ahunter3 | Entries tagged with objectification

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I go on Facebook and encounter an image of an (apparently) male person staring in the mirror, caption says this person is trying on his mom's clothes while she's out; reflection in the mirror shows an (apparently) female person in bra and briefs staring back; thought bubble says "Wow, I look BEAUTIFUL"; caption below says "... and then she knew who she really was".

I am one of those people who were born male -- by which I mean born with the physiological equipment that tends to lead obstetricians to assign newborn infants to the male category -- who then subsequently identify with the girls and women instead of the boys and men. There is a pervasive notion that the core of identifying that way, the reason for it, the important part, is all about being a sex object, a desirable beautiful person.

And I do mean pervasive. It's everywhere. You can find this notion expressed by trans women and by trans exclusive women who mock them; you can encounter it among the socially aware who support transgender and other gender-variant people's rights and concerns but also from transphobes and social conservatives who are dismissive of us.

There's certainly some pushback, but not enough to keep me from wanting to push back against it myself. So maybe this is something you've heard several times, but maybe you need to anyway. This attitude is annoying AF and I get tired of encountering it.

* I first started thinking of myself as essentially one of the girls and only technically one of the boys when I was about eight. Third grade. There were a lot of things about being a girl that just seemed right, and superior. Being pretty wasn't an important item on that list. I'm not sure it was ever on the list at all.

* When I came out in 1980, at the age of 21, I began trying to explain that who I was inside (and who I had been for years, inside) made it appropriate to think of me the way you think of girls and women, and that I didn't aspire to be a man or have any interest in being measured by the standards associated with them, but that, outside, I was male. The male part wasn't wrong, just the man part. I never had any interest or intention of passing as a female person -- beautiful and sexy or otherwise.

* I'm not saying I never had any interest in being found sexually attractive and desirable. As a teenager and young adult, I developed a dislike for the asymmetrical situation, where the girls were being hit on and pressured and cajoled and sought after for sex, and where the boys were expected to do that hitting ond pressuring and, if they didn't, were assumed to have no such interests. You know the drill: sex as something where the female people are the commodity and the male people are the market. I didn't want to play at that table. I wanted reciprocity. I wanted to be desired in the same way that I desired, and to be no more a sexual consumer than the objects of my own desire were. So, sure, I ended up wanting those aspects of being human that are marked "female" in our society. But...

* In my particular case, the people for whom I felt sexual attraction were, in fact, female people. That meant I could not get this reciprocal and egalitarian sexual experience as easily as folks with same-sex attraction. It also meant that, although I did want to be sexually desired, the notion of literally being a sexy attractive female person myself didn't have as much appeal to me as it might have for someone who found male-bodied folks sexually interesting.

In a world where women in general are often treated like the only important thing, the only thing that matters if you're female, is to be sexually desirable to men, it should not surprise any of us that the attitude towards someone born male who says they identify as one of the women is to reduce that identification to an identification with being the sex object. And to map it directly onto the sexualized idealized female form with its idealized shapes and curves and associated apparel.

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting that, if that's what you want, but the people for whom that is true are not the only show in town. And, in the social climate where this is the pervasive default assumption about all of us born male who identify with the women and girls, you have some responsibility to avoid perpetuating that this is what it's all about.

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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 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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I've said before that in an intimate relationship, there is often a power inequality -- not so much because someone is seeking it or deliberately weilding it, but because intimacy creates vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to not be in control. There's no way to structure vulnerability out of intimacy, so it's there; and vulnerability is the risk being taken that makes intimacy scary as well as desirable.

Using people for sex is a behavior overwhelmingly associated with my own sex but I suspect those of you who are female people also run up against that, and it's not a comfortable feeling, this sense that one uses other people for sex. But just as not eroticizing power over other people isn't the same as sex without differences in power, so also not intentionally or comfortably using people for sex, or setting out to do so, isn't necessarily the same as not using people for sex.

It has been spoken of that some people eroticize the notion (as opposed to the actual experience) of someone else having power over us and using us for sex. I think this tends to be paper-clipped to masochism, but being the person done unto takes one off the hook for being the one doing unto others, where doing unto others is using people for sex. That's the attraction of it.

Yeah, I said "us". I'd definitely categorize myself into that second paragraph. For me, the fact that being on the using side is more associated with my sex combines with an attitude I already had about how other males were and how I was in general. Well before puberty I was not identifying with them, wishing, in fact, to distinguish myself from them, so things associated with my sex often tended to be repellent to me just because I associated them with my sex. So on top of whatever general guilt trip one gets on about using people for sex was added the notion that doing so would make me more like the men, would dump me in with them. The men with whom I don't identify.

In the specific case of using someone for sex, there are so many vulnerabilities about hurting the people you care for, and coercion is a form of hurt, an erasure of the other person's will.

Intimacy is not safe and cannot be made safe. It's inherently risky. It's fun, it's delicious and thrilling. But not safe.

Here's my arrival path to intimacy. I accept going in that there is the risk of coercion, and I take that risk with a willingness to assume the lack of deliberate intent, an openness to forgiveness. I guess that kind of makes it a BDSM arrival path, this acceptance of coercion, and I'm okay with that.

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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.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

Just a couple of decades ago, we had no term, and no concept, for what we now call "cultural appropriation". Like "genderqueer", it's a new notion we can now use to frame our understandings of social inclusion and social justice.

As with the subject of gender variance and diversity, cultural appropriation is not something that should be oversimplified. We should use tools such as this concept of cultural appropriation to add a more nuanced understanding of social patterns, to illuminate what are actually fairly complicated situations and draw our awareness to some patterns that we should be keeping in mind.

In contrast, there's very little benefit gained from trying to use it as a rule, as a policy in and of itself that replaces having to think. Stating "all cultural appropriation is bad" won't take us very far, and even asserting that "dominant groups should not engage in cultural appropriation of more marginalized ones", while more useful, doesn't banish the need to look at situations from multiple angles.

Here are a few example situations I'd like to use as discussion-starters:

EXHIBIT A: Since the 1990s, New York City has had fast-food Mexican restaurants sprinked throughout several of its boroughs with the name "Fresco Tortilla" or "Fresh Tortilla".

They aren't owned by Mexican-American people, nor are they staffed by people of Mexican ancestry. They are universally run by people of Chinese ancestry instead.

When I first came to the city myself, it didn't have many Mexican restaurants (not even many Taco Bells), nor did it have a very large population of people of Mexican descent. Fast-food Chinese places were ubiquitous by comparison. There was less competition to contend with in opening and operating a place that served inexpensive Mexican food, and it is my understanding that an immigrant of Chinese descent learned the cuisine and then moved into this niche, and when it became successful brought other family members in to open establishments at other locations.

Mexican people in the United States are marginalized and viewed disparagingly, have a history of being economically oppressed here. Chinese people, like other Asians, have often had a rough time here as well, but have been an established community in New York for a long time.

In recent decades, many more ethnically Mexican people have moved into the New York City metropolitan region. Opening and running Mexican food restaurants is a likely avenue to financial stability, as it is a popular cuisine.

Is the presence of a chain of Mexican restaurants run and operated by Asian personnel a cultural appropriation issue? Was it less so when there were far fewer families of Mexican origin potentially competing for this niche? Or was that actually making it more of a concern?

There hasn't been a public phenomenon of Hispanic or specifically Mexican people complaining about the situation. Does that mean it isn't problematic? So we aren't being charged with the responsibility of noticing it, we're just being called on to react with the correct reactions when someone makes the charge of cultural appropriation? Does that make it a valid defense to respond "Well, nobody complained about it before now" when someone accuses you of cultural appropriation?

Would it be more of a problem if the people doing it were not themselves a historically marginalized ethnic minority?

EXHIBIT B: One of Paul Simon's most successful albums was Graceland. The music is a combination of heavily influenced and directly lifted from indigenous African musical culture, was recorded in South Africa, and features African musicians who are named and credited. Many people view the album as a mostly successful effort to introduce this music to a wider audience.

Still, Paul Simon is a white person and he was making money and furthering his career through the use of folk music traditions of a different culture, definitely an oppressed and marginalized one.

Does it make it okay that he had the permission and direct participation of African musicians, and credited them on the album?

Unlike the case with Fresco Tortilla, there have been some African musicians who have complained about Graceland and Paul Simon. What percent of the original culture have to approve before it can be considered that they have given permission? Or do we assume that because of their lower social status and clout that they aren't able to give consent, in the same way that minor children can't consent to sex?

The counterargument has been made that if mainstream music and its musicians makes no effort to be stylistically inclusive, music on the margins will never find a wider audience. That the alternative to Graceland would be the major record labels signing contracts with indigenous people to record music that is unlike what the mainstream musical audience is accustomed to -- something that Paul Simon was less in a position to make happen, and which, as the record companies would have pointed out, would not have been anywhere as likely to result in those recordings being purchased and played.

That's a specific example of a more universal response to the charge of cultural appropriation, by the way: if we don't let ourselves be influenced and inspired by traditions and creativities that originate anywhere but within the cultural confines of the mainstream, if we don't learn from and emulate anything except the dominant culture, that clears us of being cultural appropriators but aren't we then turning our backs on the rest of the world, shutting our ears and eyes to what they might have to teach us?

EXHIBIT C: Back in the 1950s, Harry Belafonte released an album of music from various world cultures, titled An Evening with Belafonte. Among other tracks, it included a recording of "Danny Boy".

"Danny Boy" is considered Irish and is associated with Irish cultural pride. And the Irish people, subjected to centuries of English domination and the conflicts referred to as "the troubles", can be considered marginalized and oppressed.

