One of the early reviews of GenderQueer noted that my thoughts and attitudes during my later teenage years in my book reminded her of the Nice Guys™.

It's an accurate call. When I first encountered the send-up of Nice Guys and their behaviors, I winced in recognition. Yes, I was definitely on that trajectory for awhile. The Nice Guys overtones in my book are acknowledged as intentional. In my own personal life, I didn't descend very far into blaming women, or considering the gender-polarized dating environment to be women's fault, but I had a lot of frustration and irritation; and in one important scene in the book you can see me expressing those feelings internally as resentment towards girls, and experimenting with the kind of behavior that is often advocated by so-called pickup artists.

I'm about to do something that many folks would say is ill-advised. I'm going to defend the Nice Guys (god help me). Well, sort of. I'm not about to make a positive case for being a men's rights advocate or explain why it really is all the fault of the women. But all the material about the Nice Guys describes them with eye-rolling dismissive contempt for exhibiting behaviors that we're encouraged to think of as manifestations of character flaws. I'm going to challenge you to perceive them (well, us, actually, since I'm reluctantly claiming the mantle) as people whose behaviors take place in a context, and look at the context long enough to see how it elicits those behaviors.


We are considered creepy. Creepy because we often have a hidden agenda of wanting sex. Creepy because we allegedly act nice thinking that we'll get sex as a reward for being nice. Creepy because our reasons for behaving "nice" are all about obtaining sex. Creepy because we think that by being nice, we somehow deserve sex.

So let's examine all that -- removing any gendered double standards in order to do that exam. I may be projecting my own experiences onto the Nice Guy™ debate, but it's not like there's an organized body of Nice Guys™ with a spokesperson and a position paper -- it's an identity largely created from the outside by folks who were tired of the Nice Guy shtick, and I confess that I recognize myself in a lot of the description so I may as well wear it.



a) Is it OK to want sex? Is it OK to expect or anticipate that someone would want to have sex with you?

This is a question that many a nice girl has found it necessary to contend with, so let's not dismiss it too quickly. Female people have often encountered judgmental hostility if it were thought that they wanted sex. They have often found themselves laughed at with derisive contempt connected to the idea that they did. And they've been told that if it were true, it meant they were not nice.

Now what (you may be asking) does that have to do with Nice Guys™, who, as males, would presumably not be facing those attitudes? Well, yeah, the boys are indeed sort of expected to want sex and to seek sex. But that confirms that they are Bad Boys™, not Nice Guys™.

Bad, bad, bad, bad boys
Make me feel so gooood...

-- Miami Sound Machine

Bad Boys aren't Nice Guys™. The fact that there isn't a massive social pressure on males to be Nice Guys™ instead of Bad Boys™ is particularly relevant -- somehow these particular male folks embraced an identity as Nice Guys anyhow, and overtly wanting sex isn't compatible with that. Displaying interest in sex would get the girls, the Nice Girls™, kicked out of the Nice category. Being overtly focused on the chance of sex happening is, in fact, a central part of what affirms a male person as a Bad Boy™.

That's not to say that interest in sex is entirely incompatible with Niceness, whether as manifested in Nice Girls™ or in Nice Guys™. In sitcom TV shows and romcom movies as well as in real life, we often hear the female characters complain that they'd really like to meet some guys who aren't married and aren't gay. There's no real reason for them to care whether interesting guys are single or to be concerned with their sexual orientation unless they wish to have sex take place in their lives occasionally, if you see what I mean.

But those female characters don't move around proclaiming to likely prospects that they want sex. That would not be considered Nice™.

How do the Nice Girls™ conventionally handle it? By bundling sex into a larger constellation of experiences and opting to partake of the bundle. To want a romantic relationship. To want a personal and emotional connection and within that context to be sexually active. Not otherwise.

Obviously you and I may not be at all inclined to sign on to the notion that female people should be shoehorned into this notion, this social construct that we call Nice Girls™, but you aren't unaware of the historical presence of this notion. You aren't unaware that it still has some social clout even in 2020. That even now, even after all the questionings and discardings of sexist and gender-polarized notions about how female folks should behave, a girl growing up in a randomly-selected American town is likely to have an easier time of it socially within the parameters of Nice Girl™ than she would if she were to utterly disregard it.


b) Well, is it OK to put on a "nice act" in order to get sex? Is it OK to go around thinking that because you're nice you somehow deserve sex?

