Coming to Terms With It


I don't have the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. To be relevant and capable of explaining a lot of things that you were concerned about.

I think that a lot of the things I say and write are important and powerfully explanatory, but for the most part I don't have what you could call a following. It's an interesting word, following. When I was a juvenile, it had a kind of stuffy "congregation of the church" official kind of vibe, but now I'm more likely to associate it with TikTok and FaceBook and YouTube, places where you get other people to follow you and listen to your videos or read your posts.

I am frustrated because of this. Obviously I want the experience of being regarded as important. Let's be upfront about that, I definitely have an ego invested in this. It would be fun and would feel really satisfying to wow people. Musicians have that, the desire to really affect an audience, to have so many people tuned into you. Oh, and incidentally I am a freaking musician and I think more people should be listening to my music because once again I think I'm better than the miniscule size of my audience ever gave testimony to.

So in terms of desire and me putting focus on it, I'm definitely craving the experience of feeling important and connected to a set of listeners.


Please treat all the preceding paragraphs as Item 1. The observed fact that I crave that kind of attention. You're invited to be cynical. Children do that, but we don't necessarily give them attention because we agree with them that their ideas and opinions and perspectives are important. We often regard it as immature, but cute and some of us regard it as selfish if it persists in adults where it is a lot less cute. So here's Flouncy Derek, getting all frustrated because he's not getting the attention he craves.

Back to me not having the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. Communication is a competitive market. I'm not doing well in that market. I don't seem to have the skillset. I don't think that should be terribly amazing to anyone, insofar as I've been trying to explain myself as a marginalized outsider person. I don't know how to do the communication-market magic stuff. It's not that I am cynical myself about the process of selling what one has to say — I could admire the trait of being good at it, and I can definitely envy it — but my frustration does have me wondering if there aren't better ways to share stuff that you really want other people to pay attention to. Making it available to them is easy; but how do you make them aware of its availability when they don't already know what it is you're selling?

Say a shorter version of it, they say. Give me a Synopsis. Explain everything in one page. Please summarize what it is that your book says in one sentence. Give me the bumper sticker version.

This limits what one can say. I just applied to enter a writing contest.

(Admittedly Cynical Reason: claim another award in the text of my query letter)

I see a contest where nonfiction is eligible and what you submit is a full 1st 50 pages. After so many contests where they want you to submit 500 words, a page, 275 words, 100 words, etc, this appeals as a chance to communicate more. But on page two of the application, they ask for a Synopsis, 100 words maximum.

The usual description of Synopsis is "boil down your book into a single page; include all spoilers", which is a horrendously reductionistic request, but to do a 100 page version utterly defeated me. I wrote

1982. Derek, nursing student, is kicked out of program, refused to pressure patients to take medications. Parents think he has drug/alcohol problem. Sell him on idea of fancy rehab and life-coach facility.

Derek's genderqueer (sissy femme), wants facility to make him better speaker.

They're pushy, tell him he's in denial. Other residents initially resent him for being disruptive.

They're slickly manipulative, he's stubborn, they treat his femininity as pathological, he tries to get something out of the program but they're headed for a collision.

Want real synopsis? I need more than 100 words, I don't do bumper stickers.

That's a hundred freaking words.

There has to be a better communications process. I have my author's group where people read from what they've written and give each other feedback. What I visualize is something hierarchical but not in the sense of bosses and employees or captains and lieutenants and sergeants, but instead a hierarchy of communication itself, with little groups that meet often being a part of somewhat larger groups that meet a bit less often and concepts that get a lot of endorsement or generate interesting conversations are more likely to be brought forward into the larger group. Or something like that. I mean, I have more specific ideas but if we were to do this, I'd need to listen to other people's ideas pretty early on.

Call the preceding paragraph Item 2, if you will. This notion of a communications funnel. Local smallgroup passing on that which communicates in a meaningful sense to the next larger group.


That notion, Item 2 (even if it's not how our markets are really structured) suggests that I should select topics and insights that aren't mine or, even if they are, precede the stuff I'm attempting to publish, and trace back to some point where it's easier to make sense to people.