But not only is Harry Belafonte also a member of a readily-identified marginalized group (as with the Chinese people operating Fresco Tortilla in the first example), he is also in this case not appropriating a song that arose as part of Irish indigenous culture. The song was written by an English composer, and set to the tune "Londonderry Air", which itself was not so much a long-established Irish tune but rather a somewhat garbled annotation of one, written down by a songcatcher in the 1800s, a tune the original of which is apparently more closely represented in "The Last Rose of Summer".

How authentically a product of a given culture does a cultural work need to be in order for its use by someone of a different culture to be liable for cultural appropriation?

If a white fashion model styles her hair not in an historically established ethnic fashion, but instead in a style promoted in modern times within fashion magazines that happen to target specific ethnic communities, is she doing cultural appropriation? Does it matter if the fashion magazines pushing the style have white owners?

All of these examples are somewhat deliberately retro, referring to things that happened (or first happened) long before our society began discussing cultural appropriation. That minimizes the tendency of people to respond with whatever views on the specific incidents are already on record as public statements (although less so in the case of the Paul Simon example). It's also a way for me to try to split the discussion of cultural appropriation itself from condemnation of people for doing it. Even there, we don't have a consensus on whether or not it's a valid defense to say "That was a different time and you can't judge people in the past for violating the standards of today". It is, after all, a variation on "Well, nobody complained about it before!" ...

Overall, I can't conjure up any rules that start with "Never" or "Always". Not that anyone appointed me to be the issuer of rules. But for myself, for my own behaviors and my own social responsibilities as far as cultural appropriation goes, I can't write for myself any guidelines that start with "Never" or "Always".

I take the concern seriously. Not because I do not wish to offend. I'm actually okay with offending people sometimes. I have several skirts in my wardrobe and I wear them when I feel like it, with very little restriction as far as where I am or what I'm doing. I manage to offend a few people who don't think male people should wear skirts.

But I understand and agree with the sentiment that it isn't fair to snag someone else's self-expression, one that is tied to their identity and solidarity, if their identity is a marginalized one. And it isn't fair to swipe someone else's meaning-imbued symbols and expressions of their concepts and faith and convictions and use them as adornments and trinkets. The question of if and when a situation falls into that description is a complex one, and there will be disagreements about them, but I am willing to do my best to listen and take other folks' perceptions into consideration.

For my own part, I've been told on occasion by cisgender women that I should not be wearing a skirt because it's theirs; I do it anyway; I go to Ethiopian, Chinese, Czech, Indian, Greek, Persian, etc restaurants and eat their cuisine, and I learn how to cook a decent subset of what I like, and (at least back in the pre-COVID era) we like to have dinner guests so I often serve these cultural appropriations to others, but in the privacy of my home. I'd feel less entitled to open a chain of restaurants (if I had the skill and the means to do so) and serve other folks' cuisines, and even less so if the ethnicity were rare and relatively unknown and I somehow had the clout to establish my restaurant chain as the single definitive source of that type of food.

I have a garment in my possession, a beautiful dashiki I bought from a street vendor in Manhattan; it is gold and green and red and black and I bought it because I liked the way it looks. I didn't think about cultural appropriation as I was buying it, but by the time I got home with it, I had begun realizing it could most certainly be perceived as that. I haven't worn it. I'm thinking maybe I will wear it in the privacy of my home when I have reason to think I won't be out and about, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being in public with it on. Not because I don't want to offend so much as because I can see how it might be offensive, if that makes any sense. It's a shame because for me it conjures up memories of countercultural guys from the early 1970s. But the fact that that's my cultural association for this item of apparel, and not tribal African wear, more or less highlights why cultural appropriation can be a problem, doesn't it?

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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. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

It's a trope of both literature and film. We have two protagonists thrown together by circumstances, allies working together. They don't particularly react to each other as attractive romantic possibilities, and instead we find them interacting as people with skills and talents, areas of expertise and passionately held principles. And they come to regard each other very highly for this, to respect each other as a colleague who is a formidable force to be reckoned with. Then there's that moment when they've just pulled off a triumph or gotten past a major hurdle and they look at each other for the first time with erotic interest; their eyes meet and their lips meet and things get all sexy and steamy.

Raise your hand if you have no idea what I'm talking about. No one? Good... so hang on to that image, if you will...

So: the Nice Guys thing -- I first ran into the complaint about Nice Guys from a website called Heartless Bitches International, back in the 1990s. I'm under the impression that HBI were the folks who publicized the concept and made it a part of our shared social repertoire. They said Nice Guys were the ones always complaining that women don't really want nice guys, that women gravitate towards sexually predatory jerks. Or to be more specific about it, they complain that women don't really want to date nice guys. That nice guys get "friend zoned", treated as friends who aren't heterosexually eligible. The Heartless Bitches' complaint about us (yes, us, because for presumably obvious reasons -- if you've been reading my blog -- that description certainly hit home so far) was that we only pretend to like them, that our real motivation is to worm our way into their affections by being nice to them, in hopes that they'll dispense sex to us. And that when that doesn't happen, we get all bitter and hostile. And this all means that we really just viewed the women as sexual opportunities, as sex objects, and were only being nice as a ploy to make them like us, and think we're entitled to have sex happen as a consequence of being nice, which, when you sum it all up isn't very nice at all, now is it?

Well, look, Ms. Heartless... may I refer to you as HB? (It's one thing for you to refer to yourself as a bitch, but...) Look, HB, I wasn't pretending to like you as a person. I really do, I admire you and greatly enjoy your company, and no, it's not a calculated attempt to sneak my way into your pants. Do I hope that some percent of my associations with women I like and admire will develop like the romantic films and stories, where one day a moment will come...? Oh hell yeah. Sure I do. I'm attracted in your direction, why wouldn't I hope for such things? Frankly, I think that for a lot of people who have never thought of themselves as genderqueer, or as nice guys for that matter, they'd like for more of that kind of thing to happen in their lives, so it's not just us.

But somehow it's creepy to hope that one day she'll decide I'm kind of hot and that she wants to kiss me and make out? "She" isn't a specific person; it doesn't have to be you, personally. This trajectory doesn't have to be how all my nice warm collegial friendships with female people end up going, and I don't expect them to. I'm certainly not thinking about it every moment of the time we spend together.

Let's revisit: I grew up with girls saying they were tired of being treated and regarded as sexual opportunities instead of as people. And we Nice Guys, perhaps we are the males who grew up liking girls as people, like their company, share their values, and want their approval as a person, as well as being attracted to them. That's certainly where I'm at. So -- Ms. HB, over here, she says she prefers the bluntly honest horndog, the fellow who clearly signals that his interest in her is of a sexual nature.

What's the complaint here? Oh yeah, that we Nice Guys go around claiming that you prefer the bluntly honest horndog aka sexually predatory jerks and don't want really want to date nice guys, although you're fine with having us as friends. Sounds like we're pretty much in agreement with how things are.

Oh, but we're bitter and hostile about the situation. That we act like we're entitled to have it play out differently, that we deserve better. Hmm, yeah, I can see how that impression could develop. Mind you, when I do my complaining, I complain about the overall situation, not about one individual woman or her sexual preferences. I've heard some of the bitter and hostile guys, incels and all that, making it sound like we, the nice guys, are the victims of a social situation that puts us in double-binds where we're damned if we do and damned if we don't, but that you, Ms. HB, and your sisters, are free to act in a different pattern if you so chose, and that since you don't so choose this is somehow all your doing. I'm personally going to plead Not Guilty on that one, but I concede that there's a lot of that behavior coming off the Nice Guys in general. It's not nice and it's not fair, but people are often hostile towards individuals when what they're actually angry and frustrated about is how things are set up socially. A lot of us Nice Guy types don't like aspects of our gender role, that's what it comes down to, and we complain about it being unfair, and sometimes we get downright adversarial and confrontational about it. Sometimes we act like the individual person in front of us is somehow personally responsible for setting it up that way. And is free in a way that we are not. That's just wrong.

(Hell, it's a patriarchy, and women, including you, Ms. HB, have been complaining about the unfairness to women of these rigid roles and pointing out how you're constrained by them, so it's quite amazing that Nice Guys can be so opaque about how no, you and your sisters didn't personally set it up this way. But the whining Nice Guy who is doing this didn't personally set it up this way either, and neither, for that matter did the bluntly honest horndog fellow, whose bluntly honest tendency to treat you like a sexual bonbon right from the outset is only preferable under some circumstances).

Let me explain a couple things from a personal vantage point, if I may.

First off, some women do prefer Nice Guys. You personally, Ms. HB, are free not to, and I'm still on board with being your friend. But the sexist courting and dating scenario paints the honest horndog fellow as the male who is doing it right, so it's harder for us to figure out how to make our situation work.

Second, let's posit for the sake of example that I'm attracted to you from the outset when we first meet. That's not special. I'm attracted to an incredibly large percent of your very cute morphological variety, and at the stage where I've only just met you that isn't any more personal for me than it is for you, you see what I'm saying? And just like a lot of nice girls, I tend to want to feel personally appreciated for who I am and treated individually and not like an interchangeable Tab A, and even if that were not true, I've heard all the nice-girl complaints about being treated like sex objects and sexual targets and opportunities, so no, of course I'm not going to express to you the fact that I find you sexually attractive, I don't even know you!

