Is Masculinity Inherently Toxic?

A while ago, Red Durkin posted something on Facebook celebrating Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, expressing her delight at having two such fantastic people as the highest-profile trans women in the US at the moment.

One trans man's response was a jocular wish that the guys had anyone half as good to represent us. As he pointed out, who do we have? Chaz Bono? Buck Angel?

What I want to know is: why? 

Why are the high-profile trans women amazing people who speak out with incredible nuance and sophistication about intersectionality, while the high-profile trans men are just swimming in unchecked male privilege and douchebaggery?

Is it because they're men? Is masculinity inherently toxic?

The answer is, I think, more complicated than a simple "yes" or "no." It's a bit of both.

Obviously not all men -- not all trans men, not all cis men, not all non-binary-but-masculine-leaning people -- are privilege-denying (trans-)misogynists. I'm not literally saying that all men are terrible and all masculinity is toxic. But I do think that, as long as we are uncritically beholden to western late capitalism's current construction of maleness and masculinity, we can't help but be misogynistic, for one simple reason:

Masculinity as we know it is primarily about rejecting femininity.

Western late-capitalist masculinity is basically this, with fewer newspaper hats and more violence.

Around eighteen months ago, I was getting really sick of being taken for female. Being pre-T and in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was consistently seen as a butch dyke. In frustration, I took to Facebook to ask my friends for tips to appear more masculine. Every response -- every single one -- was about being a douchebag. I was told to take up more space, to be loud and annoying, to be rude and obnoxious. Farting and misogyny: is that what masculinity is?

I don't think it has to be, but I think we have to try extra hard if we want it not to be. I wish I could say that trans masculinity is a different creature than cis masculinity, but you don't have to spend time in the cesspool that is the FTM Facebook group to know that trans guys are exactly as insecure, juvenile, and misogynistic as cis guys. Just because your gender identity is different from your birth-assigned sex does not mean you have spent a lot of time pondering the nature of gender and trying to challenge cultural sexism (and, of course, vice versa).

One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my gender was when a friend said I reminded her of her son, because we both manifest a kind of masculinity that is not about constant oneupmanship. Of course, then the danger is that I find myself Doing It For The Cookies, and my God that's a strong temptation. I want to be a good man, a man committed to dismantling the patriarchy, but I want to be doing this for the women and the non-binary people and the gender-non-conforming guys, not for the accolades.

COOKIES FOR ME BECAUSE I AM ONE OF THE GOOD ONES!!!!!

This post has been on the back burner for a while, not least because I was afraid it would turn out as narcissistic cookie-hunting, but in the wake of Elliot Rodger it seemed important to finish it. There's a direct line between a masculinity predicated on rejecting femininity and violence against women (and men judged insufficiently masculine -- the gender-policing of men and boys in our society is appalling). As long as masculinity manifests as misogyny -- objectifying women, a sense of entitlement to women's bodies, controlling and policing gender expression, self-defining in opposition to femininity -- it's going to be toxic. "Misogylinity," as Jenn at Reappropriate calls it, is inextricable from white supremacy. And cis supremacy, and all the other supremacies that constitute the shit stew we call kyriarchy.

I don't really know what non-toxic masculinity is. Maybe we'll only find out once we've dismantled the toxic kind. Maybe non-toxic masculinity is the dismantling of toxic masculinity. I know it's my duty as a man.

Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny?

[ETA: It's been brought to my attention that this post is founded on certain cissexist assumptions. It's true that I haven't engaged with my ingrained cissexism as much as I should, and I hope to work on that. Apologies for fucking up.]

The other night I dreamed I was at a church that had three bathrooms marked Men, Women, and Genderqueer. Entering the last, I found a glorious wonderland that was everything I could possibly want from a bathroom: talking Japanese supertoilet, hot tub, surround-sound entertainment system, etc.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that I trust my dreams. Dreams are your brain sorting through its junk drawer: most of it is pure junk, and occasionally something important turns up. I trust my reactions to my dreams. I've had sexual dreams about male friends which didn't disturb me at all, because I instinctively classified them as junk (hell, if everyone keeps calling him your boyfriend, your subconscious is eventually going to try it on for size, even if the notion is quite revolting). And it was a thoroughly PG-13 teenage dream about a female friend which unleashed the initial torrent of panicked self-reflection that is the first tender step on toward the closet door.

