My maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing I did. It just happened that way. Nonetheless I am a man. Male body.
When I was a late teen I recognised in myself, within, that I was 'androgynous' in that I was neither male nor female as played out by those around me, in the character of my mind and psyche. Or at least when I discovered the word 'androgynous' and put it into that context I felt it made sense of my inner reality. I did not feel the roles laid out by culture fit within me. I could not talk about 'women' the way other men did. I wanted to meet minds. I was interested in bodies too, and shy with that, yet it it was the mind that I was really interested in. The person. Who are you, what do you think?
And because I did not understand that the discomfort I felt (around culturally imposed male and female roles) and behaviours was accurate I thought that there had to be something wrong with me, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not internalise those values. I have always felt deeply uncomfortable around the typical male - female behavioural dynamic.
When members of either biological sex talk of the others as if they were another species I always felt something was deeply wrong.
I think I need to get over it. I am not the only one. Women are not a separate species, a mystery. Women are person, minds embodied.
So here goes.
I now understand that those cultural imposed conditioned roles are intrusions into the psyche of the person, they are what we call part of poisonous pedagogy.
Poisonous pedagogy, in Katharina Rutschky's definition, aims to inculcate a social superego in the child, to construct a basic defence against drives in the child's psyche, to toughen the child for later life, and to instrumentalise the body parts and senses in favour of socially defined functions.
There's a long history of culturally male behaviour that punishes women for not complying with male demands for sex as if access to women's bodies was some kind of inherent right. Incels are one expression of that. Women as chattels is another. Pornography has elements of that too. Eroticism less so. The idea that masturbation is not really sex. The bluster that penetration is an expression of that 'right to sex' by virtue of phenotype that is entirely a cultural construct.
There is no inherent right to sex with anyone other than oneself. There is a need, indeed, but it is primarily for intimacy and for procreation - and even so it must be governed by informed egalitarian consent unsullied by any form of power differential, formal or informal.
We see a long of anger in the male culture, a lot of pain around this.
We see a lot of punishment of women around this.
It is there. It cannot be denied or played down. The impacts are too vast, too disruptive of conviviality, mutualism and collective coherence.
I do not feel in any way diminished when a majority of women protest - "too many men, too many times, too much impunity". I know they are not talking about me. I get how they must feel. Not least because of what my close female friends have disclosed and what I have seen myself, and how I have intervened at different times in my life to stop harassment and abuse. I do not feel the need to say 'not all men'. At all.
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Being biologically male or female is :
a) an accident of conception, yet not in the same what that the class one is of is an accident of birth. Class is created by a hierarchy cult. It is not natural at all. Class is artificially imposed. Obviously the Hierarchs hold that class is natural. They have to believe that or their self assured stated withers before their eyes.
Being biologically male or female is :
b) really easy, I don't have to do anything at all. Being proud of it is silly. Humility is a more accurate approach.
c) Avoiding the dominant culturally imposed definitions of what maleness/femaleness means is difficult. That is something to be proud of, glad of. It is difficult. It is scary.
And yet it must be done to become the full person I am. My body and mind is in evolutionary terms so much older than this dominator culture, by a million years or more. Personhood is older than this culture. Personhood is deeper than anything this culture has ever philosophised. I laugh at the history of Philosophy mostly for it's lack of sensitivity. Way too serious, not playful. Not like my being at all. Where is the philosophy of nurture?
d) I experience my natural personhood as asexual, non gendered and I feel this sense of self is way more sensitive than the dominator cultural value sets delineate. Super alive. Super alive to the world and to feeling. Super sensitive. Playful. Creative. Joyous. Kind. Vulnerable. My music is not male. My writings are not male. They are both of the person I am. And when I feel maleness and this male sexuality, I delight in it, on my own and with my partners. It's got nothing to do with anyone until I consent. It's nobody's business. Until I choose to invite contact and that is always in the context of the other person. It's personal, it's person to person.
e) The struggle or discord between that natural ancient evolutionary base - the person - and the cultural overlay - the persona - is immense and intense and it is a taboo subject. The cultural overlay is a wound.
I internalised an identity given to me by a bully cult. It never fits. I have never been comfortable with that inside me. I have learned that it is not of me, does not belong with me. I decide what maleness means in as much as I am a person, who just happens to be male, and the maleness is a small part of me, it is not the whole of me, not by any stretch. Maleness is an aspect of my body and how that relates through my personhood is for me to define, to decide. Emergent.
f) I think there are many culturally conditioned males who are taking it personally when women are speaking as persons in such large numbers demanding that this misogyny, this unwanted attention, harassment and sexualised violence that is happening as a daily occurrence in so many lives MUST STOP. Now!
I also know there are bullies and professional predators who are gaming all of this, for power. They are grooming the cultured males and females for political, economic and psychological advantage.
I know there are cultured males and females who do see the wound of this behaviour and want it to stop and are confused as to why it is happening at all. I get that some feel a strong male or female identity and that it's a big part of who they are. I hope it is emergent for them, rather than a cultural internalisation.
All of us are caught between a rock and a hard place within the culture that is a hierarchy of power and violence.
f) I think that there is a fear to see the wound that the women are drawing attention to. And I think it is in part that for culturally indoctrinated men to see it, to be really honest here, to submit to the truth as it really is to lose that culturally imposed identity, that internalised value set of the good male, or the bad male, whatever - it was not what I was born with, but by golly it is who I am now - is something can be perceived as, or imagined as a loss of self, a dissolution, a death of sorts.
When it's a liberation. It IS a liberation. To be truly male is to nurture.
g) What if we are not really men, not really women, we are really persons, and we need to meet and live as persons in order to deal with this dreadful wound?
h) How much of the dominant culture collapses in that realisation?
Boys! Our maleness is an accident.
Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing you did. It just happened that way.
I think we need to get over it.
Free our minds. Our hearts. Come home to who we really are.
You do know there is no such thing as a male brain, a male liver, a male kidneys, or even male lungs?
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."