Thirdly, let's assume some time goes by and we do get to know each other, and I'm liking you. I'm liking you on many levels. Well, when that happens to you, do you, umm, find it awkward to express a type of interest that would move the connection in a romantic direction? I sure do, so I wait. Not only is it not my responsibility as the person with the male anatomy to be more blunt and honest in saying so, I'm totally into being less so precisely because of how it's all set up.

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All of the above set of notions and concepts are things I more often express as "I am of a different gender than the one that is conventionally assumed of male people". You do need to realize that there is more than one way of putting things into words. If you never before thought of Nice Guys as people unhappy with sexist expectations, or as people whose assumed gender is a bad fit for who they actually are, it may be because they aren't being called that, aren't typically discussed that way.

You do, I assume, realize that Nice Guys, in the sense promulgated by the Heartless Bitches International characterization, is labeling from the outside, right?

Well, that was true of the label "bitches" too, wasn't it? Good on you for reclaiming it.

I'm following your example.

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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.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/90157.html

I remember when I was an early elementary-school aged child, old enough to have gotten the "where do babies come from" talk but too young to have picked up on the notion that when I got older I'd have a craving for that, an appetite for that activity. An interest in doing that for reasons other than wanting to become a parent. So we're talking a stretch of time when I was between 5 and 11 years old.

I can see where the following paragraph might be TMI, so consider yourself warned, but...well... I had a secret perversion back then, despite being a notoriously squeaky-clean prissy and prudish kind of kid. I was fascinated by where girls pee from. Their shapes, right there, where they were physically constructed differently from me. I wasn't the kind of eight-year-old who likes telling stories about bathroom functions, or making fake fart sounds with my armpits or by flowing through pieces of paper. I didn't scrawl four-letter words on bathroom stalls. So this was embarrassing to me. To find that I liked catching a glimpse of girls where I could see their anatomical shapes, like if they were wearing pants or shorts, or swim suits or ballet leotards. Or underwear. I was surreptitious about it, keeping it a total secret, never telling anyone, because although I didn't think it was hurting anyone, I sure didn't want people to know I was a kinky pervert.

I was embarrassed back then because I thought it was just me and had no idea what it meant. By the time I started attending junior high as a 7th grader, that part was no longer so. I got it. Sexual appetite, okay, that makes sense! And it was expected, and girls and boys would start dating and all that.

I'm bringing this up for a reason.

The mainstream trans and nonbinary message these days is very much about "what you've got between your legs doesn't matter and doesn't count and isn't anybody's business". You know -- because if you were born with a vagina but you're a man, the vagina part doesn't make you less of a man. Or your body came equipped with a penis, but you're one of the girls, and the penis doesn't invalidate your identity or your femininity. And so on.

But I don't feel included or taken into account by that message.

I was definitely one of the girls growing up. All during that same time frame, elementary-aged child, I liked who the girls were and admired them, and aspired to be just as good as they were in the ways that count. Being self-regulated, a mature person responsible for her own behavior. Being patient, even-tempered, being able to behave within the rules and color within the lines, to be a good student and a good citizen and not a bad rule-breaking coarse crude violent brainless jerk like the majority of the boys. I was told I acted like a girl; this was supposed to make me stop it or prove I was as "boy" as anyone, but my attitude was "yeah, so? they're doing it right!" So: femme or sissy or girl, that was me.

But skippng ahead to adolescence, once there was a prospect of actually acting on those "gee I'm fascinated by your girl parts" feelings, those sexual-appetite feelings, well, I was only going to be comfortable expressing that if it was going to be a mutual thing. The girls were pretty vocal and emphatic about finding it creepy when boys were only interested in them as sexual possibilities. That selfish boys who didn't care if the interest was mutual were annoying. I didn't want to be thought of as being like those boys -- as being different from these girls, the people that I emulated and admired -- so yeah, if these feelings were going to be openly acknowledged, they had to be mutual, and that specifically meant that my parts needed to evoke within them the same fascination and appetite that I felt for them and theirs.

Maybe as a society we're too focused on finding someone with the designated Right Set of Genitals to partner with, I'll grant that. But I don't particularly want to find someone who will like me as a person and shrug and decide she doesn't care about my physical configuration. Because I can't reconcile that with her having a craving for someone with a configuration like the one I've got. I don't mind if she also gets the hots for people of a different contour. Also find broad-chested big-jawed guys hot and cute? Sure, why not? Also get turned on by female people with perky breasts and deep throat hollows and green eyes? No problem, I can relate! But she better have an erotic response to slender wiry longhaired bearded male-bodied persons, whatever else may be appealing to her.

A lot of gay and lesbian people say it matters to them too. That their identity is not about "I don't discriminate based on people's reproductive morphology, I'll do anyone equally if I find them to be appealing people", but is instead about "in contrast to the expectation that I've the hots for the conventionally opposite sex, I totally don't and have a same-sex erogenous interest instead".

I am sorry if it hits you as transphobic, or binary, or genitally obsessed, for me to care that people know what merchandise I come with. I do understand that many people don't have a single physical design that they find sexually appealing, and I also understand that many intersex people and transgender people don't want partners who "chase" folks with their specific physiology because of a fetishistic obsession for that. I, on the other hand, do. Hope you're okay with that.

I won't rule out the possibility that I need to listen and learn things from you. But only if you're going to listen and learn from me, and maybe modify the message to make me feel less erased by it. I don't wish to fit in, indistinguishably, with the female people and to be thought of as a woman like any other woman. That's not where I'm at. I'm not a transgender woman, I'm a genderqueer sissy femme male person.

And I seem to have been born this way.

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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.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

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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Index of all Blog Posts

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/89017.html

I occasionally hear some cisgender woman express her dismay about AMAB girls and women fervently embracing the status of being an object of desire. She might say, "Maybe it's because you haven't been exposed to it all your life like we have, but you sometimes act like none of you never heard of women's liberation and the importance of not just being treated as a sex object". Or with more exasperation, perhaps, as "Yeah, trans women are women, but I'm so tired of seeing the intro posts with the posed photos... it's like they're saying that's what a woman's existence boils down to -- being somebody's fucktoy".

Male and female people, cis and otherwise, can make lists of things that are less available to them in social life because of gender. For the folks perceived as male, these may include things like the opportunity to nurture relationships and the ability to be with children without being viewed as likely child molesters; and for the folks perceived as female, things such as being regarded as likely leaders, being taken seriously and followed when they speak with authority. The sense of being excluded from these things unfairly is considered legitimate, and to rejoice in having gained access to them anyway, whether by transitioning or by other means, can be high-fived as a well-deserved trumphant celebration.

But when people who were not originally designated as female celebrate being perceived as sexy? That often gets seen as trivial fluff.

In discussions with cis women who spend a lot of their time analyzing what the rigidity of sex roles deprives people of, I encounter some of that. "Oh, seriously, that's something you think you'd enjoy? Honestly, it's very tiresome and annoying, and most women wish it would just go away".

It's one of the most interesting "grass looks greener on the other side of the fence" perceptions. Talk to a bunch of cis hetero males and they'll often emphasize the power that comes from being the wanted component in a partnership. "Whether you've got a company that everyone wants to work for, or you're a really skilled expert that all the companies want to hire, if you're the one that everyone else wants, you get to call the shots, you know? Or let's say you're a famous movie producer, and all the actors want to be cast in your movies. But you also get that if you're the actor that everyone wants to get to play starring roles in their movie, right? So how can women not be experiencing that as power? I think it would be wonderful".

The envied women say it feels like always being a gazelle or an impala on the veldt with tigers constantly trying to take you down and prey on you. The never-ending harassment, the pushiness of the sexual pickup attempts, the constant reminder of the possibility of sexual coercion, none of that makes them feel like they're the ones in control of the situation. "And when you add in the way you're so often just seen as sex on feet, that you get reduced to this and the rest of who you are and what you're doing doesn't count, hell no, we don't feel like we have the power, not the way you make it sound".

So when it comes to transgender women (or other feminine-spectrum identifying folks originally designated male), when we indicate that we want more of that kind of experience in our lives, or we post our "hey check me out, how do I look?" selfies as part of our introductory posts on Facebook, we are sometimes made to feel like we're airheads. TransBarbies whose most important social-political concern is the chance to be whistled at.

I sometimes feel like responding, "Look, you can't have it both ways. Entire theories of women's oppression have been formulated that revolve around the notion that males fear their own craving for the female body and for that reason set out to control women. Well, if sex objectification is a central issue for female people's experience of gender, you shouldn't trivialize a similar centralization of the same topic when people in the male situation examine the workings of gender".

Trans women may not regard themselves as ever having been male, but they started off barred from a range of women's experience and women's existence, so they still have the experience of staring at this phenomenon from the outside. Being deprived of it.

I personally am one of the odd gender-variant folks whose identity is subsumed in the "Q" rather than the "T" of LGBTQIA. I am not a transitioner and I don't present as female; I neither pass nor seek to pass. That puts me on a somewhat different trajectory in approaching this issue. I'm perhaps more inclined to emphasize the priorities in life that make me one of the girls and not one of the boys, and the tastes in movies and books, porn and erotica, and nuances of behavior, as ways in which who I am is femme, the self that I am is a person who is one of the gals and not one of the guys. I can't strike a pose and display my feminine appearance and say "See?" Not because I don't have a feminine appearance, but because to see it requires a mental translation that most people aren't equipped to make; it's discernable to people who can abstract the feminine as a way of being in the world and then apply it as a style to the physically male body without finding any conflict or discrepancy in that.

