Gender is a Vector

[kiya]

Honestly, what I really mean is Hegemon Is A Vector (and Gender is a component thereof, necessary but not sufficient).

(Also I am well aware that I need to actually read de Beauvoir. I have not.)

The thing is - okay this is straight-up de Beauvoir as I understand her but keep in mind that I have not actually fucking read her - that people go on about two genders but culturally speaking there's basically one and nobody has it.

The One Legitimate Gender is Hegemon/Man, and because everyone falls short of that there is a constant opportunity to leverage insecurity due to Insufficient Masculinity on the part of man-categoried people for fun, profit, and disruption, and the categories of people who are Non-Men (de Beauvoir again) are variously sorted depending on what is most convenient for the people who are currently pulling the levers on the Insufficient Masculinity Insecurity Machine.

So there are sort of three broad semi-permeable categories, because certain types of Non-Men can aspire to merely be Insufficiently Masculine if they get their hands on the levers of the Insecurity Machine; any individual trait can be disqualifying on Man but if the power flows shift just so then it might not matter. (Consider the number of mainstream cis gay men who, having attained Man status despite being Insufficiently Masculine (like everyone else), proceed to give the ladder a good yank so none of the effeminate queer men, the divas, the trans people, the kinky queers, etc. can make it into the Insufficiently Masculine Man box.)

The whole damn thing is a hob's game that keeps the people who think they can climb the glass pyramid of masculinity by using Non-Men as stepping stones, including by declaring certain forms of Insufficient Masculinity as qualifying for Non-Men status, busy eating each other and also the rest of us.

Hegemon/Man is an arrow that goes in one direction, a greased pole that nobody can actually climb to the top of. It's built that way. And security is framed in terms of whether or not one can climb the pole, with some people not allowed to even try.

(World made of levers, said Tyl.)

Comments

[graydon]

All the world is levers.

It's the single central unattainable ideal of being like god; you can derive the great chain of being, the divine right of kings, and an exculpation for being special from it.

And yes, nearly everything that's a problem is a problem due to bad insecurity management, but that surely doesn't mean none of the bad insecurity management is like that because insecurity has been weaponized.

[kiya]

It is certainly convenient to the Powers and Principalities that Man is unattainable and thus men can be motivated by attempts to attain it.

All of this is coming out of my attempts to parse masculinity, of course. While I am not sure we will ever get a better answer to "What is a man?" than "A miserable pile of secrets" I am not entirely secure in sourcing all my philosophy from video games. :}

[graydon]

There's a long rant about the Problem of Armies (once anyone has one, everyone needs one) but at the personal scale, "a miserable pile of secrets" isn't so bad.

The fours (forthrightness, foresight, fortitude, and forbearance) might be more "adult" than "man"; necessary, but not sufficient. And the "strangers presume you so" construction, while grimly factually the case, is not much in the character of being personally useful.

The wretchedly zen but possibly personally useful version is "if you have to say you is, you ain't"; fours plus competent insecurity management will do it. (The parts that aren't socially coded presentation.)

[kiya]

I think there's a nuance in "if you have to say you is" because there's the insecurity-management-problem version of it, but there is also the transmasculine "I have to say that I am to get anywhere, including in setting up the social improv correctly in the long-term by getting relevant medical care now".

Yeah, artan has a rant or three about how a lot of the traits associated with "man" are simply "adult". (And I was noting that stuff like "kindness" often gets lumped into "woman" the other day.) But there is also a there there somewhere at least in my perception, even if infuriatingly vibes-based rather than articulatable.

[graydon]

I'm making a (perhaps improper or unwarranted) distinction between identity and social mechanism. (Acknowledging that reparative care may be both.)

The setup is unquestionably a pain; the point I thought I was after but did not especially well express is that the identity part needs to rest on an internal conviction absent fear, rather than any external source. Externally sourced self-esteem or identity are not especially effective insecurity management (while not caring about one's fellows is terrible insecurity management in a nigh-eusocial species…) but they're (I think) particularly and ineluctably tangled into the social construction of "man".

(In large part because the social construction of "man" is an agency sump, which is not in and of itself a good thing because it's the agency sump. An agency sump would be OK.)

Absolutely hear you about the infuriatingly vibes-based aspects.

[kiya]

Oh, that's an interesting angle - that hegemonially constructed Man is an acclaim position, I mean. Which is another way of expressing the inherent instability of the greased pole gender and the levers of the insecurity machine.

I have the particular infuriating problem that I have a clear internal conviction that I am something but have an absence of sense of what that something is, particularly as that category of somethings is partially internal conviction and partly what-social-improv-do-you-get by intrinsic nature and thus the lack of clear social examples of same is crippling to the cognitive processes of analysis for me.

More annoyingly vibes-based things.

[graydon]

Very much acclaim; a whole lot of the current unpleasantness comes down to demands for more acclaim. (by the definitionally unworthy; one cannot merit acclaim that is demanded.)

Does the music thing make poetry a bad idea? if it doesn't, reading a lot of Houseman might do something useful.

[batrachian]

Tangentially related (because it's what I've got at the moment): this... thing, about aspirational Maleness, and how it's tied into (some forms of) transmisogyny, because it looks to them like here are some people who are happy about sliding down the pole and that doesn't fit the model.

[kiya]

Absolutely though. Because transmisogyny is part "oh hey a volunteer to be a stepping stone so I can get higher up the pole" and part "wait, why are you walking away from the pole entirely, get back here so I can climb on you".

The denial of the appeal of the One True Gender confuses people in a way trans men don't.

[batrachian]

Precisely.

(and then confusion twists into "well they're a threat" and coercive violence and and. sigh.

[kiya]

"They fear what they do not understand" is a cliche but also to the true believers in the One True Gender model basically anyone who does not value the greased pole correctly has become an eldritch Lovecraftian horror, literally incomprehensible in a Color-Out-Of-Space way. It's ontology-breaking in ways they are utterly unequipped for, and from that root springs violence of a particularly godawful nature.

[batrachian]

*mutters about Lovecraftian being the annoyingly perfect analogy to make here, given, y'know, That Dude*

[kiya]

Very deliberate articulation choices are very deliberate. Unfortunately.

On the other hand Lovecraft is a good manifestation of "It may be that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others"?

[amberite]

This is well said! I have been trying to articulate a thought for nearly a decade now that's something like "gender privilege gatekeeping can be modeled as egg-shaped" which is almost this.

[kiya]

I feel that this is a very evocative image but not one I can actually translate.

[amberite]

More or less, the pointy end of the egg is man-ness, the wide end is woman-ness, and there are different force fields triangulated with respect to either end that are for keeping people in or out.

Edit: er, sorry that isn't very much clearer, but if I could get it fully clear, I could design the image, and I haven't really been able to.