Rebecca Katherine Hirsch, guest-blogging at Feministe, has a really awesome post on the hotness of gender-non-conformity. Quotes and commentary and stuff below the cut.
But first! Masculinity as defined by our lovably open-minded, calmly acceptive, live-and-let-live culture is one of—oh wait, let me rephrase: Masculinity as defined by our anal-retentive patriarchy is one of EXTREME STOLIDITY and INTENSE NOTHINGNESS, big braggadocio and mind-numbing manipulativeness born of fear of emotions we demote to “women’s roles.” I do not appreciate these male stereotypes any more than I appreciate the female stereotypical mandates to be passive, sexy-not-sexual, stupid and performatory…
The erotic appeal of interdependent individuality is great! The appeal of stretching the extremely limited norms outside of the gender binary is great. As is the ethicality and empathy to coexist with fellow peoples trying to navigate the world in their own way. In trying to hone in on what exactly elicits such enjoyment in the idea of non-gender-conforming men, I’ve decided that (intellectually) I think it must be the bravery and vulnerability, which as far as I’m concerned operate simultaneously and cross-influence the other.
The comments got into a very interesting discussion on fetishization. I am particularly fond of Jadey’s comment, which nicely delineates the difference between attraction and fetishization/objectification:
have a huuuuuuuuuuge gender-play kink (+1 to Thomas’s comment about “fetish”), but a major lesson for me over the last few years was not to confuse my kink with someone else’s life or identity. This is extra super-duper important when it comes to fetishizing trans* people (like a certain Erika Moen cartoon that I won’t even link because it still enrages me that much) and queer people, because of all the shit they are already putting up with. Do I get goosebumps seeing a dude (not necessarily a cis dude) happily wearing a skirt? Oh my yes. Does that picture I found once of Meryl Streep in a ‘man’s’ suit (and cannot seem for the life of me to track down again, damn!) set my heart a-racing? And how! (And that’s just drag – non-clothing non-conformity does it for me too.) But that can’t turn into, “Hey you there, person with a politicized and marginalized experience of gender, I have decided that you are erotic because of how I choose to define your gender and/or sex. Wanna hook up?” It puts me in mind of this post, A Message to my Fellow Fat Admirers. Attraction? Fine. Mutual attraction? AWESOME. Dehumanizing and demeaning objectification and fetishizing? HELL NO.And you’d hope that it would be easier to tell those things apart, but yeah… Being attracted to a person who is often socially derided as being fundamentally unattractive based on fucked-up social norms is not a bad thing in and of itself, but A) it’s not a political action that the attractee should be eternally grateful for because you deigned to get a boner (literal or metaphorical) for them and B) it doesn’t mean that you get to decide how they ought to define themselves or see themselves just because you’re attracted to who you perceive them to be.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeWhich is not to say that this an extreme to which the OP has gone, just that it’s the minefield that this kind of thing exists in.
Also, the OP links to a picture of this muscular dude drinking a Jager while in a tutu and a tiara. I want to do so many nasty things to that guy. You don’t even know. Come home with me, sexy gender-non-conforming person! You can leave your tiara on.
Hi guys. Enjoyed the dialogue! Enjoyed the (friendly) disputes! I watch, from afar, with eager interest…
“that place is… probably as hostile toward women as the good folk behind the Spearhead. ”
No argument here, thats why I pretty much lurk there, and don’t bother to read threads past the first posts. I just wish I were more artistically inclined so I could make my own images. Oh well.
*looks around* aaanyways….
@L
-nods- Minimizer’s stuff is pretty good, hadn’t seen it before. I usually hang out at CF and GTS-city
“THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN YOU THINK”
I understand this, intellectually, (of course “what I thought” used to be 1 so, it wasn’t a really hard number to beat :p) but I’d never knowingly encountered another one “in the wild” so to speak. so, mind=blown, lol.
@Paul Hobson: I started off at GTS city because that’s where the kind, patient folk at macrophile.com pointed me to when I realized that I didn’t fit in with a bunch of furries, but that place is… probably as hostile toward women as the good folk behind the Spearhead. A lot of others’ work doesn’t really appeal to me beyond “Oh, that’s pretty”, though, so I mostly just keep to myself. And haha, I like that. In the wild…
@Paul Hobson: Nah, I’m more of a Minimizer kind of gal, but I do enjoy the high quality stuff that comes out of some of the artists at CF.