Circling back to Item 1, the ego stuff, ...I really don't know if it's how people in the publishing industry thing of it, but to me, it's like a conversation, very awkwardly conducted:

Author: I have stuff to say

Market: Who can you sell it to?

Author: That's what I was going to ask you, dammit!


Back to my lack of skillset.

Then somehow I'm supposed to leverage my sense of connection to those people so as to find the people to whom I could say more without losing them or failing to make sense to them.

God I hate this. I hate this process. Flouncy Derek: You people are hard to make sense to, I have stuff to say, I'm not very good at what I set out to do, and I'm very frustrated!!



Item 3: Acceptance


I once said — as recounted in the very damn book I'm trying to sell — that I think the Serenity Prayer should be inverted, like so:

God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between the things I cannot change and the things that I can, the courage to change the things I can change, and when all else fails, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

I'm 65. Retirement age.

I actually retired once already from pushing this specific gender agenda. This whole notion that I had something important to say. I put it down when I left college, grad school, 1992. Not toting a PhD. Not having made a mark in academia with my ideas. Then I picked it all back up in the mid-2000s, intially just thinking and processing and rereading the things I'd written.

So I picked it back up and (again) pushed and spoke and wrote. (And yeah, again got all full of self-worship for how exquisitely damn GOOD it was).

But once again it hasn't caught much fire.

I don't want to use "acceptance" as an excuse for not trying any more. But if I'm going to keep doing this, I need some protection from how utterly frustrating and demoralizing the experience is.


Oh, as long as we're on the topic, here's the shit I usually append to the bottom of my blog posts. What is there about self-marketing that I don't get? It's like shouting into a void.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This is me, a first grader, and I want to write about something very important.

First, pretend I'm you when you were a first grader, because the person who actually is me might not remember this, or I wouldn't need to write it down now and it's important.

---

I remember being four, so maybe there's no reason to think you won't remember being seven. Let's talk about being four. Nursery school. Sitting around a ring to hear the story being read. Little rows of kids, some in front, some behind them, up close. You're already worrying that this is going to get pedophilic. Yes I knew the word pedophilic when I was in first grade. I thought it was a totally creepy concept and of course I memorized how to spell it. No, this isn't that stuff. I didn't know the word when I was four but I felt the concern and got the general notion, minus the specifics, so back when I was already that much aware of the notion, this other thing happened, or was happening, around that time, and I wanted to write about that.

---

Bodies had dirty parts. No they didn't that's too simple. Parts that could have something to do with dirty. Diaper parts, potty parts. Don't put your hands in it, it's dirty. Don't talk about it, talking about it is dirty. That's too simple too but I bet you know what I'm talking about don't you.

Then something that people act as if it is kind of dirty but kind of not. There are parts that the girls have and parts that the boys have. It's described like if you are a girl you get these parts, like being a girl is first and then you get the parts. And boys. They have different parts. Boy parts. It makes you different. Well then it's having these parts, that's what makes you a girl, you weren't a girl and then got these parts. No. Well then having these parts doesn't make you different.

Liking the way they look. Pee from there, it's down there, it's dirty. Not to talk about not to think about but we think about it they call this dirty and it's liking the way they look. Oh I assumed. I didn't know some liked the way themselves looked. Oh I hadn't thought about. What if people with girl parts like me, the way I like theirs, and they're nice I like them anyway. But what if?

Yeah, little rows of kids, some in front some behind them, up close. Someone, somewhere, is playing with the waistpants band of the person in front of them, the latter someone being me. This unknown person wanted to slide a thumb under the edge of my underpants. I wasn't horrified, nor was I elated. I knew it was in that argued-about "dirty" territory. I could stop it. It felt like I was doing the unknown person a favor by not stopping it, and I liked that feeling and I was curious. Content warning update: that's as bad as it gets, we were four. As for the sensations themselves... nothing I saw any lure for. Although I found that I liked the idea that this person had been one of the tomboyish girls in our class and she'd done this to me.

