Summary: This is more abstract than even I usually get it’s about a point Bond makes about a very concrete consequence of confusing gender and sex. The resulting mockery interfered with what might otherwise have become a perfectly unexceptionable relationship.

Bond of Dear Diaspora has what amounts to a lovely tone poem about the difference between sex and gender.

Butches are not men.

Butches are not failed men. Butches are not fake men. Butches are not wannabe men. Butches are not imitation or ersatz men. Butches are not men.

Butches can be and usually are mannish, manly, and masculine. But butches are not men.

What we need, and badly, is language to talk about butchness without deference to maleness. We need ways to celebrate butch gender specifically, distinct and definite, hale and whole.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m sure the same can be said of the need to talk about femme-ness (or feyness or whatever you want to call it) without dragging femaleness into it.

Bond was speaking by the way of a friend of a friend who, trying to relate to her crush on a butch-y woman in the face of her own comfortable lesbianism, chose to deprecate that woman’s “masculinity.” Which is, on the face of it, a compound absurdity.

Not absurdity in the sense of wariness of a sex towards which one isn’t oriented. Absurdity in the sense of confusing the assumed behavior and appearance of someone you’re oriented to with a sex you’re not oriented to. And absurd in the sense of assuming that a set of behaviors and appearance makes you of one sex or another. As opposed to, you know, being one sex or another. (Including, by the way, being trans or intersex which I get the repeated and distinct impression is about being what you are instead of how a majority of other people look or act.)

Finding language that allows separation of gender from sex would be pretty helpful in a lot of ways. Not least would be that it could be just one more of a way of being, like, say, sportiness or piousness or vegetarianism, than rule of biological conformity that can get you mocked, clocked, excluded, or assaulted for not having a sufficiency of.

Oof. That all sounds pretty abstract. If you’re still with me let’s look at examples: Mr. Rogers was a man. Bond is a woman. By most cultural signifiers Bond is almost certainly more “masculine” than was Mr. Rogers. Bond is most comfortable the way she is. Rogers was most comfortable the way he was. Yet, because of the way their pee-pees were shaped other people feel privileged to make judgments about both: for the comfort of others she should be more “womanly;” more “manly.” And yet both were, in Bond’s lovely words, “distinct and definite, hale and whole.”

Along the same lines, by the way, I remember a friend, herself a bit butch more often than not, returning from a week on Fire Island where she wound up rooming with a bunch of gay transvestites. She said one night they decided to dress her up so they could all go out partying. And dress her they did, and dressed her hair, and made up her face, and even gave her tips on how to move, shimmy, and turn her face and eyes. She said she’s never looked more gorgeously feminine in her life. But that there was a bit of competitiveness about it, like, she said, they were telling you “‘this is how you do it right, girlfriend,’ as if they thought they were better at being women than I was.”

See what I mean? It’s only weird if you equate “femininity” with being a woman. Or, in Mr. Rogers or Bond’s case or the case of the uncomfortable lesbian she mentioned, confusing being “masculine” with being man.

Point being that if you’re going to bother having these constructed and adopted aspects called “gender” the least we could do is cultivate language that disambiguates them from handed-to-us-at-birth attributes like biological sex, somatic bodies, sexual identities, and sexual orientations.

Two quotes from Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon First there’s Laura Ingraham who unloaded on football great Brett Favre who teared up when he announced his retirement.

“All these years, and I didn’t know there was a woman quarterback in the NFL.”

“Brett Favre…we’re watching this in the studio, obviously retiring from the NFL, great quarterback, handsome 38-year-old man, he gets up there and he does this press conference that was frankly one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.”

“That’s a great message for young boys. ‘Get up there and act like a girl and start blubbering like a baby.”

Find the appropriate links here.

And can we just send her a giant “eat shit?” Because who would know better what it really means to be a man than a quack talk-show host?

And here’s a more interesting quote, from Stephen Duckat’s The Wimp Factor (if you buy the book with that link it’ll be credited, appropriately, to Marcotte.)

... It suggests that being biologically male is not sufficient to confer or sustain masculinity. Instead, it must be asserted through repetition, words and actions. The everyday vocabulary and common-sense notions of gender remind us that in the majority of patriarchal cultures, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.

Do I need to restate the case that contrary to what aficionados of “masculinity” and “femininity” claim, the constructions of gender are almost entirely subtractive rather than additive? “Real men don’t cry.” (Though, obviously, real men do.) “It’s not feminine to cross your legs when you’re wearing a skirt.” Blah, blah, blah.