I have to question the assumptions on that first one. The common derisive attitude towards Nice Guys™ accuses us of adopting a fake "nice" persona as a means of getting sex, but we are as we are -- this thing called "nice" -- despite a cultural push to be more of a Bad Boy™ and very little pressure on us as males to be Nice™ -- and we deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is who, and how, we are. We may expect things (including sex) as acknowledgment or reward for being Nice™, expectations that folks may have contempt for (and more on that shortly), but that doesn't make the "being nice" some kind of phony act.

Let's again glance across the aisle at the Nice Girls™. People don't tend to assume that they are being Nice™ in order to get sex to happen. People don't tend to assume that they are putting on a "nice act".

There is a belief about Nice Girls™ that is worth bringing up, though. They are often believed to have a high opinion of themselves, a high opinion that leads them to think and say hostile and disparaging things about boys who would rather devote their attention to considerably less-nice girls. The Nice Girls™ also may be expected to occasionally say uncomplimentary things about the not-so-nice girls themselves.

The Nice Girls™, in other words, regard themselves as a "catch", as worthy of admiration and value as potential partners. This is part of the understanding that people have of Nice Girls™, that they may tend to have this attitude about themselves.

Note that this is not characterized as them thinking that they "deserve sex". As I said before, the Nice Girls™ are taught to bundle sex along with emotional connection and think in terms of romantic relationship. So it's not that they think they "deserve sex" for being Nice Girls™, it is that they think they deserve consideration as good girlfriends for being Nice Girls™.

But as we've also already discussed, yeah, that formulation does include sex.

I think Nice Guys™ are basically doing the same thing. We tend to think we shoud be regarded as good romantic prospects. We start off putting a lot of energy into being good companions, connecting with the female people who are in our lives, thinking that sooner or later one of them will find the interactions enticing, will appreciate our value as potential boyfriend material, and if they also happen to find us physically attractive, then hey, things should progress from there, shouldn't they? It's not a materially different expectation than what the Nice Girls™ expect.

But in this gender-polarized world, we operate in a different context than they do.

Incidentally, no, I don't think we (Nice™ people of either sex) are intrinsically better than other people. It's just how we identify, how we think of ourselves and comport ourselves in the world. I'm proud of how and who I am. It's in the face of a lot of disapproval and so I don't feel apologetic about that.


c) So is it somehow OK to go moping around and getting all pissy and hostile because the girls don't appreciate your virtue as a Nice Guy™ and don't find you such a hot prospect? And WTF is with the Nice Guys™ bitterly pursuing an aggressive Pickup Artist approach and treating women like garbage while continuing to complain about things?

No it isn't OK. It isn't appropriate, it isn't politically legitimate, and, incidentally, it also isn't Nice™.

So why does it occur? I mean, look across the aisle again: the Nice Girls™ aren't doing anything equivalent to that, and I've spend the last few paragraphs comparing Nice Guys™ to Nice Girls™ to shed light on other Nice Guy™ behavior. So what's up with this bitter hostility?

We all operate in a social context, the Nice Girls™ and the Bad Boys™ and the Nice Guys™ and everyone else. There is a courtship dance established, and it has a role for the Bad Boys™ and it has a role for the Nice Girls™. The courtship dance calls for the Bad Boys™ to try to make sex happen and the Nice Girls™ to decline that and assert that they don't do that kind of thing outside of the context of an emotional connection and the prospect of an ongoing romantic relationship -- the "bundle" of which I spoke earlier -- and the dance goes on from there. They each know their lines and they anticipate the behavior of the other. But there's no courtship-dance role for the Nice Guy™. He isn't doing the Bad Boy™ dance steps that the Nice Girl™ expects and knows how to respond to. Whether she finds him physically attractive or not, whether she finds herself liking him as a person or not, whether she appreciates his personal qualities (Niceness included) or not, her own role instructions don't give her any lines or provide her with any dance steps that would make it easy for her to act on that interest if it were to occur.

