Maleness
I approach the topic of maleness from a different angle than most people. It isn't irrelevant to who I am; I do identify as a male person. But it means different things to me than it apparently means to most male people, or, for that matter, to most non-male people.
I'm a sissyfemme, one of the girl people, someone whose gender is queer instead of the expected value for male folks. Most of them grew up internalizing a lot of beliefs and attitudes about how a boy or a man ought to be, a lot of notions about how to compare themselves to other males and how to assess themselves.
For me, it was more like having been issued something, like a vehicle or an office or an identification number or something. I didn't choose it but nobody else did either. "Here, this is the morphology from which you'll be living this life", you know? Or at least once I came to be of an age where I observed myself to be more like one of the girls than one of the boys, that's the way I ended up thinking about maleness. It didn't contradict me being more like the girls. It also wasn't wrong. They simply didn't have much to do with each other.
I'm certainly not the only person for whom maleness and man-ness aren't coterminous:
"Yes of course, I have a male body. But why does that mean I have to go with the other males? Are we only going to be talking about our bodies? Are we only going to be talking about our dicks and beards and how weird it is when you start to grow hair around your nipples?", I asked quizzically. "Or are we going to be talking about being men? Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation".
-- Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, pg 276
...Reactions from Grindr and OkCupid users enlightened me. I either have to be a drag queen, transsexual, or woman for my identity to make sense to some people. I am a cisgender male who occasionally wears makeup and might dress in drag three or four times a year. I am not a drag queen because I am not in possession of that fierceness. I am not a transsexual because I was assigned male at birth and I identify as male. I am not a woman because I am not a woman. Some women do have penises and they are still women. My penis is a man’s because I am a man. Can I make this any clearer? I urinate standing up.
-- Waldell Goode, Queen Called Bitch, pg 134
It's a fine enough morphology, and overall I have few complaints. At puberty, I gained a lot of strength without having to do anything, that was kind of cool. In general I like the aesthetic design of narrowness. Growing dark hairs in all kinds of places that either previously didn't have hairs or only had pale soft nearly-invisible ones didn't immediately rock my world, but I became fond of them pretty soon. I almost immediately resisted the expectation that I was going to start scraping them off my face with a razor: "Why, what's wrong with them? I kind of like it!"; getting a swollen bulge in my larynx was a bit offputting, to be honest, as I was a narrow skinny teenager and now looked like I'd tried to swallow something I shouldn't have with unfortunate results, but I liked the new baritone voice.
I was brought up with a somewhat puritanical set of adult teachings about the body and the parts that we were supposed to always keep hidden, the private parts of the anatomy. Less an emphatic "that's dirty" than an awkward embarrassed adult self-consciousness combined with anger and disapproval when some kid was being exhibitionist. The body parts in question were referenced mostly in terms of body-waste disposal, both by the various adults and by the other children, with a far less recurrent and far more veiled reference to the reproductive and erotic functionalities, so it was like pee/poop/{sex}.
Having a main part among these covered-up bits be extrusive and hanging out instead of tucked away didn't seem like a great design feature in a world where everyone either stammered and blushed or busted out in coarse crude vulgarity if they had reason to discuss such things.
I didn't have any direct experience of the primary alternative morphology, of course. Like everyone else, I got the version I was issued without any option of test-driving them both first. I was somewhat curious about what it was like, I suppose. I liked girls in general and thought they were cool so I didn't associate their form factor with anything negative, but there were areas of life in which I was in competition with them -- to be perceived as mature, self-controlled, on the road towards adulthood and responsibility -- and in that competition I was definitely a male who was keeping up and giving them a run for their money, beating them at their own game, the inverse of what the tomboy gals were doing on the playground.
Jack and Jill Magazine came in the mail once a month. I remember the story and the illustration: "I'm tired of being peanut butter", the girl's thought-bubble proclaimed -- she being the middle kid and feeling like the middle of a sandwich where the youngest and oldest kids got more attention. I found her cute, as drawn. Attractive. I had discovered touching myself, "tickling" private parts in a way that felt good, and it somehow got connected with looking. Yeah, first kink, I was such a pervert, a pretty non-uptight pervert who didn't worry I was doing anything wrong but at the same time I sure didn't want anybody to know.
