Complex Numbers

Nonbinary

Today's thing is a bit different from usual: a gender-issues retrospective from a male homo sapiens.

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/identitieswhat-are-they-good-for/articles/what...

What Is It Like to Be a Man?
Sometimes I just feel like a bad joke.

Oh, man up.

Wait, that plays right into his hands. Nevermind.

I figured out long ago that there is only one way for me to avoid feeling like a bad joke. No, it is not "stop being a bad joke." That is impossible. It is "OWN the bad joke. BE the bad joke." Be the ball, Danny.

A woman coworker, explaining the different ways men and women move through the world, says to me, “As a man, you never think about how much space you take up.” I nod, because I agree with the point she intends to make, but the wording of the statement is so literally false—I have fretted about the physical space I occupy for most of my clumsy, in-the-way, yo-yo dieting life—that I am still thinking about this trivial exchange hours later.

Yeah. Literally false. For a long time I felt like I was too big for the world - and I'm only 5'6".

“Men don’t have to think about how they look,” says another coworker, also a woman, and I nod again. Then I realize, days later, that the reason the statement is still bugging me is that I am literally never not sore from the gym, because I am so concerned with looking a certain way.

Also literally false. Not only is the weight issue a pressing thing for many men, but I avoid online dating specifically because most of the women on there specify 6' or taller. I can do something about my weight, and I am. Can't do anything about my height. On the other hand, I can't say I don't have physical desires if I were to look for a partner; it's just that this one seems so arbitrary. What's height got to do with anything besides blocking the people behind you in the theater?

I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self-imposed discipline that I owe the universe.

Lest anyone think that you can generalize about "men," this should stop that shit dead in its tracks. I believe the author believes that about himself. Fine. I'm precisely the opposite: I want comfort, and I only exercise because I have to. I do try to avoid painkillers for one simple reason: how do I know if the pain is actually gone or if it's the painkillers' effect? Pain isn't weakness or a sign of being somehow lesser; it's your body telling you something is very wrong. If you push through the pain, like coaches urge, you risk further injury. If you mask the pain and then push through it, the result can be even worse.

Never had any use for moisturizer, though.

(An anarchist friend of mine was going to teach me, until he left town for vague but important-sounding reasons, as one’s anarchist friends are prone to do.)

See, that bit is legitimately funny. If this author nourished that side of himself, he could learn to live with being a joke by telling them.

When I try to nail down what masculinity is—what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism, this showboating asceticism and loud silence—I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect.

Yeah... I'm calling bullshit on that.

I have to admit, as an aside, that I find it hard to see the whole "gender is a social construct" thing. I mean, yes, certain aspects of it are, in my view, but they're mostly superficial things: a particular style of haircut, wearing bigger watches (if one wears a watch at all these days), a lack of makeup. Big deal. I knew a guy who kept a Barbie doll collection, and sewed little outfits for them. I never thought of him as anything other than a man (though such a hobby is, in my view, weird for anyone of any gender, I'm in no position to call anyone out on weird hobbies).

Basically, if something is a social construct, the social construct can be changed. Even if it's inherent in biology, one of the hallmarks of humankind is to try to transcend one's biology.

By this I don’t mean, of course, that we should give up. Men will not stop worrying about their wives, or their husbands, or their children, or their friends and coworkers and dogs, or about the little patches of civilization to which they may feel they’ve contributed. Nor will women, or the nonbinary (a category that I sometimes think includes most of us).

Which, really, is what I've been trying to say all along. We think of these gender roles, these social constructs, as binary, and, as I've noted in other places, life isn't binary; it's spectrum. There is no one who exemplifies the Platonic ideal of "man" or "woman," even if such an ideal existed. Each individual is who they are, irrespective of what roles society tries to place on them, and regardless of genetics or hormones or plumbing.

One of the greatest failings of modern society, I think, is this "binary" myth. "Oh, you're single and you're not out pursuing women? You must be gay." No, I'm not gay; I'm so fucking hetero that I don't even like to see dicks in my porn. No, I just don't like to do all the work involved. Which puts me outside the current Platonic ideal of "man," which requires that I be interested in the chase and then lose interest once the woman is hooked. No, thanks; not going down that road. Point is, most of us aren't either "gay" or "straight," but somewhere in between. This is even more apparent with actual physical attributes; I mentioned height above -- while you can generally look at one person and call them "tall" and another and call them "short," the full reality of human adult height is on something of a standard bell curve (also called a Poisson distribution after the mathematician who popularized it; as I'm sure you know, "poisson" means "fish," and there are plenty of fish in the sea, of all different sizes).

Even if one restricts oneself to the biological aspects, chromosomes and genitalia and the like, it's not like everyone's either this or that. Most are, probably, but there's always chimerae and intersex people and those with extra chromosomes or whatever. And everyone deserves basic human dignity and rights (at least until they prove themselves unworthy of such by their actions), regardless of what pigeonhole you or society says they belong in.

Anyway, that's enough of that rant for today. I suggest reading the article; it's very well-written, even if I have my issues with it. As I'm sure some people will have issues with what my white (sort of) cis male hetero ass wrote here. That's okay; I can take criticism.

I am, after all, a man.