My own sexual orientation is not towards male folks, and that probably worked against me developing any particular interest in having the appearance of a female person (the existence of lesbians not being sufficient to offset that). Instead I found myself pining for a visit to a world where the dynamics were inverted. To be sought after, to live in a world where the people to whom I'm attracted might seek me.

More analytically, I already knew how to want. But since I'd always considered myself to be one of the girls, therefore an equal to them, for me to want meant also wanting to be wanted in return, mutually, and reciprocally. And to not want sexual access doled out as a reward or favor or earned on merit. That's unappealing. A gal needs to be craved a bit, prized and cherished.

———————

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/80780.html

Femininity and womanhood are gender identity terms, but more fundamentally than that, they are socially shared notions, and what they are notions about, historically speaking, are female people.

I have male parts (or at least the parts that led my mom's obstetrician to put "male" on my birth certificate—and for the record I call them male parts myself). But I'm definitely a femme, and I'm happy to be living in 2020 where gender identity has been somewhat split off from physical bodily architecture.

But it doesn't avail us anything to pretend that the feminine gender identities don't have diddly squat to do with physical femaleness. The socially shared concepts and roles, and the accompanying notions about a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on, didn't originate independently and then somehow get ideologically and artificially attached to the female physical morphology. The notions were originally notions about female people. They may not have correctly or adequately described female people in general, and they certainly did not correctly or adequatly describe all female people; and because this has long been a patriarchy, this human society of ours, there may indeed have been ideological content stirred into the pot along with the generalizations. But the gender identity is social; it exists as a bundle of shared concepts, and the subject matter that the concepts were originally and historically concepts about were people who had vaginas and ovaries and fallopian tubes, the biological females of our species.

Now, even as increasing numbers of us find personal validation in gender identities that don't correspond to the physical morphology to which those identities were originally and historically attached, some of that past still haunts us.

You'll recall that I said this society has historically been a patriarchy. One thing that means is that the most established socially shared notions about pretty much anything are men's ideas. To be more specific, cisgender heterosexual men's ideas. Because the viewpoints of other people weren't being spoken in public, weren't being published. So views and attitudes that were really only the views and attitudes of these men got put out there as default views and attitudes. That applies to a lot of subjects, but at the moment let's focus on the definition of women.

Top of the list: sexual attractiveness, the desirability quotient, one's value as a sexual commodity. These days we refer to it as the "male gaze" but it used to be discussed as if women's sexual appeal was intrinsic to the women and men were just noticing it. Because "attractive to cis het men" was defaulted, universalized into "attractive". Because women's usefulness in patriarchy was largely constrained to their usefulness as mates to men.

Women may have meant more to each other, and to themselves, but their opinions weren't being enshrined. I wrote earlier of a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on — all components of her gender identity as a woman. Those are all aspects of the self that a woman may find validation in, may take pride in, but all that has tended to be overshadowed by the focus on sexual desirability, aka sexual desirability as determined by an audience of cis het male people and their appetites.

Why is this relevant to today's gender identity discussion? Because sexual attraction often tends to be "to a body structure". (And that, too, has been culturally emphasized.) In short, sexual orientation has been geared not so much towards what we speak of as gender identity, but to the physical morphology, to shape and contour. So the most emphasized, the most underlined, aspect of what it means to be a woman is to have female curves and contours and the relevant female organs. That shoves beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes, etc, into the background.

Someone in a Facebook group posted a meme stating "It's not sex change, it's gender-affirming surgery". Well, that's wrong. It's not gender-affirming surgery, its SEX-affirming surgery. If a person's gender identity as a woman is 100% valid whether they have a penis or a vagina, then obtaining surgical services to modify their physical structure so that any visual observers will assign it "vagina" doesn't affirm their gender. It affirms their SEX, as female.

Of course, being attractive to the heterosexual male gaze really is central to some people's sense of their feminine identity. It's what's most emotionally important to them about being a woman, as opposed to singing alto arias or becoming a really good seamstress or something. Nothing wrong with that.

But not everyone who identifies as woman or femme or girl is primarily concerned with appealing to the male gaze. Of having a sexually desirable appearance as filtered through the fakely universalized male gaze.

The centrality of the whole "do you look sexy, can you compete with the sexy women of the world in sexy appearance?" question is often used to invalidate feminine people. It is used to invalidate many cis women for whom it simply isn't the end-all and be-all of their self-worth. It is used to invalidate many trans women for whom being evaluated in terms of how well they "pass" as a sexually desirable specimen gets to be old and tiresome.

Well, it is also used to invalidate the identity of people like me, who definitively do not identify as female, who do not transition, who do not attempt to present as female-bodied people, who distinguish between physical sex and gender and identify as male women, male femmes, male girls.

I get a lot of pushback about it. People who say "It's nobody's business what you got in your underpants" when what they really mean is "You've got no business having that attitude of 'yeah I'm male, so what', that's the wrong attitude about your male parts, we're all supposed to be going around saying 'it doesn't matter'". But what actually doesn't matter to me is being found sexy in that sense. Sexy to the falsely universal male gaze. I am male. Sure I want to be found sexy... to people who specifically like the male physical morphology. Since that's the morphology I've got. And I'm a male girl. My gender-atypical identity doesn't have a damn thing to do with claiming femaleness, regardless of whether yours does or not.

———————

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Event: Salon: Karen Bernard's LAKESIDE
Date: February 06, 2020 8:00 PM
Douglas Dunn's Studio
541 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

My friend and I share our guilty secret: we prefer narrative forms of dance and performance art, where there is a message or a plot line. It's akin to admitting you mostly like representational art when you're coming back from a show of abstract oil paintings. It tends to brand one as less sophisticated.

I find that the lack of a defined meaning creates a challenge for someone seeking to do a review. One could restrict one's self to how the performer moved, their talent and grace on stage. But that dismisses the performance itself as exercise. The problem is that my mind wants the piece to be "about something" and so it seizes on a message, a "something" that may originate entirely in my own head, making any review more about me and what I made out of this Rorschach choreography than about the performance that anyone else may have seen.

Hence the title "Anatomy of a Review".

I bring with me to the audience member seat a pair of tools, if you will, my main everyday obsessions: feminist theory and gender theory. When the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say. Well, here's what I saw:

A garment is in view in front of a kneeling performer (K. Bernard) under a tightly focused light. She and it. She stays that way for a prolonged duration, and doesn't react. Then very very slowly extends her hand, until the elbow is completely straightened, the arm as distant from the core of her body as she can make it, before she slowly pinches the fabric between fingertips and with agonizing slowness lifts it towards her.

Do I see a facial expression, or am I imagining it? I interpret something repellent, a displeasure, that makes the slow approach shot through with reluctance.

The outfit turns out to be a skirt and blouse. I see: gendered clothing. It has pastel colors, lacy ruffles, and once she (slowly) dons it, I see it is cut in a style that draws visual attention to legs and breasts, curve of torso, neck, and arms.

Once she's finally in the thing, she strikes poses and begins to move in it. I see: mockery, revulsion. I see: mincing and prancing, acting out in overstated compliance that which is expected of her. I see: resistance to femininization, trivialization, sexual fetishism and objectification. Her costume is a garment that renders one as an object for others' visual consumption, and it's not designed primarily for the wearer's convenience and comfort. These aren't, I think, interpretations that the clothing in and of itself would conjure for me, but by her body language as she interacted with it.

Due to my gender identity activities, I'm quick to attach the extreme reluctance and disgust that I see to the act of being misgendered. An expression not so much of resentment towards the costume per se as towards the package of feelings and attitudes towards anyone who would wear it, a rejection of femme. "Yes, that's it", I nod affirmatively in my seat. I imagine the cartoon thought-balloons over her head: "I don't want to wear this girly-girl thing, this so is not me. I'm supposed to be in this and prance around like this and pretend I'm eye candy and shit. Fuck this, gimme a goddam suit and a tie and a fedora, willya?"

The piece was presented without program notes, and was not followed by one of those "talkbacks" where the audience or a panel of people discuss the piece and what they got out of it, so we made our exit with only each other to consult.

We agreed that the dancing, the timing, the expressiveness were superb. She creates suspense and delivers an almost nerve-wracking intensity at times in her performance.

Had I seen anything that the artist had intended? Had the things that I did see reside at all in the performance piece, or strictly within my head as a gender-variant person and a feminist theory junkie?

"I saw an earlier version", my companion told me. "There were things she took out. I always thought it was about a murder. But that could have just been me, that's what I thought the piece was about, and she took out the parts that made me think so, so who knows?

Now to be fair, we do that to everyday life. The events of the real world aren't written with a plot, a clear storyline. We weren't handed a program explaining what the life we're about to experience is supposed to be about.
(Or, for those of us who were, we came to doubt the authority of the ushers who handed it to us). Some of us embraced a viewpoint, a political social theory about what's going on in life. We have come to use concepts of gender and identity and narrow confining gender-boxes that people are imprisoned in and struggle with. We embraced the concepts because they explained a lot to us, they clicked into place inside our heads and caused a lot of what we saw on the stage called World to make sense to us.

I believe in theory. I believe in the process of analyzing things. For the record, I don't think it leads to seeing things that your theoretical model say are there when it really all comes from you, the person observing life, inventing meaning where none actually exists. We share these analyses as communities of people who believe these explanations fit well, that they make sense of life. If they didn't offer us much explanatory power, it wouldn't be very satisfying to use them and we'd switch to one that did.

But I do think a lot of it is involves filling in a lot of everyday blank spots with what our theory says is going on. We see a behavior and without access to the thoughts in the behaving person's head, we make assumptions about their attitudes and intentions.