At any rate, the erotic was pretty quickly linked to fascination with female morphology, looking at it, thinking about it. And soon enough this prompted some perplexed thoughts about what it meant to be female, insofar as the place I was "tickling" was specifically the place they didn't have. By early adolescence, I had learned that they "have one" too -- that in the analogous area they had a place that made the same kind of sensations and felt that way.
What was less obvious, less discernable, was whether or not they liked thinking about male bodies if and when they did that to themselves. Or whether looking at us gave them the same feelings I got from watching girls in their female shapes, taut jeans and dance leotards and swim suits and other apparel where you could see their shapes, especially right there where they were different.
Just as most of what is socially packaged as attractively masculine is irrelevant and foreign to me, most of the small array of presentations of male anatomy as visually erotic and desirable hits me as pretty hilarious and impossible to take seriously. Underpants with hot dogs or bananas depicted on them, that sort of thing. Or the associations with weaponry and the obsession with size. That all feels like it has more to do with the whole masculine thingie about being an adversary and conqueror than with the body contour itself being something that could evoke erotic appreciation. Oh well, I've read things written by female authors expressing a combination of mirth and dismay about wedgies-r-us bottoms (swimwear and underwear), "boob tray" tops that contort breasts into silly shapes, and other processes that convert the female body into something utterly without dignity. Still, the relative lack of cultural awareness of how people who desire the male body experience it as an object of desire creates a certain dubiety about any attempt to package it as such.
Not being someone who has wished to be female rather than male, I'm not a central candidate for being accused of autogynephilia, although yes, that has happened. I don't tend to view my identification with the women and girls as having anything much to do with my fascination for their physical architecture, and certainly not with any visualizing of myself as a person in possession of that architecture, since those are two entirely different things. But be that as it may, I have imagined being female and that imagining was definitely erotic in nature. But how can you act upon someone else's nerve endings without some notion of how that would feel? Reciprocally, being on the receiving end of someone else's tactile attentions is nowhere near as much fun in the absence of imagining the pleasure they're getting from it. We all do that, don't we? I don't think erotic emotional experiences are intrinsically gendered, but they may be sexed, even if only as a consequence of the architectural differences.
Maleness is one thing; being a man is something else. To echo what Jacob Tobia and Waldell Goode said, I don't have anything to add to the latter except from the outside, but maleness itself is part of my experience and identity.
-----
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.
My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and 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. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
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I'm a sissyfemme, one of the girl people, someone whose gender is queer instead of the expected value for male folks. Most of them grew up internalizing a lot of beliefs and attitudes about how a boy or a man ought to be, a lot of notions about how to compare themselves to other males and how to assess themselves.
For me, it was more like having been issued something, like a vehicle or an office or an identification number or something. I didn't choose it but nobody else did either. "Here, this is the morphology from which you'll be living this life", you know? Or at least once I came to be of an age where I observed myself to be more like one of the girls than one of the boys, that's the way I ended up thinking about maleness. It didn't contradict me being more like the girls. It also wasn't wrong. They simply didn't have much to do with each other.
I'm certainly not the only person for whom maleness and man-ness aren't coterminous:
"Yes of course, I have a male body. But why does that mean I have to go with the other males? Are we only going to be talking about our bodies? Are we only going to be talking about our dicks and beards and how weird it is when you start to grow hair around your nipples?", I asked quizzically. "Or are we going to be talking about being men? Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation".
-- Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, pg 276
...Reactions from Grindr and OkCupid users enlightened me. I either have to be a drag queen, transsexual, or woman for my identity to make sense to some people. I am a cisgender male who occasionally wears makeup and might dress in drag three or four times a year. I am not a drag queen because I am not in possession of that fierceness. I am not a transsexual because I was assigned male at birth and I identify as male. I am not a woman because I am not a woman. Some women do have penises and they are still women. My penis is a man’s because I am a man. Can I make this any clearer? I urinate standing up.
-- Waldell Goode, Queen Called Bitch, pg 134
It's a fine enough morphology, and overall I have few complaints. At puberty, I gained a lot of strength without having to do anything, that was kind of cool. In general I like the aesthetic design of narrowness. Growing dark hairs in all kinds of places that either previously didn't have hairs or only had pale soft nearly-invisible ones didn't immediately rock my world, but I became fond of them pretty soon. I almost immediately resisted the expectation that I was going to start scraping them off my face with a razor: "Why, what's wrong with them? I kind of like it!"; getting a swollen bulge in my larynx was a bit offputting, to be honest, as I was a narrow skinny teenager and now looked like I'd tried to swallow something I shouldn't have with unfortunate results, but I liked the new baritone voice.
