From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Redefining masculinity
Date: 22 Aug 92 20:14:51 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison


In article <joelp.714438821@cs.man.ac.uk> joelp@cs.man.ac.uk
(Joel Parthemore) writes:

>Continuing to follow the Sarver/redefining masculinity
>thread, I want to let go and cry.

Certainly that's allowed, I think.  If you want to, why
shouldn't you?  I'm responding here for a coupla reasons.
One is, I'm anything but sure I fully got what you were
trying to say.  Another is that if I got any of it, it 
suggests you and I might be about as diametrically opposed
as two personality types can be, on the face of it.  But
"on the face of it" could be an illusion.

>I realize I'm having trouble reading some of the postings
>(especially the ones from Bob, with the sheer intensity of
>their emotion) because of the strength of the response they
>evoke in me.

Other than contempt for the ideas expressed, and pity for
what I see as an amazingly warped personality in the author,
Sargon's tripe has evoked little emotion in me, so I'm
wondering what more specifically you might mean here.

>I don't think of myself as a queen.  Whatever ``effeminate''
>is, I'm probably not.  But people do consider me highly
>eccentric, and I've been told already that my eccentricity
>is a way of gaining attention.

This is probably fairly far off *your* point, but somehow I
think it does relate.  And it's this:

I don't think of myself as a queen.  I don't think of myself
as gay.  I don't even think of myself as a man.  My
self-concept *itself* doesn't really seem to involve any of
these things.  To show what I'm getting at, opposite my big
brass bed there is a 4x5' plate glass mirror.  The very
first thing I see in the morning, other than perhaps the
bedroom ceiling, is me.  I *never* think: there's that man,
there's that gay person, that fag, that queen, that lover of
men, that <anything>.  What I think, if I think anything at
all about what I see in that mirror, is: "There I am." And
that's *all*.

Male, man, gay, queer, fag, queen, effeminate, masculine,
and all those words are not *for* me or even *about* me;
they are for others, they are social and political
categories to which *when relevant* I freely assign myself,
for the sole purpose of interacting with my world in
mutually useful or comprehensible terms.

In my self-concept, the ideas butch or nelly do not arise.
Anyone who's been reading my stuff here for any length of
time will recall that I use such descriptors a lot, however.
But it's really a matter of generalizations for the purpose
of making a rhetorical point, to the extent a person and
their rhetoric can be conflated.

If we start talking about straight people in their roles as
oppressors, then by god, I'm going to be *very* gay all over
them.  If we find the Sargons of the world (they are legion)
pulling that "real man" shit, then girlfriend I am going to
hiss the nasty little prick off stage in the *most*
outrageous ways I know how (which is many).  If some twerp
shouts "Faggot!" at me, you watch how fast I holler after
him, "You betcher sweet ass I am, you fucking piece of
shit!" and am prepared (despite my brittle aging frame) to
do actual battle with the asshole.  I grew up in a
blue-collar town and had at least one fist fight every day
until I was in about 7th grade, plus hundreds more of them
less often after that, and one lesson I learned from that was
this: I don't want the motherfucker to be *able* to hit me
back, so hit first and hit hard.

And, I feel fairly certain, thoughts like those ran wildly
through the subconscious minds of the famous Stonewall drag
queens, whose "effeminacy" was a social construct of the
oppressor, not of the men themselves.  What *they* were was
madder than hell, fed up with the bullshit, and not about to
take any more of it, that particular night.

What makes them radical is that they *refused* to accept the
oppressor's constructions of reality as valid for
themselves.  So this brings us back to issues related to (a)
what you call your eccentricities and (b) what I might call
my butchness if I could relate to the term.

I have attracted plenty of attention in my day.  For one
thing, I am a born performer.  I have insecurities (plenty
of them), but they do not concern my outward behavior.  So
perhaps your friends merely don't know you well enough to
see the difference between what *they* think makes you an
attention-grabber and what really occurs in the inner
recesses of your private person.

>These people don't understand: I am *much* more
>``eccentric'' when there's no one else around....  OTOH, the
>thing people who like me respond to is a sense of strong
>individuality.  They don't understand either, how much I'm
>still holding in.

I'm with you on that one, am I ever.  For one thing, one
doesn't want to get locked up.  One doesn't want to be
alienating even to one's intimates by revealing the
unvarnished and florid truth of every inner moment.  The one
(and only) situation in my life -- no, there are (or were)
two -- in which the full and complete me is on view is when
I am making music, and not always then (the other situation
is love-making, but I haven't done that for almost a
decade).

Now here comes the part of your thing that I had trouble
following, though *maybe* I got some of it:

>Anywhere where expectations remain -- any expectations
>beyond human respect and dignity -- I will feel like a caged
>bird who vaguely remembers he once knew how to fly.  I
>cannot function in a rule-bound environment; under weight of
>imposed structures I lose sight of myself.  I build patterns
>in my head: patterns, endless patterns; but the most
>wonderful thing about me is the driving fire within me that
>I think I can never begin to understand: the whirling
>confusion carries a satisfaction I cannot begin to explain.

I do notoriously badly with rule-bound or conventionalized
contexts.  *Something* (I really don't know what) about me
gets paralyzed (or maybe its energy gets drained away).  An
image I used to find vivid (corresponding maybe to your
cage) was the idea of being tethered, that I would kind of
run, spreading my falcon's wings, building up speed almost
getting to the point of being airborn, when <whap!> the
tether would crash me to earth in a very undignified heap.
It was painful, but I got so I didn't cry out (my ability to
endure physical pain is nil, but my capacity for psychic
pain is enormous, having at times been suicidal).

It's the fire part I understand least well in what you say.
I can relate to it as passion, as a rage to express
something, but more than that, I'm unsure about.

>I am drawn, have always been drawn, to uncertainty, to
>insecurity, not as negative things but as a source of great
>creative force within.  

This is one thing in which I find myself strongly
contrasting; all my life, if I could spot insecurity in the
offing (and my background made me well-nigh flawless at
that, long before radar was invented :-), I used cunning to
avoid being engulfed by it.  This made security a big item,
bigger than it needed to be, really.  But it did serve as
fuel for creative activity within, somehow.

>I will never be content with
>anything less than finding my own path; and always -- well,
>hopefully not always -- terribly afraid that I am giving in,
>that I am sacrificing my image of who I am for the
>adulterated image that others would give to me.

What I've discovered about that, especially about the last
part of it, is that all you have to do is give yourself
permission: everyone wants to feel significant, it's one of
the great motive forces, I think.  But that does not *have*
to translate to approval of others, because you can validate
yourself without reference to them.  Indeed, this is the
core source of most of my present strength and inner repose.
I don't know your age, haven't the slightest idea about it,
but I can say that I was probably 40 before the full meaning
of inner poise came into my life.

>Compromise begins and ends as a bad idea: human strength
>comes from conflict.  The basic things should *never* be
>compromised, and the rest, I guess, don't really matter.

As long as you're sure what's basic, I might agree with
that.  Compromise, however, is not a simple thing.  Let us
suppose that the goal is getting up the mountain; it makes
less difference if the path goes left or right, is steep or
shallow; what counts is that it goes *up*!  Even more, it
counts that one *goes*.

>We have to go with the image we have of ourselves; we have
>to stand by our understanding of the Truth, even as we know
>that it is flawed.

There's no other way that I know of.

>Hoping this makes sense,

Mostly.

<> Evil doesn't exist outside of people's desires to do bad
<> things.  It's simply a label for a person's characteristics.
<> -- Rob Bernardo (rob@mtdiablo.Concord.CA.US)
-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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