Being self-aware means reminding ourselves occasionally that we do that.

———————

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 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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/67840.html

"I was born this way", he says. "I know some of you think there must have been some event, or situation or whatever that made me like this, but honestly I've always been into dicks since before I knew what sex was".

I can relate; I can recall knowing the biological facts of life about how babies get made, but not knowing diddly about sexual appetite and sexual attraction. My understanding at the time was that the only time people did this behavior was when they wanted to have a baby. I had no idea that it felt good or that there was a hunger for it.

And at that age I had definite feelings for female contours, I mean yeah specifically there where they're different from male people. Their different architecture makes everything shaped differently down there, so that when they wear pants it makes shapes that are specific to their anatomy. And I liked to look at it, I liked the way it felt when I did. And oh! *blush* Was this ever kinky and perverted or what?! I mean, that's where you pee from, so I had to keep this secret lest I be mocked mercilessly by the other kids.

So anyway, yeah, I too seem to have been born this way.

In pretty much any discussion of what floats your boat and gets your motor running, sooner or later someone's likely to say that it's shallow and wrong to have the hots for slender blond people with seductive eyelashes. Or perky green-eyes freckle-faced redheads for that matter. Someone is going to say that you should care about who the person is, not what they look like, all that superficial stuff.

And now, added to that, we sometimes encounter the notion that it's shallow and wrong (and transphobic too) to care that someone has a penis instead of a clitoris, or vice versa or some other variation on that theme. We should accept someone as being of the gender with which they identify, and that goes all the way down to not imposing binary intolerant attitudes about what body parts a person has inside their underwear.

Well, I'm not without some limited experience. I've tried participating sexually with someone who had a penis. I didn't care for it. Call me shallow if you wish, judge me and find me wrong if you must, but I seem to have my sexuality wired to the physical architecture that's traditionally dubbed female.

Meanwhile, some folks don't much care to encounter people who find their physical morphology sexy. Or who find the combination of their physical morphology and their overall gender identity and expression sexy. "Chasers are disgusting. They have a fetish and that means they aren't interested in us as people. We want to be accepted as ordinary members of our gender. What's in my underwear is really nobody's business and I don't want to get involved with somebody who has a thing for that, that's creepy".

I don't mean to discredit that feeling or that attitude. Those who find chasers creepy shouldn't have to step back from saying so.

And there are people who don't opt for medical transitioning. And people who can't afford it. I'm totally on board with their gender identity not being any less valid.

But one size does not necessarily fit all. Some of us find the notion of being chased for the specific combo of our gendered self-expression and our physical morphology quite appealing. I do. I'm a girlish femme, of the starched crinolined variety, a good girl with only a modest naughty streak. I happen to be a male girlish sort, a person with physically male morphology. I present as male, expecting to be perceived as male, in hopes that those people who are attracted to feminine male people will take notice of me. The female folks among them are people I'm potentially going to enjoy connecting with.

There are intersex people who kind of like being appreciated, not merely tolerated in a non-judgmental way, for their variances, for the specifics of their physically unusual selves. Author Hida Viloria, for example, describes her own enjoyment of being able to penetrate her partners with her clitoris, and mentions several people who were pleased to find her to be a person with something extra to offer.

Is it shallow and venal? I don't know. I feel like I don't want someone to reward me for being a nice admirable person by handing out sexual access like a door prize. I feel like I want to be lusted after. I want someone to have the hots for my bod and appreciate that I'm a nice person. I get the hots for people because of their physical contours and I crave reciprocal hots for mine.

———————

My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

———————

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

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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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Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/55082.html

I'm with my Mom in her hospital room. Her body flung a bunch of clots into her circulatory system; one of them wiped out some brain functioning, mostly motor and sensory stuff but some cognitive functions are messed up too; the worst of them plugged up her femoral artery and it cost her most of her left leg, so she's in bed with no knee or anything below it on that side; yet another tried its best to claim her other leg as well, but the surgeons sliced deep into her calf muscle and removed the clot, and after a few iffy days she had enough circulation in that foot that they stopped saying they might have to remove her right leg as well.

It's a huge insult to body integrity; it's almost impossible for me to be here without identifying with her situation and recoiling from it in horror, thinking life would not be worth living, that I wouldn't want to continue like that, and of course she does feel and express a lot of that (to everyone else's dismay). But she wants out of the hospital and to regain control of her life, since dying doesn't seem imminent. She sent me downstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich, bypassing the hospital dietician's tasteless pablum (and ate half of it, which is more than she's been eating off the hospital trays), and then asked me to help her sit up and swing her legs over the side of the bed (this is something physical therapy has been working towards, but my Mom is pushing the issue; she wants maximum mobility and she wants it now).

She and my Dad both fall into that difficult-to-explain middle space when it comes to understanding and accepting me as genderqueer. On the one hand, they've never rejected or made an issue of my femininities. Didn't seem bothered by my lack of interest in sports or my preference for girl playmates when I was a little boy. Didn't join their voices to those of other adults — relatives, neighbors' parents, people from church and school — in questioning why I wasn't more like other boys. And there's no way it wasn't brought to their attention, so they had to have dismissed these concerns as immaterial and irrelevant. The way I was was fine with them. They even suggested a career in nursing back when I was in my early 20s.

On the other hand, I've been out and have tried to be vocal about it since 1980, taking a public stand as a male feminine person, explaining it as a social issue, but their reaction has consistently been "Why do you want to talk about that? That's a personal matter, it's private and nobody else's business and it isn't polite to bring it up". In short, they're OK with me being a male person who happens to have some feminine traits or to have made some choices and decisions that are viewed as appropriate for women and girls, but not so OK with me defining who I am in those terms. They don't like me distinguishing myself from other identities, from straight, from cisgender, from transgender, from gay, in order to explain that my identity is different, that it's something else.

My reading material this week has been Hida Viloria's Born Both, an intersex memoir. Once again I'm finding the thoughts and experiences of intersex activists to be very topical and relevant to my own even though I'm not intersex myself. A great deal of the focus of Born Both is the distinction between viewing one's self as an (otherwise) ordinary man or woman with a physical (medical) intersex condition, or viewing one's self as an intersex person, a person whose body is intersex (not male or female) and whose gender is hermaphrodite (not man or woman). That definitely resonates with me, kin as it is to the distinction between viewing myself as an (otherwise) ordinary male guy who has some feminine traits and behaviors or instead as a gender invert, a male girl or male femme.

Late in the book Viloria writes about her discomfort with the formulation "cisgender": it is a term that sometimes been defined as that state where one's gender matches one's birth sex, and sometimes instead as that state where one's gender is consistent with the gender assigned to one at birth. The problem for Viloria (and for intersex people) is that in the case of the first definition for cisgender, a person who identifies as intersex would be cisgender (the birth sex is intersex and so is the gender identity), which is misleading, and in the case of the second definition, intersex people would be labeled transgender instead because virtually no one is assigned "intersex" — but that's misleading too. The possibility of "intersex" gets erased by binary assumptions that are built into transgender versus cisgender definitions.

And again I find myself nodding with recognition, because I often feel erased by the same definitions. In my case, I have a body, which is male, which was assigned male when I was born, and which continues to be assigned male by anyone who views it. So my sex is cisgender, right? Well, I have a gender too: girl, or femme — definitely not guy or boy or man. Yet my assigned gender, both at birth and as an ongoing act of assignment-by-others, is perennially boy, guy, man. So my gender is trans. The problem for me is that there is a very lazy distinction between sex and gender in the definitions of cisgender and transgender. Those definitions erase the possibility of someone having a current sex that does not "match" their current gender. In other words, they erase me.

Viloria also identifies as a "hermaphrodyke". Her gender is hermaphrodite, her sexual orientation is towards women, and she thinks of herself as a lesbian, not as a straight guy. She of all people would not be inclined to box in everyone as either male or female, and hence as objects of attraction to her as either one orientation or the other; but although in her book she describes times when straight women were attracted to her as a straight guy, and gay men to her as a gay guy, her own appetite seems linked to those set of morphological characteristics that make up classical female body structure. That is true for me as well. There do exist viewpoints among people within the LGBTQIA communities to the effect that no one should have a morphological preference. That it is transphobic or chauvinistically binary to go around requiring that the people to whom one is attracted be in possession of a standard-issue penis or that they own a conventionally defined vagina or whatever. Reciprocally, there is a suspicious mistrust for people whose sexual interests are expressed specifically towards transgender people. Trans women and trans men often find it creepy and objectifying in a fetishy and dehumanizing way to encounter folks who want to become sexually involved with a trans woman (or man) when they themselves identify as women and men, not as trans women or trans men.

But among nonbinary people there has emerged the term skoliosexual, i.e., "to be attracted to transgender or non-binary/genderqueer people". Not all non-cisgender people are people whose identify is anchored in the binary identity opposite to the one they were born into (or assigned to at birth), and as a consequence some of us actively prefer to connect with people who are affirmatively attracted to us as we are, for what we are, for our configuration. Viloria proudly described partners who found her intersex body intrinsically attractive and relays similar tales and experiences from other intersex people she's compared notes with.

