Some People See Me as THE STRAIGHT DOPE

In My Humble Opinion
101

re: What the hell makes me (or anyone else) a ‘male girl’, or ‘gender invert’ or ‘genderqueer’ or whatever? How does it make me different from everyone else? AND re: that I am reifying gender norms myself by saying I’m feminine and therefore don’t fit in as one of the men

My earlier reply to Penfeather (reacting to the Terms to Endearment movie trailer) does of course leave itself open to “Well, yeesh, you don’t have to be a ‘male girl’ in order for that to happen!”

For some minority sexual orientations / gender identities, there may appear to be a distinct behavior that people can point to and say “THERE! If you do that, you’re a ZZZZ. And if you don’t, you ain’t. It’s that simple!” For example, if you are male and you have sex with other males that “makes you” gay. So what “makes me” a male girl? Is that what’s being asked here?

Things aren’t that simple even when and where they appear to be exactly that simple. If a person is a male virgin, what “makes him” gay? Oh, he whacks off to pix of guys instead of to pix of girls, huh? What if he doesn’t use any visual aids, or doesn’t masturbate at all, does that disqualify him from being gay?

Penfeather’s tone towards me, in particular, made me feel like this was intended to be a “gotcha” question. I contemplated a long verbose post trying to describe not one single factor but a constellation of things, and even made some notes — specific femininities — then ended up feeling like that just adds gasoline to the whole navel-gazing thing that’s also on the table here.

I am going to ask instead that we postulate that there are and have been factors that have caused ME to observe and conclude that how and who I am fits in far better against the backdrop of women’s experiences & behaviors than against the backdrop of men’s; and that they’ve also quite often caused others to make the same observation and to express it to me.

It’s a counterintuitive observation. As Eyebrows of Doom, Manson 1972, Guinastasia and others point out) there’s hardly any single behavior that’s sex-specific and hence people of either sex do exhibit nearly every conceivable behavior — and what that means is that most people, perceiving a male person, perceive that person’s behaviors as nothing out of the ordinary for a male person. (Or, if they are non-ordinary behaviors they’d be no more ordinary for a female person). And that goes for one’s own self-perceptions.

So what we’re positing here has to be a pattern of behavior that is so pervasive as to outstrip that tendency to see the behavior of a male as, well, male behavior. When you observe a male behaving, most of the behavior is behavior that would not be atypical of a female person’s behavior OR atypical of a male person’s behavior. So it would probably have to be an accumulated observation. But an accumulation of occasional moments and times when some male person’s behavior strikes the observer as more akin to how you’d expect a female person to behave would not be enough. Even that’s no big deal. They would also have to be of a density, a concentration, a high enough percent of the observed behaviors to cause the observer to make this counterintuitive interpretation.

102

That’s fine for a blog, but the SDMB is not your blog.

I think this was a poor decision on the part of the Mods, and that they should not approve future requests of this kind. Reposting your blog posts here is talking at us, not talking to us in the way I expect on a message board. Occasionally linking to or reposting one’s own blog posts should be fine, but if people want to follow a blog then they can do so outside the SDMB.

103

You just spent eight paragraphs not answering the question.

OK, fine - it isn’t one behavior. Instead, it is a pattern or a cluster of some density that marks you as a male girl. And you had a long post describing the pattern, but deleted it in favor of just saying that we should take it for granted. Why should I take it for granted when you won’t tell me what it is?

It’s not even that I think you’re wrong. But the more you dance around parsing differences, the less inclination I have to plow thru more to get to whatever you are talking about.

Get to the freaking point, wouldja? What the hell makes you (or anyone else) a ‘male girl’, or ‘gender invert’ or ‘genderqueer’ or whatever? How does it make you different from everyone else?

Regards,
Shodan

104

See, to say this is as clear as mud would be inaccurate–this is about as clear as 15 light-years of lead.

105

re: What the hell do I want from my readers? What am I asking of you?
Continuing the thought-line from the previous post… suppose an observer never does formulate the notion that the male person they are observing is displaying a tendency to behave more like you’d expect a woman to behave — because this observer flat-out doesn’t have a bunch of unconscious notions about women and men having different behaviors. They’re just behaviors! And, yeesh, as we’ve already established, there’s not a single behavior (except maybe breast-feeding, ejaculating, menstruating, pulling your balls out of the way of your zipper before you zip, and a few other things really anchored in physical morphological differences) that both sexes don’t engage in, so this observer is never struck by that notion.

I don’t want any changes from this person. We’re cool.
I don’t think there are many such people. I think many of us aspire to be that person, we believe we should not be walking around with a headful of gendered assumptions and interpretations of behaviors. But be that as it may, hey, if you feel the description fits, more power to you, and I’m probably more than a bit jealous of you and your freedom.

