Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 1: Who Cares? Why do I care about masculinity?
I'm rather perverted, but not enormously queer. I present as femme, and -- although I've been known to tease my sensitive (frequently long-haired) lovers for being "unmasculine" -- I fall in love with men. I'm hardly one to go for the "manly man" type, but at heart, I love knowing that I'm fucking a man.
However, because I'm cisgendered and straight, I feel profoundly at a loss when trying to articulate problems of (for lack of a better phrase) "Men's Empowerment." The issues don't feel "native" to me; I've intersected with these questions mainly through the lens of lovers and friends. Watching their struggle is demoralizing, but trying to imagine how I can give them feedback is more demoralizing.
A male friend once wrote to me, "I think you personally find expressions of masculinity hot, but you also have no patience with sexism. You've caught on that it's tricky for men to figure out how to deliver both of these things you need, that you don't have a lot of good direction to give to fellas about it, and that neither does anyone else."
So: How can men be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine?
On top of my limited perspective, there's been an echoing lack of discourse -- that is, very little mainstream acknowledgement of the problems of masculinity. The primary factor in that silence is that normative cis men themselves tend to be flatly unwilling to discuss gender/sex issues. Often, their first objection is that the discussion is neither important nor relevant. This is true even within subcultures centered around sexual analysis, like the BDSM world -- I once met a cis male BDSMer who said, "Why bother talking about male sexuality? It's the norm. Fish don't have a word for water.”
But if masculine sexuality is water and we're fish, why doesn't that motivate us to examine it more -- not less?
Don't get me wrong: I agree that America's sexual conceptions are centered around stereotypical male sexuality, and I agree that this is damaging and problematic. Believe me, I'm furious that it took me many years to reconceive "actual" sex around acts other than good ole penis-in-vagina penetration! But if American stereotypes and ideas of sexuality are male-centered, then surely that makes it more useful for us to be thinking about male sexuality -- not less.
And those male-centered ideas of sexuality aren't centered around all men -- just stereotypical men. LGBTQ men are obvious examples whose sexuality falls outside the norm; fortunately for them, they've created some spaces to discuss that. But there are lots of other non-normative guys who aren't gay or queer, yet feel very similar sexual alienation -- and because there's so little discourse about masculinity outside LGBTQ circles, they usually just don't talk about it.
What does it mean to be a cis het man whose sexuality isn't normative? Which straight cis guys don't fit -- and hence, feel alienated from -- our current overarching sexual
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