In which AHunter3 pits/debates/seeks opinion on his maleness

In My Humble Opinion
1

I hereby pit my maleness (slightly used, dysfunctional).*

Nope, not the parts. The equipment seems to be in dependable and satisfactory working order. I hate to disappoint the thoughtful spammerfolks who have sent me so many ads for viagra and cialis over the last few months, but the only time my erogenous zones have zoned out have been when the gal of the moment (for, you see, the orientation of the appetite is towards the female of the species) was for one reason or another a bad idea and the erogenous zone caught on sooner (or was more honest in its response) than the parts of the cerebrum directing activity.

Actually, I have been wondering if perhaps I’m a transsexual.

Stuck. Good Og, yeah, stuck is how it feels. Whatever, whoever I am, I’m definitely stuck in the wrong…

Nope, not the parts. (Didn’t I just say that??) I mean, it’s not like I look down when I’m dressing or undressing and experience this longing for tits to be manifesting themselves on my chest. No overwhelming sense of rightness and “yeah, that’s how it oughta be” about rediscovering myself to be peniled and equipped with the dangly things below, but no genuine sense that a clit and mons and whatnot oughta be found there instead (although if it were I’d have better indoor entertainment, but that’s been said before).

And if it’s not the parts, there’s not much support for saying I’m transgendered. Except, umm, isn’t gender supposed to be different from biological sex? I’m stuck in the wrong gender.

WOMEN

Umm, maybe it is the parts. OK, look: umm, looks. Visual aspects of sexuality. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but I have an astonishingly strong, not very picky, perpetually present part of my sexuality that just goes off whenever I see female people in decently good shape clothed (or in deshabille or without clothings) so as to show off their distinctively female body architecture. Now where this gets to be a bad thing in a hurry, and where I start to wonder if I really am stuck in the wrong body, is that this does not seem to be mutual. I can get out of the subway and walk the three long blocks to work and see maybe 8, maybe 15, maybe 27 deliciously cute attractive females and lust after them based only on how they look, and when I get to work, despite not being in awful shape myself, I have no confidence that 27, or 15, or 8, or even one of those women glanced at me and lusted for me because of how cute I am and how sexy I look.

I can’t play if I don’t feel like I’m bringing anything to the table that lets me play. If I’m not cute to you the way you’re cute to me, well that sucks and life goes on. Now, I would not just intuitively know, necessarily, every single time some female found me to be lookin’ delicious, but let’s face it, over the long haul I’d get a sense of it. And I have. And it ain’t mutual. Meanwhile I live in a culture and participate in a message board and my ears and my eyes tell me that it’s just kind of an understood thingie, that it’s the boys that are wired to find the girlies visually sexually attractive in a big way. Not to diss those of you who are not heterosexual and definitely not to diss those of you who are female and lust after dozens of guys per block based on how they look whenever you’re out for a walk, I’m just summarizin’.

So…other guys can do with it whatever they’re comfy doing with it, but for me, if I can’t be the cute one 51% of the time…oh all right 50% of the time, then I’m not playing, as far as this visual attaction thingie goes. I just won’t ever do anything to let you know. You probably assume it anyhow. Fine. The ball is in your court, so you do something with it.

Now, moving right along. I’ve heard many of you female hetero folks say that it is not in your nature to fall into bed or equiv. with guys merely because you think they are cute and vice versa anyhow, that you would rather hold out for the more passionate, more intense experience of falling in love, which necessarily involves the meshing of personalities. OK, yeah, I can dig that, I love being in love, I delight in the intensity of it, the riskiness of it, the exquisite tenderness of it. I can make myself vulnerable to it. That, more than the chimera-mirage of the cute-body thing, is where my sexuality seems to be at. So, we’re approaching our interest in this possibility as equals, yes?

That does mean that we should dance our way closer to that as equals. It does mean that you should not be looking from amongst those males who have come to you to express an interest in you when they do not know you aside from knowing what you look like. It means you should not be using visual sexual attractiveness to draw guys in if this, instead, is what you’re looking for. Well, that’s how it seems to me at any rate. If this is what I’m interested in and this is also what a lot of you female folks are seeking, it seems like there should be venues where I could show up, venues more or less dedicated to people who wanna couple, and after attending several over a protracted period in many different locations and situations I would not be left with the sad and dreary impression that if the last folks to leave the party consisted of me, a quadraplegic guy paralyzed from the neck down, a Catholic priest, an overtly out-of-the-closet gay guy, and eight fascinating interesting cute women, one woman would go home with the paralyzed guy, two would fight over the possibility of seducing the priest, three would join the gay guy to either compare notes on sexy guys or to see if they could convert the fellow, and the other two would go home together to see if lesbian sex were really where it’s at.