And sorry, saying “well, I’m mostly feminine but I fall asleep after sex like a man,” or “Well, Brett Favre’s 100% man but on top of that he does feminine things like crying too” just doesn’t work because you’ve still got all these scared, narrow little people who can’t make contributions of their own who use false distinctions like “a) crying is feminine” (and really I could just rest my case there couldn’t I?) and then go on to “b) Brett Favre cried” and then on to the technically logical but otherwise irrational conclusion that “c) Brett Favre is feminine” and therefore (by logically invalid extension) Favre is a woman.

“Being biologically male is insufficient to confer or sustain masculinity.” Huh. In other words, if there’s anything wrong with that picture it’s obviously masculinity and not men. (And no less obviously femininity and not women.)

I mean… doesn’t it just make more sense to say “some men never cry, others do” and just ditch the whole “he’s just a man but he’s not masculine? And “some women are interested in the way they look in dresses, other women aren’t” and dump the extra step of distinguishing “feminine” women from “regular” ones?

—-

Oh, and in yet another one of those small coincidences, while I was just out with my children for their evening romp at one of the local playgrounds (don’t ask) I ran across a line in Susan Bordo’s The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Privatethat, while I’m pulling it slightly out of context, proposes a different perspective on men’s tears as a, literally, “softer side” that succeeds without invoking gender at all.

Tears are permissible, even admirable, when they fill the eyes of an old warrior reminiscing about battle or a jock talking about his teammates. In such contexts, tears are like the soft penis after satisfying sex.

Again, while the point Bordo is working towards is almost contrary to the text of the quote, what really matters is that the text doesn’t need to ship in “otherness” as an explanation. And unlike Ingraham’s invocations Bordo’s version implies no mysterious insight into what it must be like to be a man. Instead she relies on what could be confirmed by aobservation. That’s pretty cool.

Commons
“She Ra and He Man” photo by Flickr user Alex Peterson.

More on the distinction between masculinity and being a man, derived Amanda Marcotte’s reflections at Pandagon on Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity).

I’m not sure why eradicating masculinity offends Courtney [Martin, who wrote about Jensen’s book at Feministing] but I can’t help but think maybe she’s confusing it with eradicating maleness? I’ve seen Jensen speak; he struck me as someone who is quite full of confidence and conviction, far from the self-hating weasel his critics try to paint him as. When he talks about eradicating “masculinity”, he’s talking about eradicating the social construct of masculinity, especially as it’s defined in America. Think about how masculinity is constructed in America: violent, hateful, out of touch with “softer” emotions like love, irresponsible, stupid, willfully ignorant, and of course with a sexuality based around violence and conquest, not around pleasure and the sharing of it. (Today’s example—how anal sex is only “fun” if it’s a coercive process—is just one of many to add to the mind-numbing amounts of misogynist porn out there.)

The construct of masculinity is largely responsible for everything from rape to the propaganda push leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But masculinity victimizes the true believers, as well as women and men who find themselves on the wrong side of dudes on a masculinity trip. Men die younger than women for a myriad of reasons that relate to the construct of masculinity, from the idea that overeating (especially of fatty red meat) is a proof of masculinity to the unnecessary risk-taking that accompanies displays of masculinity. Masculinity is extremely stressful to men, since it’s not something you ever get to have, but something that you’re always fighting to prove, a battle that’s never completely won but has to begin anew every day. Men sacrifice a lot for masculinity, often destroying their ability to have truly loving and intimate relationships with their friends, family and romantic partners in order to maintain the facade. Feminists have invested a lot of energy into showing how the construct of femininity—from feigned helplessness to restricting ambition to the endless beautifying tasks—cripples women and clips our wings. Isn’t it possible that the construct of masculinity does the same thing to men? Masculinity is a burden; surely men would be better off without it.

I’ve mentioned before that I started to distinguish “masculinity” from being a man after reading discussions of the feminist distinction between being “feminine” and female. Without taking anything away from transsexuality, bisexuality, or intersexuality, our gender is with us right down to our chromosomes — we are nearly all male or female (even with transgender we’re male or female assignment if not in biological fact.) But if we’re born male or female, woman or man, we make up masculinity and femininity.

Now making up personas like “femininity” or “masculinity” is all fun and games until someone forgets its a game and mistakes it for the truth. Then it stops being fun and then, as Marcotte reminds us, people start to get hurt.

