OK, y’all asked, so I wrote it.
By popular request…
Repeating the same disclaimer once again, not all female people have these characteristics, nor do all male people who don’t happen to be me lack them, and you know that and I know that, so you aren’t going to reply in a way that just reiterates that or claims that I somehow don’t realize that.
To begin, this is me
Priorities —I value the establishing of voluntary cooperation more than I value defeating someone as my favored means of getting my way. My close interpersonal relationships are more important to me than financial success or being seen as a winner or a leader. Within those relationships, I want to be experienced as the listener, the person they can tell things to and expect to be understood, the person who understands their feelings and can sometimes give good advice, even if the advice is just on how to handle situations emotionally. I need to be valued by my friends and partners as a good person but I don’t expect or need my friends and partners to adopt my plans and centralize my needs. Being friends is more important than sex, and sex for me is something best shared with someone I have openness and trust with.
In nearly every endeavor, the goal or objective is less important than the process by which it is sought. In any argument or dispute, the other person or people see things from a vantage point in which they are in the right, and it is always productive to try to see things from that vantage point one’s own self, to understand the folks you’re trying to communicate with, to perhaps realize that their position in the argument or dispute should prevail over your own, or, if not, to better explain your position in terms that they will understand — so disputes and arguments are not about defeating an adversary but are about sharing viewpoints and having the courage to consider things non-defensively. Courage, in general, is about being honest and allowing one’s self to be affected by others, to risk being changed, to be fully present and to integrate as much of the entirety of what one feels and thinks and cares about into one’s interactions with others as possible, while receiving as much of their thoughts and feelings and considerations as well. The ends rarely justify the means.
People are of value for how they are, not merely for what they do or how they can serve a utilitarian benefit; their expression of themselves participates in making the world what it is, and those who brighten life are a positive. The individual self is not arrayed against the society, nor has a duty to comply and to be obedient to it, so much as the individual self is a participant, along with others, in forming a social self. We are interdependent, rather than independent. Our individual selfishness is a good, a seeking of the best that can make everything better for everyone when we understand it well. That’s because, as I said, we as individuals aren’t arrayed against the others. There is no need for adversarial struggling for the most part: as long as there’s enough to go around, being at peace with each other is a natural state, and fighting is an anomalous state that isn’t inevitable or necessary most of the time.
Tastes & Preferences — I’m afraid I don’t have a very well-developed sense of humor. I’m ponderously serious and earnest mostly, although I can be silly and I can also see the ridiculous side of things, including myself in all my so-serious earnestly intended self-importance. I like things to be efficient in how they achieve their purpose, but not at the expense of being pretty. Elegance requires both. I like stories with a long slowly-developing plot line, whether in a TV series or a book or other medium, the long story arc with the entertaining episode or scene or chapter in the foreground providing faster and more immediate entertainment but with the long tale unfolding behind it. Corny as it may be, I like music and theater that creates the tension and builds and builds and actually gets you nervous and frazzled and then finally, eventually, explodes in a climactic moment.
I don’t have a favorite color so much as a favorite color combination: rich deep blue (not DARK blue but blue like the Arizona sky in autumn, intense blue) with the contrasting color being a fiery reddish-orange, the redorange of autumn maple leaves. In short, you can understand why I love the northeast fall season when the leaves are changing! (It’s not something I grew up with, I come from Georgia and New Mexico where the fall foliage is quite different). I like classical music, the dramatic stuff like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and Grieg and Beethoven and Verdi and Rachmaninoff, but also the ethereally shimmery stuff like Sibelius, Vaughn-Williams, Satie, Nystedt and others, and the ones who do a lot of both, like Holst. I can enjoy a good funky jaunty tune (or tale or personality) and I embraced rock (eventually) but I can be put off by perceived coarseness, bluntness, which sometimes pushes me away from things I later discover I like quite well.
Postures, Movements, and Gestures — I sit small, or else I sprawl latitudinally with my legs extended out in front of me, but I don’t tend to sprawl side-to-side. In repose I have the opposite of resting bitch face —I seem to always be smiling. In motion, I tend towards extremes: small and slow movements or else rapid and purposeful. When I cook, my girlfriend says I “dervish”, spinning from one countertop to the next, darting here and there rapidly and leaving her unsure of where she can safely position herself to avoid collisions. When I walk, I stride, fast long walking that covers the ground. When I stand, I am out of people’s path, out of the way, accommodating people as they approach from any direction. I drive that way, too, changing lanes to allow faster people behind me to get around or making room for people coming in from the sides. I futz with my hair a lot when I’m talking to people, a nervous habit I guess. I also stroke my beard, not generally a feminine trait I suppose, although it might be if girls had beards.