I wish I had access to the diary entry of the time so you could see it in its full, verbatim hilarity. “I'm not gay,” I wrote desperately (or something to that effect), “though it would make sense of a lot of things I like (hot girl-on-girl makeouts on Sugar Rush; scantily clad women in horror movies)...”

(I know! Bless, right?)

It took me a couple more years of self-torture – writing things like, “I'm not gay. I'm just homosexual”, which presumably made sense to me at the time – before I gave up trying to resist The Gay. (“Suck it, haters,” I at last wrote triumphantly: “I am a lesbian.”) My reluctance to accept The Genderqueer reminds me a lot of my reluctance to accept The Gay. I'm probably scrabbling for any available reason to deny something I pretty much know is true.

And yet, and yet...

I can't stop obsessively second-guessing myself. Just as I used to fear that my homosexuality was nothing more than intense fear and disgust at the penis, I now worry that my inclination toward genderfuckery is nothing more than internalized misogyny.

Like, when I reject the societal performance of femininity (shaving, makeup, skirts, long hair), is it because I consider the feminine-coded to be lesser?

If I accept the proposition that no true generalization can be made about women without resorting to tautology – if I accept that you don't have to be, have, or do anything to “qualify” as a woman, apart from identifying as a woman – why then am I not comfortably identifying as a woman?

When I'm enraged by someone in a store calling me “Missy” (THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED LAST WEEK, IN BERKELEY, IN 2012), am I enraged because it's fucking patronizing as shit, or because it genders me as female?

Does my general feeling that being gendered female is wrong mean that it's wrong for me, or that deep down I buy into the patriarchal equation female = wrong?

I feel increasingly disconnected from the pronoun she/her. When somebody refers to me as she/her, it feels as though they're talking about someone else. I like it when I get read as male or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I would love to ask people to use ey/em, but they probably wouldn't: even in out oh-so-progressive, wonderfully accepting and queer-friendly community, most people are terrible at respecting the pronouns of our openly genderqueer friends. And even if I could convince my friends to make the switch, how can I stop strangers from gendering me female?

We're so indoctrinated to categorize everyone into this M/F binary that people immersed in a supposedly queer-embracing environment won't even refer to someone as “they” after being explicitly asked to. And yet I pull on one thread and the whole gender thing comes apart in my hands. The existence of trans men and women is proof that it's possible to scrutinize and deconstruct your gender identity and reach a conclusion other than “Gender is bullshit”; but more and more that seems like the inevitable endpoint of my own inquiry.

"Room" For Improvement

Last night I went to a movie theater in Oakland to see The Room. (If you're not familiar with The Room, well, this might not be the blog for you, but this might give you some idea.) I've seen it on the big screen before, in London, but this time was special: writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau, the finest auteur of our time, was there in person. Getting to meet him, shake his hand, get his autograph, and have a photo taken with him is definitely one of the high points of my life to date.

A couple of things struck me about the audience for The Room. First, everyone was exactly the same age – members of the “are you being sarcastic, dude?” “I don't even know anymore” generation. Second, a lot of them were kind of douchey.

When Tommy took questions before the movie, most of the askers – a group, I note, comprised exclusively of dude-identified humans – were out to be as obnoxious as possible, trying to make themselves seem hi-larious. (The dude who suggested The Room 2 should be a zombie movie, so undead Johnny could tear Lisa apart? Bitch, please.) And when it came to the movie itself, things got even worse.

Maybe it's because the cult of The Room hasn't been around as long in the UK, so people are more joyful about it and less vicious, but when I saw it in London the audience riffing was a lot less mean-spirited. This time around, there was just so much vitriol directed at the character of Lisa. I myself am hardly immune to getting carried away in the excitement of audience participation and shouting something I regret a moment later, but the full 100 minutes of dudes hollering “slut” and “whore” was a bit much. There's a fine line between mocking the movie's misogyny (“because you're a woman!”) and actively participating in misogyny yourself, and these dudes were way over the line.

