When you’re a sissy femme male, you learn that indicating sexual interest in anyone is risky and can conjure hostility and contempt. If it happens to be male-bodied people that you like that way, you learn that not only the straight ones but the gay ones as well may regard you as creepy and pathetic and perverted and disgusting. If, on the other hand, your sexual inclination is to find female-bodied humans to be the enticing ones, you soon realize that you’re expected to be boylike and to have boylike sexual priorities and attitudes, and to the extent that you don’t, you’re considered inferior, pathetic, creepy, and loathsomely disgusting.
You may notice a theme here.
So. I wrote a coming-out tale that details what it was like to be me, from age 13 to 21. It included a lot of pining and hoping and wishing and lusting for the possibility of a girlfriend in my life. Because, yeah, that happens to be how I was wired, I was a femme male who found female folk attractive. My narrative included a lot of confusion and frustration, because that’s what it’s like to be a pubescent sissy male with that attraction.
Among the reactions and feedback that I successfully solicited from people willing to review my book were comments that my sexuality was creepy.
a) “I was creeped out by how the author saw every female character as a possible sexual partner”
My last girlfriend had been back when I was in 3rd grade. It had been wonderful. We had loved each other, shared, talked, held hands, defied hostile classmates and even an occasional hostile teacher to be together. In the intervening years I’d developed a much stronger and emphatic interest in girls’ bodies. Not that I hadn’t felt some of that in 3rd grade but I was ignorant and thought I was a pervert back then.
You want to call me a pervert at 13, or 17? Fine. Maybe I was. I wanted a girlfriend. I was seriously into girls. It wasn’t happening but I wanted it to. When I had girls who were friends or associates or colleagues, I fantasized that maybe what I wanted could develop with them.
Since it wasn’t happening, hadn’t happened, and I was feeling left out, I read advice columns and stuff of that nature, and several writers said I should not restrict my potential availability to the ultrahot sexiest girls but should realize that the average ordinary girl in the next row might be a good prospect if I didn’t restrict myself to considering only the sexiest hottest ones that I saw. Well, nearly every female person I saw looked hot to me anyhow, but yeah I took that advice into serious consideration. It could be her. Or it could be her. Or her. I was totally girl-crazy.
Maybe that’s creepy. If so, I don’t think it’s massively different from how a lot of adolescent girls at that age were about the boys.
b) “The author creeped me out with how much he thought he deserved sex, he sounds like an incel or something”
I never thought or wrote that I thought that I deserved sexual attention from this girl or that girl. I did admittedly think that sooner or later, someone would look upon me and think “Ooh, nice! Cute and not at all like the other boys” and would want to do me. Around me, I heard and saw that other males were being pushy about sex. I thought that was creepy.
I was a person who’d grown up thinking of myself as a boy who was like the girls. I valued their opinion and wanted their understanding now that sexual feelings were involved. I wanted to know how it was for them. I wanted it to be mutual. I wanted honesty. And yeah I expected to be a valued commodity, sooner or later, and yes I got a bit indignant when that did not seem to be happening. The pushy, sexually aggressive boys were not only experiencing sex but also having girlfriends.
I saw how the game was played. If I acted like I only wanted to have sex and had no reservations about it, the girl towards whom I acted that out could protest that she wasn’t that kind of girl and we could banter. But that wasn’t honest, that wasn’t me, that role did not fit me, it was written for someone else.
Incels…I am not an incel. They harbor offensively sexist ideologies towards women, attitudes that are chock-full of hostility. But incels are people and some human experiences gave rise to that viewpoint, however twisted it may be. Yes, I was on that path. Feeling unfairly isolated, deprived.
When African natives were forcibly extracted from their homes in the 1600s and beyond and shoved into slavery, they felt the urge to turn to each other and sexuality inflected that, where applicable, and there was mating despite the fact that their children would have this institution of slavery inflicted upon them. That is powerful. That puts the desire to mate on a very high plane of priorities in life. So it is unfair to denigrate the desire to have that in one’s life as if it were some dismissable trivial concern. It is a human thing to want, with relative degree of desperation, a connection, a love, a sexual joining.
To find one’s self in a category where you don’t get to have that? Yeah, there’s going to be anger, resentment. The incels don’t get it. They are wrong. They theorize as if female people have complete autonomy and that they, the males in this position, are controlled by that. That’s ignorant and oblivious. Feminists have been writing and speaking for years and years about the coervice social pressures that control young women’s sexual choices.
I grew up with feminism. I expected my female classmates to be liberated, feminist, nonsexist. I expected them to deal with me as a person who was fundamentally like they were, other than physically male. They didn’t. They had expectations. They bought into beliefs. They also of course became necessarily wary and guarded and suspicious. All of that put a wall between them and me.
My sense that I was a person who was desirable? That I should logically have been a catch? Call it creepy if you must, but I found it liberating to shove aside the value judgments and the notions of what constitutes heterosexual viability.
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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It’s going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It’s a sequel to GenderQueer Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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genderkitten 