When I’m talking with someone, my hands are usually in my lap, sometimes between my knees. Maybe that helps keep them out of my hair. I flounce, especially when I get more animated, involved in talking. I’m more condensed when listening, sitting more still, letting the other person have the space. I have playful gestures, like I’ll reach past something and come around from behind it to pick it up, carving a sort of swirly shape in the air as I move. I bounce when I walk, making me a pathetic dancer, all spring-loaded on the balls of my feet and boinging around like Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh. I skip. When I feel shy I often clasp my hands behind my back instead of in front. My partner allthegood says I have an array of flirtatous gestures and several times has asked me if I know what I’m doing, if I’m aware of what I’m doing, and I’m not sure. I think there’s a lot that I’m not aware of.
Conversations, Vocalizations, and Language Use — I get “ma’amed” on the phone constantly. People can’t see me and without visual cues I apparently have a voice that people interpret as feminine. Here’s that link again, judge for yourself. I don’t talk particularly fast usually, though; I’m verbose (big big surprise, right?) and folks say I don’t tend to get to the point, so much as I sort of set off on an excursion with an eventual goal of getting to that point. I’m not an interrupter, mostly, although I have a bad habit of chiming in to finish people’s sentences sometimes. I have a quiet voice. In a room full of people, I often get excluded from the conversation because people don’t hear me starting to say something and talk right over me. It’s one of the reasons I prefer a small group. Not the only reason, I think conversations go in more personal and interesting directions in a smaller group, but it’s definitely a factor. I am a very verbal person with a large vocabulary, and I tend to describe things my own way. One of the feminine things I don’t do too much is that thing where you end all your sentences on a rising note as if you’re asking a question. Although I’m not a very funny person, mostly, I can be amused, and I either cackle or giggle when you get me to laugh.
Style & Adornments — There’s a diagram that got floated around on some of the gender boards, a grid on which one dimension is your gender component (masculine, androgynous, or feminine) and the other dimension has to do with how much effort to put into your sense of style and expression. Here it is. I’m a swan-sparrow with intermittent ambitions to rise to swan-crow. My default garments are either jeans or skirts coupled with a simple t shirt, with a sweater or jacket or coat thrown over during colder months. I’d never be caught in one of those “suit” things that males tend to wear, the blazer jacket that opens in front down to your navel, with a necktie, and those hideous pants they wear with the side-slit pockets and the loose baggy fit… ugh! I always liked my clothes to fit well enough to contour to the shape of my body. That may be a notion I need to rethink as my belly keeps getting rounder as I age.
Anyway, I wear my hair long and loose, except when I’m out hiking in which case I bind it up in a bun with bobby pins (to keep it from getting horribly tangled in the wind). I have several sets of post earrings, and I like a design that has a bit of a swirl to it, a creative shape either for the jewel itself or the mounting. I’m terrified of dangly earrings, I’d probably catch them on something. My footwear is exclusively sneakerwear unless it is rainy or snowy and then I put on boots. No way in hell I’d go around in high heels, and you shouldn’t either. They’re really bad for your ankles and feet. Most of my skirts are denim (consistency!) but I do have a couple nicer ones and some white dance tights to wear with them (I have nice curvy legs). I wear necklaces on occasion, and would like to acquire a few more. I hate rings and bracelets and won’t wear them. I trim my own facial hair with a Wahl shaver, and when I take my time and do it right, it ends up looking kempt and intentional and neat. I really should do that more often. I have a small collection of purses and pocketbooks but I only use them if I’m in a skirt that doesn’t have decent pockets, which they don’t tend to but some of mine do. My favorite bag is ALSO denim, with applique designs, very hippie-esque.
