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since the last time I got it together to post. I do apologize for this. However, one part of the journey has been learning that, despite my trying to deny it for many years, browbeating myself to do ‘better,’ and desperately hoping for some kind of medical solution, I’ve simply got lower energy than other people — whatever the cause may be — and can’t always accomplish everything I set out to do. Especially since my life has been much busier than heretofore over the last month or so. And this is okay.
I’ve started a new academic career, in a field related to gender and sexual orientation. Much to my chagrin, many of the professors are coming at it from a place of a huge amount of unexamined straight and cis privilege and centrism, that really keeps them from perceiving a big part of their field.
It’s very frustrating. Read the rest of this entry »
SO.
tory majority.
ndp official opposition.
tory majority.
ndp sweeps quebec.
tory majority.
Jack Layton in Stornoway. three new gay MPs and any number of new women MPs, MPs of colour, and young MPs.
tory majority.
I voted for a winning candidate for the first time in my life and now I have an NDP member of Parliament.
tory majority.
*brain go splody*
ANYWAY. Here’s something about the foofaraw over the magazine that had male-assigned genderqueer model Andrej Pejic bare-chested on their cover. Some bookstores decided that, what with the hair and the makeup, he looked a little bit too much like a nekkid laydee, and since laydees’ bosoms are obscene and scary, his must be too, and ordered the issue put in a concealing bag. In addition to pointing out how frantic some people get over gender presentation, it also illustrates neatly how ridiculous our society is over breasts and related issues. Interesting read.
Robby’s 5-year-old son loves to play with Barbies and prefers wearing girl’s clothes. She asks Dr. Phil how to deal with this behavior, which she doesn’t think is normal.[…]
Dr. Phil tells Robby that she has a job to do: “Direct your son in an unconfusing way. Don’t buy him Barbie dolls or girl’s clothes. You don’t want to do things that seem to support the confusion at this stage of the game … Take the girl things away, and buy him boy toys.”
Most importantly, he tells Robby, “Support him in what he’s doing, but not in the girl things.”
Bilerico contributor Alex Blaze observes:
The goal is not to make this boy happy. What the boy wants does not concern Dr. Phil; he neither asks about it nor does he respect what he’s told the boy wants, advising the mother to steam-roll over her son’s personality and force him to replace his desires with other desires.
The goal is to make the boy normal, because everyone’s goal in life is to make the Dr. Phils of the world more comfortable.
ETA: Here’s an additional opinion from a mom of a femme boy, under the admirably blunt title “Dr. Phil Wants To Make My Son Cry”:
“Most importantly, support him in what he’s doing, but not in the girl things.”
Nice. Only support half of your child; you can support all of them if they fall in the range of “normal.” I should support C.J.’s brother because he is into video games, baseball, skateboarding and fart jokes. But, I shouldn’t support C.J. completely because he likes dolls, playing beauty parlor, doing girly sticker books and walking around in my high heels. Support him, but only half way. Let him know that only certain parts of him are okay. To me this is the worst suggestion of the bunch.
Last night at 1:15 a.m. I was awakened by my downstairs neighbour, who brought to my attention that my hot water heater had vomited all over his kitchen. Apparently, hot water heaters die like supervillains: splashily, explosively, and with a maximum of structural damage. All it failed to do is shriek, “No! It cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!”
The water’s now back on, but to go along with my generally unpleasant mood, fabulous B.C. blogger Kaitlin Burnett takes on a truly hideous Dockers ad. The tagline? “It’s time to wear the pants.” No, it’s not ironic. Sexism, homophobia, transphobia, effemimania, it comes complete with all you see here:
And that’s not the only one: they go on. And on. Ye gods and little fishes. At any rate, read what she has to say about it.
A question occasioned by a strong emotional reaction recently experienced in a bookstore:
Are there any queer-boy sex books that aren’t totally masculine-normative, that talk about femme boys as if we might conceivably be attractive, in which all the advice about sex doesn’t have an undercurrent of “and this is how you can be a Real Man in bed with your lover!”, and that actually mention trans guys?
Recommendations eagerly solicited.
From time to time, I get into a discussion that goes more or less along the following lines: there’s pressure on straight men to be masculine, and there’s pressure on queer men to be feminine, and both are equally bad. Or: some queer men will reject you for being too femme, and others will reject you for being too butch. Or: you are just feminine because it’s expected of you as a queer man; you’re just conforming to the stereotype and either putting on a show for the straight people or trying to impress other queers.
Not to be too blunt about it, but I’m always forced to wonder which planet these people grew up on. Where in heaven’s name is this mythical pressure on any (cissexual) man to be feminine? Where have they ever seen it? What evidence or experience can they possibly point at to back up what they’re saying? Who do they imagine I am impressing by being this way?
Let me tell you what pressure I had in my life to be femme, either before or after I came out: none.
“ Soft people have got to shimmer and glow- they’ve got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a paper lantern over the light. It isn’t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And I-I’m fading now!”
– Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
As mentioned in the last post, I’ve spent just about the most unpleasant May in recent memory battling it out with a really rather dreadful spot of stomach lurgy that showed up and decided to make itself at home. Beyond the more prosaic misery attached to it, I’ve been feeling just about the least sexy I have in years. So it seems a good time to talk about body image.
A number of years ago I had one of the most frustrating conversations ever. I was just starting to try to intellectually work out this femme thing, and was opening up to an older gay friend about it. “Oh come on, you’re not femme,” he said. “Sure, you play at being femme like we all do, but you aren’t really femme.”
When I protested, he pointed out a hot guy across the street from where we were sitting. He had nice arms and was wearing a tight tank top and a sarong. “Well, for one thing,” my friend said, “to be femme you’d have to look good in a sarong, and honey, I’ve seen you in a sarong.”
Sigh.
femme guy! 