It's a funny thing about fandom: if you were a nerdy kid who liked a lot of music and books and movies and TV shows that the kids around you had never heard of, meeting a fellow fan of these things was incredibly exciting. “Wait, you know all the words to Tommy as well? INSTANT BFF!” There's still a part of me that wants to believe anyone that likes the things I like is a kindred spirit. Certainly I have had and do have some very deep and meaningful friendships based primarily on a shared enthusiasm for MST3K or the Coen brothers or Sharktopus or Ursula LeGuin. Hell, for me a necessary component of a good friendship is the frequent saying and hearing of the words, “You were right. [Venture Bros/Veronica Falls/Community/Margaret Atwood] is AWESOME.”

However, “douche” and “person that likes the things I like” are not mutually exclusive categories, and that's a hard lesson.

Not Like Those *Other* Christians...

It's all too easy to be both a feminist and a misogynist, especially in the early stages of your feminism. Recognizing that the world is rigged against people of the female persuasion, you refuse to play the role forced upon you by the very fact of your (assumed) femaleness. You cast aside make-up and dresses and pink and all other things coded “feminine” in our society. You do “masculine” things and hang out with masculine-type humans. Maybe you even start bad-mouthing women who wear make-up and dresses and pink, because the fact that they buy into these products means they are perpetuating their own oppression. Not like you, who have seen the fnords of cultural misogyny and know that masculine-coded things are Good and feminine-coded things are bad.

...Whooooops.

The real reason you are bad-mouthing those silly ladies and their silly skirts (and I speak from a place of painful personal experience) is that you desperately crave the approval of non-feminist men. The patriarchy has instilled in you the idea that Getting Men's Approval is the only way to validate your existence. It's like the patriarchy is a dream within a dream: once you recognize it for what it is, you think you've escaped it, but actually you've only peeled back one layer – you're still stuck in the dream. Actually, it's worse than that, because there's this whole kyriarchal onion of layer upon layer upon layer of assumptions and bigotry and -isms; but let's stick with this first layer for a sec.

So you've recognized that the kyriarchy's expectations of Woman are ridiculous, contradictory, labyrinthine, unfair, and impossible to meet. Good for you. Trouble is, you've responded just the way the kyriarchy wants you to respond: by rejecting Woman altogether. You're still buying into culturally-ingrained misogyny; you've just granted an exemption for yourself. You're out to prove to the misogynists that you're Not Like Those Other Women.

I think/hope I have at last reached a point where I don't reflexively do this, or if I do I catch and correct myself; but I've noticed myself doing the same thing in a different field: I keep wanting to prove to non-believers that I'm Not Like Those Other Christians.

I'm on a progressive message board, prefacing snarky comments about mainstream Christianity with, “Speaking as a believer...”. I'm telling new acquaintances that I'm about to start a master's in theology, and I immediately add that my school is very progressive and pro-QUILTBAG. I play down the Christian aspect of my identity and play up the Jewish side for the benefit of secular communities that tend to conceive Jewishness as a cultural rather than religious identity.

I'm no longer saying, “I'm a woman, but woman-haters should approve of me because I don't buy dresses and I don't wear make-up and I hate romantic comedies. I'm Not Like Those Other Women!” I'm saying, “I have faith, but secularists should approve of me because I believe in evolution and I'm pro-choice and I don't think I have a monopoly on spiritual truth. I'm Not Like Those Other Christians!”

Now, there's a very important distinction between these two kinds of disavowals. The feminine-coded things I'm disavowing are not inherently bad. Dresses and make-up and rom-coms are inherently value- and gender-neutral. They're not somehow intrinsically masculine or feminine or good or bad (though you could certainly make an argument for the intrinsic badness of most recent movies with Katherine Heigl in them) – they come to be seen as m/f based on arbitrary patriarchal prescriptions, and whether we designate them Good or Bad is our response to this coding.