Flirtations, Seductions, and the Erotic Life — I will be writing a blog post about this on Monday, specifically about visual aspects of sexuality and how that seems to be a different thing for me than for guys in general. But I can tell you I do like to look, and that it’s sexual for me. I don’t at all like being perceived, interpreted, treated, anticipated, or regarded as an appetite symbol, that whole thing where since I’m male it is assumed that I want sex from women more than they crave sex themselves, or want it in a different way, or that it means something different from what it means to them. That’s a very big thing for me, a very important element of all this. I experience sexual desire as a vulnerability, a needy openness and hunger that I seldom know what to do with. It’s always a little scary as well as exciting. Feeling those feelings does not translate for me into any kind of specific and focused desire to do any particular thing. I’ve always been very private about my own sexual feelings, dating back to being a kid when I had no idea anyone but me ever had such feelings. The ones that accompany the seeing of a sexy woman with sexy shapes and contours don’t have anything to do with her personally, it’s not like she’s aiming that appearance at me personally, and it also doesn’t mean we’d hit it off and be ideal partners or have anything particular in common, and nearly always she, whoever she is, is very much accustomed to being found sexually alluring by males so it isn’t going to be anything special for her to know it’s having that effect on me.
So I experience it as a power she has, to either act on or not act on in any given situation, and my relationship to it is reactive rather than instigative. For me, sexual feelings are always complicated and bound up with ambivalences, wanting in the larger overall sense for sexual things to happen but not being anywhere near as clear on whether I want them to happen with this particular person at this particular time. I am not passive, and I should be explicit about that: I am aware of the possibilities, and I can and do exchange glances and give the other person the opportunity to look me over and consider the possibilities, and to have a conversation largely composed of gestures and glances and things you put into your voice. It’s sort of like a tennis or ping-pong game, no one is doing all the pushing, there’s always that sense of “your turn or you must not be interested” and that attitude is both a kindness or gift, “I don’t wish to impose this on you”, and also a pride and dignity thing, “I am not available except to those who are seriously about wanting me”. Wanting me personally and not just some body. And yes, I think I’m quite different from other males as a collective group, that they nearly all do this differently from how I’m doing it, and I need to be preferred.
I’m not a prude; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with casual sex, either for other people or for me, myself. But it doesn’t have much appeal for me when compared to the emotional intensity of being with someone I can be noncasual with, be close friends and confidants and take care of each other on a variety of levels and not just the tingly-parts levels. I love to be in love, to get to that state where you’re just glowing with joy about the other person and daydream about them all the time and they seem so perfect. I know there are hormones involved, that it’s a very biochemically-driven process, so what? It’s delicious! I can give of myself and trust openly and completely and really let those feelings build, let it happen. I’m also resilient and a survivor and I am able to take the risk of a broken heart, a sudden unexpected loss of who and what I thought I had, and if and when that does happen I will make it through the misery and live to love again, I know that from experience. I want to play with adult women, passionate women who want this too and have been there and discovered the same.
I maintain my relationships; I tend them, care for them, for what I and my partners have going between us. Relationships don’t just spring into existence and then exist of their own accord, you have to care about the relationships themselves as well as the other person IN the relationship. I go in expecting to be an equal partner, doing my share of the relationship-maintenance. Incidentally, I have been told over and over by women that they nearly always feel like they are doing this alone, that sustaining romantic relationships is something that women do, that keeping them ticking along, and hence “keeping your man”, is women’s emotional work, and that they rarely feel like they are equally partnered in this respect. (Your mileage may vary of course).
General Reactions to the Guys and The Girls, and Theirs to Me — I don’t have and haven’t tended to have many guy friends, and the friendships I do have with other male folks tends to feel attenuated, flatter, with less personal sharing and less investment and involvement. I’ve spent my life, or at least the portion of it subsequent to 2nd grade, feeling like I was not like them and did not want to be perceived as being like them. Instead, I felt like I had a lot in common with the girls.
Girls and women have not been particularly quick to see me and designate me as one of them. It’s a more gradual and cautious process. But, yes, long before I began specifically telling people ’ identify as one of you’, I found acceptance among the girls and women, and it tended to grow as they interacted with me and we became pals, folks who hung out together, friends, intimates.
Boys and adult men have been far quicker to specify that I didn’t seem to them to be one of them.
This section is really the one that counts, you know. A person’s identity is what they identify as. I do hope you, having read this entire longwinded constellation of traits and whatnot, now have a clearer idea, but you should think of all the sections above this as contributing to this final verb, the act of identifying, counterintuitively and unexpectedly, with the people of the opposite sex instead of those of the same sex.