Ok, so this post started out with a simply, somewhat wry question with a patented figleaf twist on standard conservative tropes. I’ll get to that in a second but I wanted to mention the results of a couple of searches I did trying to find a story link from a month or so ago. The story was that in certain, mostly urban/near-suburban areas of the U.S. younger women tend to have higher incomes than their male counterparts.

The specific story I was looking for was some sort of whine about how men, and for that matter women, where having a pretty hard time with the issue that it’s somehow emasculating for women to buy dinner if/when they have higher incomes than the men they’re dating. (If you’ve got a link to one of those stories I’ll update the post and, naturally, give you attribution.)

Anyway, my intended joke was to the effect that if something as trivially inessential as earning less than one’s partner, or, even more trivially, having her buy you dinner is enough to render you unable to reproduce (or at least go through the motions of reproduction) then… isn’t that just survival of the fittest in action?

There are other outfalls, of course. One being that when we have real gender equity then on any given day when heterosexuals meet for a date then, ceteris paribus, about half the time the woman’s income will be equal to or greater than the mans. And, of course, vice versa.

The problem with ceteris paribus, though, is that everything else really does have to be equal. And, as with issues of partner selection and height where relative heights in heterosexual couples is greater than it would be if men and women were genuinely paired at random, we can see cultural bias in both lower-income men and higher-income women. In other words we’re not going to have social parity until both men’s and women’s expectations shift.

Another outfall, by the way, is that if it really was emasculating for men to have their dinners paid for, enough to make them allegedly lose ambition, enthusiasm, and libido, then it follows that it must be equally “emasculating” for women to be paid for. If that were so then one might predict that if, say, women’s dinners were traditionally paid for then they’d manifest below-baseline interest in sex with those partners…. oh wait!

Sigh.

I think the problem boils down to our general failure to distinguish masculinity from manliness, in the same way that women’s studies suggests we fail to distinguish being feminine from being a woman. And since some people are probably saying “huh,” check out the “opinion” of University of Texas student Ryan Haecker, Who wears the pants?.

Dresses epitomize womanhood in the Western world. Such has been the case since the western man adopted pants to replace the tunic in the sixth century (an aspect of the West’s Germanic barbarian heritage). Dresses allow us to differentiate between the silhouettes of men and women on restroom signs. Dresses are the indelible image of womanhood because of the symbolic nature of pants and dresses. If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility. These defining aspects of womanhood are immutable. We all tacitly reaffirm these attributes in our attempts to find a partner. Flirtation and courtship are reaffirmations of what it means to be masculine and feminine because it is only by fulfilling the obligation of our form that we can attract the opposite sex.

If that’s not enough you can read the rest here.

Got that? Women who wear pants aren’t feminine. In this case dresses signify femininity to such an extend that women can’t be feminine without them. In this same sense (and only in that sense) simply by buying them dinners men can be emasculated of their, erm, masculinity. Presumably by women in pants.

Which is, again, insane. Almost exactly half of my partners over the years have had and/or earned more money than I did. All of them have worn pants at least some of the time. Many of them have bought dinner for me. (I particularly remember a Friday night pizza-and-pitcher tradition/ritual that made all the difference in the world to me, and to us when we were almost literally starving students in college together. She could afford the $10 to cover both of us. I could usually afford only rice and beans, and towards the end of the quarter sometimes only rice.) But here’s the thing!

1: Only an idiot could fail to recognize the difference between fully dressed men and women.
2: And I do mean a target=”_blank” href=“http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiot”>idiot, particularly in the archaic sense of lacking the mental development of a four-year-old and from the Greek derivation of one who “has no professional knowledge, layman” and “unpracticed, unskilled.” Because, y’know, in addition to non-masculine/non-feminine-dependent visual and behavioral cues there’s also this thing called words that come out of these things called mouths that express these things called “preferences,” and “expressions of interest” such that even when visual and behavioral cues are ambiguous one can always ask and/or receive answers.
3: Pants come off just like dresses do.
4: When they do, underneath our pants men and women are profoundly different.
5: For healthy, lusty, untraumatized heterosexuals, those profound differences are, well… profound! (And of course for health, lusty, untraumatized non-heterosexuals the similarities are no less profoundly profound.)

Therefore: Requesting or requiring affectations of “masculinity” or “femininity” for the benefit of those who are so enfeebled, inflexible, or easily confused that they can’t otherwise tell men and women apart paints conservatives and traditionalists not as strong or moral but anchorless and weak.