Not that he, the Nice Boy™, has a clearer idea of what he should be doing. His bitter accusations are all focused on the Bad Boy™ stuff that he is not doing, Bad Boy™ stuff that the Nice Girls™ vocally complain about. He says that despite their complaints that's still where things progress, whereas affairs with the girls don't progress with a Nice Guy™ like him, and (he says) "that's unfair!"

Fair or unfair, his observations are accurate: the dance calls for the Nice Girl™ to protest the unbridled raw male expression of sexual interest as crude and demeaning and for her to assert her lack of interest in that. The dance sets them up as opponents, adversaries, with him trying to make sex happen and her disdaining that but seeing if perhaps he seriously likes her as a person and not just a sexual possibility; with him seeing if he can get past her defenses by studying her reactions and tuning into her thoughts and concerns and paying stragetic attention to her feelings. Maybe proximity and time causes him to develop real feelings for her. Maybe proximity and time causes her sexual appetite to kick into overdrive and she consents to doing more and more sexual stuff. They each have lines and dance steps and they know them. They know them the same way you know them. We all do. We've been to the movies, we've read the books, we've listened to the songs, we've heard and sometimes laughed at the jokes. Many folks dance very loosely instead of being rigidly bound to the dance steps, but the known pattern of the established dance still forms a structure.

But not for us.

Nice Guys™ are a type of gender misfit. Because Niceness is gendered and the males are the wrong sex to be embodying Nice. Nice Guys™ may not conceptualize themselves as feminine, as sissy, as trans, as nonbinary, as gender inverted people. In fact, I think they mostly don't. But in a nutshell their complaints do boil down to saying that they approached the whole sex-and-romance thing the same way girls do but that the world didn't play nice with them and left them out in the cold, with no girlfriend, no romance, no sex.

And if and when a Nice Guy™ decides to emulate the Bad Boys™ because the Bad Boys™ seem to be getting all the action he's missing out on, he may do so with contempt and hostility and bitter resentment. You want to know where else I've seen that emotional combination? Certain women who have observed "what works" with guys and have adopted the expected behaviors with scornful hate that they should have to do such demeaning and dishonest things. Yeah, hello.


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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:

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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I've been considering an additional way to present and market my book: as "Nice Guy™ Tells His Side of the Story" or "Testimony of a Self-Identified Nice Guy™" or something of that ilk.

I've blogged in the past about how I've perceived a connection between the Nice Guys thing and where my head is at (or has been at in the past), things that I see in their alleged whinings and complaints that mirror some of the things that made me angry and frustrated growing up.

This wouldn't be an "instead of" effort but perhaps something I'd use when requerying lit agents or when the profile for a lit agent or publisher makes me think they wouldn't see themselves as appropriate for A GenderQueer Tale.

I could fashion a query letter, kicking off with something like this:

Yes, I'm a Nice Guy™. From when I was a little kid, I tried to be a good boy, and I wanted to be seen that way by others. And yes, it's fair to say that I wanted and expected good things to come my way as my reward for being good and nice, so guilty as charged on that.

It's a gendered thing. Rocky Horror Picture Show aside, Nice GIRLS are generally not held in the same contempt for seeking the same things, even when they commit the egregious sin of expecting the boys to value them over the bad girls and to reward them, eventually, by seeking their ongoing relationships with them.

You haven't heard our story. You've heard other people repeat some things that some of us have said, in order to mock us and express their annoyance and disgust with us, but it's really rare for any of the so-called Nice Guys™ to speak on out own behalf beyond an occasional 1st-person complaint that the women keep going for the Bad Boys who mistreat them and that it isn't fair.

The book itself wouldn't have to change much. I think I might make an alternative final chapter, one that adds a paragraph or two describing the Nice Guys™ stereotype and summarizing the ways in which my own attitudes and experiences fit right into that, but otherwise it would be the same book.

I'd need to work on that query some more — I need more of the plot to be described or at least hinted at, so that a lit agent or editor gets a glimpse of the conflicts and likely story arc. Come to think of it, the synopsis should probably be reworked a bit too.

Oh, and I need a book title. "Testimony of a Self-Identified Nice Guy™" could work as the subtitle but I think I need something both shorter and catchier for the main title.