So, to head off your responsive post and develop my situation a bit further, what I actually do is advertise online, whenever I’m unattached and single, and I do emails with women who by definition are looking, and in relatively short order I click with someone and as long as I can keep it to a text medium long enough for things to blossom, I’m well set, and when we get together things work out quite nicely because passion has been kindled in a medium and a context where I shine and where an astonishingly and conveniently major portion of the scripted-gendered sex-role stuff doesn’t seem to hold sway. (Maybe because being textual, it’s verbal, and a really significant part of what is expected from guys in bars, dances, and other pickup venues is nonverbal). And so I’ve had pretty decent continuity of good relationships (and some not-so-good ones now and then), and some longevity thereof, and therefore I’m at least somewhat inclined to reject the potential proposal that the reason neither casual appearance-based nor lookin’-for-love singles venues work for me is because I’m a dreary boring sot that no one could enjoy being with anyhow.

I do okay, actually. Am I still pissed? Yeah, now and then. Therefore this post. The online thingie leaves me feeling still circumscribed somehow. I’ve heard married women say they like to be able to walk though crowds and sense that they are still found attractive to guys, not that they want to have affairs with any of them, just that they like how that feels. I want that. I want that too. I happen to be in a good relationship but sick and sad as it may sound I want to experience myself as desirable, generically so.

In closing to the women: there’s something really really wrong when sex is handed out like an award for good character. Feels like a Boy Scout merit badge. I want to be lusted after cuz I’m hot.

MEN

It would be nice to have colleagues. Others like me. An identity in common. Scarcely nothing is more basic, more fundamental in our society than the notion that peopel of the same gender have gut-level stuff in common.

I’ve never, ever, felt like I was one of the boys.

Your sexually aggressive, pushy, oftentimes bordering on begging type behavior with the females ruins the market dynamics. Market. Market. Market, dammit. Supply and demand. We have supply, they have supply. We have demand, they have demand. You fucking pigs. You, in general, not each and every one of you, but you in general: you’ve established us as the demand side. I do not like being on the demand side of the equation.

Oh, and those of you, who have testified as to what men are like, what males are about, as if you’d been appointed official spokesperson for our sex — you left me out. You left me and whoever is like me, out.

Oh yeah, and the faggot beatings. I dont’ happen to lust for male people. Convenient, I think, since I have not tended to like male people. (I’ve gotten over a significant part of that, finally. Lots of likeable admirable male people in this world if you aren’t prejudiced against them as I was for a long time. But at really close range I don’t think I’d be good for another guy and I don’t think I’m at all ready to open myself in a sexually-responsive way, categorically, to males). But that didn’t protect me from getting beaten up on multiple occasions for being a fucking faggot. Because I’m different. Because I leave a “taste” in lots of people’s heads like I’m not “right” for male. I have called myself a “heterosexual sissy”. I’ve written about it. I don’t know if more traditionally “masculinized” guys are victims of some process or if it’s just how lots of guys are, but I never received any emails or other correspondence from guys who seemed to understand what I’ve gone through unless they’d been through a lot of it themselves. And even then, it is rare that this experience, this difference, defines them, becomes the central part of how they think of themselves.

For me, it is. And has been for a long long time. I feel so alone. And I’m tired of being alone. I’m really really really sick and tired of being the only one I’ve ever known. I have never known a brother. I have never had any sense of being among other males with whom I had this, this most central part of the experience that defines me, in common.

Sum-Up

Feminism speaks of patriarchy, the socialization of males into men, and the changeability of the social environment, the social-political environment. On the other hand, more conservative / less politicized descriptions such as sociobiology, medical studies, genetics, etc, speak of innate differences between the sexes, while also according to certain subpopulations such as gay guys and lesbians the discovery that the tendency to be who they are — sexual orientation — is intrinsic to their biology.

I, too, seem to be an outlyer, and maybe I, too, am essentially a representative of a marginal phenotype.

I think I’d be OK if, as per radical feminism, the world could be changed and patriarchy dispelled to the point that maleness was not associated with sexual aggression and initiative, or even visual sexual receptivity, moreso than femaleness, to the point that the folks I interacted with did not have gendered expectations based on observing that I was male. I also think I’d be OK if, as per science fiction, I could just change worlds and move to a place where what it means to be a male and what it means to be a female, sociologically, is reversed from what it is here on Earth.

