bring on the sissies! :/

[reenka]

It's sort of a combination of thinking about gender (being one's gender, being transgendered, being cross-gendered, whatever) & reading 'Self-Made Man', about a woman (Norah Vincent) who spent a year cross-dressing & passing as a guy in various all-male situations & on dates with women. And then randomly I found this site called heroichomosex.org (and by 'heroic', they mean 'manly', which means 'no penetration, honey'), and there's this post on it which made me reconsider my position on character feminizing in slash. :/
    Like, okay, these people are kind of nuts-- extremists, y'know-- but still. Having this person be like 'oh, I'm in luuurve & I wanna get down on one knee and be boyfriends' and the site owner be like 'BUT THAT'S CHEESY-- I MEAN, NOT MANLY!!1'.... It just made me realize that there -is- this pressure among men to be, uh, masculine-- it's not like they naturally are that different and emotionally alien compared to women, but they're heavily acculturated the same way women are to be more passive (though we had our feminist revolution & men didn't have their emo revolution by a long shot, and aren't even that likely to anytime soon).

So, like, okay-- in stories where characters are feminized (or rather, 'sissified' and made into emo weepy/talkative/sharing basketcases fixated on their love-lives moreso than fucking, their job & sports-- whatever, you know what I mean), generally what I hate is the OOCness. The fact that this isn't that character. I mean, if this character was like that in the book/show, great. But they're not.
    On the ooooother hand-- this just struck me-- what if... okay, what if writing completely realistically from a guy's pov (given that we don't get the guy's inner monologue on their romances in most shows anyway, so there -is- v. little direct canon source for the places fanfics go) would mean portraying an attitude and degree of emotional intelligence that I find unpalatable the way I find that guy's moronic advice on heroichomosex.org unpalatable? I mean, is it possible that 'getting it wrong' at least to -some- extent about a given male's thinking on romance stuff is all that's keeping your average fanfic reader from just... getting pissed off? The way one would get pissed at one's boyfriend being all pig-headed and ugh and male, y'know? Hahah.


You have to realize where I'm coming from here-- I mean, I love guys for being guys; I love... masculinity, boyishness, roughness, bluntness, pragmatism, actions-over-words, even aggression & rage and all that good stuff-- I love my animus, pretty much, to the point where you could say I'm obsessed. It's just when it gets turned into what's basically a religion, an oppressive cultural force (that it is, no one has to turn it into that, actually)-- that's when it just pisses me off. Reading 'Self-Made Man' just brought it home to me how much it's hurting the guys themselves to perpetuate the masculine 'Hero Myth'; how much equating vulnerability & emotionality & expressiveness with 'girliness' is confusing and crippling their self-image and self-esteem. There's sometimes this feeling that some guys are gender-confused or think they're 'female' just because they possess these desires/qualities which are absolutely normal and not 'unmasculine' anymore than being take-charge & unconcerned about looks & not interested in mothering is 'unfeminine'. We've fought so hard to have the most butch woman accepted as a woman, and yet it's still somehow okay to say these men are 'girly' if they're overly emotional or like to dress up or whatever.

I mean, as a girl, I've felt some pressure to be 'more feminine' and take better care of myself and be more social and clean/cook/have a boyfriend, sure, but a lack of these things just made me a loser, even a failure at most rather than, y'know, unfeminine. Maybe it's because the whole women's culture is set-up towards subtler forms of 'oppression', if any. It's just not all that in your face-- I mean, if you're uncool, other girls pity you, even ostracize you & mock you, but they don't have that aggressive dominant need to change who you are by force; it's not that I feel accepted so much as being a (theoretically) 'unacceptable' example of womanhood, I just get left the hell alone.
    Norah Vincent actually wrote about this in her book: that women take pleasure in the failures of other women rather than feel other women's perceived failures as their own and therefore need to 'fix' them by any means necessary. The idea that one's manhood (ie, identity) itself gets bluntly questioned and decimated in the attempt to twist it into the 'right' shape if you're not tough and rough and emotionally stunted enuf is just... too much. Most of the guys I know in real life are a) geeks and/or emo and nonstandard 'evolved' types (well, to talk with me fruitfully in the first place there's a certain implied required mind-set); b) straight, so I can't really judge from personal experience that much, but there's just this scary suspicion that what if writing about the emotional, inner 'real', 100% 'non-feminized' guys would like... drive me utterly batty with frustration? Just how scarred, repressed & emotionally stunted -is- your average guy? Arg.... I sort of feel this urge to fix it! Fix it~! FIX IT!! (...which sort of scares me at how immature/unrealistic -that- is... I mean, uh, y'know, they mostly think they -like- being that way as long as it doesn't inadvertently mess them up too obviously to ignore... uh....)
~~

