Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=4071]Growing Up as a Girl and What it Means to be a Man in America: Part One[/drupal]
What does it mean to be a man? This is a question that I have been wondering for years if only because so many different experiences in my life have forced me to ask it. I’ve also began to ask myself this question again because of what all I’ve been learning about childhood and adolescent development this semester. In concerns to my own childhood and adolescence, a decent percent of the stress that I experienced during those years were struggles that I had defining not only my gender but also my sexual orientation. What’s strange about this is that I’m male and straight but the culture I grew up in along with various people I’ve encountered in my life tried to tell me otherwise. The following essay is basically a look into a part of my life that I have never openly talked about in person. This is a look into how I grew up as a girl and am still one according to American standards.
As it should be abundantly apparent, I’m not the manliest man in the world. If it weren’t for my soul patch (that takes over a month to grow), my Groucho Marx eyebrows (that grow back almost instantaneously when I try to trim or pluck them), and my “I’m shy but Mother Nature is unreasonably sadistic and decided to make me immediately apparent when I walk into a room” height, I could probably pass as androgynous. Personally, I would be okay with this but by American standards the very idea should be devastating to my male ego to the point that repairing it requires me to eat a pound of raw beef, punch a hole in a brick wall the size of a watermelon, and rip off the antlers of a charging moose. It’s funny but I had to deal with this mentality a lot while growing up.
It’s hard to say when I started being a girl. Developmentally speaking, it could be argued that part of my personality was shaped by being so close to my mother or having an older sister that lovingly tried to kill me on numerous occasions during my toddler years (I’m afraid of raisins because of her) but I genuinely don’t know. One of my first best friends was a girl in preschool and that might have played a role. Maybe it had to do with the interests that began at a young age. Instead of cars, action figures, and stuff that would have reasonable potential to cause violent explosions if they were real like most “normal” little boys play with, I played with stuffed animals and other similarly snuggly things. Not only did I play with them, I also collected them until middle school and I had so many that I could completely bury myself under them (which I found to be loads of fun because nothing’s more fun than potentially smothering yourself and having your parents find you dead several days later when the ceiling to the living room starts to leak). Again, what made me into a girl is unclear but I became one regardless.
There really weren’t too many problems in elementary school. The only things that really set me apart from other kids were the quirks of my ADHD fueled behavior (pretending to be certain video game characters at inappropriate times, using wild hand gestures to express simple messages, talking to myself in public, etc.) and the fact that, after kindergarten, I was one of the few kids who frequently crossed the “gender barriers” established to prevent the spread of cooties/AIDS. I had many “girlfriends” at school and I didn’t believe that girls were acidic to the touch. At church, the only friends I had were girls and this didn’t change until I was almost in middle school. It could even be said that I was practically raised by girls. The only time when I tried to give being a “tough-guy” a spin was when I was in the fifth grade by being a bully and it backfired spectacularly. I didn’t become overly conscious of how I was a girl until middle school.
Middle school sucked in an incalculable way. In elementary school, most of my problems came from events that happened at my church while in middle school it shifted to school itself. I was made aware that I wasn’t the manliest of men very quickly in what was probably one of the more difficult times of my life. It started simply enough. Within the first couple of days of school, I made it clear that I didn’t want to change in front of the other guys in the locker room after gym. I was accused of being gay for the first time. “What’s that?” “It means you like boys.” “But… I don’t.” “But you go in the stalls to change so you’re gay.” Crumbling under the flawless logic of my peers, I started to question my gender and sexual orientation.
I didn’t fit the standards of masculinity very well. Aside from very brief times in my senior year of high school and my junior year of college, I’ve never had a lot of muscles. I still had a cringe worthy huge collection of Beanie Babies. To help me fall asleep at night, I whispered myself stories that usually had a romantic nature to them until probably the eighth grade. I really wasn’t a fan of any sports like my friends were. I cried when I was sad. I was afraid of a lot of things. I blushed when I was embarrassed and was generally shy. It seemed I betrayed too many common ideals of masculinity to be straight, let alone a boy. I was a “nice guy” and in, middle school terms, that basically means “latent homosexual” so I felt continuously betrayed by my own girly personality. Various events that had happened in the past and at that time as well as being completely ignorant to how homosexuality “works”, I was pushed into feeling a lot of self-doubt and insecurity. The end result of nearly two years of teasing, harassment, and being put on the spot erupted into me bawling my eyes out in the principles’ office and losing the last best friend I would have until my senior year of college. To this day, I still feel a hint of mistrust towards most men because of what all happened.