My mom is an attractive woman. She has nice curves, nice female shapes even at 82. I'm seeing a lot more of it than I'm accustomed to — hospitals are like that in general, and in her case she keeps feeling so hot that she can't get comfortable, so she's almost become a naturist here. There's a first-tier reaction of turning away from it, embarrassed by proxy. She's from an era and a culture where you kept yourself covered up, especially if you were a woman. But being attactive, being perceived as attractive, is a part of her identity, part of how she thinks of herself: she brushes her hair here, and puts on makeup: blusher, powder, lipstick. She isn't seeking to be attractive in order to prompt active sexual behavior from anyone (she's got that situation handled; she's got my Dad), but because it is woven into her concept of who she is. For me to find her so, on the other hand, is inappropriate, disturbingly so to most people. It's supposed to be so taboo that it would be impossible for me to see those contours in sexual terms. We've put a lot of energy into supposed to when it comes to sexuality. As a culture we invest in shoulds and should nots and leave little room for people to feel what they feel, alleged sexual revolutions beside the point. Poke at this particular one and you'll see that under it is the hidden notion that male people can't help acting on any sexual feeling that they experience. The #metoo movement says that's bullshit. I do too. The attraction is there because my mom is female. Not because I'm imposing a litmus test that says I can only find someone attractive if they're female. I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing much in the way of shoulds here if you see what I mean. I can also state with confidence that finding her attractive doesn't make it likely that I'm going to climb into her hospital bed and commit acts of sexual assault. People don't recoil in quite the same way at the notion of a daughter seeing her Dad as a sexually attractive man. But that's because there's a preconceived notion about what male sexuality is like, one that lots of folks hold in their heads without being fully conscious of it.

The difference between being a guy who has some feminine attributes and being a male girl is the same as the difference between being a woman (or man) with some sexually ambiguous characteristics and being an intersex person. It's the difference between noun and adjective, it's the declaration of a phenomenon, a thang. Before 1980 I knew myself to be a male person who had more in common with the girls than with the other boys; I was aware that that made me subject to being classified as a fag, a sissy queerboy, which wasn't right but neither was it right to say that no, I was a regular guy, a straight boy. After 1980 I knew myself to have an entirely separate gender or sexual identity, something just as different as being gay, but not that, and not being male-to-female transgender either. Something else. Something folks hadn't heard about yet, weren't talking about, had no awareness of. It was a sense of identity instead of a box of attributes. It converted the attributes into normative aspects for a male girl instead of peculiar aspects for a guy. It explained my experiences in political terms instead of implying that character defects on my part had brought my experiences upon me. It made a huge difference in my self-esteem.

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It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.

What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.

The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.

That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.

I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.

But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.

Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.

Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.

And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.

The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.

But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.

Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.

Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.

I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.

Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.

Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.

I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.

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More specifically, the Tourism Board of the planet of Czilan is interested in increasing the number of earthly visitors, and they've been tossing around some ideas about how to market Czilan as a vacation destination.

Although they aren't lacking in natural wonders and historical sites, they're convinced that the main feature of Czilan they should focus on in their marketing efforts is the fact that, compared to earth, Czilannian stereotypes and expectations about the sexes are exactly reversed. Mirror-image. No one knows specifically why — whether folks there are biologically different from earth folks or if it's just an accident of different historical and cultural shifts.

Conveniently, they look very much the same, to the point that people from either society would fit right in, indistinguishable on the basis of appearance, and since we all speak Galactic Standard, language won't be a problem.

So, here's what the tourism board was initially thinking:

• Earthly men could be lured to visit by the likelihood of being hit on by Czilannian women if they pretty themselves up.

• Earthly women, meanwhile, would respond to the promise of being able to get away from that, to be safe anywhere and everywhere from overt sexual attention.

But that initial focus has been challenged and after a couple of protracted arguments, the folks on the Tourism Board are no longer in agreement. Here are some of the concerns that got tossed out for additional consideration:

• Someone brought up the "likely behavior of the earthly males" and conjured up an unflattering picture of them running around acting in ways that would provoke hostile reactions from the Czilannians. There was a long loud argument in which some people thought the folks on Czilan would label these guys as "sluts and tramps" and become actively angry with them for overtly propositioning native women, while others said "You're assuming these beliefs about differences are based in actual differences between the sexes. They're just beliefs and neither real Czillanian men and women nor real Earth men and women actually have those differences." After an hour or so of arguing back and forth, a third cluster of board members coalesced around the viewpoint that whether the sexes are different or not, the expectations are real and that people might react based on the violation of their expectations, if the earthly males actually acted that way — "But why would they? They'll have it made! They don't have to behave that way here, and, besides, getting a reputation is unimportant for someone who is on vacation, they leave at the end and that's the end of it".

• Someone else brought up the question of whether to market visits to Czilan to LGBT communities, especially to transgender people. "Why would they want to come here?", a dissenter replied, "I would think that for transgender people from earth, coming to a gender-inverted environment would either be creepy or just irrelevant, and any marketing efforts implying otherwise would insult them and piss them off". From that beginning, the argument went off on a tangent about whether transgender people mostly want to get away from sex-based expectations that dont fit or whether it's mostly about the body itself being wrong and has little to do with cultural gender expectations and notions. Finally a consensus emerged that this was not on topic and needed to be shelved, so the question of whether to extend marketing efforts to the earthly transgender community remains unresolved. There was also an attempt to discuss the potential appeal (or lack thereof) to gay and lesbian or intersex travelers but the folks who were exhausted by the transgender discussion said it wasn't relevant either, and those who disagreed were shouted down.

• Then someone took issue with the notion that the only interest for earthly women would be to get away from unwanted sexual attentions for awhile. "Do you seriously think those gals on earth have so little of a sense of adventure? This would be a different experience opportunity for them. I bet there are many earthly women who would find it fun to be the overtly sexually predatory sex and have the chance to explore that without guys interrupting them to make passes and take the upper hand in being sexually pushy, the way those earth guys are". Once again there were several people arguing that "Women on earth, women on Czilan, women everywhere pursue sex just as actively and overtly as men do, it's just a silly outdated social notion that they don't, but it was probably never true on Earth any more than male sexual passivity is true on Czilan". One person said the reactions of some Czilannian men, deliberately designed to discourage overtly pushy women and to establish that they aren't just passive and get to make their own choices, would be very offputting to women from Earth. "Well, that's the challenge of it" the original board member replied.

So the Board decided to do some research, which is where you come in!

Is there any marketing strategy that's been discussed so far that would make you more likely to book an excursion to Czilan? How would you improve or elaborate on it?

Is there a different, unmentioned interest you would have that the Board should consider in designing its approach?

Please include your sex and gender identity and other factors including sexual orientation and whether you consider yourself cisgender or transgender or other departures from the binary if you think they're relevant to your answers.

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The world of Czilan was the setting for a 300-page science fiction novel I wrote in 1982. It's sitting in the back of a dusty back drawer, where it belongs: it was awful.

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Today I'd like to talk about visual aspects of sexuality. One person sees another and that person's appearance is sexually stimulating to the observer. A person spends a fair amount of time thinking about their own appearance and whether or not they are sexually desirable on the basis of their looks. A person who wants a sexual partner goes to a singles environment and looks around first and foremost for someone whose appearance appeals to them as sexy and enticing.

The visual aspect of sexuality is gendered. I don't know for sure whether the experience of seeing a visually appealing representative of the sex to which one is attracted is a different experience for male folks than for female folks, but there's not much question that it is widely believed that it's different. The belief is that men are much more visually responsive, that women's visual appearance (for heterosexual guys) or, for that matter, the visual appearance of other men (for gay guys) motivates male people much more emphatically than female people are sexually motivated by the looks of male people's bodies (for straight women) or the bodies of other women (for lesbians).

If it isn't actually true, it certainly wouldn't be the first "difference between the sexes" that turns out to be a myth. Some feminists who have believed it to be just that have said "Hey, this patriarchal society has not been particularly interested in what women want. Until recently, the female orgasm didn't get much press, so it should not come as a surprise that most ideas about what looks sexy are actually ideas about what men find to be sexy-looking". And, yes, there has been more recognition in the modern era of the female erotic gaze: this Optimum Online ad that's running currently and, for that matter, this Diet Coke ad from a couple decades ago. So it's out there and it's not exactly brand new.

But there's still the persistent notion that male sexuality is far more visually oriented, even if we now recognize that women like to look too. When we discuss women as sex objects, what we most often mean is women as visually consumable sex objects. It is women who mostly have to confront the insistence on the importance of their looks; it is women for whom having a potentially sexually appetizing appearance is most totally rendered into social currency, for whom it plays such a prominent role in some people's evaluation of their worth and value, and it contributes to the sense that the trajectory of an individual woman's social power seems to peak so much earlier than that of individual men.

Well, today I'd like us to consider how much this visual thing has to do with another popular notion about the differences between the sexes, the notion that men are more sexually aggressive than women.

Let's say for the sake of argument that it really is true that men are more visual, sexually. A man sees a woman across the room, a complete stranger, and, attracted to her, he acts on those sexual feelings. From her perspective, a complete stranger with whom she has no connection is suddenly coming on to her.

She, with her clitoris less wired to her eyeballs, would have been far less likely to do the same if she'd seen him first.

If we remove the visual from the situation, and look at the rest of sexual interaction and the formation of sexual interest, we're mostly looking at people who come on to other people as an outgrowth of interacting with them. Eyesight, specifically, has that peculiar quality of creating a reaction towards another person with whom there hasn't been any personal interaction.

I've long thought that a good research project on gender could be done by interviewing blind men and observing blind individual in social settings, to see what happens with male sexual behavior in the absence of reactions to visual stimuli. I haven't had a chance to pursue it, though.

Meanwhile, I am curious about your experiences with the visual aspects of sexuality, and your own thoughts on the matter:

• if you are male, does it seem to you that your own sexuality is more driven by other people's visual appearance than the sexuality of women seems to be? if you are female, do you have the sense that male people are more sexually driven by how people look?