Denying evolution, though? Denying womb-owners their bodily autonomy? Dismissing other faiths as inferior to yours? I'd argue that these are, in fact, inherently bad things. When I as a Christian disavow them, it's not equivalent to when I as a woman disavow value-neutral feminine-coded things. It's equivalent rather to being a man with a lot of misogynist male friends, hitting on women by telling them earnestly that I don't objectify and dehumanize them, I'm not a rape apologist, I don't blame women for provoking lust in men – in short, I'm Not Like Those Other Men.

But you know who overwhelmingly doesn't need to hear that this stuff is wrong, because they already know it? Women. And you know who does need to hear it? Misogynist men. “Pro-choice Christians exist!” is not a message non-believers particularly need to hear – it's one that anti-choice Christians need to hear, desperately and urgently.

I'm past insisting that I'm Not Like Those Other Women, but in this context I'm still insisting that I'm Not Like Those Other Men. The trouble with this defensive self-exceptionalism is that it doesn't challenge the status quo – it reinforces it.

"Facebook-rape" No More!

We've all done it: your friend forgets to log out of Facebook and leaves you unsupervised, and within moments you are declaring to all the internet your friend's unusual sexual predilections or Justin Bieber fandom. I myself did it to a good friend just a few hours ago. It was, and is, very funny.

What's not so funny is the popular name for this practice: “Facebook-rape”, or “frape” for short. People, this is not a cool thing to say. I know that if I tell you this kind of language trivializes rape and perpetuates rape culture, some of you will roll your eyes and tell me to get a sense of humor; but spare a thought for this statistic:

One in six women have been sexually assaulted.

One in six.

Do you know more than five women? Then, statistically, one of them has been sexually assaulted. Your friends and relatives are not exempt. You may not be aware of it, but you know people who have been raped.

And it's just possible that, when you are explaining your sudden linkspam to Justin Bieber fanvids, one of them will see the word “frape” and be triggered into reliving the worst thing that ever happened to them.

I agree that “I left Facebook logged in and unattended, and one of my joker friends posted these things under my name” is a little long-winded, so, as an alternative, I propose that we refer to this phenomenon as “Facebook-pranking” – “franking” for short.

It's short, it's snappy, and it just might spare someone a traumatic flashback. If we change our language, we might change people's thinking, and our culture might stop seeing sexual assault as something to laugh about.

Don't frape your friends. Frank them.

Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, & Violence Against Women

[Newsgrape.]

On Tuesday, Feministing posted an article “On Charlie Sheen and Chris Brown”, which I think everyone should read. It's a cogent analysis of the role played by racism in the internet and media response to Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, and their respective violence against women.

Brown tweeted his frustration at still being asked questions about his violence against Rihanna two years on, pointing out that nobody is taking Sheen to task for his history of violence. Obviously it is not okay for Brown to be “over” it, and we need to keep questioning any public figure who has done such a terrible thing – but, in the second half of his tweet, he kind of has a point.

When I wrote about Charlie Sheen, back at the beginning of all the ugliness that has gone down in his current media blitz, I (somewhat naively) considered him solely from the perspective of his TV role, and I (very naively) concluded that his role on Two and a Half Men makes the snarky denizens of the internet leery because of its uncomfortable resemblance to real life. Obviously, this has proved not to be the case: cyberspace will forgive any sin if it finds something funny. Sheen's twitter account garnered a million followers quicker than anyone had before; he has been fawned over by numerous talk show hosts who are happy to avoid difficult topics as long as he talks about tiger blood and goddesses and winning; and many of the things he has recently said became memes inescapable on the web. For the past month, we have all been talking about Charlie Sheen, but we have not been talking about his abuse of women.

The Feministing article does a good job of tracing the connection between racism and violence against women in the US back to times of slavery, and showing how the image of African-American men as aggressors against (usually white) women still pervades US culture. This is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon of intersectionality. Obviously violence against women is a feminist issue, but in this instance the cultural response is such an inextricable blend of misogyny and racism that we simply cannot divorce the two, and attempts to approach this sorry story as a purely [implied: white] women's issue are dishonest and counterproductive.

An astonishing number of people do not take systemic racism seriously. They deny its continued existence today, or they try to soften it by calling it “subconscious” or “latent”. But ours is a world where a TV executive can refuse to hire people of color for years, and nobody notices until he admits it out loud. How much more overt can it be?