But OK…change world, change worlds, or change me, what’s easiest here? Does Ockham’s Razor kinda resemble a scalpel, do ya think?

  • This almost got posted to the Pit. Then this almost got posted to Great Debates. I think I can safely rule out Cafe Society and ATMB, and am choosing IMHO rather than MPSIMS…<sigh>
2

Well, old chap, you sure seem to have done a deal of thinking about this.

I do too – maybe not as much as you have, though your web-available essays did help me out a good deal – and am currently dipping a toe into that rather indistinct-edged but intriguingly warm tub currently called genderqueer.

Although I do like “outlying phenotype.”

3

Your story puts me in mind of two people. One of them is myself, about a dozen years ago. The other is an old friend of mine, from about five years ago. I won’t use his name, to protect his privacy.

Of course, I’m transsexual. My friend, on the other hand, isn’t. He crossdressed for a while, but last I talked to him (about a year ago) he had a happy relationship with a woman and hadn’t crossdressed in years. He seems to have found peace with himself without having to go through all the trouble of transition and reassignment. In some ways, I envy him. In others, I don’t.

So maybe you’re transsexual and maybe you’re not. As matt_mcl says, welcome to the poorly-defined land of the genderqueer. Give it a few years; things may become more clear to you with time. It took me nearly ten years to go from “I don’t really feel all that much like a guy” to “There’s no other explanation; I’m a transsexual”; don’t expect an answer overnight.

4

I don’t think you are transexual at all, Outlying phenotype either. I believe what you are describing is a normal reaction to a normal situation. Hunter you are plugged in, you are in the know, you understand your body and your mind like only a master of it can. What it appears you are demonstrating is that O’So Human trait of being inquisitive, non-ignorant, knowing both sides of every situation. Sexuality just happens to be a facet of humaness that is outside our societies capability to discuss openly, even with ourselves…

You are a smart guy who most likely on some level or another likes to philosophize about veritably anything…As a man who is in touch with his feminine side, I’d say you are quite normal…certainly not the neanderthal, jock who can’t put 2 and 2 together to get 4 :slight_smile:

5

AHunter3, I dunno for sure what you are in terms of gender identification/sexuality, but it sounds to me like you are maybe an atypical, sensitive kind of a guy. Just that, no more, no less. I’m glad for you that you live in an age where the internet gives you the access you need to have some good relationships; I’m guessing that guys like you had a much harder time of it 20 years ago!

6

You sound a lot like my father, or as we lovingly refer to him, “Our Gay Dad.” He’s not a jock. He’s not violent. He’s not aggressive. He’s sensitive, extremely well-read, funnier than all get-out, kind, generous, a natty dresser when the occasion calls for it, simply adores women, is everyone’s favorite uncle, and all my girlfriends think he’s the greatest dad on Earth. But his obvious love of the female gender – his genuine interest in who they are, how they think, and what they have to say – has gotten him labeled “Horn Dog” by my husband’s niece (the man-eater). He didn’t do anything to deserve that, but evidently she mistook his interest in her as a hit, and she immediately backed away. :rolleyes:

I wouldn’t worry about it. There are women out there who are looking for a guy like you. Depending on where you live, they could be more difficult to find. But they are out there. Looking for you.

7

Hello! First off, I’d like to apologize to matt and Kelli for my uncertainty about how to respond to other people who posted to this thread causing me to not respond to you either. matt_mcl, thanks, doubly so for the concept-link and for letting me know you’ve read my stuff; and moreso, showing up felt like a real statement of support and makes me feel understood. [Aside]And at some point I’d like your opinion and feedback on my attempt to remap the lines of NYsubway circa late 1930s onto the modern NYsubway route map (I’m pretty sure of the stops and moderately sure of the routes but doing a lot of guesswork on the transfer points).
[/Aside]

KellyM, it means a lot to me to feel heard and listened to by a transsexual. I wasn’t entirely sure this would not feel to you and Eve as…what’s the word I’m looking for? Like I’m too easily helping myself to the mantle of the word that describes what you’ve been through without having to go through all of it myself…cooptation?

Which, I suppose, brings me to the troubling part. I may not have experienced all that folks like KellyM have had to cope with, as a consequence of not having issues with the, umm…morphology, let’s say, of the body I was born in, but…

Philosphr, Norinew: Responding to what you have said is hard for me. It’s why this thread went dormant. I really feel that you meant well. I think your intentions were generous in motivation and that you believed yourselves to be feeling for me when you posted. So this is not about “how you don’t care”.

