I think about gender a lot. I have written about it quite often as well. A few decades ago, I was big on discourse re: sexism. I wrote for a political blog, and my beat turned out to be abortion. Not because I was assigned it, but because that was where my passions lay. I wrote so much about it and so often, I burned out. I must add that being in an even worse place now than we were then really makes me mad. I came back from the dead (twice) for this?
I do believe that in the long run, this whole anti-abortion bullshit will backfire on the right (probably after I’m terminally dead), but it’s going to hurt so many people in the meantime. In fact, it has. And it makes me so fucking angry. Like, incandescent with rage. I cannot believe we have taken this huge a step backwards. Well, yes, I can, but it still pisses me off.
Anyway. That is not the topic of this post. It’s gender. Back in the day, there were men and there were girls. Gad. I do not want to get into that, either. I’m trying to stay on topic today. Men and women. Two genders. There were trans people, of course, but it was much more on the downlow. I had a difficult time because I got so much shit from women about how I was womanning wrong.
Side note: There is a thing called being a cool girl. It’s when a woman declares she’s not like other women and doens’t get along with other women. All her best friends are men because she just likes guy things. I was like that when I was in college until I realized that I was there on sufferance. I was ‘one of the guys’ until I slipped and did anything even slightly girly. Plus, I met many wonderful women and got over the idea that I was not like other women.
Except.
(Here I go derailing myself again.)
When I was in my twenties, I had many women tell me that I was not a real woman (as I mentioned above). It wasn’t me rejecting womanhood, but womanhood rejecting me. When I started learing Taiji weapons, I would tweet about it (I was on Twitter then). The responses from men were, uh, shall we say, lustful. They would send me clips of movies that had women with swords and whimper about how hot it was.
The women, on the other hand, were all appalled. One wrote in a tone of heavy displeasure (yes, I could see it coming off the tweet) that she never thought i would do something so violent. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. I did not like either reaction, but the latter really hit me hard. See, I expect to get thirst messages from dudes on the internet. That’s just life presenting as female on the internet (or, to be frank, in real life). I didn’t expect the censure from the distaff side of my Twitter feed.
I should have, but I didn’t. It really hurt me, mainly because I was not a violent person at all. I had been a pacifist for a big chunk of my life, but jettison that when I started bagua (walking the circle with the deerhorn knives, oh so many years ago). When I stopped being a pacifist, it didn’t mean that I suddenly went all Rambo on everyone. It just meant that I was no longer unilaterally against using force.
In addition, I was not drawn to the weapons because of violence. I was drawn to the beauty of the sword. It was like an extension of my hand, and the Sword Form is so elegant. It’s considered the second most difficult weapon form to learn (staff/spear is the first) and it’s the scholar’s weapon. I am now contemplating getting a steel saber and a proper steel double saber set. That’s how much I love my weapons.
Anyway, I told this woman that I was not violent nor were the Taiji weapons. I felt like I was making excuses, though. Or rather, I couldn’t explain to this woman why I was so drawn to the Taiji weapons. I have jokingly compared them to romantic relationships, but it’s not far from the truth. I adore my weapons so much. I have tried to find an online forum to talk about that love, but most of them want to talk about the mechanics more than the feeling. Not surprisingly, they’re mostly men.
I love my weapons because of how they feel in my hand. Which is definitely more the art of it than the combat. Sure, I want to know the martial use of the movements (like, really want to know), but sometimes, I just get lost in the beauty of it all.
I was talking to a friend who is very femme in clothing. I’m more masc, but not completely so . I was musing about how I was looking at androgynous clothing, which seems to skew heavily masc. I found an article about fat androgynous people who mixed masc and femme. I found this refreshing and mused to my friend, A, about why did androgynous mean masc? It was a rhetorical question because I knew the answer before I asked it. Patriarchy, of course! When masculine is considered the default and feminine something to move away from.
Two decades ago, I would have been happy with androgynous basically meaning masculine. Now, however, I was not satisfied with that description/definition. Therefore, I was happy to find the link I included before. There are pops of color (or whole swathes of color) and there are frills and lace. I appreciated this because while I love me some masc butches (hey, Rachel Maddow, hey. Hey, kd lang, hey!), I was not thrilled with the idea that androgynous meant erasing everything feminine.
Again, we have another word for that–masculine.
This is one of my issues with gender and why I’m glad we’re expanding the notion thereof. Before I settled on agender, I was dabbling with genderqueer. I like to call myself queer rather than bi because I’m queer in many ways and because it means weird. So I’m queer in both ways. Heh. If I had been grappling with my gender identity three decades ago, I probably would have settled on nonbinary. I did not care for genderfluid because my gender is not fluid. It is, as they say, what it is, but it’s not ever-changing.
That’s all I feel like writing tonight. I got nowhere near where I wanted to go with this post, so more tomorrow.