But we live in a (still)-gendered world. Most people have internalized stuff from movies, TV, books, the attitudes of their friends, teachers, church pastor, pop song lyrics, classmates, coworkers, parents and siblings. And, on top of that, I (gasp) think there really are, in general, differences that can be observed, and we humans do observe and we do make generalizations. Now, whether those differences are biologically built-in or socially taught is an interesting questions, but it’s almost a red herring here. If the differences are observable, they’re observable, and hence the observing mind can generalize.

What am I asking of folks who (like me) have some of that stuff imprinted into their mind?

• If you have a sense of masculine men and feminine women and their respective behaviors in your mind, you probably also have some sense of the exceptions, the men whose behavior leaves you with that sense of “hey this male tends to behave more like how you’d expect a woman to behave”, and vice versa for the exception-female people. So far so good…

• More likely than not, some of that sense of us comes from your own experience — the times in your life when you’ve done exactly that, come to think of this person or that person in that fashion — and some of that sense comes from what you’ve picked up from friends, television, books, movies, parents, etc, because, yeah, you would probably have internalized some of that too.

•So… do you have, in addition to that, access to first-hand accounts of what it is like, from the inside? I’m telling you (have BEEN telling you) that the socially shared descriptions and notions do not cover me, and reflect my experience of being like that, worth a damn. Not because of the hostility and contempt, although yeah there was a lot of that, but even without it, the content is largely missing and often wrong. You (collectively, you the society surrounding me) understand quite a bit about the male people who fit the description who happen to be gay; y’all understand to a significant extent about the male-at-birth people who eventually identify as transgender. What do you understand about the people who fit the description who are hetero? Do you have any understanding of how heterosexuality is different? Have you ever paused to wonder whether heterosexuality would, in fact, BE any different? Do you assume it would not be any different? Do you have friends who have largely been thought all their lives to be more like the opposite sex (in general) who are heterosexual and who have talked about what that has been like for them? Do you assume that if they have not chosen to talk about it, there’s nothing different there to BE talked about?

I’m asking you to be curious. Many of you keep thinking that what I want from you is for you to be more accepting. That’s not it. I have confidence that most of you will be. You’re pretty accepting of other differences that you’ve come to understand. I’d rather be reviled and hated and understood than accepted without understanding. Be curious.

I’m telling you it’s a story, an experience-type, that most of you really and truly have probably not heard before.

106

Also, if you don’t mind me asking, do you see much traffic on your blog? Do you think you have developed an ongoing readership? Because browsing through a few dozen entries, I’m seeing very few comments.

107

Fair enough. I’ll write one and post it in a different thread and link to it. By necessity it will be very much a navel-gazing exercise.

108

A man having sex with another man makes him gay? What if he wasn’t gay before? Does a gay man having sex with a woman make him straight?

109

Nope. (So it’s nice to also be able to post them in here where I get more responses)

110

In what ways are you more like the opposite sex? And how does that change your experiences?

111

Sorry, clarification: I am not saying that if you are male and you have sex with other males that males you gay.

I am saying that this is an example of a distinct behavior that people may point to and say “In the case of being gay, if a guys does this — has sex with other guys — he’s gay. What goddamn behavior exists that means you’re a male girl?”

112

Well, if you are advertising on multiple sympathetic fora, and people aren’t buying what you are selling, that should be a clue that you need to change the way you are selling it or broaden your inventory. Don’t be a one-trick pony posting walls of text about the same subject every time. I read the blogs of a few other authors who do sometimes talk about their books and subjects directly related to their books, but they also talk about other things. It still gets their names out there as publicity, but it also provides some variety. For instances, look at the blogs of John Scalzi, Jerry Coyne, Peter Watts, and Justine Larbalestier. Yes, the blogs are vehicles for marketing their books, but they are also places to just talk about things that interest them. And it draws readers and commenters.

113

With all due respect, it’s not your place–as the writer–to tell us whether our perception is a mistake. We see what we see. You may not intend to come across as saying LOOK AT ME! But that is how you across to us.

This where having a little more humility would help you. Writers have to take responsibility for how their writing is perceived.

114

You are missing my point, which is why did you not say so in your previous eight-paragraph post, and why did you not say so in this one, and why do you want to open another thread?

And it can’t be a navel-gazing experience if you want to engage anyone who isn’t already interested in your navel. You need to give us, or at least me, a reason to be interested. “Keep reading and eventually I will get to the point in another thread” is not such a reason. Neither is eighteen paragraphs of “that’s not it” and “that’s not it either”. Cut to the frigging chase.

Who the hell cares? You’re not gay. How does it help anything if you say "here’s a distinct behavior, but it’s not an example of what I am talking about.

What G*ddamn behavior exists that means you’re a male girl?

Regards,
Shodan

115

So…you like to wear women’s underwear or somethin’? I still don’t get it.

Here’s my share:
I’m your pretty typical heretosexual male. I’ve always been attracted to women (and I’m married to one right now). I like to lift weights. I wear suits during the week and shorts/jeans, t-shirt/hoodie on the weekends. My hair is cut short. I’m not a sports nut, but my wife is always impressed by my ability to talk competently about the latest game, or the playoffs, or the recent season. It would be great pleasure for me to go camping in the woods for days on end, without once longing for a shower.