We were defining our boundaries, and our sense of being in control of them, and we were experiencing ourselves as our own curators, granting or denying access, and we were doing that at four.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be an unfair situation if a five year old or a six year old started it, because they're bigger and more advanced, but you aren't protecting us by pretending all that stuff didn't come onto the scene until we were sprouting boobs and whiskers. Just because we're not sexless doesn't make it okay to do stuff to us like we're sex toys. Point is, we were *not* sexless. Or we were not sexuality-less and we were also not necessarily genderless (although some of us certainly might have been).

You're never going to understand it if you keep pretending it wasn't there all along.


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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

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Excerpt from page 22 --

He never wears skirts or dresses to school because he says they aren't comfortable for dodgeball, which is another thing Birdie likes. Even still, most people do notice that Birdie doesn't dress like most boys. But his pink and purple shirts, rainbow shoes, and leggings covered in pink donuts, and everything else, have never really been a problem.

Birdie is a nine year old child. He is assigned by everyone as a boy, at which point it is often remarked upon that he wears "girl clothes", or at least clothes that other boys won't and don't, purple scarves and items with spangles, not to mention fixing his hair in pigtails and painting his nails with nail polish. And learning to sew, in order to be able to make his own versions of what he sees in fashion magazines.

Jack is Birdie's older sister and the narrator of the story; we see the events, and Birdie, through Jack's eyes. Jack's friend Janet, who aspires to a job in a hairdressing salon and doesn't wish to wait until adulthood, describes Jack's sense of style and presentation as "a disaster". But aside from Janet, very few people comment as much about Jack's own variance from gender expectations the way they remark on Birdie's.



There is a lot that I like about J. M. M. Nuanez's Birdie and Me (New York: Kathy Dawson Books: 2020). You know how lots of people have said they want to see more books featuring gay and lesbian and trans characters that don't make the fact that the character is LGBT the focus of the novel? Well, here's one like that for the rest of us. The book has characters who are gender-atypical in some unspecified, undisclosed type, and yet the book isn't about that.

I try to read several new books featuring folks who are at least somewhat like me every year. A lot of them are sort of polemical and didactic, if you know what I mean: "See, folks, here is a little trans girl; see, some people accept her but other people misgender her and they act all hostile and belligerent. See how the mean ones are evil and horrible and wrong? See why everybody ought to accept people like her?" and so on.

Birdie and Me has some hostility and identity-acceptance elements woven into the plot, don't get me wrong, but it's less a conflict between being phobic versus affirmative than it is a conflict between what is socially safe and what is important for expressing one's true self, and how adult protectiveness and authority gets stirred into that issue. People who are responsible for others are often torn between wanting their children or their charges to keep their head down, to stay out of trouble, or supporting their self-expresson.

This is a tale where any initial tendency (whether on the part of the reader or on the part of the characters themselves) to sort the world into good people and bad people runs into complexities and inconsistencies.

Nuanez has a skill for gradual character development, blocking out whole people from their behaviors and observable nuances as seen from the outside. The pacing is a brisk strolling speed, languid enough to keep questions floating but fast enough to keep you immersed in what's happening. This book is appropriate for middle grades but I'd recommend it for adults, who should find it both thought-stimulating and entertaining.



If you are a person who doesn't easily find your own identity type emblazoned on the title of any message board or Facebook group, if you've hovered around support groups for transgender and nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid and gender nonconformist groups and asked yourself and other people "Do you think this label describes me? I was thinking I was more *this label* but lately I've been thinking this *other label* fits me better?", well, here's a book that features one of us.

"So, Birdie," Janet says, breaking the silence. "Do you think you're gay?" I'm too shocked to say anything.

"I don't know," says Birdie in a small voice.

"Do you want to be boyfriends with girls or boys?"

"I don't want to be boyfriends with anybody."

"Janet," I say, "this has nothing to do with being boyfriends with anyone. And I"ve already talked to him about that."

"Okay, okay," she says, waving her hands at me. She turns back to Birdie. "So, do you feel like youre a girl, then? Have you ever heard of the word transgender?" ...

"I don't know," says Birdie, shrugging. "Everyone says I'm a boy."

