Hi there, I’m a straight white male. I’m very comfortable with my body and with my sexual orientation. I have absolutely zero issues with my physical being and with my sexual desires. With that being said… I cannot for the life of me figure out what the deal is with gender.
I don’t think I’m non-binary. I looked into some ideas about being anti-gender and then saw that they were chock full of transphobia, which is horrific. The best I can come up with is that maybe I am agender in a similar way that I am atheist? Or maybe I’m just cisgender and confused. I honestly don’t know. I recognize that gender is a thing that’s important to a lot of people, but also… it’s made up.
What troubles me is that a lot of people seem to think that it has some objective basis in reality. So maybe I have everything all twisted up, or maybe I’m overthinking things.
But, please, help me out here. What the heck is going on?
Let me try to do a better job of explaining where I’m coming from. I know that sex and gender are not the same thing. I’m perfectly fine with the concept of sex. I understand that there are more than two sexes, that sex is not immutable, and that it is not uncommon for people to feel as though they are in the wrong body.
I understand that gender is the social construct of behaviors that people are expected to adhere to if they are of a particular gender.
What I don’t understand is when people treat the social construct of gender as if it was some objective thing. I’ll give some examples.
I’ve seen several articles on The Good Men Project that highlight the problems of toxic masculinity. These articles promote the idea that we should be doing more to celebrate feminine characteristics in men, i.e. qualities related to nurturing, emotional awareness, and sensitivity. Conversely, I’ve seen articles that say we need to celebrate masculine characteristics in women, i.e. leadership, ambition, and strength.
So… yeah… those are all great characteristics and more people should have them. But those are just human traits. Why are we saying that expressing our emotions in a healthy way is a feminine trait and strong leadership is a masculine trait?
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that assigning traits to genders make them more difficult for people to accept if they happen to be of the opposing gender. Not only does it keep men from embracing positive “feminist” traits, it also excuses them for bad “masculine” ones. (“Boys will be boys!”)
It’s so blindingly obvious that these social constructions aren’t real. We think femininity is being subservient in the workplace, but that women should also be project managers in the home. (But also be subservient to their husbands?) Men who express joy at a sunset are feminine, but men who express joy at a football game are masculine. It’s absurd. It’s cartoonishly fake.
I very clearly present as a man. I have a short haircut. I wear men’s clothes. I don’t wear makeup or perfume (or cologne, which apparently is a word we had to come up with because men obviously don’t wear perfume? (Yes, I know the difference has to do with the percentage of oils in the mixture — arbitrary definitions are still arbitrary)). However, a woman could do everything that I do in terms of presentation, and still present as a woman.
We’ve all seen the ridiculous gendered products out there. Dude Wipes, pink AR-15s (guns are bad, people — I don’t care who’s carrying them). Women get upcharged for the same product that has a “For Women!” sticker plastered onto it. It’s nonsense. And good god, the gender reveal parties.
At the same time, I recognize that the social implications of gender are all too real. I recognize that I occupy a privileged space due to my designation as a man. I have seen it firsthand.
I’ve tried thinking about gender in terms of another social construct: race.
I can’t just say, “Well, race isn’t based in biology, so I’m not white.” That’s way too close to the old “I don’t see color” thing, which is ridiculous. But it really feels like we’ve gone so far overboard with gender. Imagine if we assigned character traits to race and tried to encourage these in separate races. That would be racist as fuck.
(Oh, wait, we do that already. “Gosh! You’re so articulate!” And, yeah, IT’S RACIST AF.)
It’s sexist to say that ambition is a masculine trait. It’s sexist to say that kindness is a feminine trait. And if your response is that men and women can have both masculine and feminine traits, then what is the point? Why gender these traits? What makes ambition masculine?
I don’t even know what the words masculine and feminine mean anymore. There are endless rules for masculinity and feminity, they change constantly, they’re inconsistent, they’re unfair, and they’re just plain stupid. Walk along the surface of the internet and you’ll find people claiming that men who shave any part of their body below the neck aren’t real men. Seriously. As if the neck was some magic boundary of masculinity.
Real men do this, real men don’t do that, real women do this. A radio station in my area that I used to listen to encouraged me to “Man up!” every few minutes or so. What does that even mean?! It’s gotten so ridiculous that I’ve started to feel uncomfortable with the label of “man”. It has nothing to do with my identity related to my body; it is purely in relation to these insane social constructions.
Just… why? Why are y’all like this? Why do people hold so tightly to fictitious constructs that are so obviously fictitious? Why do you accept constructs that make absolutely no sense under the slightest scrutiny?
The only gender-related term that has any sort of tangible meaning that I can discern is “gender identity” — the self-conception that we have of our sex (or gender, which is obviously different from sex, so gender identity is still a confusing term). To me, it seems like “sex identity” would be a better term here. I don’t have any problem with my sex, but I have just so many questions about my gender.
What is it that makes me a man? (Separate from what makes me a male. I know that part.)
So what am I missing? What’s the really good reason we have for these constructs? Or what basis in reality do these constructs have? Is the problem I’m having not really about gender but just our current modern conceptions of gender?
And also maybe: what the hell am I? Am I not a real man if I groom my body hair below (*gasp!*) my neck? Or don’t like guns? Or don’t know a gd thing about cars? Or cross my legs when I sit down? Or cry at movies? Or, you know, just emote in general?
To be clear, I’m totally fine with that. If all of those things mean I’m not “a real man” I honestly don’t care. If there are social definitions of gender, then I don’t necessarily get to define what I am. (I can’t define myself as Black just because race is a social construction. (I mean, I guess I could, but that would be fucked up, offensive, and wrong.)) So I’m cool with a label being applied to me as opposed to picking one myself. I’m just curious what exactly that label is supposed to be.
Help!
Disclaimer: I have no background in gender studies and am speaking only from my personal experience as a human being (i.e. I’m a straight white dude who thinks his opinion on shit he has no idea about is still the most important thing ever). Honestly though, I am trying to learn and to do better, but I am really disturbed by the social construct of gender. My actual expertise is in policing and I write extensively about that on Medium. Check out my page if you’re interested, but a good place to start is here: https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-defunding-the-police-could-look-like-in-practice-6a48ff46c676.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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