Serious Hunk of Man, and The Shades of Gray

This week so far (which, apparently is Female Desire Week in the feminist blogosphere) has been all about the spectacle of hot men for me. Damn! As usual I spent a decent chunk of time this past weekend with my own personal serious hunk of man, and then on Monday I got to rub, er, elbows with Buck Angel and gawk at hot, strapping gay men, and then last night I went to a sneak preview of Venus Hottentot’s new film Aphrodite Superstar, where I got to see Mr. Marcus and Simone Valentino do each other on the big screen. That spectacle made me inadvertently say “Sweeeet” out loud during one of the shots. I am shameless, it is true.

On Monday night, in between moments of lasciviousness, Molly Crabapple and I were bemoaning the dearth of manliness in New York. She’s really keen on her idea of Buck Angel opening up a Man School in Williamsburg, where he would teach those little emo fucks to be men. And of course we would get to gawk and give them their final exams, which somehow involve us being foxy and touching nice looking dudes. Um, yeah.

I noted to her – and I’m noting to you now – that my taste in men has changed in recent years. Though I’ve always sort of had my types – dudes a little taller and a little thinner than me or dudes a little shorter and a little thicker – in the past I’ve traditionally been more into guys who were a little on the soft and effeminate side. Today, however, that is massively untrue, as I’m now in the habit dating and objectifying a certain man who is thick, tattooed and sings in a hardcore band (with all the hotness, and none of the unsavory meathead attitude).

I had the realization recently that somewhere in my head, when I was dating more effeminate dudes, I probably thought that they couldn’t hurt me – when really, they hurt me in new, creative and horrific ways. Just not physically. But also in my youth, I feared/loathed clear definition of gender, especially in that proper way where the dude is manly and the lady is feminine.

All through my teens, I was not comfortable in my female body. I don’t mean to say that I felt transgendered in any way, because that wasn’t it at all. I just wanted to be – less shapely, less feminine. My curves and what they meant, how they were read and lusted after, scared me. And I starved myself to make the curves go away, and I had a lot of weird and bad sex to try and figure out what other people were seeing. By the end of my teens, I wasn’t so focused on the destruction stuff, but polarity in gender still freaked me out.

I’m thinking about this today as the result of that conversation on Monday, plus the fact that when I was procrastinating I found the following picture of myself just before I turned 20:

[As an aside, this pic was taken in March 2000, when I went to visit Amber at the University of Georgia in Athens on my spring break]

Today I have a much more playful approach to gender, my expression of it, and to my attraction to gender presentation. I mean, I was foxy in my own way when I was 19 – I just didn’t really know it and was kinda freaked out by it. I still don’t really know how to put makeup on (I was actually grilling Molly about makeup and hinting that I needed girl lessons on Monday), and despite the naked on the Internetness, the years of playing girl as a sex worker, the fact that my hair is longer than its ever been and the fact that I don’t even wear pants anymore, sometimes I’m still surprised when people read me as feminine and not butchy. Probably my self-image is still a little screwy, but what fun would it be if I had that all worked out. The point is – I don’t think about it all the time, but I have these weird moments, when I step back and look at my man-attractions and the way I look these days, and I realize that gender is both massively important and massively unimportant.

In the years since that photo was taken, I’ve become more comfortable with my own tendency towards enjoying and playing with a more solidified, binary gender system of representation and attraction, but at the same time I’ve become infinitely less obsessive and precise about it. Its sort of ironic that in my soft butch self, dating the femmey dudes and getting shocked reactions when people realized we were together and not just best queer buddies, fighting with gender norms was so important, and now in my for all appearances heteronormative lifestyle (on the surface peoples) it isn’t and I actually feel much freer, much queerer.