"But what about on the inside? Do you feel like you're a girl on the inside?"

Birdie shrugs for the millionth time. "I don't know. Sometimes I wish I was a girl because then it would make everything easier. But I don't know what my mind is." He looks down at this shoes again. "Is it bad that I don't know?"

-- pp 185-186


This book, by never handing Birdie or us an identity-conclusion, tells us in a quiet but proud voice that our identity is valid without a label to put on it. That it is valid even if it seems to fall between the cracks and not fit into transgender or genderqueer or anything else we've heard about.

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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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In my blog post of two weeks ago I wrote that I'd been mulling over the possibility of marketing my book as something akin to "Nice Guy Testifies & Tells His Side of the Story".

I've pretty much decided against doing that, but I thought I'd write a bit on the subject.

As I've told people several times, my earliest sense of being gender atypical came in childhood, and it did not initially take the form of wanting to be a girl or wanting to be thought of as a girl, but rather took the form of thinking of myself as a good boy deserving of the respect of the adults.

I wanted to be thought of as mature, as having myself in control. Keeping my own behavior within the lines was at least as important as coloring within the lines. I was holding myself to a standard, for my own self-worth and pride as well as wanting it to be seen and acknowledged. "Good" also involved performing well as a student, applying myself to the material presented to me and satisfying the teachers and getting a good grade.

I think adults sometimes forget what it's like, but when you are a child, adults monitor your behavior a lot. They intervene quite a bit to correct behavior that they disapprove of and they put a fair bit of effort into trying to describe an ideal good behavior that they want children to aspire to. With that going on pretty much all the time, it had the effect on me of making me feel that adults were perpetually suspicious of children as potential misbehaving people. Adults explained this in terms of children's insufficiencies: we weren't mature enough to be trusted to behave properly without an adult monitor; we didn't understand enough things yet to do the right things, we were still ignorant; we didn't have good judgment yet, we could not properly weigh all the things that had to be thought of and taken into account to make the right choices.

Well, with them harping on that so much, it should not seem surprising that a child would see behavior and maturity as an important thing, a central issue in life. When adults emphasize something the way they emphasized behavior, if you as a child consider yourself to measure up rather well, you're likely to take pride in it. When you get praised for something, you tend to take pride in it. I had both: I made my own assessments and thought I was pretty grown-up, and I had teachers and parents and other adults saying so as well. So it became an important part of how I thought of myself.

It was not just a matter of "do what you're told and don't disobey". There were principles. You were supposed to be nice to people, you were supposed to avoid doing things that would hurt anyone, hurt their feelings, break or mess up things. Be kind, and don't be destructive. Be thoughtful, instead of just acting without consideration of those actions. And disruptive was a form of destructive, so in a lot of situations it was bad to be loud or rude or to be offensively crude and nasty.

I was serious. I don't mean I never giggled or had fun, but I took myself seriously and accepted the importance of all this and internalized it.



What made it a gender issue, of course, was that the boys in general were not very good at it. And since "it" was the process of trying to be good, that could be stated more succinctly: boys in general were not very good. I was. I was competing with the girls. For self-respect, because this was important. And to show the girls that they couldn't be dismissively smug and superior to me, oh yes, I was totally about showing them and sometimes showing them up. I also admired them and thought of them as people like me, naturally. We had this important characteristic in common!

The boys rebelled. I don't know to what extent they had problems with self-esteem and self-respect due to not being very good at this thing that the adults emphasized so much. Maybe they did, or maybe they never cared and never valued that stuff, I don't know. They certainly acted as if it was stupid stuff to be concerned with, and they held it in contempt. They embraced bad, whatever was considered bad, whether it was being loud and disruptive or crude and disgusting or hurtfully violent, boys seemed to take perverse pride in being bad. I have more sympathy and understanding for that now than I did then. At that age, I found them embarrassing and I disapproved of them, and I didn't want to be seen as one of them, as anythign like them, so I did what I could to step away from them.

They used dirty words (we weren't supposed to, and I didn't). They reveled in potty functions, body functions, body parts that were supposed to be private, talking about them all the time and being crude.

