When I ask you what masculinity is and you stare at me blankly, rejecting the whole of the ideology as mal/tainted/bad, I remember the singsong story of what “little boys are made of”. I remember my jealousy too, in grade school, and my own rejection of “what little girls were made of” as surely as I rejected standing on the sidelines. I wasn’t invited to wrestle, and I opted out of playing house for skinned knees and running through fields, talking to rocks and trees, climbing ever higher, skirt hitched wherever it needed to be so that I might reach to the sky and recline high up in the air, covered in patches of leaf-shaped shade before being called down to lunch.
Masculinity is not a thing which exists only in response (positive or negative) to something outside of itself. I’ll start with my own points of reference. Being assigned female at birth, I’ve been faced with taunts about the size and shape of my always shifting body since an inappropriately young age. That I am female conflates this experience as a feminine thing. It is not though. This happens to all people—body shaming. Some more than others, and some in ways which are more or less tolerable. Picking apart my dysphoria caught up within dysmorphia clearly shows that the range of possibility for making someone uncomfortable because of gender-expectant conformity is not only a feminine trouble.
If I had to come up with an idea describing masculinity as I experience it, I’d say that masculinity is best understood by looking at ballerinas. Their lines, discipline, effort to precise physical victory, the machinelike bits of their strong, resilient, apt and focused bodies, making beautiful, emotional, unbelievable designs for our eyes and hearts to be inspired by. In loving ballet, I am loving a masculinity our society calls “pretty”—even a girly thing.
Much of femininity is defined as “nice”. It’s ridiculous to paint this trivializing mood onto the “fem(me)”. Femininity, when I feel her in me, is the ocean—that which we come from, that which we are made from inside. Femininity pushes and pulls one like the tides, asking you to strengthen in response to subtle and stronger movements all around. Nurturance and resistance. Mysterious. Indirect. Winding like snakes toward consciousness and skill. There is no “barre workout” leading to a perfect leap or pirouette, there is a wrestling with insecurity, a quiet reflection leading to subtle moments of change, growth, and resilience. Femininity is in the listening which brings mastery.
Masculinity is lightening from the sky, illuminating a path to power.
Femininity is the universe of knowledge found by touching Earth, smelling every scent, and knowing dark things intimately.
We living beings are each, both, all and more—balls of flesh with features varying in color, structure, and a million details adapting to each environment we are in, in order that we may survive another day.
Toxicity is held within broad definitions, bound up in media pressure to conform. Toxicity is adopting inauthentic ideas about some “rules” concerning how one must be in order to exist as a passing part or thing. We cannot pass nor fail at being what we innately have at our disposal.
Nourishment is in balance.
May we all learn to swim and dance.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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