• assuming you do perceive such a difference, how do you feel about it? or, if you do not see that kind of pattern in real life, do you have any feelings about the widespread belief that such a difference does exist?

• think about a person who sees someone they don't already know from across the room or on the subway platform or standing on the sidewalk or something, and that they experience that person as sexy, sexually appetizing, because of how they look. if I ask you to imagine what kind of feelings and thoughts are likely to be going through the sexually interested observer's head, can you describe that for me?

• do you, or have you in the past, often experienced yourself as the object of other people's sexually interested gaze? how does or did that make you feel, both "at the moment" and overall as a feature of your life?

• is there any part of the entire phenomenon about visual aspects of sexuality that makes you angry and resentful? for that matter, do you ever feel like other people have resentments pertaining to visual sexuality in such a way that their resentments affect you?

I myself identify as genderqueer, meaning (in my case) that I think of myself as "one of the girls" rather than "one of the guys". And yet this is definitely one area of gender and sex where my own experience matches up with the expected male pattern: yes, a big component of my sexuality and sexual feelings is tied up with my reactions to women's appearance. I see women's shapes and contours and I have strong sexual feelings.

It has long seemed to me that many people equate being sexually visually attracted like that with being a sexual aggressor: you know, you see someone who looks sexy to you, so that inspires you to go try to make things happen. Except that isn't how it is for me. I'm nearly always ambivalent and uncertain about what I want in the "here and now" specific sense of this or that sexy-looking woman. The sexual feelings I experience make me feel vulnerable and shy. Here is this person who may be a total stranger who is having this sexual affect on me just because of how she looks.

Recently, I wrote this:

The social awareness and expectation of female sexuality — distorted though it may be in a zillion other ways — incorporates an acknowledgment of ambivalence, of the possibility of feeling sexually interested or sexually attracted or sexually aroused while, nevertheless, having feelings about that other than hot damn, wheeeee, sex sex sex!

In fact, there's a general awareness (about female sexuality) that having a sexual response to someone, whether physical or emotional or whatever, involves vulnerability. It's an appetite, a situation in which one needs something from someone else, and where the fact of having that desire can sort of leave you open (and vulnerable) to variations on that "something" that are not, actually, what you want and need but come close enough to it to confound your filters, your self-protective mechanisms, or your just-plain-old tastes.

We can relate to women in books or films or real life when they discuss being in a situation where a sexually fascinating guy was doing things and where the woman's reaction was complex and ambivalent and nuanced: "On the one hand, he was handsome and tall and had nice hands and I wanted some of that kind of action, but I wasn't feeling like he was connecting to me, he was too slick and polished about it, and I didn't sense an awareness on his part that he acknowledged that I get some say-so about this, that he isn't just entitled to it because he's learned his lounge act so well, so I found myself not wanting to, and the more he continued the less I wanted to have anything to do with him". Or whatever. Right?

So, I'd also like to pose this question, or set of questions, to other male people specifically: to what extent is it like that for you, too? Does the social expectation that, as males, we're always ready to jump on the opportunity, that for us to be visually attracted always means we are happily ready to have sex... does that expectation annoy you, anger you, do you resent it? Do you feel ignored or silenced by the lack of general acknowledgment that our sexuality is fraught with ambivalences and vulnerabilities too, or do you not feel that that is true for you?

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Tea and Transition: A Story of Love, the Human Spirit, and How One Man Became One Woman, by Nicola Jane Chase (Telemachus Press: 2015)

Barriers to Love: Embracing a Bisexual Identity, by Marina Peralta with Penolope James (Barriers Press: 2013)

These are a pair of memoirs, one from a transgender woman and one from a bisexual woman. Both are effectively self-published (Telemachus is basically a vanity press, and Barriers Press appears to be therapist Marina Peralta's own publication vehicle). I am all too familiar with the difficulty involved in getting a conventional publisher to publish an LGBTQIAetc memoir, and both of these books were recommended to me in response to my searches for such stories.

I began Nicola Jane Chase's book a couple months ago and ended up putting it aside, unfinished, for several weeks because it did not draw me in at the beginning. To be honest, I was expecting a standard narrative story arc and didn't get one. I mean, I opened the book expecting "My childhood was like this, you see, and here is when I first began to realize I was different from other males, that I was one of the girls instead of one of the boys", and then a tale of events and realizations and so on.

Instead, I was immediately plummeted into the current mental world of a trans woman. Chase warns in the prologue that "All true tales should start at the beginning. However, in my case I can't be sure when that beginning was." I flipped the page and she was already writing of her impending sex reassignment surgery appointment. The flow of Tea and Transition is nonlinear, more akin to listening to a very verbose and chatty companion rattle off thoughts from the top of her head than akin to reading someone's meticulously wrought story of what it was like to be her and to go through the experiences she has gone through. There's no objective reason to require a chronologically linear tale, and, indeed, many excellent authors bounce around between years and settings in the process of telling what they wish to tell, but it did not sit well with me.

I found myself formulating a mental image of the author, and it was one I was not comfortable with. To be quite blunt, I discovered myself thinking of her as a scatterbrained airhead, all fluff and trivialities. I felt squirmy about that, because there's a strongly misogynistic strand in that, of thinking of women in that dismissive fashion, and a transphobic / trans-hostile strand also, I think, involved in viewing transgender women that way as well: was I harboring creepy sentiments that I needed to deconstruct and examine before proceeding?

I eventually decided -- somewhat cautiously -- that I was not guaranteed to always like each and every woman, nor each and every transgender woman, that some individual human beings may indeed leave me with the impression of being scatterbrained, and that unless I had a pattern of seeing all folks in a category that way, it wasn't necessarily an illegitimate reaction on my part. So I picked up the book and this time I kept reading. And it got better.

There are many books written by transgender people which are more like the book I was initially expecting, books that detail identity-formulation from some point in childhood. Tea and Transition is entirely focused on adulthood and in large part this is because Nicola Jane Chase did not become conscious of a differently gendered sensibility until well into adulthood. Even at that point, there is not as much mulling over of the relevant issues as I would have wished. I suppose I'm guilty of some degree of projection: why hadn't Nicola been less comfortable considering the prospect that she was, indeed, a she? Instead, the narrative describes considering it, dipping a toe in the water (cross-dressing), liking it, and proceeding blithely onward. Be that as well it may, the journey soon enough required serious commitment, and in this, the author describes an almost agonizing passion to hold on to this despite the threat of high prices to be paid. Will she be able to retain good relationships with her mother, best friend, her place of employment and career? There's nothing trivial or airheaded about her evaluation and acceptance of these risks, which were clearly nontrivial risks. And there is more about this aspect of the trans journey in Tea and Transition than most such narratives provide.

At some point I came to realize where some of my hostility was coming from. It's defensive on my part. I myself identified with girls back when I was 7 or 8 years old. As an adult, presenting to other people as a genderqueer and gender inverted individual, I have encountered an expectation, sometimes explicit but more often hinted at, that I, and any other male who identifies as a girl in some fashion, crave the specific female experience of being a sex object. It's more of a sore point for me that I realized, but there you have it: my sexuality outgrew in complicated ways but it was entwined with gender and had a whole lot more innocence (and perhaps eventually the erotic potential of corruptibility thereof) than it had of either the boys' contempt-flavored delight in the crude or the adult female sex object's confident enjoyment of a status as arousal material for others.

And Nicola Jane Chase was too much exactly what I'd been suspected of: someone whose realized identity as femme was very much grounded in a desire to wear Victoria's Secret and to slink into a bar and be hit on, to be visually desirable precisely as a female, to be the hot chick.

So yeah, my hostility. Yeesh, I'm basically a frowny-faced disapproving censorious puritanically prudish tight-lipped femme person, shaking my head negatively at Ms. Chase. I don't think it's quite slut-shaming (I like and respect sluts), it's more... sex-object-shaming. Calling her shallow in my head and all that.

At a minimum, chalk one up for Nicola Jane Chase for teaching me more about myself. Title available from Amazon.

I picked up the Marina Peralta title specifically because I had not run across many bisexual coming-out / coming-of-age stories and I wanted some for my bookshelf collection. I'd read little articles and online posts on Facebook and whatnot about how bisexuals were not exactly embraced by the lesbian and gay folks within the LGBTQIAetc community but were instead treated as if they'd already been spoken for since gay males and lesbians had had their turn, while at the same time treated as if they were hedging their bets with one foot in the straight world, and regarded as risky partners who would be likely to dump you to be in a straight relationship.

For the second time, I was somewhat disappointed that the book I picked up didn't meet my initial expectations and projected assumptions. Peralta's book does not delve much into participation in the modern lesbian-gay-etc community and this is in part because of the temporal setting: she came of age and had most of her relevant experiences (as recounted in the book) in the 1950s and 1960s before a post-Stonewallian movement existed to contend with or belong to.

What WAS fascinating about Barriers to Love was the author's narrative of trying to understand her sexuality in an era when "bisexual" wasn't really on the map of possibilities to choose from. As a genderqueer person who came of age when there was no identity such as my own available to me, I saw parallels there and could relate to her own slow and gradual trying-on of identities only to find out later "no, that's not really it", and to keep requestioning and searching for a valid answer all pretty much on her own.