The boys thought I was obedient and a follower of behavioral rules because I was scared of adult disapproval, scared of punishment. I wasn't. I took on adults when I thought they didn't measure up. There were principles and standards involved and it was totally unfair for someone to say "do as I say and not as I do" or to be behaving in a fashion that would have gotten one of us in trouble and then claiming different standards because they were adults. I wasn't just competing with the girls, I was competing with the adults themselves!



Fast forward to the adult male phenomenon of the Nice Guys™, the males who are associated with the complaint that girls don't choose them, don't choose guys who are nice but instead make themselves available to the bad boys.

It is important to understand "nice", to pause and ask what it means in this context. "Nice" is what was held out to us as kids. Being good. Holding ourselves up to an internalized standard and getting our self-esteem from measuring up well to that. "Nice" is what the boys, in general, rebelled from. "Nice" is what the girls more often successfully aspired to.

Recall, now, that this notion of being good included avoiding the crude and disgusting. Not to put too fine a point on it, but being sexually aggressive, being physically invasive and focusing attention on personal and private body parts and body functions and so forth, really don't fit into the "nice" and "good" package.

The pissed-off Nice Guys™, who admittedly don't tend to be in a very nice mood at the point that they're whining and complaining and muttering in dark fury about this stuff, are basically saying that they internalized the same "good nice" stuff that so many of the girls did. And the girls, what are they doing? They're holding themselves up to a standard, thinking highly of themselves with good self-esteem, being kind considerate people who play by the rules they learned, and they aren't doing anything so crude as blatant sexual aggression and when it is done unto them they tend to pull back from it as nice girls should.

But the gendered world means the nice girls are in an environment with somewhat-less-nice boys who do more of that disgusting invasive bad boy stuff, and the gendered world means the boys are enveloped in the mantle of masculinity when they do, it's OK and even admirable for boys to be bad because when you're a boy being bad is assertive, rebelling against the rules, whereas when you're good you're thought to be passively obedient due to fear of disapproval and punishment. So the bad boy is sexy. And sex is something for which we have an appetite. And from the standpoint of the good nice girls, the bad boys are bringing it on and the small handful of good boys, nice guys, they aren't doing that. They're being, well...nice, and then daring to act and think that sexual attention will be coming their way as a reward for that or something. Which calls into question their niceness, as if they are only being gentle and respectful and well-behaved because they think they'll get rewarded.

As I said in that previous blog post, that's not all that far from what the nice girls are doing as well: not merely holding themselves up to a standard for their own internal self-esteem but expecting some admiration for it, to be regarded as good girls, and daring to think of themselves as far better catches than those wicked bad girls who do bad and crude things. Of course the nice girls are generally not bitterly complaining and whining. They do have some gendered complaints but they're different ones.

Think about sexual initiative. The personality attributes and behavioral components that evolve into a comfort with doing that are largely set in childhood. In a world where sex and sexuality is bad, it takes a bad person to push someone else sexually, to make sex happen. And bad, as some have observed, can make you feel so good. Perhaps good enough to drop some of the superior haughtiness that one might have absorbed as one of the "good" "nice" people and realize that these more rebellious bad people occasionally have some rather likeable characteristics themselves.

The primary complaint of the Nice Guys™ is legitimate. Yes, if you aren't skilled in a bad-boy way at pouncing on the girls and getting some sexual tension going, the Nice Girls™ aren't likely to be any more skilled at kindling it and weren't raised with the expectation that they'd be doing so. And yes it isn't fair, the overall situation.

But they won't get anywhere until they realize the girls didn't set this up. And that not all girls are Nice Girls™, although there's no culturally shared expectation that bad girls will seek out nice boys and stuff. It has to be understood as a gender issue, a byproduct of the way that gender is constructed.

Once you understand what you're up against (and quit complaining about the girls) it's possible, if not quite easy, to figure out how to find your own personal solutions.


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There are two recurrent and interrelated comments or lines of thought that have cropped up quite often over the years in which I've been trying to do this:


• What is it that you hope to accomplish? What's your goal, your ideal outcome, if your efforts were to succeed?