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I do tend to whine a bit. In here, and on the topic in general. Comes with the territory: when atypical female people set out to draw attention to social feminization and the expectations and roles and whatnot that they have to cope with, it's widely perceived as aggressive belligerent ranting; when we do our version, it's naturally going to be experienced as narcissistic whining.

I do a lot of my whining about the difficulty of getting more people to listen to me whine.

I was out for one of my long walks last Sunday and wondering how I'd feel about this obsession, and about my life in general, if I never get any significant traction. Would I feel like I had wasted my life and my time? I've occasionally said that in my life I really only set out to do one thing, take on one serious project, and this is it. Now that I've passed the midlife marker, it's a question worthy of consideration: how will I feel if I wake up on one of my last days as an old old person and look back and realize, if such is the case, that I set out to do one thing in my life and failed at it?

Mostly I think I'd feel like I gave it my best shot. And that I had done what I felt driven to do, and was true to what felt right for me. I think if it comes to that, I will feel good about myself for having believed in myself and made the attempt. And I will consider it a life far better spent than if instead I found myself looking back and realizing I had set aside something that I considered an important mission or calling simply because the doing of it turned out not to be easy or swift.

So in light of all that, I should acknowledge that although I complain a lot about how frustrating this all is, I am doing what I have selected for myself; i chose it and it is what I want. I get some measure of satisfaction from it even when it resembles beating my head against a wall.



Meanwhile, I have some news-bits, some morsels that are all flavored up with success instead of that perennial head-against-wall stuff for a change.

• Thanks to musicman, who recommended me to them and encouraged me to keep following up with them, it appears that I will be a presenter at Baltimore Playhouse, most likely on January 22. This will be another performance of the basic talk I gave at LIFE in Nassau last March.

• I finally met with the woman who manages the campus Women's Center and also teaches introductory Women's Studies at my alma mater SUNY at Old Westbury -- Professor Carol Quirke. After what happened with the personnel at the Nassau County LGBT Center, who kept not returning my phone calls and then indicated a nearly-complete lack of interest when I finally got more pushy with them about it, I was mostly starting to think that the Old Westbury people were similarly hoping I'd simply go away before they had to tell me I'm nowhere near as interesting as I think I am. But I made an appointment to drop in on her during her regular office hours, and it went well. I left off some additional materials (including a printout of my blog posting) and we talked about socialization and gender and how we felt about biological essentialism and coercive political correctness and I think we're very much on the same channel as far as how we view such things; I definitely went away thinking she was receptive to my ideas and really is interested in having me come to speak there.

• I'm immersed in a slow shift from mostly querying literary agents to querying independent editors (for feedback, actual content editing, and potential referrals whether they officially refer authors or not) and querying small publishers. One editor, Nikki Busch, has recommended that I find an independent editor who specializes in developmental edit, i.e., "the big picture stuff: organization, narrative voice, pacing, character development, and so on". She's aimed me at the Editorial Freelancers Association to find someone who specializes in memoirs and nonfiction narratives and I'll probably do that. Meanwhile, I have a query in at Neuroqueer Books, an enterprise that I believe Old Cutter John's son started, and I should be hearing back from them any day now. And I'm about to query Manic D Press, another possibility.



Whilst out walking and thinking last Sunday, I processed some other related notions and ideas:

• Some of my difficulties with networking are actually tied to my tendency to speak to people who happen to be members of an organization or participants in some movement-related activity as if they, personally, WERE the movement incarnate. I caused problems for myself back in 1980 when I tried to correspond with the Director of the on-campus Rape Crisis Center as if she were radical feminism incarnate and poised to consider my perspective on behalf of radical feminist thinkers everywhere. It was more recently a behavor causing confusion and miscommunication when I contacted the Programming Director at the Nassau Country LGBT Center to suggest that I present to them there: I spoke to her as malebodied sissyfem genderqueer liberation addressing the existing LBGTQ establishment and not as a potential presenter speaking to an organization official in charge of booking speakers and arranging events.

I do that, I realized, because I am mostly doing my own socio-political activism all by myself, so none of my behavior is supported or reinforced by being a person in a position doing a task or job, or of being a part of a group or organization and therefore experiencing the little social perks of belonging and participating and being engaged in a shared activity.