High school started off well enough. I had a girlfriend and the seemingly unending jeers of middle school ended. I felt like James Bond with 24 pack abs who could make tanks explode by clenching his butt cheeks. “I’m a *cough* little effeminate but I have a girlfriend; up yours world,” I thought. Things went swimmingly until we broke up and then I literally went nuts for about a month. It seemed that within weeks of breaking up all the latent fears and insecurities I had in middle school came racing back and the feelings were much more intense this time around. These feelings were once again fueled by what American culture defines as masculine as well as ongoing paranoia that I was going to wake up one morning and suddenly be gay. Yep, I was one of those poor uneducated people that believed in the “vampire/zombie effect.” If you’ve never heard of this, it’s the idea that being in contact with a gay person or simply thinking of the possibility that you could be gay could turn you gay. Go to bed straight, wake up and suddenly love Bravo. Shake a gay man’s hand, have it down your flannel pajama pants when you wake up next to him spooning you the next morning. Nauseatingly irrational but growing up in a Christian conservative home and the unfortunate events that followed my cousin coming out of the closet helped further cement this mentality into my mind until early 2009.
The feelings I had in my early college years were so intense that I felt perpetual shame and self- consciousness in public. I didn’t make new friends and the only people I really tried to connect with were women that I was interested in dating (see my last essay for all the fun roadblocks I ran into there). Things hit a critical point when I went to England the first time and had a gay roommate for the course of the trip. I was uncomfortable enough with sharing a hotel room with a gay guy but he was stereotypically gay in just about every sense. He wore women’s shoes, he had a lisp, he had a perm, he sang show tunes to himself, he ran up to random women and gushed about their fashion sense, he wore that one Britney Spears perfume, and one of the things he talked about the most was, you guessed it, all the guys he had slept with in graphic detail and how one of his favorite things to do was “covert” drunk straight guys. Needless to say, we hated each other immediately. Despite this he ended up trying to solicit me for sex one night which resulted in me locking myself in the bathroom and scribbling in the travel journal I was keeping about revenge, how I could have died of shame and embarrassment and how I was scared to death of going from slightly effeminate to full blown “that.” These events made me draw even more into myself when I got back home.
How did I get to where I am today then? It was a mixture of things. One of the more significant was a seemingly random encounter with an older French woman in Paris who explained to me that “American men don’t know how to dress and are terrible lovers.” It was a short conversation but for the first time I actually heard criticism about American masculine ideals from someone aside from my mother. About a year later, this inspired me to start dressing nicer even if it risked me being accused of being effeminate. The second was actually making gay friends at SEMO and learning that, in contradiction to popular belief, gay people aren’t mindless sex hounds that want to hump you ravenously until you/they are close to dying of dehydration. The third was the most important and that was, bluntly put, the long and arduous process of pulling my head out of my own *** and finally hearing more than just the echoes of my self-doubts bouncing off the walls of my rectum.
There are still a lot of things about me that would classically define me as a “girl.” I would rather drink a glass of wine then a pint of beer. I would rather go to an art museum than a football game. I would rather be in a room with women gossiping for an hour than five minutes in a room with guys talking about sports statistics or who/what farm animal they plowed last night. When I’m genuinely upset, I will cry and I don’t have any issues with talking about my emotions. I use both perfume and body spray. I enjoy romantic comedies. I look amazing in a dress. (Who am I kidding? The amount of hair on my calves could pass as leg warmers.) Most of my closest friends are still women including my best friend. Yes Burger King, I like quiche and tofu. Yes Hardees, I bake and cook. I like musicals and operas. I can wear a scarf in the spring or fall and not feel like my balls will fall off at any given moment. Sometimes chocolate IS the only right solution to problems in life. I could go on and on until you were convinced that Betty White was writing this instead of me. It’s been a long road but I’m finally comfortable enough with myself to actually talk about these things openly. In a long-winded way, I’ve formed the foundation for what I want to talk about in the second part of my first multi-part essay: what makes a man a man in America and, being the girly man that I am, what my thoughts are on it. Stay tuned.