• Why do we need to identify and "have liberation" for this or that specified out-group? Shouldn't we just have human liberation, embrace the ideal of equality for absolutely everybody and leave it at that? I mean, by identifying yourself or your group as ThesePeople™, you're adding more energy into the old tired labels that labeled you as ThesePeople™ to begin with; if you don't wish to be treated differently, that seems kind of counterproductive.


The real AND the assumed answer to the first question is implicit in the second: when extrapolated to the final ideal outcome, yes, the ultimate desired end result is that the category should not matter. In this case, that either gender ceases to be a factor in how people think of other people (we might still be quite conscious of biological sex and have sexual orientation and preferences and so on based on that alone, but without differing notions and expectations of personality and behavior, let alone different yardsticks of desired or acceptable personality and behavior), or, alternatively, that we keep gender around in some fashion but have a multitude of variations and roles that we "play with" and none of them are specific to just one sex.


If I may step a step or two (or a dozen) back from the ideal outcome to a more in-my-lifetime attainable sort of outcome, one that is more closely linked to what I personally am trying to do, it would be that people end up holding in their minds a notion (a stereotype, a vague concept) of male-bodied people who are women or girls or sissy-esque or however you want to express that whose sexual orientation is towards female-bodied people; and, along with that notion (however cartoonlike or caricatured it may be) a sense of how male-female sexual behavior plays out. How people like that probably flirt or get laid or what they get hot for or who gets hot for them and so on.





So, now (finally) a reply to the second question. Whether it is being asked about feminism (as opposed to "humanism" or "people-ism" or whatever), or one of the movements against specific types of racism, or children's liberation, or schizophrenics' liberation, or this, my own home-rolled personal gender identity concern, the GENERAL answer to the second question is that most of the world already agrees in principle with "everyone should be equal", but huge chunks of that population have huge holes in their awareness of the ways in which equality is still lacking and in which their own perceptions and assumptions and attitudes may be playing a role in that.


Circa 1776, Thomas Jefferson rather famously stated that all men are created equal and are governed with legitimacy only with their consent, and furthermore have not only the right but the duty to throw off any government that becomes destructive of its legitimate purpose, which is to provide for their safety and happiness. It has often been pointed out in the modern era that when he and his cohort spoke of equality, they meant WHITE men who OWNED LAND. Rather than calling them dishonest or cynical, I would tend to assume that they believed that they did indeed want liberation for everybody, that they did indeed really support universal equality--they just had blind spots that seem suspiciously large to us, making it difficult for some modern people to reconcile their racist attitudes and assumptions (and laws) with their idealism.


We, of course, being enlightened, have naturally discarded all those exceptions and when we speak of equality we really do mean for everybody. Well, not for children, of course, they really are different, and it would be genuinely silly to try to treat them as equals in law and in everyday interaction, not to mention how massively impractical it would be... oh, do you hear a bit of an echo?


No, this is not about to become a treatise on children's rights or children's liberation, but it makes a good example, doesn't it? Regardless of whether we someday rethink and reconfigure the treatment of children, MOST people in today's society haven't consciously thought about and then rejected the notion that we SHOULD extend equality to children, so much as it simply hasn't crossed their minds. That's what I mean by a blind spot. I'm saying that in Thomas Jefferson's time, the average enlightment-inspired idealist didn't think one way or the other about race when they considered equality.


So that's the general answer: we can't just hop to an all-encompassing "humanism" or "people-ism" because first we find it necessary to draw people's attention to specific discrepancies in folks' widely-shared thought patterns that get in the way of that.



Now, the SPECIFICS:


Yeah, I could say "let's just can it with the sexist assumptions about behaviors and personality traits and agree on sexual equality", but y'all--you, the rest of the society I've spent my life living in, addressing you generally and in the plural--y'all have a specific blind spot. Me.