But…
I don’t like having body hair (the only reason I don’t shave my legs more often is because it is a huge pain in the ass). I was a fan of Oprah’s show. I have been known to cry at sappy commercials. I like to wear pastel shirts and ties (especially pink and purple) with my grey, black, and blue suits. I’m a sucker for a puppy or a kitten. I like a good rom-com (I said “good”). If you asked me to go hunting, I’d demure, since I’d much rather bring a camera than a gun.

That’s my experience of coming up against gender norms. I have little doubt that the OP has more extreme manifestations of gender fluidity, but I can’t figure out for the life of me what they are.

116

Yeah, it seems like that question “What goddamn behavior exists that means you’re a male girl?” is what some people are asking you.

117

Addressing the last, first:

You’ve underestimated your audience and insulted their intelligence in so doing. Well done.

I was somewhat curious. But you’ve failed to interest me for the last time. Commanding me to be curious without the slightest hint of what I’m to be curious about suddenly feel like I’m being sold a bill of goods, and a boring one at that. So thanks, but no thanks.

118

I am going to disagree with Joanna. I don’t think a unique perspective all by itself makes something inherently interesting and thus worthwhile to listen to.

For one thing, all of us have a unique perspective. We inhabit unique bodies, possess unique minds, and the combination of experiences we have are all different. While it is true that some folks are more “out there” than others, simply being more “out there” does not entitle someone to more gravitas. If I don’t want to listen to someone’s “out there” narrative, that doesn’t mean I don’t like that person or I don’t appreciate their “out there-ness”. It just means that their “out there-ness” isn’t important to me. It is possible to appreciate that we are all individuals with own stories, while also caring more about the things we have in common than the things we differ on.

AHunter, you tend to communicate with a tone that assumes that your reader is clueless about basic things and is operating under a lot of misconceptions. Now, that may be true for a lot of people in society as a whole, but I seriously doubt someone who is that ill-informed is going to be landing on your blog… I don’t know who exactly your audience is, but I think you need to start giving them more credit, whoever they are. At the very least, don’t insult them by putting words in their mouth or inserting beliefs in their heads. Assume they know a little something about gender non-conformity from first-hand experience, and that they are being honest when they say it doesn’t bother them. Not only has the transgender movement done a lot to educate everyone, but enlightenment has also come from social changes over the past fifty years. Personally, I had parents who were old-school in a lot of unfortunate ways (corporal punishment and time-wasting in an awful church being two of them). But they always encouraged their kids to challenge gender roles, if only for pragmatic reasons.

Also recognize that many of us know what it feels like to live in the gray areas of social constructs. A lot of us can actually relate to the misfit/misunderstood/social reject experience. Sometimes your writings make me think you’re assuming that your audience is comprised of Chads and Stacies–folks who live at the top of the social hiearchy and thus couldn’t possibly know how it feels to not fit in a pre-existing box. Chads and Stacies aren’t going to be interested in your blog. The people who might be interested are the people that spent their formative years being vexed by Chad and Stacey. I say “vex” because maybe Chad and Stacey never harassed them or gave them a hard time, but their presence still did a number on their self-esteem.You could use your blog as a way to reach out to all misfits and let them know, “Hey, I get it. And over my 58 years on this planet, this is how I’ve learned to deal with all the feels.” The internet is swarming with misfits with the “feels”. You may be able to appeal to them.

It seems to me that if you’re going to fashion your book as a “self-help” parable for young people coming to terms with their gender fluidity, then it makes sense to use your blog in the same capacity. Right now, I can’t see how all the taxonomy lessons on “man girl” and the arguments about what “heterosexual” implicitly connotes really help someone develop self-esteem or self-acceptance, let alone esteem or acceptance for someone else.

119

I agree with this.

AHunter3, to go back to my earlier analogy of you posting about a self-diagnosed medical condition, it’s as if you keep talking about how you have this very important, very distinct set of symptoms. But when asked to describe these symptoms–which actually define the very issue you’re trying to raise awareness of!–we can’t get a convincing picture of what you clearly want us to see.

Perhaps you want us to accept that you are a “male girl” because that is what you feel you are. But you don’t just want acceptance; you want people’s attention and curiosity. That requires more than what you are providing.

To be honest, I am curious about the “girl” part of your identity. But to be even more honest, a big part of me rejects the idea of any adult identifying as a juvenile, either in part or in whole, regardless of gender. So I’m not sure if I’m actually as receptive to your message as an ideal reader would be.

120

You’re doing it again.

Here’s something.
Here’s more about that something.
It doesn’t apply to me.

No. How about if you explain it and quit dancing around?

No, I haven’t. How about if you explain how it is different?

I’m asking you to give me a reason why I should be curious.

Then GO AHEAD.

Regards,
Shodan