Violence against women is not taken seriously either. We are told that feminism has achieved its aims, in the West at least, and we are “over-sensitive” to perceived instances of misogyny. But in the West a prestigious newspaper can still blame an 11-year-old for being gang-raped by dozens of men. How much more overt can it be?

The Charlie Sheen débâcle of the past month has been characterized by misogyny; with our treatment of Chris Brown for comparison, it's evident that racism also plays a part. A man of color with a history of violence against women appals us. A white man with a history of violence against women entertains and delights us. Everything about this phenomenon is shameful and sickening. We in the media and internet need to start showing a sense of responsibility. We need to start asking the uncomfortable questions and we need to stop perpetuating the same old systems of injustice. Social media and information/communication technology can be a powerful force, and we should be using them to do something worthwhile.

Fortunately, the life cycle of a meme in cyberspace occurs at warp speed. Already it seems the internet has tired of the great Sheenstravaganza of March 2011: tickets for Sheen's forthcoming tour have undersold, and we internauts have turned our derision and glee to newer phenomena. This has more to do with pop culture's infinitesimally short attention span, however, than it has to do with morality. On Newsgrape, my “Charlie Vs. Barney” post has more hits than anything else I've posted there, and I regret not using that pulling power to write something more responsible. Like everyone else who has written about Charlie Sheen without foregrounding his history of violence, I can only say: mea culpa. I'll try to do better next time.

I'm Not Here For Your Entertainment

The other night I was at a party, where I saw somebody I haven't seen since high school. Let's call him Flobberwobberbobberbobberbobber (+10 if you get the reference, +100 if you can say it out loud without cracking a smile). At some point, the inevitable happened: I made a passing reference to an ex-girlfriend, and Flobberwobberbobberbobberbobber said, “So are you gay now?”

That kind of phrasing sets off all manner of alarm bells, but the simplest answer is “yes”. Of course, this led to a barrage of inane questions, which I really didn't feel like answering. (Mad props to my homies in the house who jumped straight to my defense with the usual inversions: “How long have you been straight?”) Later on, I'm pretty sure he was trash-talking me to a good friend, who also defended me like the absolute brick he is.

It would be nice to say that this is the worst I've ever gotten from a straight dude, that I've never been treated like a performing seal or been called unpleasant names or come close to getting the snot beaten out of me on account of my sexuality. It would be nice, but if I said that I would be a lying liar who lies.

All of this harassment, without exception, has come from men.

Some of these men were bullies; some of them were merely ignorant but well-intentioned; they are all products of a culture that tells men they can belittle women's sexuality with impunity. That tells men all valid sex revolves around men's sexuality. That tells men gay women are putting it on to titillate men. That teaches men to question a gay woman's very existence, because it doesn't make any sense that women can have desires and attractions that don't involve men in some way, so any woman claiming to do so is at best a divertissement for men's amusement and at worst a pervert (yes, I've been called that – for holding hands with my girlfriend in public).

What does it feel like to be told, implicitly or explicitly, that your existence is invalid?

It feels like shit.

The only time a woman has made me feel this bad was when a conservative Christian friend lent me a charming book called Blame it on the Brain, which purports to offer solutions to problems like depression, alcoholism, and homosexuality through a cobbled-together mess of dubious neuroscience and Scripture. How much it hurts when people use my faith, the God whom I love and trust with everything I am, to invalidate me is a whole other story. In the secular world, though, women don't doubt other women's sexuality, because we know from our lived experience that, contrary to the teachings of the kyriarchy, women are sexual beings just as much as men are. Some women, of course, are asexual, as are some men; but among those of us who are sexual, some of us are gay. Yes, really.

We're not doing it to get your attention. We're not doing it to play hard to get. We're not doing it because we feel a feminist's obligation to reject men even though we secretly want them. We're doing it because it's who we are.

