Maybe she wanted to. She’s certainly described it in very positive terms.
And it doesn’t mean that there is equal levels of attraction between the sexes. If most men are bi (which has been asserted without any evidence supporting it but whatever),this doesn’t mean most men find most men attractive and it doesn’t mean they don’t have strong preference for women.
I’m a person who claims to be attracted to “masculinity” rather than bodies, per se. (And to be more precise, I’m mostly attracted to people who are mildly masculine. I find extreme masculinity, like femininity, a turn off.) But it’s not (at least for me) about performance, it’s about an underlying masculine mind set.
Can you expand on this? What does it mean to have a masculine mindset but not act masculine? Because “act” is what I mean by “performance”. I don’t literally mean someone making the conscious decision to act a certain way. I mean they are acting a certain way because they’ve been socially programmed to.
I actually struggle with the modern conception of gender, because I’m a first wave feminist (i think that’s right) who believes that your sex shouldn’t determine how you have to behave or perform. But that’s a topic for a different thread.
It’s actually not, though. That’s what we are talking about. Gender ideologues believe that sex and gender are the same (or at least should be). Which is why they think “female” and “male” should be concepts a person can opt into the same way they can opt into “woman” and “man”. If this weren’t a position of gender ideology, I probably wouldn’t be posting in this thread as much as I am. If gender ideologues were fine with playing with gender and had no interest in disappearing biological sex, then I wouldn’t be so concerned with the discourse.
I will testify that as a woman who never shaved, and never wears makeup, I’ve had no trouble at all attracting men.
I don’t wear make-up. I do shave the parts of my body that are visible to others (I do daily maintenance on the ole mustache and chin whiskers), but I am an androgynous woman otherwise. Without even trying, I attract men. Perhaps not as many men as someone who is more gender conforming, but I do have men hollering at me. So I know men aren’t that particular, in general.
But I also know that if I were looking for a mate, I would not be interested in all the men who holler at me. I would be interested in men that I feel are compatible to me. I think I’d probably be like you–I’d be attracted to a mildly masculine man. Someone who, if we heard a noise in the middle of the night, would be the first to jump out of the bed and get the baseball bat. Someone who is stronger than me and more assertive than I am, but not too macho to run a vacuum or change a diaper. So I would use how masculine a man behaves to predict if they are the kind of partner I’d want.
A man might see me in my business casual and assume I’m sufficiently feminine for them. But once we went on a couple of dates, they would quickly realize that I’m not feminine. Having a feminine form is not the same thing as being a feminine person. So just because I attract men’s gaze, I do not assume that those men would want to be with me once they got to know me. Once they see that I keep my legs in hairy state, they realize I do not groom my pubic hair or wear pretty underwear, they listen to me mansplain or blabber on about esoteric subjects, they see how misanthrophic and emotionally insensitive I can be, they see how I require more nurturing and patience than I am will to give, and they discover my suboptimal domestic skills…they will realize that while I’m fuckable, I’m probably not their idea of an ideal partner. I have no problem with this kind of discrimination. I know that if I do ever want to acquire a mildly masculine male mate, I’ve got to step up my performance in certain areas and behave in slightly more feminine fashion. It’s a no-brainer to me that this is how sexuality works.
They probably didn’t want to spend megabucks when she could just… cut her hair.
I was 13 when Sinead O’Conner came into the mainstream. I was absolutely floored. Hers was the first album I ever bought.
I remember pulling my ponytail back real tight and hiding it behind my neck so that I could imagine myself with a buzz cut in the mirror. Sinead O’Conner was who I had in mind when I eventually got a buzz cut in college.
I was a bit disappointed in the results. Twenty-something Sinead had a perfect face for a buzz cut. Twenty-something me had too much of a horseface to really pull off the look well. It’s fortunate for me that I wasn’t trying to date any dudes. Because I know it would have been hard dealing with the rejection.
You answered your own question:
Do you think you are like that due to social programming? Or do you think it’s at least partly “nature”?
fwiw, I may have misunderstood what you meant by performance.
Maybe. fwiw, I didn’t. And while my marriage has, like most, had certain stresses, those issues have not been central to them.
(Although I’ll admit that not shaving my body hair is a bit of a cheat, as my body hair is naturally fine and uncolored, and hard to see unless you look for it. And no one shaved their pubes in my generation. Ick. Like dating a child. I do have more underarm hair than is generally considered socially acceptable in women, though.)
Do you think you are like that due to social programming? Or do you think it’s at least partly “nature”?
I think I am the way I am due to a combination of nature and being in the privileged position of not being shaped by sexual pressures. If I were a sexual person, I would care more about how I behave, which would mean I would pare back on some of my natural tendencies and cultivate other tendencies. I think I’m emotionally insensitive because I have never had any reason to be emotionally aware. No one has pressured me to be more sensitive. No one has dumped me for not being sensitive enough. So I can be a dullard without suffering from the ramifications. I think sexual beings are shaped by the game of sexuality. The game influences how a person develops, consciously and subconsciously.