I usually see my isolation as a limiting factor (and a source of frustration). But there's a sense in which it means that nearly all of it that I do involves a cerebral connection to the cause qua cause; I'm never immersed in it because my friends are there, or because I like the wine and cheese and music at the receptions, or because it's an ideal socioppolitical venue to meet interesting new people, or because it's my job or my career.

Oh, it's still mostly a limiting factor, and yeah you can be forgiven for pinching your nose at the intellectual snobbery residing in the previous paragraph, don't get me wrong on either account, I know and I know. (The latter is a compensation for the former). But it's still relevant here. If there's a useful takeaway from this observation, it's that I will probably have my most satisfying conversations with the most fervently committed extremists, and that I need to nurture a more pragmatic streak within myself for having conversations with the rest of the folks I encounter along the way.

• When I speak of being a sissy or a male girl or describe that I was always one of the girls despite male body, one of the common misconstruals I get is that people visualize flamboyant emotive dramatic people, people for whom the feminine is centrally about "look at me". That's not it. Actually it was all about "approve of me". More explicitly, it was "obey the rules, be the teacher's pet, show us what a good citizen you can be". There's a not-so-nice element to it which I should probably emphasize more often, if only because it offsets some of the sickeningly-sweet aspects that may be hard for some to swallow: we who bought into that thought ourselves superior, were often smug snobby kids who were sure that we were going to be the ones to end up in charge of things. Because we were doing it right, were doing what adults valued.

Women's studies courses often observe that the "good girl" mystique sets girls up: it turns them into approval-seekers, pleasers of others. What sometimes gets lost is that the girls who embraced it believed in the same tradeoff that I did: they thought they, and not the undisciplined weak childish people who lacked self-control and who did not play nicely with others, would be the ones who would run the world.

At any rate, I was not initially alone among the children. What happened to the rest of the good boys, the nice guys? How did the other ones feel about the bad boys, the disruptive and disobedient boys, calling them girls and calling them sissies and taunting us with the claim that they were doing "boy" right and we were the weak ones, afraid to risk disapproval? I know what happened with many of them: they became convinced and got defensive about it. They stopped caring more about what other goody-goody people (mostly girls) and teachers and other adults thought and started to care about what the bad boys and tough boys thought of them. But what about the others?

Anyway, yeah, we wanted to be better than others. Little Lord Fauntleroy aloof from the riffraff. Tattletale Boy glad to see the misbehaving children get what they deserve. Sure, I'll confess to it. So OK, the world is fully entitled to be wary of our reappearance on the stage to claim once again to be some flavor of better, a new and more sexually liberated way of doing male and all that squeakyclean gender smugness.

How about merely "as good"?, though? You figure people can admire us some if we stand up for ourselves and assert that we like being who we are?

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So I've written this book about being a male person who is akin to male-to-female transgender folks except that I don't think I'm in the wrong body and am not trying to pass for "female" so much as be understood as "girl in male body". And about being attracted to female people but specifically AS a girlish rather than boyish-persuasion kind of male, and how that's different from heterosexuality and all that.

Now, as you may have noticed, this specific gender & sexual-orientation identity is not a "Thing" in our society at the moment. When I've asked people if they think my book would be redundant because this is already well-established and people with that sense of self are all over the place already, they say "Nope, that's definitely not already said-and-done and nope, kinda rare, that particular configuration".

Maybe too rare. What (you may well be wondering) is the basis for me thinking there's anything akin to a population of like-minded, similarly-experienced people who would read my book and identify with it? Why ought I to think I'm some kind of vanguard for an entire gender/orientation identity? What if, instead, I was a person who was a boy by day and a girl by night and was sexually attracted only to androgynous-looking people who flirt by night but consummate by day? I mean, at some point it becomes just my own personal unique turn-on or special-snowflake sense of identity, yes?


There are two factors that I believe play into why there isn't really much of a social presence for this sexual-invert identity I'm trying to talk up.

ONE: Personality itself. My partner Anais_PF heard me describe this one and it really "clicked" for her. Visualize my mostly-opposite corollary person for a moment: female bodied, has a very boy-identified past and in both personality and behavior is more like one of the guys than one of the other girls. And is attracted to male-bodied people albeit not necessarily the most conventionally masculine amongst them. Such women are not shy about their existence. They may not be melded into what you'd think of as a "movement" constituted around that specific identity, but they are a visible component of other more general movements and expressions of identity.

