Tuesday, January 22, 2008

cathartic gender-role rant, possibly for reading at an anarchic open mic like Eggroll Cafe

Do you ever feel things too strongly to put them into poetic words?
Do you sometimes have a feeling so intense the best you can manage to do with it is just say what it is bluntly, and every attempt to polish the words into something beautiful falls apart?
If not, you might as well tune out now.
Because this isn't going to have rhyme or meter or assonance or metaphor or even much structure.
I'm just going to tell it to you.
First of all, I am a man, and I don't see that as a problem.
I have a penis, I enjoy having a penis,
I don't think it's an error that I have one, I don't think I'd be better off without it.
I am a man.
But there are things about masculine and feminine gender roles that I simply cannot accept as the way things have to be.
The way heterosexual people are expected to go about connecting to other people for sex and romance basically sickens me.
Men are expected to go up to women in a way women are expected not to go up to men.
Men who want sex or romance are expected to go up to a large number of women and make active inquiries. Men who don't enjoy doing this have to hide that fact or they're considered inferior.
Women who want sex or romance are expected to make themselves passively attractive and wait for men to approach them. Women who enjoy actively inviting men have to hide that fact or they're considered inferior. Women can go up to one man if they really specifically want that one man, but they can't just go up to men, plural, the way men are expected to go up to women. And they can't signal too overtly that they're waiting for men to go up to them, because that makes them inferior.
And this situation makes me sick because I am very bad at the first part of conversations with strangers, and I am very bad at picking up on subtle visual signals, and I don't think these facts really make me inferior as a potential date or potential mate.
And it also makes me sick because if a woman came up to me looking for sex or romance, social conditioning would kick in and in the back of my head, in a nonverbalized vague way, I'd think she was inferior for doing it, even though I know that's not true at all.
So this whole gender role going-up-to-people pursuer-and-pursued situation pisses me off. Some men are more comfortable being the pursued. Some women would be more comfortable being the pursuer if society let them.
If there were a way I could look passively attractive and be approached with overt signals, I'd take it. There isn't.
This is as comfortable as I can get actively addressing strangers. I can sound good talking to a room with strangers in it. But that's because I know you're here to listen, or you can tune me out as background if you're not. The only way I can go up to one stranger and be comfortable and sound good is if I already know we have a common goal to communicate over.
I don't want to have to hit on someone. I don't want to have to intrude into her space. I want romance, or possibly sex, but I do not want to play by the rules society has handed men, and I do not want to limit anyone to the rules society has handed women.
And, that's that.
It's ugly.
I can't make it beautiful.
I can't decorate it with poetic devices.
When I try to make it more of a poem, I get too angry about the ideas to keep my focus on the words.
I can read it out loud just fine though. To a group.
Thank you for listening.

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