I was brought up with a somewhat puritanical set of adult teachings about the body and the parts that we were supposed to always keep hidden, the private parts of the anatomy. Less an emphatic "that's dirty" than an awkward embarrassed adult self-consciousness combined with anger and disapproval when some kid was being exhibitionist. The body parts in question were referenced mostly in terms of body-waste disposal, both by the various adults and by the other children, with a far less recurrent and far more veiled reference to the reproductive and erotic functionalities, so it was like pee/poop/{sex}.
Having a main part among these covered-up bits be extrusive and hanging out instead of tucked away didn't seem like a great design feature in a world where everyone either stammered and blushed or busted out in coarse crude vulgarity if they had reason to discuss such things.
I didn't have any direct experience of the primary alternative morphology, of course. Like everyone else, I got the version I was issued without any option of test-driving them both first. I was somewhat curious about what it was like, I suppose. I liked girls in general and thought they were cool so I didn't associate their form factor with anything negative, but there were areas of life in which I was in competition with them -- to be perceived as mature, self-controlled, on the road towards adulthood and responsibility -- and in that competition I was definitely a male who was keeping up and giving them a run for their money, beating them at their own game, the inverse of what the tomboy gals were doing on the playground.
Jack and Jill Magazine came in the mail once a month. I remember the story and the illustration: "I'm tired of being peanut butter", the girl's thought-bubble proclaimed -- she being the middle kid and feeling like the middle of a sandwich where the youngest and oldest kids got more attention. I found her cute, as drawn. Attractive. I had discovered touching myself, "tickling" private parts in a way that felt good, and it somehow got connected with looking. Yeah, first kink, I was such a pervert, a pretty non-uptight pervert who didn't worry I was doing anything wrong but at the same time I sure didn't want anybody to know.
At any rate, the erotic was pretty quickly linked to fascination with female morphology, looking at it, thinking about it. And soon enough this prompted some perplexed thoughts about what it meant to be female, insofar as the place I was "tickling" was specifically the place they didn't have. By early adolescence, I had learned that they "have one" too -- that in the analogous area they had a place that made the same kind of sensations and felt that way.
What was less obvious, less discernable, was whether or not they liked thinking about male bodies if and when they did that to themselves. Or whether looking at us gave them the same feelings I got from watching girls in their female shapes, taut jeans and dance leotards and swim suits and other apparel where you could see their shapes, especially right there where they were different.
Just as most of what is socially packaged as attractively masculine is irrelevant and foreign to me, most of the small array of presentations of male anatomy as visually erotic and desirable hits me as pretty hilarious and impossible to take seriously. Underpants with hot dogs or bananas depicted on them, that sort of thing. Or the associations with weaponry and the obsession with size. That all feels like it has more to do with the whole masculine thingie about being an adversary and conqueror than with the body contour itself being something that could evoke erotic appreciation. Oh well, I've read things written by female authors expressing a combination of mirth and dismay about wedgies-r-us bottoms (swimwear and underwear), "boob tray" tops that contort breasts into silly shapes, and other processes that convert the female body into something utterly without dignity. Still, the relative lack of cultural awareness of how people who desire the male body experience it as an object of desire creates a certain dubiety about any attempt to package it as such.
Not being someone who has wished to be female rather than male, I'm not a central candidate for being accused of autogynephilia, although yes, that has happened. I don't tend to view my identification with the women and girls as having anything much to do with my fascination for their physical architecture, and certainly not with any visualizing of myself as a person in possession of that architecture, since those are two entirely different things. But be that as it may, I have imagined being female and that imagining was definitely erotic in nature. But how can you act upon someone else's nerve endings without some notion of how that would feel? Reciprocally, being on the receiving end of someone else's tactile attentions is nowhere near as much fun in the absence of imagining the pleasure they're getting from it. We all do that, don't we? I don't think erotic emotional experiences are intrinsically gendered, but they may be sexed, even if only as a consequence of the architectural differences.
Maleness is one thing; being a man is something else. To echo what Jacob Tobia and Waldell Goode said, I don't have anything to add to the latter except from the outside, but maleness itself is part of my experience and identity.
-----
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.
My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and 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. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts