First draft thoughts on masculinity

I realize I’ve been writing the script for this week’s show through an almost manic amount of tweeting. This isn’t a great idea considering how deranging Twitter is (‘X’ whatever), but it is helping consolidate and figure out what I think.

This topic exercises me; it’s pretty much a new frontier in the change of public discourse: that masculinity is almost universally “recognized” as a state of sin, a state of innate hostility and danger. Almost everyone believes this, even when they say and believe that they don’t believe it.

They do. The merest mention of the ideas “boys ought not dance like girls on the Minnesota Vikings cheerleading squad” is met with shock and abuse. Accusations of “misogyny,” of “homophobia,” of “attitudes like yours are why these kids think they need to trans.” Men are not allowed, ever, under any circumstances, to ever object to sissying up boys. Why, that’s abusive. We have to make even more space for sissy boys, encourage more sissiness and faggotry, because that means we reaaa-weeeee wuv them.

Meanwhile society has space for no men who aren’t sissies. And this isn’t about gay or straight—none of us men who talk like men and insist on being men, however we may fail in the ways we do—we all get called toxic. Misogynist. Why trans kids happened.

You ungrateful wretches. We have a lot to talk about.

It is loathsome, and it’s common. I’m seeing people online I like and respect and my eyes are goggling. There is much to say about this on Disaffected this Sunday.

For now, here’s something that has a better chance of sane discussion or disagreement here than it does on that hellscape.

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As a boy, I had no father. Mine left my mother before I was born.

At three years old, she hooked up with my stepfather, then married him. He was a violent abuser. He concussed me, beat me, beat my mother, and molested his own daughter, my sister.

Against this backdrop was my abusive mother, the woman with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. She vacillated between mocking and humiliating me for "being soft; no girl will ever want you, and you're going to turn out like every other piece of shit man like your father" and treating me like a golden prince, "You're so handsome all the girls will go for you."

I didn't know if I was coming or going.

Having no father, I never learned to fight. I didn't learn how to defend myself. I didn't even learn how to walk like a man, talk like a man, or take responsibility for myself like a man.

Instead, I learned to cry. To panic. To dissolve in tears of frustration, and then to scream to get my way. I learned to be a feminine borderline, like my mother.

Every normal, masculine man or boy I met I feared. I believed men were born innately evil and abusive (think how that affects a boy child's view of himself). When I did get pushed around or picked on for being a homo, I was terrified. And I exaggerated the bullying to a hysterical degree.

But most normal boys rejected me because, well, normal people can smell the freak on you (you may call it ‘trauma’ if that’s more palatable) and they could smell it on me. I had almost no friends until middle school when I suddenly “became funny” and found some popularity or acceptance for the first time in my life.

I became a histrionic. An entertainer. I had a power no one else did. I couldn’t throw a football, but I could cast a spell on a room. Hey, it does me pretty well today to keep people entertained. But it’s definitively an adaptive behavior as a response to abuse. I would have been better off at least learning to throw the football, too.

If I'd known how to hold my own and throw the punches back, I would have been even better off.

Until my 40s, I thought I wasn't part of the male sex, not really. All straight men hated sissies like me, I thought, and would kill me if they could. It's deranged, but this is the mindset of so many guys like me.

What I needed was a male role model. I needed to learn to be a man. That didn't need to mean I'd turn into a football jock. Society has always had a place for bookish, intellectual men--and that's a path I could have taken respectably. It didn't have to mean being a feminized, histrionic mess.

But I didn't have that. Millions of boys don't.

And I removed myself from the society of men, not realizing that I was part of them. That most of them didn't hate me. That they, and I, all being men, could be friends and share men's business.

As gay rights became "the thing," society hug-boxed me. Women especially. I "leaned in" to being a victim, into seeking out maternal love and approval from women friends, into performing "gay best friend" for them.

I turned into a stereoptypical pocket pansy.

I’m not a “gay man” anymore. Not in any way that’s fundamental to who I am. Not in the way you inevitably hear when a guy describes himself that way. I am a man, and I am also a homosexual. Yeah, I’m shaped by my past and I’m definitely “gay” in that way. I like to put on camp humor. I’m a 20th century gay, and it’s fun. But I’m not a sissy, not anymore. And there is no dignity in sissyhood. That’s why it’s a popular BDSM fetish for God’s sake.

Do you want this for your sons? For your neighbors' sons? For the boys you claim to care about?

Have you ever thought about this?

Don’t mistake me please; I’m not asking for your sympathy. I’m not wallowing in victimhood, or presenting myself to you as a victim. I’m trying to tell you a truth that pertains to many more gay men than me personally. I hope you’ll want to understand that point of view.

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