest in sticking up for me because what did I expect being such a little queen. Almost all of it from men and boys. The sexual threats implied in the violence were clear, even if they were never spoken. I knew from the beginning that men had slotted me into the category of bitch, that which is slapped around, used, degraded, and raped if too uppity. In short, I read as “girl/woman” in this misogynistic system. In some ways, even a bit worse, because I willingly liked “girl things.” Didn’t even have the sense to be ashamed of it.
Girls and women were usually safe havens for me. With rare exceptions, I wasn’t afraid of girls. I didn’t fear they’d hold me down and laugh while beating the shit out of me. I didn’t fear they’d drag me into a public space to mock and degrade me, confident that their peers would support them or say nothing. Which EVERY macho boy got away with EVERY time with NO consequences. They were right to be utterly confident. They were usually socially rewarded for their bullying, including by teachers.
All this is not an exercise in “working out demons” or any navel-gazing bullshit like that. It’s meant to explain the conclusion I came to recently about my motivations. While I’m not and never will be a woman, I do think I have a closer grasp of what that experience can be like than the average man. Certainly more so than the average straight man. Does this seem reasonable?
This is why feminism matters so much to me. This is why I get shouty and screamy and angry and over the top at the ceaseless misogyny and degradation of women that goes on everywhere, all the time. Because I feel it. Not the way women do, but closer to that than most men will grasp. It’s also me, my kind—-anyone not working overtime to disavow any feminine-coded interests—who is meant to be frightened and put in place by this behavior.
When the women I know and love describe what they go through, it hits me in the gut in a way ordinary empathetic identification doesn’t explain.
Toxic masculinity. Why men need feminism too.
(And I want to give you all the hugs, too, even though I HATED girly things when I was growing up.)
And, one can be tagged for bully-bait without even being gay. The enforcing of cartoon ‘masculinity’ starts so young. It is easy to claim that there is something ‘natural’ about it, but even a little thought should dispel that idea.
Absolutely.
I think that’s probably true. And I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s complete bullshit and someone, everyone really, should have protected you.
But Nellie Olsen? That is almost unforgiveable!
I probably risk looking like one of those people too, but I honestly just like to argue.
I’ve been pretty clear on my motivations though, introspection is pretty important in dealing with tourette’s. I would say that you certainly know more on a personal level what women might be experiencing because of certain similarities between the oppression of women and the oppression of gay men. In fact my psychology tends toward a sort of “hyper-male” thing that I have to control. I just mostly know what oppression looks like and expressions of pain are literally overrepresented in intensity in the social emotions that I feel.
I have felt similarly. In my case it’s the tourette syndrome that tweaked others into targeting me, but I still had and have the sense that it’s men and groups of men that I would have to watch for the most. Sure there were woman that were mean but when it comes to organized social dominance behavior men were what needed to be worried about.
When you have tourette’s there is always something socially “off” about you and that is a thing that certain people just can’t tolerate. So every community has had one of “those people” that I get to deal with. Having to deal with that made it easier to see who the people who were really being oppressed were.
After that it was realizing that the social BS that led to that sort of abusive dominance culture was the same one oppressing women, LGBT people and the abuse and suppression of other racial groups. It just made sense to me that solving the problem with respect to women would implicitly let us figure out a lot of the other stuff along the way.
Ringlets.
Thank you so much for writing this, Josh.
It happens that I’m writing a couple of posts about a relevant 2013 article – Molly Farneth’s “James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and the ‘New Vocabulary’ of Existentialist Ethics” (Soundings 96(2): 170-88).
Here are a couple of choice quotes about Baldwin’s “Preservation of Innocence”:
What’s amazing about Baldwin’s piece is, first, its courage, and second, that he put the spotlight not on the deviants/women but on the pathetic and cowardly “tough guys” and their worshippers who fearfully cling to the status quo.
* I have disagreements with this, as I’ll discuss in my posts.
This piece brings flashbacks to me about all the schoolmates, campmates, and dormmates who targeted me as the subject of their harassment because I was less straight and less violent than they were. I have never felt safe in any male-only space dominated by straight men. Ever. No exceptions.
Nellie Olsen …
I haven’t read
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated
in a while.
It’s on the shelf … somewhere…
BITE YOUR TONGUE NELLIE IS THE BEST
Also yes, Josh, that makes sense to me.
Nellie Olsen is a sympathetic, relatable character. That time she crouched down to look shorter than the boy she liked-and horribly embarrassed herself-who hasn’t been there?
I always wondered why I wasn’t “fag tagged”-plenty of other boys were. Maybe my bullies just had enough excuse already (I have Asperger’s, and that was before anybody knew what that was).
There’s a way a large man will grip your shoulder, almost taking possession, that makes my skin want to crawl off. I haven’t experienced that in many years, but I understand quite well when women complain about men feeling free to grab and restrain them. It is possible for a man to “grok” some, at least, aspects of how women are mistreated.
@Robert, not Bob
It can be difficult. We end up recognizing pieces of context that we share and that is good for empathy. It’s a solid connection that can be used to learn more. But there is this general problem that our instincts drive us towards that I think of as the “Me too!” problem. That is where you try to talk to another person about some aspect of your life that is particularly significant and by different methods they insert their own experience of that aspect. I think it’s a well-meaning instinct, it tries to bring up the thing that is being discussed and make a connection with the other person.
But it also serves to hide very important individual differences by different means depending on how the other person inserts their experience. It’s why “OCD” is used to indicate a peeve casually, or why “autism” is used as a pejorative in parts of the internet to mean “I don’t like how you are doing what you are doing” or “I don’t like that social thing” or similar. That sort of thing helped me to understand things like appropriation of culture.
@Brony etc. #11 (what, I’m gonna type all that?)
Yeah, I’m aware of that problem and it’s a difficult line to stay on one side of. Sometimes I just have to guess; well, I’m no stranger to that.