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.)

I'm gonna do some omphaloskepsis thing here and I'm gonna cut it because I expect it will be long and excessively meta and have a lot more poking social dynamics with a stick than should be blatted onto people's read pages without warning.

( I've been thinking about bullies. )

I saw the boy who lives in the mirror last night.

I had just gotten out of the shower -- I had been rinsing the dye out of my hair -- and my hair was pulled back and slicked, and the towel was wrapped tightly around my chest, and we spent a little bit staring at each other.

He looks more like my brother than I do. A little darker, a little more angular in the jaw, the sideburns a little thinner and fluffier, but I can see the facial structure around his eyes and recognise those cheekbones, the thick, bushy eyebrows, the underlying bone structure there.

He looked a little spooked to have been seen, as if I had exposed him unexpectedly, caught him with his pants down. Eventually we got used to each other, familiarised ourselves with our respective twin on the other side of the mirror.

I wonder if I go in there, if he'll be there, or if I'll just see me.


[ Please be advised that I did not select the music for this. It is, in fact, what started playing just as I started writing. ]

I was going to write dream notes, but I've lost them, alas. All I remember clearly is shaddragon pointing out that there was a supernova event visible to the naked eye on/in the world we were in at the time ... Well, that and a lot of near-identically named ninjas.

... but the velvet painter (who is going out of business and thus has all her stuff on sale) has resolved my what-shirt-for-the-Pomba problem. At, I would note, half price.

Because, y'know, the gorgeous sexy red shirt is exactly what the orixa ordered.

I expect Certain People to be very appreciative when I get home.

You hear me, Certain People?

I have now placed my first Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab order, in my ongoing tentative explorations of this whole being a girl thing.

I blame cangelo. I was successfully resisting the lure until you mentioned 13 at the training weekend, and curiosity ... rising .... ;)


[ I could dither about whether to post this with the 'scents' icon keyword or the 'inexplicable femme moments' keyword, but they go to the same userpic. I suppose I could do the bowerbird if I wanted to go the 'acquisitiveness' route, and there are blue bottles.... ]

So a fair number of people are discussing gendering at the moment. Most of these people aren't actually people whose journals I read regularly, but a couple of people whose journals I do read regularly have been commenting upon same with occasional links back.

I have a weird sort of interaction with matters of gender.

On ap, the standard of politeness is to use 'zie' or other gender-neutral pronouns for folks who one's not aware of preference for. When this gets used on me, it drives me completely insane. I consider GNP useful for people whose gender is unknown, unspecified, or other; my gender is none of these. Being identified as a 'he' is several (perhaps five or six) orders of magnitude more accurate than being referred to as a 'zie'. It actually has components of 'true' to it.

Most of the time I'm comfortable accepting 'female' as a word that describes me. I can't say I identify as female; it isn't a matter that has that much sfik-value for me. I've always had the basic attitude-feeling that if I do it, it has to be the sort of thing that women do, more or less.

Except.

Except.

When I'm spending time with women -- with Earth-woman-gendered-women -- I often wind up feeling like I'm doing the whole woman thing somehow wrong.

(This thought comes out in pretty simple trigonometry; for those people who run screaming from mathematics, I apologise; I can't do it any better.)

Unit circle centered on the origin; X-axis female-ness, Y-axis maleness. I'm not on either of the axes; I'm up about thirty degrees or so. I have a distinct, specified, very clear gender, located somewhere about half root-3 X + .5 Y, and when I'm near women who're near 1 on X, I'm clearly not fulfilling what womanness is by comparison, because I've got an angle there that I'm taking the cosine of to get there. Unit length falls short.

My gender is not unknown, unspecified, or other; it's just . . . a bit irrational.

"She" is close enough for everyday use. Call it about 86.6% accurate.

Because I haven't written about anything since we went to the movies.

( Saturday. )

( Sunday. )

( Monday. )

Still suffering from the d'waaaaanas. This may improve if I wind up feeling less vaguely icky.

Need to repot a plant. I think I'll do that now while I'm thinking of it.

[ Note: if you think you know all of what's going into this, you're probably wrong. If you think you know some of what's going into this, you're probably right. ]

[ Note #2: This may not make much sense; part of the writing it is trying to work things out. I did some working-out talking to teinedreugan and later brooksmoses last night, but a lot of it's still under my tongue. ]

[ Note #3: I should add a wolf silhouette to my hawk icon. ]

( All these damned monkeys frustrate me. )

But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.

[ The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling ]

I'm asking erispope for girliness tips, and oneironaut is quoting poetry. (Poetry I introduced gtst to, mind, but gtst Doesn't Do poetry at all.)

Sewing project half-done, looks smashing already. Being harassed for photos by lecherous people who don't understand how hard it is to take a photograph of the clothes one's wearing.

listen;there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go