In the day before yesterday’s post, after a great deal of throat-clearing, I wrote the following, fairly succinct summary of how I believed my interest in gay male culture is in fact a kind of sublimation of my repressed interest in women.
What’s compelling to me about gay men, I think, is that their unavoidable separation from traditional hetero male culture has condemned them, but also liberated them, to look to women as models of how to be interesting, charismatic, attractive people. They seem different from straight men because most straight men are too scared or too ignorant to explore ways that they might want to be like some of the women they admire. The irony, for me, is that I think I’ve been so open to the gay male influence in large part because it’s easier for me to want to emulate gay men—who are still men, after all—than it is for me to imagine emulating women.
I ran this notion by my wife, and she had two reactions. The first was to tell me, as she’s told me many times before, that I need to stop pretending and just come out of the closet (I’m serious, she says this to me all the time. As far as I can tell it’s basically a way of saying “I love you,” and also has something to do with her excitement/anxiety at having married a man who’s moderately in touch with his feminine side and has a deeply problematic relationship with his masculine side.) The second was to remind me that this issue—that men are so afraid of, and afraid of seeming like, women—was one of the reasons why she was hoping that we’d have a daughter rather than a son.
Perhaps because I have both a younger brother and a younger sister—Jess is an only child, and her significant childcare experiences have been with girls—my basic sense is that after you weigh the various pros and cons, boys and girls are roughly equally difficult, and easy, to raise, but on this particular matter I’m coming more and more to agree with Jess. There’s simply more psychological space in our culture for a young girl to look out at the array of adults she can choose to admire and decide that she wants to have the athleticism of Uncle Jim, the professional aggressiveness of her father, and the emotional sensitivity of her mother. Or if her mother’s the good business person, and her father’s the emotional one, that’s pretty much okay too.
Not that girls aren’t troubled by having gender atypical parents, or about being gender atypical kids. I’m sure they are. But it’s different. As Stephen Ducat writes in The Wimp Factor, which I talked a bit about yesterday:
There are two sets of phrases that condense much of the culure’s values and taboos surrounding gender: sissy and tomboy, and mama’s boy and daddy’s little girl. At first glance, we can see symmetry between these expressions. “Sissy” and “tomboy” both refer to cross-gender behavior. Both “mama’s boy” and “daddy’s little girl” describe a special closeness with the other-sex parent. Nevertheless, “sissy” and “mama’s boy,” which apply exclusively to males, are clearly pejorative, and in many cases, viewed as grievous insults. “Tomboy” and “daddy’s little girl,” which refer only to girls, are far more neutral—and in some circumstances are even used as endearments.
To be labeled a sissy is to endure shame and humiliation and, not infrequently, physical assault. Because of their treatment by peers and adults, such boys tend to have much lower degrees of self-acceptance and confidence, impairments that endure well into adolescence and beyond. On the other hand, girls seen as tomboys may be the subject of some disapproval, but even in culturally conservative settings, the view is often expresed that such female children will “grow out” of their predilection for rough-and-tumble play. Researchers have confirmed what most readers probably know from life experience—that sissies are viewed far more negatively than tomboys. In many settings, being a tomboy can even elevate a girl’s status by placing her on par with boys, especially in athletic activities and other endeavors valued in the playground patriarchy. ? A mama’s boy is seen as embedded in a shamefully close and dependent relationship with his mother, one that imperils his masculinity and invites the derision of others.
The funny thing is that I don’t even have distinct memories of being made to conform to male roles, or of being mocked for being too girly, and yet there’s no question that I was conformist in almost all respects to the gender stereotypes. It wasn’t even a conflict. I had lots of insecurities about not being manly enough — I was too short, I wasn’t good with girls, I didn’t get pubes until fairly late — but it never even occurred to me that it might be nice to be more like a girl in certain ways, or that I was repressing some part of myself in being a conventional boy. The only imperative was to be more manly; being more womanly wasn’t even in the realm of consideration.
Fucked up, eh?