Feminism doesn't enshrine traditionally manly characteristics but it embraces the notion of even-handed fairness and hence the idea that if it is good for male people to exhibit certain characteristics, they must be equally admirable in women even if social norms and values say otherwise. And although the political consideraton of women's oppression and the demand for a level playing field have made feminism attractive over the years to a wide spectrum of women, we DO have a stereotyped notion of a woman of a certain personality who finds feminist sentiments particularly and personally validating, these being the women who proudly defy expectations of feminine daintiness and delicacy. Robust women. Some of whom, of course, are lesbians, confirming a certain expectation associated with those behaviors and expressions of personality; but some of whom, even if they aren't loudly distancing themselves from their lesbian cohort, are definitely NOT. Their not-lesbianism is often manifest in their critical assessment of male behavior, the complaints of women who at least potentially find male people attractive, were that maleness not quite so entangled with those males being MEN.

Yeah, OK, now consider us. Our situation is comparable, mirror-image, but being outspoken and confrontational about expectations is not merely a response to a situation; being outspoken and confrontational are also behaviors that reflect personality attributes to some extent, and so are the expections that are BEING defied, THEMSELVES. Visualize a roomful of males who, by our definition, are not feeling well-described by the masculine gender stereotype of personality characteristics. The robust women in the other room are defiantly tough confrontational women reacting to the definitional expectation that they be dainty and delicate, but in this room we have guys reacting to the definitional expectation that we be noisy boisterous aggressive tough guys, guys who are reacting to that because that description does not fit us. See the problem?


TWO: The, Umm, Being Coy Problem. Y'all remember the post about the "nice guys", the fellows who are perceived as manipulative whiners, guys who complain that women don't "give them sex" as rewards for being nice but instead "give sex" to guys who treat them horribly and all that? Well, as I said, those guys are sort of us and sort of not (and I've both acknowledged the overlap and made some rather emphatic distinctions). Let's take this opportunity to rephrase and reshape the expectations: not that women would "give us sex", because sex is not a commodity that females possess and for which males are the consumers; and not that we would get a "reward" for being "nice" because being "nice" is a personality characterisic, or a constellation of them, an aspect of who we are, and not some kind of favor we're doing women (or for that matter, anyone else).

If there's something we expect, or at least hope for, it's probably better expressed as women perceiving us as cute and imagining what they might do to us, what they might want to make us feel. Perceptions of our personality, the, umm, "niceness", might play a part in that. So, not women "giving us sex" but selecting for themselves an opportunity that they visualize themselves as being in charge of, that it is at their initiative and part of their pleasure coming from that dynamic. I would like to suggest to you that if the guys in this room are sort of imagining that, fantasizing about that kind of thing, we're also thinking that if we hang signs around our neck that read "We're hoping you'll do this, oh please DO ME, DO ME!", drawing attention to ourselves as individuals who would kind of, you know, react to that kind of situation with a significant degree of satisfaction and pleasure, that...that ... it's just not DEMURE, ok?? It would likely repel the women we're hoping for. If such scenarios have the possibility of playing out, if this can be a Thing, or even if the guys just maybe THINK it could be... well, the women involved in that scenario are going to want to believe it's their idea, at least to the extent that any really overt expression on our part of the fact that we want this to occur is most likely to be a major turnoff for them.

Yeah. There's no dignity in saying so. Yes, I do feel faintly ridiculous at the moment, thanks for asking.

By staying silent, we are deprived of the benefits of a collective identity, but those of us who need it the most (young ones coming of age and having to figure this out in order to function) would be the least able to speak out, and those in the best position to speak out (people like me who have not only figured it out but are actively IN relationships with people who understand us pretty well, thus have less to lose by being overt instead of coy about being sexually reactive), well, we have less pressing need for our gender and sexual orientation to be widely understood... we've GOT ours, if you see what I mean? And the ones in the middle, who have perhaps developed a sense of self and of their sexual nature that's somewhat congruent with what I've described here, but are still looking for partners in some significant sense of the word, well, the situation asks them to choose between being social activists about it or being viable potential partners.

You do the math.

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