@Jay: I’ll take the fist bump, I think! -returns- :B
THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN YOU THINK
Do note that some people are into being forced or forcing someone to do something, either because the scenario feels good, they like the constraint or power trip, or they want to assuage guilt. I know a friend who had a fetish about feminizing men. She didn’t write a blog about it, but I was able to empathize how it might work with the right person. I personally have fantasies of being forced into things through agreeing to the act beforehand anyways. It’s not about guilt here, it’s entirely about liking being forced, “having no way out”. I used to… Read more »
@dungone: Dressing up as a woman does not automatically open a man up to the world of female experience because so many of the permissions required for that experience are not men’s decision to make. Wearing that tutu isn’t going to erase the years of socialization where the only public way for a man to show friendly intent towards a woman is to perform some banal task such as opening a door. So if you want men to experience the “sensitive side of life” by wearing that tiara, just don’t count on it. On this – and I’m claiming expert… Read more »
@L
“I’m a macrophile and I’m attracted to depictions of men that are upwards of 2 and 3 stories tall. Do I express my disappointment in every single male I meet or see because they don’t meet that requirement? No.”
*spit take*
Coiledfist.org? Question mark?
… she’s an evil she-wolf out to prey on unsuspecting men and force them to cross-dress for her cruel circus of entertainment. Did she uh… happen to post her number? 🙂 I kid! I kid! I thought the author was nice and up front about her kink and the mutual choice it would be between her, and her prospective lover. Rather than a “None shall pass!” sort of wizard, I was reading her as a “Fun shall pass!” sort of wizard. True, she came down on a strawman version of ‘conventional’ masculinity, in the course of making her point, and… Read more »
I find both L’s and dungone’s interpretations of Hirsh’s OP plausible. Perhaps we can agree that she left some ambiguity?
Which group do you put me in? Do you honestly want to know the answer to that? Okay, I’m not about to call you a gender traitor or anything like that, but I will say that if you speak as a feminist then you speak for and defend a woman’s point of view, not for a man’s. If you speak as a man then you speak as a man. So what I think of the things you say really just depends on the point of view you’re trying to defend. It’s duly noted that some men are feminists, or feminist… Read more »
@Daisy – thanks. That’s what I’m talking about. Dressing up as a woman does not automatically open a man up to the world of female experience because so many of the permissions required for that experience are not men’s decision to make. Wearing that tutu isn’t going to erase the years of socialization where the only public way for a man to show friendly intent towards a woman is to perform some banal task such as opening a door. So if you want men to experience the “sensitive side of life” by wearing that tiara, just don’t count on it.… Read more »
@dungone: On your “quick side note”: the fact that everyone and her sister thinks she has the right to talk about male sexuality, except for men. Who is “everyone”? As I’ve already said more than once, the OP is talking about her own sexuality not “male sexuality” (supposing there even was such a thing). And who are “men” in this context? Does that “men” include me? Instead of deferring to, “what do men think about this?” Why should men be “deferred to” when she’s talking about her own sexuality? And again who are the “men” here? when men do read… Read more »
Daisy said, ” that any race of woman can initiate the goo-goo talk at the babies” Female privilege in the matriarchal dominated family life. If I try to goo-goo talk a baby the mom might call 911. (yes I exaggerate a little…but only a little. And, for what it’s worth, today is better for fathers than it was when I first started. And yeah, I’ve said this before but I am a stay at home father…children are my life…that is the context of what I speak of. Me, as a man, have to deal with mothers all the time.) I’ve… Read more »
L, great posts, and I didn’t even notice the math mistake until you said it!
Dungone: For example, as far as my own comfort level, I would sooner walk around dressed as a woman than to fawn over a random cute baby. I am going to grant you this point, never thought of it before. However, I will add, that when you are of grandfatherly age, you will be allowed, but only if you have grandchildren and talk about them at the same time. (Unless you are a priest, or in the south, a preacher, then you can do whatever you want. But you knew that.) I enjoy the baby-fussing bonding, and I would miss… Read more »
To be fair, it seems to me that the men in this thread also claim the right to talk about the sexuality of the female OP – or at least the way she chooses to express it.