Fatmanonice, March 6th 2011
“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.” – George Eliot
“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.” –Voltaire
What does it mean to be a man? This is a question that I have been wondering for years if only because so many different experiences in my life have forced me to ask it. I’ve also began to ask myself this question again because of what all I’ve been learning about childhood and adolescent development this semester. In concerns to my own childhood and adolescence, a decent percent of the stress that I experienced during those years were struggles that I had defining not only my gender but also my sexual orientation. What’s strange about this is that I’m male and straight but the culture I grew up in along with various people I’ve encountered in my life tried to tell me otherwise. The following essay is basically a look into a part of my life that I have never openly talked about in person. This is a look into how I grew up as a girl and am still one according to American standards.
As it should be abundantly apparent, I’m not the manliest man in the world. If it weren’t for my soul patch (that takes over a month to grow), my Groucho Marx eyebrows (that grow back almost instantaneously when I try to trim or pluck them), and my “I’m shy but Mother Nature is unreasonably sadistic and decided to make me immediately apparent when I walk into a room” height, I could probably pass as androgynous. Personally, I would be okay with this but by American standards the very idea should be devastating to my male ego to the point that repairing it requires me to eat a pound of raw beef, punch a hole in a brick wall the size of a watermelon, and rip off the antlers of a charging moose. It’s funny but I had to deal with this mentality a lot while growing up.
It’s hard to say when I started being a girl. Developmentally speaking, it could be argued that part of my personality was shaped by being so close to my mother or having an older sister that lovingly tried to kill me on numerous occasions during my toddler years (I’m afraid of raisins because of her) but I genuinely don’t know. One of my first best friends was a girl in preschool and that might have played a role. Maybe it had to do with the interests that began at a young age. Instead of cars, action figures, and stuff that would have reasonable potential to cause violent explosions if they were real like most “normal” little boys play with, I played with stuffed animals and other similarly snuggly things. Not only did I play with them, I also collected them until middle school and I had so many that I could completely bury myself under them (which I found to be loads of fun because nothing’s more fun than potentially smothering yourself and having your parents find you dead several days later when the ceiling to the living room starts to leak). Again, what made me into a girl is unclear but I became one regardless.
There really weren’t too many problems in elementary school. The only things that really set me apart from other kids were the quirks of my ADHD fueled behavior (pretending to be certain video game characters at inappropriate times, using wild hand gestures to express simple messages, talking to myself in public, etc.) and the fact that, after kindergarten, I was one of the few kids who frequently crossed the “gender barriers” established to prevent the spread of cooties/AIDS. I had many “girlfriends” at school and I didn’t believe that girls were acidic to the touch. At church, the only friends I had were girls and this didn’t change until I was almost in middle school. It could even be said that I was practically raised by girls. The only time when I tried to give being a “tough-guy” a spin was when I was in the fifth grade by being a bully and it backfired spectacularly. I didn’t become overly conscious of how I was a girl until middle school.
Middle school sucked in an incalculable way. In elementary school, most of my problems came from events that happened at my church while in middle school it shifted to school itself. I was made aware that I wasn’t the manliest of men very quickly in what was probably one of the more difficult times of my life. It started simply enough. Within the first couple of days of school, I made it clear that I didn’t want to change in front of the other guys in the locker room after gym. I was accused of being gay for the first time. “What’s that?” “It means you like boys.” “But… I don’t.” “But you go in the stalls to change so you’re gay.” Crumbling under the flawless logic of my peers, I started to question my gender and sexual orientation.
I didn’t fit the standards of masculinity very well. Aside from very brief times in my senior year of high school and my junior year of college, I’ve never had a lot of muscles. I still had a cringe worthy huge collection of Beanie Babies. To help me fall asleep at night, I whispered myself stories that usually had a romantic nature to them until probably the eighth grade. I really wasn’t a fan of any sports like my friends were. I cried when I was sad. I was afraid of a lot of things. I blushed when I was embarrassed and was generally shy. It seemed I betrayed too many common ideals of masculinity to be straight, let alone a boy. I was a “nice guy” and in, middle school terms, that basically means “latent homosexual” so I felt continuously betrayed by my own girly personality. Various events that had happened in the past and at that time as well as being completely ignorant to how homosexuality “works”, I was pushed into feeling a lot of self-doubt and insecurity. The end result of nearly two years of teasing, harassment, and being put on the spot erupted into me bawling my eyes out in the principles’ office and losing the last best friend I would have until my senior year of college. To this day, I still feel a hint of mistrust towards most men because of what all happened.