Anyway, I just had this fleeting moment of '...uh, what if I can't handle the way guys actually are without grinding my teeth to dust??' and feeling sudden sympathy for the urge to make them weep & hug NOW, dammit :/ (Btw, I think this makes me & girls like me-- and our cooties!!-- their worst nightmare. Sorry, guys.) I mean, I seriously think that deep down, most guys -need- to let go and weep & hug, y'know. :/ Smarm may be emotional porn and All About Women And Not Gay Men At All, but I don't think I'm being facetious when I say it can be, maybe even should be about men too. Ordinary men. Straight men, even. Y'know, especially those macho ones who keep talking about fighting & the manliness of cock-rubbing or logic, self-restraint & stoic brotherhood or whatever their patriarchal crack is. They all need to give each other a hug, ahahaha. OKAY MAYBE NOT. But something. Something. :/

And okay, let's not even get into the way I'm all for 'feminizing' if it means eliminating the sort of 'normal' guy who's like Wayne here on the heroic sex site, in his late fifties loving his wife 'to the maximum' while loving Tom, who's his best birthday present ever 'cause they frotted so wonderfully together. I mean. There's this pragmatic separating tendency I notice among both straight & gay/bi men to be like 'sex is sex, marriage is marriage, love is something else entirely', and it strikes me as a very stereotypically 'male' viewpoint that'd probably be in character for a lot of guys in fandoms, too. Except. GOD, I DON'T WANNA SEE IT IN A SLASHFIC :/ :/ EVER! :/ heh. This is especially hilarious because currently I'm pretty much -writing- it, but then I was always a writerly masochist & you can bet Harry & Ginny won't be together at the end. Probably :)) My point is, if eliminating the natural tendency towards these boundaries is 'feminizing', I'd be hard-put to stop it; after all, you could say writing slash is itself at base about eliminating male boundaries, and it's not because we have buddies fuck. It's because they love-and-fuck, inseparable, suddenly united. Maybe that's just how it is: seeing canon, seeing men acting in a way one would assume is 'natural', we want to change it. Change them.

I -like- mixy-mixing emotions into everything, and dammit, I -like- my sissy ideal of romantic devotion, which no, doesn't include frotting either another guy or another girl if you love your partner 'to the maximum' :/ :/ It's not even about cheating, per se, it's just about my utter discomfort with that 'masculine' outlook where this separation is so... heedless. Like, of course his wife's feelings don't exist; of course it's separate if they say so; of course this is apples & that is oranges because The Almighty Cock wants what it wants & doesn't want what it does want if it's too unmanly. :/ And of course I'm not ragging on that guy or any particular guy like him, people can do whatever they like, it's the -idea- that bugs me, specifically the idea that the opposite of this outlook is 'unmanly' & at all discouraged.
~~

Anyway, before anyone jumps down my throat or what have you, this was just a passing phase; a mood, basically. I don't seriously condone feminizing characters or think 'real' men's psyches are unpalatable, intrinsically scarred or alien, obviously-- I just had this somewhat stereotypical moment of "...gah!!" which made me wanna write an lj post :D
    I mean, there's a range, among both men and women, in terms of how they let the dominant culture & lowest-common-denominator ideas of gender & identity in general affect them. Most people of either gender with a certain minimum of intelligence are just individuals, who thankfully aren't about to spew the sort of bullshit you find on internet frotting sites or the places Norah Vincent hung out at, though I suppose you can't escape internalizing some. It's really way more a question of intelligence than making a character either 'feminine' or 'masculine', whatever the hell that means, and in fact yes, I don't tolerate reading or writing dumb characters very well, ahahah.

In fact, I think what I really hate is people of either gender who internalize cultural propaganda, and I reject the notion that a 'real' non-feminized guy would do so if they're an intelligent, basically decent human being I'd want to read about. Some people just can't help it because of the intensity of immersion they have in their particular subculture (saaaay, Brian in QaF), so they pick up some fucked-up ideas about what it means to be 'gay' and 'male', but even then their intelligence & decency prevents them from pressuring or proselytizing, and they basically show other people & themselves respect. They are not 'in denial' or 'repressed', just products of their time/culture/upbringing, as are we all to some degree, I do realize that. Even being a rebel (and Brian is!) plays into the cultural mode you're in-- there's just no escaping it, really. You do the best you can, and I respect characters-- and people in real life-- who do that.