When you are part of a marginalized group, your oppressors put you in a neat little damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't snare. When a member of the oppressing majority asks a question that displays eir astonishing, breath-taking ignorance, like “how long have you been gay?”, ey's putting the onus on you to educate em. You can refuse, knowing that ey will probably not bother with the five minutes of googling needed to self-educate, and so you are leaving em in ignorance; or you can oblige, and feel as though you are there purely for the convenience of the oppressor: you're the Magical Minority!

What I want from my oppressors is simple. I don't want to have to justify myself to you. I don't want to hear you say you've “turned” lesbians, or to put up with your sexual advances after I've made it clear that I am not interested. I don't want to feel like I have to educate you, and I don't want to have to be defended by my straight friends. I definitely don't want to have to run away so I can keep my face the way it is. When you do this stuff to me, you make me feel as if I am less of a person than you.

Charlie Vs. Barney: A "Womanizing Jerk"-Off

[Cross-posted at Newsgrape.]

So, Charlie Sheen is in the news again, but this time a few people who wouldn’t normally comment are taking notice. The refrain seems to be concern for Sheen’s health, even his life, because his show, Two And A Half Men, is such a money-making machine that nobody will ever tell him regular human things like ‘no’ or ‘beating your wife is not okay’ or ‘seriously, man, just get your ass to rehab and stay there’.

The people expressing this concern are not fans of Two And A Half Men. Personally, I don’t know anyone who is a fan of Two And A Half Men, though an awful lot of people must be, given the average 15 million US viewers it’s been drawing for seven seasons. Full disclosure: I have never actually seen an entire episode, only clips. Coming perilously close to doing some research, I considered watching one before writing this article, but come on, that’s 22 minutes of precious Word Bubble time.

What I do know, from my extensive readings on this here internet, is that Charlie Sheen’s character, imaginatively named ‘Charlie’, is that breed of person known in ye olden times as a manly man, and in modern scientific circles as a humongous douchenozzle. He hooks up with a bazillion different women and is a jerk to them, in episodes with charming titles like ‘Round One to the Hot Crazy Chick’ and ‘The Crazy Bitch Gazette’. If I’m to believe articles like these, this is more or less the entire premise of the show.

Coincidentally, this description of Charlie applies pretty much identically to a character on another CBS sitcom: a show with lower, but still respectable, ratings, and a much greater critical cachet; a breakout character arguably responsible for much of the show’s popularity, and beloved enough to have ‘written’ two books.

Both are womanizing, misogynistic assholes. Why do we interneterati hate Two And A Half Men’s Charlie Harper but love How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson?

I can think of at least three reasons.

First, the context of the show. People who talk about television on the internet tend to consider How I Met Your Mother a good show. At its best, it does something novel with the three-camera sitcom format, utilizing its flashback structure to tell stories in unusual ways and to build a world of consistent detail – guaranteed to appeal to an internet culture that delights in scrutiny of a show’s mythology. Even Two And A Half Men’s most ardent apologists can’t argue that it tries to do anything new, either in its comedy or in its situation.

Second, the context of the character. Barney is a supporting character on How I Met Your Mother. Protagonist Ted is sometimes derided as boring, but he grounds the show in a fundamentally decent and relatable character, which allows Barney to be totally outrageous: as with Zaphod Beeblebrox, you want to have a drink with him – you don’t want to be him. Charlie, however, is the protagonist on Two And A Half Men, and so the viewer can only enter the show’s world on his terms. If you find his terms unappealing, you’ll likely not enjoy the show. (It doesn’t help the misogyny charge that the primary ensemble on Two And A Half Men comprises, well, two and a half men, whereas the How I Met Your Mother ensemble includes two women.)

Third, and most significantly, the relationship between the character and his actor. Neil Patrick Harris’s turn as a womanizing jerk was initially funny because it essentially reprised his performance as a fictionalized version of himself in the Harold & Kumar movies (where, in turn, it was funny because it was a spoof of the Former Child Star stereotype); since November 2006, it’s been funny because we know that he is a monogamous gay man, and now a father of two. The way Barney objectifies and uses women is funny because it bears no relation to reality – the joke is “Barney Stinson, played by Neil Patrick Harris”. Charlie Sheen, on the other hand, really is a womanizing, wife-beating, alcoholic drug addict. That’s hard to laugh at.