Also of relevant interest was the way in which conventional heterosexual appetite, for a girl of that era and in that setting (Mexico), was treated as a perversion instead of being nonchalantly accepted as normative. It was a world in which females with their own sexual interest in boys were told this is bad, this is wrong. I think we forget how this maps onto and against the tapestry of attitudes towards gay and lesbian sexuality, and this becomes more vivid precisely because of the author's bisexuality: YES, once confronted with the even more scary prospect of her daughter's being a lesbian, the author's mom becomes interested in seeing her paired with an appropriate male, but her first sexual interest was towards a male and the same mom was appalled to see that appetite expressed and condemned it and did what she felt she needed to do to kill it and prevent it from consummation.

From Peralta, too, I would have appreciated more internal / mental life, more about the inside thinking processes that led up to concluding "Hey, I am a bisexual person". (Or the equivalent realization in her own terms if she came to that realization before being exposed to the concept).

It is, however, a moving personal account and although it is rooted in a specific time and culture, it has a lot of universal content about what it can be like to be sexually receptive to both sexes and how the two patterns are similar and how they are different and how others perceive and react.

I have some very fresh news but it isn't ripe yet. Watch this space. I hope to have new things to reveal soon.

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This post had its origin in my replies to a couple of Facebook posts about "Eww, did you see how that female performer was barely dressed? Way to be a role model for our teenage daughters!" and "I took my daughter shopping. Everything available looked like it came from Sluts R Us and I wouldn't let her have any of it and we got into a big argument".

While I agree that girls should be free to be energetic young people whose worth is not derived from how sexually attractive they are, I don't think it's a single-faceted issue.

• Starting at the mid-teen years, girls rapidly begin taking on the appearance that society around them says is the epitome of sexual attractiveness, desirability. To have that is to have POWER, not just to be found pleasing to others. The power aspect of it is well-represented in our cultural portrayals.

• Feminism in the late 70s and early 80s made us rethink a lot of that. It's all about the male gaze, the male appetite; there are limits to how much power can really come from being a commodity, no matter how fervently sought after. But it's not like feminists (let alone the rest of society) reached a clear consensus on the whole matter. Being REDUCED to being a sex object is obviously always bad, and any kind of double standard causing women to be assessed on the basis of their appearance while men are assessed for their skills and accomplishments is also obviously bad, but are there female-positive components to this sense of power stemming from being desired that aren't just patriarchal illusion?

• The movement against slut shaming begins with the perspective that blaming girls and women for provoking unwanted sexual attention is blaming the wrong party. But it has become also a recognition that a girl or woman has the right to be sexually forward without that constituting a blanket permission for any and all sexual attention.

Liberation means not only that it should be OK to be in public and not get sexually harassed regardless of what you're wearing. It also means that it should be OK to, yes, actually be seeking sexual attention. Not only does no mean no; "hey cute boy" means "hey cute boy".

What needs reexamining is NOT just the expectation & pattern that boys will be sexually aggressive to the point of invasiveness (and that that's ok because "boys will be boys", barf smiley here). What ALSO needs reexamining is the the expectation that girls will be, or should be, sexual gatekeepers, the sayers of "yes" and "no", the reactive party, reacting with "yes" or "no" in response to the boys' sexualized attentions. But unless we're going to tell girls that the only acceptable model for being sexually forward is to grab a cute guy and make an overt pass at him, many girls who wish to be sexually forward will sometimes do so by dressing provocatively.

I don't think teenage girls should be pushed into, or pushed away from, sexuality. Girls should not be pushed period. Girls should get to experiment to whatever extent they want to (respecting the boundaries of the boys or, for that matter, other girls) and also should get to refrain from doing so to whatever extent they don't wanna.

I'm leery of the way that positioning one's self as visually sexually desirable is such a specifically gendered thing — asymmetry is always worrisome when we're concerned with sexual equality. On the other hand, if 13 and 14 year old girls are being told that it is sexual power, that their deployment of their own appearance is a way of being sexually aggressive, telling them not to is telling them "you don't get to use that", and that's just as gendered a message, yes?

The whole consideration of visual sexual attraction and attractiveness is definitely gendered. Even people who don't ascribe to many other beliefs about built-in differences between the sexes are often inclined to agree that male people are more wired to have sexual feelings in response to the appearance of someone of the sex they're attracted to. I would tentatively put myself in that category, by the way. It's not something I'm going to claim certainty about, but I fit the pattern myself despite the many ways in which I'm gender-atypical.

I jump off the consensus boat quickly, though, when people start reaching additional conclusions based on that.

• I've heard people say that because of men's strong sexual response to seeing women, it is inevitable that men will approach women and be the ones to try to make sex happen. As I've said several times here, that's not the case for me and people like me. I explained it on my OKCupid profile like so: there are zillions of attractive women and I see them all the time as part of my daily life; if these attractive strangers were intermittently approaching me to make a pass at me, I would be doing the same to them, but they don't; and I long ago learned that most women find it annoying and threatening to have complete strangers approach them and express that they feel sexual attraction. They are rumored to be interested in sex mostly in the context of an ongoing relationship, which I can relate to, I have always wanted a girlfriend. The accusation of only being after sex combines with the expressions of anger and annoyance and the lack of successful outcome and quickly teaches that just because these attractive women are attractive doesn't identify them as sexual opportunities. Hmm, well, if the endeavor is to find a girlfriend, being visually sexually attractive isn't a good signifier of being a good prospect for that; zillions of women are visually attractive so that's nothing special or unusual, whereas I only connect well to a tiny minority. And in addition that means there's no reason I should be the one doing the approaching if the goal is to connect with someone for an ongoing relationship, since the visual sexual appeal and the differences in our susceptibility to it is largely irrelevant.

• On a second tier, the same type of conclusions get bandied around when discussing who does what once there have been cues and clues and signals that yes, there's mutual interest in having sexual activities take place. The woman is portrayed as the object of desire, which positions the man as the one with the appetite, the hunger, and from this it is often concluded that he will be doing things to her, that he will be the active party who is in control of sexualizing their interaction, with her control deriving from being the brake pedal, the reactive party. That hasn't been my experience. The person whose appearance provokes sexual interest on the other person's part is not required to be passive or to have participation limited to being reactive. Nor, incidentally, does the experience of being visually sexually attracted directly translate into having an inclination to do anything in particular, and in fact it can be a somewhat paralyzing experience. The most forwardly seductive people I've known conveyed a sense of awareness of their desirability and used it as an aggression: "You want; I can MAKE you want; I can make this happen".

In fact, the confidence and the projected sense of enjoyment and delight at doing so, of conveying "I have selected you and I'm going to have you", is a strong enough component that it outweighs the importance of the appearance itself. It's not what she has so much as how she uses it, in other words. The usual procedure that involves leveraging her own visual attractiveness goes something like this: she draws a specific guy's attention to her body and then to her eyes so as to express "yeah, I made you look, and we both know you want it".

• That behavior, in which the woman uses her appearance in a sexually aggressive manner, is not the only or even the most typical sexually aggressive behavior that I've seen women use. She may instead make a physical or verbal declaration of sexual interest that is focused on how the object of her attentions is attractive to her, making it all about her own appetite. Those expressions do not tend to focus on her own visual sexual appeal, so her own visual desirability isn't really a factor.

One thing the two modes have in common is confidence. Whether she's expressing "I know I'm hot and I can focus that on you and make you want me" or "I find you hot and I want you and therefore I will have you", her self-assurance makes it sexy and makes it work.

• And that brings me back to focusing on myself and my own situation. We all find confidence attractive, don't we? So where is a genderqueer girlish male-bodied person like me going to acquire sexual confidence from? This is no passing tangential subject, it's right at the dead-central core of things: how does a male-bodied person who identifies as girl exude sexual confidence and therefore a decent shot at being found sexually attractive by those he finds appealing?

Let's unpack that quickly. Yes, it has totally been a lifelong concern for me that girls and women to whom I was attracted would not be reciprocally attracted to me in the same way. I think precisely because I always thought of myself as essentially identical to them, it mattered a great deal to me that it be reciprocal. Meanwhile, as you'll recall, we started off saying that it's widely believed that female folks are less sexually driven by visual appearances. So that right there is going to make it difficult to believe that mirror-image parity is possible, so how *do* I find my way towards a sexual confidence?

I think we can posit the existence of some degree of female visual-based sexual interest. When I was in grad school in the early 90s there was a 4-day discussion on the women's studies discussion list about an event in which three women students on bicycles pedaled past a male student and one of them catcalled "Bow wow wow puppy chow!". And there was a Diet Coke ad on TV a few years ago in which several office women stare appreciatively out the window at a cute guy on a construction crew down below. When we say women are less sexually driven by visual appearance, perhaps we mean they feel it the same way that guys do but with fewer exclamation marks, or perhaps we mean they are interested and find it appealing but that it's less specifically sexual for them. And by now, having written this, I find myself backpedaling: I myself am suspicious whenever there's a formulation that says that the female version of anything observed first in males is "lesser". Well, I did say I wasn't certain.

Women often say that they dress for themselves. I think most of the time they do not mean that they have no consideration or concern for how they will be viewed by others (especially the sort of others that they may hope will find them sexually attractive), but rather that the important thing is that they themselves feel well put together, sexy and confidently at ease with their chosen appearance and presentation. For me it started in the same space. I didn't really know if there was an ideal visual presentation available for me that would provoke sexual interest in the type of women I'd like to be sexually interested in me. I could hope that there was, and I could choose the choosable aspects of my appearance (such as grooming and the way that I dress). Having done so, I stirred that in with my confidence that I was good company, a caring person, a fascinating person with a fascinating mind, someone fun to be with.

Nowadays I have the added advantage of knowing from experience that, yeah, it works, it can happen at any time, and sometimes it does.

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