I suppose it's most correct to say that I'm personally interested in what happens when men & boys lose their predictable ties to the predominant culture, when they have to question their identity & their assumptions about gender/self/other. This is something I'm interested in across the board, in any sort of story, and slash is just a great vehicle for it because it focuses on change rather than the static view of canon you'd get with genfic, for instance. I don't like just accepting ideas, but I believe in accepting -characters- as they are (so that you could better change them!) So yeah.
    In some ways, yeah, the ways your average guy behaves/deals with things emotionally (like the boundaries between sex & love) is pretty much the reason they say 'slash isn't for/about gay men'-- but at the same time, it's so hard to see where to draw the line between current culture and possible older/other cultures, between the weights of the 'majority' vs. the 'minority' of males, and the actual vs. the potential. Fiction itself is about the potential, and that potential definitely -is- there. People are people; characters are characters; everything is so damned complicated :D

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the thing whenever you look at cultures that are so into men beng men--they always come out sounding gay. John Le Carre's books included. It seems like the problem always is that men, like women, actually do equate sex with love, so when they try to separate it out so that women are only for sex and their real, deep relationships are all with men of course they start leaning that way, because humans actually do express affection physically. I mean, that's not to suggest all friendships lead to sex, just that if you insist that all your most intimate emotions can only be expressed with one sex that's the sex you're going to feel closer to etc.

I wonder if part of it isn't so much that bad slash (that's accused of sissifying) puts in too much emotion but that it's just not the right kind--like, that men would like to read about emotion just as much, only in a different way. (Actually, I'm working on this project where one of the books we read was Gary Paulsen's Hatchet and it's such a feeling-less book--I mean, the feelings are all never spoken about.)

I think that's a big part of hurt/comfort, actually. You have to break the guy down until he can't take it any more and then he'll be able to weep while still being manly. Although again, it's always cultural. When and how men can cry changes with the culture. I'm sure most guys know the few situations it would be okay to cry in according to their own culture.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I wonder about this-- I mean, on the one hand you're right & I love how you put that-- yeah, humans do express affection [and all emotion!] physically (unless they're really repressed & men -are- generally moreso than women in most Western and Eastern Asian cultures). There's the divide there between nature & nurture though, isn't there? Like, what human beings are like & what male human beings tell each other they 'should' be like and what it is and isn't okay to be like. I think it would be more correct (in most men's case) to say they want to express affection physically, and the thwarted energy has to get sublimated somehow, so generally their physicality is just different the way their emotional expression is different, yeah. Like, men play contact sports, wrestle, pound each other on the back, invent various forms of 'manly touching' and 'contextual' touching. Not that there's no room for hugging, but there's a very strictly defined room in any culture-- even where it's accepted, there are still many more limits on context than with women in that same culture, right. I mean, I don't think there -is- a culture with built-in limits on inter-female affectionate touching (as long as there's no tongue kissing, I guess).

You're right about them being deluded, though-- I mean, that's why it's so messed up :D I dunno about the fixating on the sex you're emotionally intimate with, 'cause men aren't intimate with each other the way they're intimate with women, y'know? They don't communicate the same way-- so you could get away with saying 'only be emotionally expressive with women' and still have this unspoken male bond nothing can replace. You're also right that they don't have the same 'kind' [of expression] of emotion-- that's partly what Norah Vincent wrote about in that book. There's a lot more stuff unspoken & between the lines or translated into helpful action-- so yeah, they don't talk about it, especially not with other men (and it seems to me this is pretty universal culturally). I think partly it's a difference in nature and partly in culture-- hard to separate entirely. It's also interesting to see/imagine what happens when you posit that men are uncomfortable speaking & yet they express affection/emotion physically-- you could just see how this'd lead to a lot of misunderstandindings, especially by/among women, but also with younger men. Fathers especially seem to damage their sons a lot with this style of behavior, right....

The whole thing, I guess, is that I myself, as a reader/writer, don't have much of anything invested in them being 'manly' (aside from the ICness issue); it's interesting to speculate on whether the h/c contingent is more into manly men and yet also want to have that emotional valve. I like stoicism and bluntness and aggression as qualities, but like... 'manliness' is just so much of a -role- to play rather than a characterization. It's like, who really wants 'manly' weeping?? Heh. Maybe that's just semantics though, 'cause I do like the breaking-characters-down bit, it's just that I'd prefer it didn't involve all the melodrama & inevitable life-and-death angst every time. It's not like I want guys in fics to be all forthcoming & talky, either, it's just hard to really know from the inside-- how do they deal with the emotions one is describing as a writer, whether or not they're then expressed? Is it really different? I mean, it's hard to really separate the way men describe their emotions/attitudes towards them & understanding the actual emotions behind them, and whether they're 'different'...