Just like a woman - NOT
Deeply irritating article here by The man who spent a week living like a woman: except, you know, he didn't do anything weird like dressing as a woman, getting 17% (is it?) docked off his salary and less status and respect, being sexually harassed, etc etc etc. No, he just remained a bloke doing what he believes to be 'womanly' stuff, apparently based on reading chick-lit.
Not enough codfish in the world, are there?
However, this does segue into some thoughts I've been having (since watching Performance at the weekend) about male androgyny, 'getting in touch with one's feminine side', and appropriation.
Because okay, Mick Jagger as Turner is swanning about in robes in a very lush feminised space and looking v androgyne, and one of the women talks about him having 'the woman in the man', but he is also hyper-masculine in that he has two women about the place, was a rock-star, etc (and this is played up in the trip-sequence in which he appears as a rocker, a gangster, and so on). (I will not go here into the fact that the women are marked as foreign, a persistent trope in British cinema of the 60s for sexually-active women in serious films, even if in the original texts they were nice English roses.)
This recalled to me my perception of something in Lisa Cody's Birthing the Nation about the rise of the man-midwife, which was that the ideal m-m combined male rationality and scientific expertise with 'female' sympathy and caring qualities. I.e. he was the positive take on the androgyne caricature version. But this didn't lead to any particular revaluation of 'feminine' qualities and competences in, you know, actual women. Possibly the reverse.
Two things here: idea that certain qualities are gendered (can sympathy and caring not be part of general human possibilities? - note here Kate Fisher's work on cultures of contraception in early C20th Wales and the assumption that it was the right manly thing to take care of one's wife by not letting her get pregnant too often), and appropriation.
This seems to me to resonate with Norman Mailer's concept of the white bourgeois hipster boy as The White Negro (I cannot believe that even then this was not regarded in some circles as deeply offensive), and contrasts with John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, which was about taking on the potential perils of passing as black during the era of segregation (walking the walk).
In my period in the 'growth movement' during the late 70s, men getting in touch with their female side seemed to involve crying, wanting to be held, and generally being emo.
Is this another take on Peter-Pansmanship? Turner, for example, moans around about being 'stuck': perhaps growing up is the next thing to do?