But what you have each said, unlike (for instance) what matt_mcl wrote, makes me feel…not understood. Erased, somehow, not like it’s something you’re doing on purpose but as a failure of communication, which goes onto the very very tall pile of failures to communicate on this issue which is a sore point and, like all things that are sore, hurts.

I’m not just a sensitive new age guy. I’m not just more intelligent and more savvy than the average guy immersed in reductionistic sex roles. Or at least my participation in venues akin to (and including) this one reinforce my sense that even if I’m only amongst a group where the other guys are intelligent, savvy, and quite often sensitive to feminist and/or other alternative non-sexrole-regimented notions about gender, I still don’t feel like there’s a male “us” that includes me. Threads pop up like crazy that pertain to comparing some minor aspect of male (hetero)sexuality and over and over again I feel like an outsider. There are so many necessary identifications of unquestioned assumptions that don’t apply to me, with necessarily longwinded alternative constructs I’d have to insert before I’d be able to say “and here’s how it is for me, personally”, that it’s exhausting to post to that kind of thread unless I adopt the phony “Of Course Anyone Who’s Hip Gets This Backdrop” kind of attitude in my post (which I confess I occasionally do).

I FEEL DIFFERENT. IT’S NOT NEW. I’VE ALWAYS FELT DIFFERENT. AND IT’S GENDERED.

Umm, it’s part of my sense of self. I “came out”, such as it was (there was not then and there is not now a name for my specific sense of gendered-disphoric sense of self) in 1980. And at at that time, in retrospect, I looked back and knew I’d been entertaining less blatant suspicions that I was different. I remember reading the Renee Richard Story back when I was…High School? Shortly thereafer? Anyway, the notion that “maybe I’m like that” wasn’t unique to my “revelation” in 1980.

In 1980 I was 21 years old. I’m more than twice that age now. This sense of self came to me when I was still a virgin and therefore there has colored most of my sexual experiences. Most of what would be defined reductionistically as my heterosexual experiences, nearly all of them, have taken place with me holding this sense of self in my mind. There has been plenty of room to find the description inadequate, reductionistic, or wrong, but nearly 25 years later I would still describe myself in the same terms, drawing at this point on my experiences within several relationships.

I have anger. I think it is strongly parallel to feminist anger, but it’s my own anger, my own situation, it’s personal, it’s me, it’s mine. It may be essentially feminist in content but by damn it’s my own. Believe me, I have not a chivalrous bone in my body when it comes to feminist social politics. If it benefits women, cool, yay women, and good for ya, but that’s not why I want a very large portion of the same shit that feminists have identified , both problem-identification and desired-solution. Go feminists.

Personally, in everyday life, in “real life”, I’m sick and tired of feeling like a Martian. I need kinfolks. I need to belong. I need others. I’m tired of being the only one I know. I think there is, has to be, an “ushood” out there. I want to find it.

8

AHunter3, I guess you’re right, I don’t understand. Obviously, I interpreted your OP withing the only frame of reference I know, and what I came up with is, obviously, wrong for you. Having said that, I’m fresh out of answers; that was the only one I had. But just because I don’t know, that certainly doesn’t mean other folks don’t know. I hope you find the people that do, and that you find your niche, and most of all I hope that you find peace.

9

AHunter,

Wow, what a great post. What struck a chord with me is the point about “not feeling like one of the boys.”

As a kid, a lot of my friends were girls. I still tend to make female friends easily, but, in fact, I do not really prefer the company of girls to men–not men who are smart and “cool,” in my book. But, still, I CAN relate to women in a way that I think many men cannot.

I’ve always been very hetero, though, but at the same time a little bit effiminate. 1/4 sissy, I’d say.

Maybe it’s like this: Guys like you and me (if we are indeed alike in this one respect, perhaps more), have a kind of vibration that crosses the gender lines. Our frequency lines up halfway between female and male.

For my own way of dress, I guess I’m in the metrosexual camp. Although I am often too sloppy to practice it, I like the primped Euro look. I like leather pants. Yeah, it’s a little queer (and I like hanging out with gay men, too, whadya know), but that’s just why I like it. And, for some reason, I like wearing women’s perfume.

So, you’re not the only one with some contradictions or hard-to-categorize traits. Try not to be to hard on yourself.

BTW, your one of my favorite posters on SMDB. Your writing is appreciated!

10

I’ve been musing on gender a bit lately. I’m biologically female and identify as a woman, but someone very close to me seems to have reached a point in her life where she feels like she can explore what gender means to her, and I’d like to help her, since it seems like I’ve run across more information sources than she has right now. I’m looking for resources, and looking for like minded people - so I can understand what she’s going through a bit better, and for myself.