I just want to make a quick side note to anyone else who might still be reading this. The problem that we are witnessing here is twofold. First, it’s the fact that everyone and her sister thinks she has the right to talk about male sexuality, except for men. Instead of deferring to, “what do men think about this?” both in the process of writing the original critique and in the consumption of it by its female readers, there is an automatic assumption that this is valid because a woman wrote this. This sets up both the writer and her… Read more »
@L, please, she specifically wrote that this is something that they “will discover throughout the course of our courtships.” In other words, this is not like a “woah, no thanks ma’am” on the first day you meet kind of a thing. This is more like an “I love you,” “Okay good, now I want you to put on this tutu and walk to the 7-11 with me” type of a thing. She specifically wants to turn them, not just find someone who meets her preferences.
Hey, I’ve got an idea: how you *ask her* what the hell she meant instead of putting extremely hostile, fear-mongering words in her mouth?
And what’s wrong with turning? At no point does she say any of the things that you keep insisting that she means. And even then, “turning” doesn’t imply non-consent. I’ve done some “turning” myself when it comes to my fiance, and he’s done some with me as well. Please. You’re trying to find some grand conspiracy where there is none.
Right, try telling a guy who works on Wall Street that showing up at work in a pink tutu is something “simple, cheap, and easy to reverse.” She did say, “walking down the street” in her fantasy. Your arguments would have a little more relevance if all of those BDSM people were dropping their kids off at school in their zippered-up leather head mask. She’s not asking men to play pretend in the bedroom, she’s asking them to abandon their own masculinity in order to fit her preference. And she’s not discussing it as a kink, but as a positive… Read more »
And you’re acting like getting into a relationship with this woman is the last thing these men will ever do. They are fully capable of, like I said, saying no and walking away. My brainwashing she-wolf comment still stands, since you’re pretending that these hypothetical men have absolutely no say as to something as basic as *starting a LTR* with her. If she is somehow blackmailing/brainwashing/forcing men into dating her, then we’ve got a completely different problem going on than her trying to get her guys to fucking indulge her so that she has a chance at having a fulfilling… Read more »
@L, it was easy. I asked myself, “what would a woman say if a man said that?” and based my level of outrage on the way I have seen most women react to similar things. “I have not gotten (many) women to act out my fantasies yet but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before all my future lovers will discover throughout the course of our courtships that these fantasies of mine are fantasies of theirs and voila, we can enjoy her breast implants or be our myriad selves while we entangle our loins, and elsewhere, like maybe… Read more »
@dungone: Hey guess what? Dudes say things like that all the time in the BDSM circles and nobody gets on their case if everyone’s happy and consenting. Except replace “breast implants” with “nipple and genital piercings”, or “branding”, or “needle play”, etc. The difference between BDSMworld and vanillaland is that the residents of vanillaland are likely to feel entitled to have all members of the desired sex meet their expectations, and if they don’t, then they are ridiculed and ostracized. People in vanillaland probably feel this way thanks to media depictions of said mainstream heteronormative attributes that are codified into… Read more »
DAMN. The joke been totally ruined. 6,999,999,999 was what it was supposed to be.
@dungone: You got all of that from this? “I have not gotten (many) men to act out my fantasies yet but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before all my future lovers will discover throughout the course of our courtships that these fantasies of mine are fantasies of theirs and voila, we can “gender bend” or be our myriad selves while we entangle our loins, and elsewhere, like maybe walking down the street.” To me, that just says she’s getting better at finding compatible partners that are open-minded to this sort of thing, not that she’s an evil… Read more »
@L, you know what it is? It’s lobbyists sleeping with politicians. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, as they say. I don’t want to be in a relationship with a woman who is using me for political gain. I don’t think any self respecting individual would find that kind of relationship rewarding. I don’t think that Hirsch will, either; I think she will find that to achieve her political goals in the bedroom, she will be compromising on who she is as a person and who her partners are as people. I think that someday she will come to the conclusion… Read more »
Having sex with people only under certain conditions is a bad thing now? You mean, it’s not bad? Earlier, you said: When you start trying to shape the world and the people around you to fit that preference is exactly when that stops. Okay, so trying to shape the world and the people around you to fit your preference is bad. But if you’re a woman and you use sex to do that, then it’s all good, because as long as you’re using your body to achieve that goal, it’s a fair trade. Right? Look, prostitution is good. Love is… Read more »
I think she was confusing masculinity for her own orgasm.