High school started off well enough. I had a girlfriend and the seemingly unending jeers of middle school ended. I felt like James Bond with 24 pack abs who could make tanks explode by clenching his butt cheeks. “I’m a *cough* little effeminate but I have a girlfriend; up yours world,” I thought. Things went swimmingly until we broke up and then I literally went nuts for about a month. It seemed that within weeks of breaking up all the latent fears and insecurities I had in middle school came racing back and the feelings were much more intense this time around. These feelings were once again fueled by what American culture defines as masculine as well as ongoing paranoia that I was going to wake up one morning and suddenly be gay. Yep, I was one of those poor uneducated people that believed in the “vampire/zombie effect.” If you’ve never heard of this, it’s the idea that being in contact with a gay person or simply thinking of the possibility that you could be gay could turn you gay. Go to bed straight, wake up and suddenly love Bravo. Shake a gay man’s hand, have it down your flannel pajama pants when you wake up next to him spooning you the next morning. Nauseatingly irrational but growing up in a Christian conservative home and the unfortunate events that followed my cousin coming out of the closet helped further cement this mentality into my mind until early 2009.
The feelings I had in my early college years were so intense that I felt perpetual shame and self- consciousness in public. I didn’t make new friends and the only people I really tried to connect with were women that I was interested in dating (see my last essay for all the fun roadblocks I ran into there). Things hit a critical point when I went to England the first time and had a gay roommate for the course of the trip. I was uncomfortable enough with sharing a hotel room with a gay guy but he was stereotypically gay in just about every sense. He wore women’s shoes, he had a lisp, he had a perm, he sang show tunes to himself, he ran up to random women and gushed about their fashion sense, he wore that one Britney Spears perfume, and one of the things he talked about the most was, you guessed it, all the guys he had slept with in graphic detail and how one of his favorite things to do was “covert” drunk straight guys. Needless to say, we hated each other immediately. Despite this he ended up trying to solicit me for sex one night which resulted in me locking myself in the bathroom and scribbling in the travel journal I was keeping about revenge, how I could have died of shame and embarrassment and how I was scared to death of going from slightly effeminate to full blown “that.” These events made me draw even more into myself when I got back home.
How did I get to where I am today then? It was a mixture of things. One of the more significant was a seemingly random encounter with an older French woman in Paris who explained to me that “American men don’t know how to dress and are terrible lovers.” It was a short conversation but for the first time I actually heard criticism about American masculine ideals from someone aside from my mother. About a year later, this inspired me to start dressing nicer even if it risked me being accused of being effeminate. The second was actually making gay friends at SEMO and learning that, in contradiction to popular belief, gay people aren’t mindless sex hounds that want to hump you ravenously until you/they are close to dying of dehydration. The third was the most important and that was, bluntly put, the long and arduous process of pulling my head out of my own *** and finally hearing more than just the echoes of my self-doubts bouncing off the walls of my rectum.
There are still a lot of things about me that would classically define me as a “girl.” I would rather drink a glass of wine then a pint of beer. I would rather go to an art museum than a football game. I would rather be in a room with women gossiping for an hour than five minutes in a room with guys talking about sports statistics or who/what farm animal they plowed last night. When I’m genuinely upset, I will cry and I don’t have any issues with talking about my emotions. I use both perfume and body spray. I enjoy romantic comedies. I look amazing in a dress. (Who am I kidding? The amount of hair on my calves could pass as leg warmers.) Most of my closest friends are still women including my best friend. Yes Burger King, I like quiche and tofu. Yes Hardees, I bake and cook. I like musicals and operas. I can wear a scarf in the spring or fall and not feel like my balls will fall off at any given moment. Sometimes chocolate IS the only right solution to problems in life. I could go on and on until you were convinced that Betty White was writing this instead of me. It’s been a long road but I’m finally comfortable enough with myself to actually talk about these things openly. In a long-winded way, I’ve formed the foundation for what I want to talk about in the second part of my first multi-part essay: what makes a man a man in America and, being the girly man that I am, what my thoughts are on it. Stay tuned.
Fatmanonice, March 6th 2011
“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.” – George Eliot
“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.” –Voltaire