For my own experience, I was raised in as gender-neutral a home environment as one could find - it was a sort of late 70s utopia. My parents raised both my brother and I with very little conscious gender bias, and when we were old enough to be running around with friends after school, we were pretty fortunate to run with kids who had parents with similar values. So I was never really brought up to feel that my gender limited what I could do or be; or that there were particular things I should do because of it. I really feel like that alone is why I’m so comfortable identifying as a woman- because it’s on my own terms. I am a woman because that is what I am, not because I fill certain social roles. I guess I’m lucky that I married a guy with a similar outlook toward gender.

When I was a kid, I had a very skinny, androgynous body. And I felt at home with it, and always assumed that I would be gamine and androgynous when I grew up. That’s not what happened, at adolescence when the hormones kicked in I got a full-on blousy hour-glass figure - massive child bearing hips, thunder thighs. It took a long time to come to terms with what felt like a betrayal by my body. I was a tomboy in a tomboy’s body and I was content with that and pretty much overnight I was something completely alien. But I do love my body now, even though I sort of see myself mentally as androgynous in spite of my fertility-goddess shape. Bleh, that was kind of a mess.

It seems like there are so many parts that feed into how I feel about gender. I don’t feel that my gender is the wrong one, but I don’t feel like divisions into two distinct genders are necessarily the whole story, and I do think the only reason my self-identified gender so closely matches my bio sex is because the social components weren’t ever really drummed into me. I think it’d fit a lot less well on me if I felt I had to fit the social expectations of what a woman is or is not.

On another note, I hate gender difference jokes -either the ones aimed at men or women, about how all men are dumb boors and all women are shopaholic airheads. They just make me see red for some reason. It’s not a feminist thing, though I am a feminist, it’s just the set of assumptions about people, putting them into those two categories and making those snide, sneering commentaries, well, it sets my teeth on edge.

Thank you for making your post, AHunter3, sorry if this response doesn’t do anything to clarify things for you, or add anything to the sum of human knowledge, but this is something I really am dwelling on a lot lately, mostly because of the person close to me who is exploring it, and also because for my own self I want to understand people and want to be part of a world that is less black and white than Male and Female.

11

AHunter3,

  1. Holy crap, that’s the longest OP I think I’ve ever seen. That must have take a long time to write.
  2. I can’t offer you much in the way of advice, but good luck on discovering yourself.
12

Can you enjoy being the object of desire from men? I have myself a certain wish for and envy of female flamboyance. I find I can wear quite extreme clothing when arround San Francisco, and enjoy the fact I can cause the occasional head to turn, even if that head is male. And women do react as well which is a real ego boost, several times I have had attractive women ask to feel the texture of my PVC trousers or satin coat. Too bad that my social-phobic nature means I am too scared to turn these encounters into possible dates.
I have never really fitted in as one of the boys, but been on the outskirts (outpants?) of that group, still I can be a bit of a chamelion and do the fart jokes burping and alcohol drinking necessary to fit in, even if I have no interest in sport or sexual agressiveness. I am lucky enough to e physically large, strong and scary enough to avoid physical intimidation from more ‘manly’ men and also studied martial arts to prove my disslike for sport was not through my own weakness or lazyness, martial arts of a non-competative sort was excellent for me both physically and mentally.

13

It doesn’t matter how cute you are. If you are cute, i might, possibly, say: “Oh. cute” but that’s it. I don’t want to go to bed with you if you’re cute. Look sexy? What does that mean? Are you sexy? 'Cos otherwise I’m not playing.

Nope. I don’t need any of that lurve business, but nor do I need cute. You’re sexy if you have specific qualities, and whether or not you’re pretty has nothing to do with your attractiveness. Nor does my prettiness interest me. I’d much rather you paid attention to my mind than my butt (and there’s nothing wrong with my butt).

Yes, you’re right. I don’t know what you’re doing wrong in these situations, as you come across as pretty presentable here.

Hmmm.

I’m not unsympathetic, but it does seem as though you are living in a rather teenaged world. My experience as I get older is that the battle between the sexes disperses, and the differences start to disappear. I know what you mean, in that, while resolutely heterosexual, I would not describe many of my attitudes to sex as typically female, but on the other hand, I do find, more and more, what I am looking for in a man corresponds to what a man is looking for in a woman, and a lot of it has nothing to do with that initial: “Ooh, cute!” reflex.