But even though I’m not sexual, I am still shaped by the game indirectly. We talked about this way upthread for a little bit. I want to be seen as a healthy, normal, put-together woman–which means adopting the ways and miens of sexual, straight women. So I shave my mustache because healthy, normal, put-together women don’t tend to have mustaches. I wear clothing that I buy from the women’s department because that’s what healthy, normal, put-together women do. Healthy, normal, put-together women also tend to act in certain ways. I don’t act in all those ways, but I don’t act like guys do since I have not been socialized to fit in with the guys. I’ve been socialized to fit in with sexual, straight women. Because of this, I think my non-feminine ways are still more feminine than they would be if I had been born a male.
Your last paragraph is funny to me because my mother is similar. My mother has naturally sparse body hair too, so she never taught me about shaving. I didn’t learn about shaving my arm pits until I was I was ten or eleven and I was visiting my grandmother one summer. She saw my hairy pits and ran to get a razor. I didn’t know that leg-shaving was something I was supposed to do as a girl until I was a junior or senior in high school and a boy playfully teased me about my hairy legs in PE class. My mother taught me about all the other feminine thingamabobs but totally overlooked the most basic ones since they weren’t a concern to her. I had to learn from other people’s commentary. Not wanting to deal with other people’s commentary is why I perpetuate certain rituals today.
I was explicitly taught to shave my underarms, but I stopped doing that ages ago, before I went to college and before I did any real dating.
In professional environments I don’t wear sleeveless tops, because I am aware that my underarm hair is not socially acceptable. In personal situations (on the beach, hanging out with friends) I don’t worry about it.
I am blessed with body positivity. That is, I have always liked my body. I mean, it’s getting old and creaky, and there are certainly things I don’t like as much about it as I used to. But I can’t recall ever being ashamed of my appearance, or feeling socially anxious about my body. I have felt social anxiety about my clothing choices, but never about my body.
I get the impression this is uncommon for women. It’s true that as a teenager I was conventionally “hot”, and I’m sure that helped my self-image. (Today I’m more leaning to “old and fat”) But I think the vast majority of healthy teenage girls are conventionally “hot”. So… I actually think that’s one way in which I am somewhat masculine.
Yeah, where’d that come from? Speaking as a man, I doubt it. I suppose a lot of guys I know could be keeping that a secret really well but it seems pretty dubious.
Of course, as I am sure many, if not all of you, know, O’Connor shaved her hair off specifically because she did not want to appear beautiful.
I think it is because I’m asexual and non gender conforming that I feel like gender identity is bullshit. I don’t think gender expression is some static, immutable characteristic. I think it is an aspect of sexual gameplay–and gameplay is, by definition, dynamic. People are subject to change up their style, their swagger, their mannerisms, their whatever to optimize their romantic desirability in a landscape that is subject to change. Which it always is. Displays of sexuality are dynamic and are heavily influenced by culture. But biological sex is constant.
I’m a student of music videos. I came of age in the 90s, so this is my favorite era of music videos. In the mid 90s (1992-1997), many female musical acts were hella androgynous/masculine. Here are a couple of exhibits:
Xscape (Just Kickin’ It)
TLC (What About Your Friends)
I was in high school during this era. This style was co-occuring with the grudge aesthetic. So you had women dressing in baggy, unisex clothing still viewing themselves as women. It was nothing to go to school as a teen-aged girl dressed in nothing but men’s clothes and still feel like you were a girl. So this is the mindset I’m coming out of. A political position that supports a female concluding they are a man because they prefer baggy pants and brogans instead of skinny jeans and heels is crazy to me. It will never not be crazy to me. Seems like we can give people freedom to identify however they want to identify without validating every reason or justification.
I just want gender ideologues to leave some space for disagreement and eye-rolling.
This is a gross exaggeration, as I hope you are aware. I hang out with a LOT of trans and nb people, in three separate social circles. Is there someone who takes this position? No doubt, there are a lot of people out there. But it’s not by any means normative in the trans-friendly world to assume that anyone who wants to wear mannish clothes occasionally is therefore occasionally a man.
Disagreement, sure. Eye-rolling is generally frowned on. Frankly, gender non-conforming people of all stripes and ideologies have to deal with a lot of shit, and having people assault them for their choices – even a mild assault, like an eye roll – is painful and serves no positive purpose.
I think most women are body positive but still have feel a certain way about certain aspects of their body. Like, just about every woman I know feels comfortable in their skin. They wear form-fitting clothes that show off their feminine curves and skin. They will wear skirts despite the stretch marks, spider veins, and cellulite. But they will look in the mirror at their nude bodies and negatively comment on their flat butt or their pudgy stomach or the second chin. But when they are no longer standing in the mirror, they are fine with themselves.