Most people have a notion about how sex works between male and female people, whether you are highly conscious of it or not. You tend to think of sex as something that girls and women consent to, or choose not to consent to. As something that boys and men seek to make happen, thus prompting girls and women to respond with that consent or lack thereof. No, not always, I know not all of you always think in those terms. But when you think of it in a more egalitarian and less sex-polarized way, you are often thinking of sex as it occurs in what is already an ongoing relationship. Or you are thinking of it as an individual scene, a liaison or tryst in which things went down according to some other sequence of behaviors, whether it be a highly mutual flirtation-to-consummation sort of thing or one in which a sexually forward female person flings a leg over or makes an overt pass or otherwise is distinctively the initiator...


So let's snag that lattermost possibility, since it sort of stands out as a clearly undeniable against-the-grain sort of image. What happens next? Does an ongoing romantic relationship develop out of this rendezvous, or is she just out for a tasty bit of nookie? What if she wanted a boyfriend and not just a sexual encounter? What if he wants a relationship if that's a possibility here, should he try to slow her down and make sure she's also interested in him as a person, or should he assume that if he's available for more than the roll in the proverbial hay she will probably be willing to explore that possibility with him? Under what circumstances would you most want your daughter to avail herself of this particular sexual strategy? What's your advice to the guy, if he wants to meet women and get involved and have a girlfriend?


How does the movie play out, with characters who, because of how they are, in temperament and how they think of themselves and so on, are predisposed to these kind of dynamics? I think probably you have an easier time conjuring up her and thinking of her and what happens to her in her life. She's been portrayed, although usually as a Bad Example. Hey, girls, you wouldn't want to follow her lead. Look what they call her, not just behind her back but to her face. Look how she ends up alone and lonely. But she talks back, doesn't she? You've heard her voice, maybe, because she isn't all that demure and shy about expressing where she's coming from. Anyway, whatever you figure she's in for as an outcome, I think maybe you have some sense of her and maybe you can sort of see how there's a mesh between her personality characteristics and these specific sexual behaviors, even if you can also see the pragmatic wisdom in the general advice that she should modify her behavior if she wants a better outcome for herself, is that perhaps the case?


But that's in part because when folks visualize her and what might happen with her, they aren't thinking of her meeting up with someone like him. Or a model of heterosexuality arranged around how things can be with someone like him. Oh, it's not entirely that he never gets portrayed at all, but how he feels about who he is is entirely in the shadows. We're led to believe he would be a lot more assertive and take a much more active role if he weren't such a chickenshit cowardly spineless wimpy person. On the rare occasion he gets to have a voice, he's all bitter and full of hate because those evil women don't like nice guys like him and instead throw themselves at horrid despicable bad boys who treat them like shit. Well, he says bitterly, no more mister nice guy, I'm going to grow a mustache and I will twirl it and I will be in the clock tower with my rifle. Well... it's better than no image of us at ALL, I suppose, but we're still very much erased and I think when people consider sex, sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender they do not think of guys like us who like being how we are, who are not bitterly trying to cast that aside, who do not aspire to being like other guys, who are proud of being like this, and who actually manage to make this way of being male work, who get to have relationships and get to feel sexy and desirable not in spite of but because of how and who we are.


I think that when people conceive of a person like that and add it, in their heads, to their model of the types of genders and sexual orientations that exist, it changes the mental landscape. I think it's sort of a missing puzzle piece and when it drops into place and folks stop having that particular blind spot, it makes sexual equality and the liberation from gender norms an actual possibility.


I'm shy and self-conscious about a lot of this, and it feels very personal, to talk about this and then have to worry (I can't help it) about looking utterly ridiculous as well as whiny and so forth, to anyone I can get to listen to me long enough to understand the message. But, well, practically by definition, anyone who fits the description is going to be shy and self-conscious about it, even if the necessary message were not so unavoidably twined up with "ooh look at me I'm so DIFFERENT", not to mention "ooh, the world has been very MEAN to me". Because. Because, think about it, that's who we are. The "personality politics" of gender at close range. Prim and private and demure, we are. So this isn't the most comfortable task possible, what I've set for myself. But someone's got to say it and so I guess it shall be me.


I'll get better at it as I go.

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