I have never been self-conscious about my physical appearance. I have always felt like I am sufficiently cute (This has nothing to do with my amazing self-esteem. I just reserve my self-hating thoughts to my internal state, rather my external state.) However, in the first time in my life, I’m not body positive right now. Radiation treatments have disfigured me. Yesterday I told my mother that I am super sad because I don’t think I’ll be able to wear sleeveless shirts anymore without being self-conscious. My entire arm pit is extremely hyperpigmented (it’s just a couple of shades lighter than asphalt), so from a distance it looks like I’ve got Buckweat in a headlock. My mother laughed (not meanly) because never once did I weep over my disappeared breast, but the prospect of having an ugly arm pit for the rest of my life has got me freaking out. I admit it is funny, but I still can’t help the negative fee-fees. I guess having two boobs isn’t important to my internal definition of “normal woman”, but having a smooth, blemish-free armpit is.
Yeah, she didn’t shave her head just for a movie and let it grow back immediately. Clearly it was conscious choice and she took some shit for it.
Lol. That song was deep as hell and they didn’t know it. These were teenaged girls dressed in the most masculine way ever, singing these lyrics:
Every man wants a woman
That can cook him up a good meal
A woman he can treat like his homie
And take her out on the ave and just chill
And every man wants a woman
That ain’t good for just lying on her back
And I’m that kind of woman
So before me and my man get in the sack
Sorry, but I have a hard time taking you seriously if you’re telling me that TLC are coding as masculine/andogynous. If all it takes to signal “masculine” to you is to wear some baggy clothes and one member have a shorter haircut, your standards for “masculine” are way too skewed. KD Lang they are not.
This is a gross exaggeration, as I hope you are aware. I hang out with a LOT of trans and nb people, in three separate social circles. Is there someone who takes this position? No doubt, there are a lot of people out there. But it’s not by any means normative in the trans-friendly world to assume that anyone who wants to wear mannish clothes occasionally is therefore occasionally a man.
But it is something that gender ideologues don’t want us to talk about. The folks waving around the TWAW posters don’t want people to say “Well, not every transwoman is a woman, because some of them are just confused people who are going through an identity crisis or mental illness and are liable to change their minds the moment they mature or get properly treated.” They want us to treat ever trans person the same, despite the enormous diversity of people out here identifying as trans. I wish to reserve my right to classify people as “man” or “woman” based on my individuals rubric. I don’t want people telling me that they are a woman and expecting me to just go along with that when they have given me plenty of evidence to doubt them.
I’m not grossly exaggerating the ideology. I’m taking the ideology to its logical conclusion and saying I don’t agree with it.
Disagreement, sure. Eye-rolling is generally frowned on. Frankly, gender non-conforming people of all stripes and ideologies have to deal with a lot of shit, and having people assault them for their choices – even a mild assault, like an eye roll – is painful and serves no positive purpose.
I’m not about eye-rolling people just to be eye-rolling them, @puzzelgal. If someone says “I’m a girl because I’ve always loved make-up and watching boys”, I want to be able to roll my eyes at them behind their back without people thinking I hate all transwomen. Because I don’t hate all transwomen. I hate people reducing my group to a set of stereotyped behaviors. If I can’t even have a negative opinion about something that affects my own group’s representation, then we’re talking about oppression, not freedom.
By, “my group”, you mean, “women”? I just want to check.
If there was a women’s musical act today dressing like TLC or Xscape, you’d have people wondering if they are all lesbians.
They were androgynous, bro. They were just as androgynous as lip-stick-wearing Annie Lennox back in the 1980s. Especially when you compare them against their contemporaries today. What the fuck are you talking about, person-who-thinks-the-popularity-of-Sinead O’Connor-means-men-don’t-prefer-chicks-with-long-hair?
I found this interesting article that compares black women musical acts through the ages:
https://www.crfashionbook.com/fashion/g32825596/fashion-influence-black-girl-groups-tlc-destinys-child/?slide=23
Playing off of the '80s hip-hop fashion scene, TLC’s style mixed androgynous pieces with traditionally feminine details. “Especially being young ladies, and not wanting to wear the typical outfits that girls would wear, like tight dresses—there’s nothing wrong with that look, but it wasn’t what we felt comfortable in,” Rozonda Thomas once said. “For our first album, we were our own dressers. We didn’t have no stylists. We came up with all of the ideas when it came to dressing. There’s no way in the world we could do the dances that we did in high heels and tight dresses—it would just be a total accident [waiting to happen]. We’d be in the hospital somewhere with broken ankles.”
I am a having a very hard time taking you seriously since you keeping you biting my ankles over very noncontroversial opinions.
Yes. I am a woman.
How do people in your various social circles decide/work out whether they are non binary or trans or not? And do clothes follow identity, eg someone who realises they are non-binary starts dressing more androgynous, or is it the other way around, that preferring to dress androgynously makes them suspect they are NB? Or neither?