So, I’m of course doing my level best to avoid fitting into the stereotype of submissive guys, I’m working on getting fit, I don’t send unsolicited creepy e-mails, to dominant identified women, I try not to obsess about hyper-specific and unrealistic fantasies. You know, all that.
But as I read around in my admittedly rather insular community of bloggers and kink resources, I’ve been seeing a familiar refrain when dommes describe their male partners, usually along the lines of: “you would never know he’s submissive outside the bedroom” or “in his professional life he’s a real alpha male, but to me he’s submissive.”
Now, of course I get that they are just describing their significant others, who they probably love, so I’m not saying that they’re promoting any sort of essentialist “good male-sub” ideal. I’m just pointing out that I see it quite a bit, and it catches my attention, because it’s not me.
Imagine a fourth wolf, who stayed home to watch Sherlock on his laptop instead of going out howling with "the guys," that's me.
I’m not an “Alpha-male” (and I’m OK with that, since almost nobody really is.) More than that though, I’ve never been into the stereotypical, mainstream guy stuff, I don’t care about cars, I can’t stand sports, and while I do like video games, I don’t play hyper-competitive FPS’s so much as sprawling single player fantasy RPGs.
I’ve often, when hearing “men are like this/women are like this.” jokes and anecdotes, felt that I wasn’t however men were supposed to be. Not that I’m doubting my maleness, or masculinity, that’s not what this is about. I’m totally comfortable with my manhood, I just recognize that I’m not your typical joe-six pack (ooh, that’s another one, I don’t drink beer, at all. I might be allergic) every-man.
I’m me, and I’ve always been cool with that.
…but, I’ve been thinking more about this sort of stuff, gender roles, presentation, masculinity, femininity, and I just notice that there seem to be a lot of dommes that are very excited about their manly he-men, “alpha” subs.
Yeah... He-Man, really isn't me.
Part of it I think is pushing back against the over-prevalent, sissy/forced-femme/cuckold submale fantasy that that is being pushed as the way that Femdom works. That stuff, isn’t at all what I want. But, I’m just not cut out to be the super take charge dude that only is submissive in the boudoir.
I’m very type B, very much into making people happy (provided of course, that we’re talking about people I like, people I don’t like can go fuck themselves) very much a fan of having someone else make the decisions whenever possible. (again, provided that it’s someone capable of making smart decisions, I don’t want to put myself in the hands of an idiot.) So, if you’ve got sub-dar, I’ll probably set it off. Which, might be bothering me a bit, seeing as I don’t hear women saying that they are with a guy that they immediately knew was submissive, and that’s what they love about him.
On the other hand, like I said, almost no one really is an “alpha male,” it’s like the Highlander, there can be only one, in any social circle. So it’s an almost useless term, being thrown around to describe some take-charge masculine ideal.
Somebody else make the plan, I'll make sure it comes together.
The thing is, why would I even want to be the Alpha-male? I Think of the A-team, they’re all awesome guys, but I don’t want to be Hannibal, even though he’s the boss. I incidentally always thought of myself as Faceman, maybe with a little mad Murdock thrown in. It’s better I think, to let someone else take charge and just be very good at what I do. I don’t need to be at the top, but I will run my level well.
I just feel a tad self conscious about my passivity, that it will be seen as unmasculine, that it will count as a strike against me (along with not knowing how to fix cars, or install plumbing.)
I think you are very right when you say some of the descriptions you read have to be considered in light of the weakling/sissy bullshit that is such a prevalent misconception regarding men who chose to be submissive. I think a lot of dominant women feel that it has to be pointed out that their man isn’t a hideous, sniveling worm because of those stereotypes.
Also, for many of us, we see the demonstration of traits we admire in men and prefer in our partners as strengths, albeit not in the standard arrr arrr arrr manly-man way.
I like that my husband doesn’t watch a lot of sports, that he enjoys cooking and shopping, that he takes good care of my children and trains them well. I like that he enjoys doing theater on occasion and that he is quick to notice and compliment new hair cuts, lost weight, etc. on myself and my girlfriends. I like that he comes home and talks to me about his day and shares his victories and frustrations. None of those are “alpha-male” stereotypes but if you only use the pathetic worm or the alpha male as descriptions, you are going to end up with the effect you’ve noticed— which is that EVERY guy who isn’t a pathetic grovelling insect is going to end up in the alpha male category even if it is not a spot-on description.
“…if you only use the pathetic worm or the alpha male as descriptions, you are going to end up with the effect you’ve noticed”
I think you’re right a lot of what I’m noticing, is people checking the alpha box because the worm box doesn’t fit.
Also consider that people always give you a skewed view of themselves and their partners, and there are lots of reasons for this.
The domme who talks about her sniveling little worm is clearly exaggerating for effect. But most people instinctively exaggerate the good points of ourselves and the people we love, and minimize the negatives. Since ‘alpha male’ aspects are often considered ‘prestigious’, it’s easy for a domme to emphasize those aspects of her sub’s personality, and not mention that he’s scared of spiders.
There’s a nice irony too, about juxstapositioning a man’s submissiveness with his cliched ‘alpha male’ characteristics. Everyone has a mix of aspects of themselves that do/do not conform to the cliches, and it’s fun to see that. If you honestly thought about it you would find aspects of yourself that your future domme will talk about as your alpha male -ness.
I wouldn’t worry about being a bit ‘passive’ in real life. So long as it’s ‘I want you to take the lead’ and not ‘I don’t care’. It seems to me from DD’s (unrepresentative sample of) domme interviews that it’s about 50/50 whether dommes like being in charge full stop or just in bed. Perhaps you want one of the former.
Definitely for me it’s less of an apathy, and more of a “I want to take the lead/get exactly what you want.”
I certainly think the best fit for me would be someone who wanted lots of control, both inside and outside the bedroom
I agree with the comments above. I think, as you say, much of the “grr, arg he-man” stereotype is an exaggeration for effect. It’s a nice fantasy. Really though, what most women want is a man who is sure of himself, who is kind and polite and a generally decent person. I’ve never cared if people I’ve dated could change a tyre/watched sports/drank beer. What does matter is how much you have in common with someone, that you share similar interests and core values and that you’re both invested in the relationship. I think what the “wormy submissive” stereotype actually shows is that women (and I think this actually applies to most people) don’t want a partner with no personality who doesn’t care about anything, least of all themselves, and has no self esteem or self respect. Regardless of one’s interests, I don’t think anyone wants to date somebody like that and I don’t think that that is what sexual submission is at all even though they are sometimes confused. You can be a submissive guy and be sure of yourself and self confident. That’s what most dominant women want. I think that’s what most people want – a person who is confident and proud to be themselves not in an arrogant way but in a quiet self assurance kind of way. Don’t worry about it, I don’t think very many people actually fit their gender archetypes exactly, either.
“You can be a submissive guy and be sure of yourself and self confident. That’s what most dominant women want…. a person who is confident and proud to be themselves not in an arrogant way but in a quiet self assurance kind of way.
I don’t know if it comes across much here, since so much of what I write about are my concerns, but I really like me, I’m great, really top notch! Now, I just need to make sure that that comes out in a less than arrogant manner.
It is a little frustrating, not fitting any archetype smoothly, it seems like life would be a lot easier, if there was a box that I fit into, that gave me a clear idea of what to do, and how to act so that people would get me.
Alas, I’m a beautiful and unique snowflake, and that’s hard to explain.
Yes, it definitely comes across that you’re comfortable with yourself. But I think this also raises the point that no one perfectly fits into an archetype. I think it’s a good thing, difficult certainly, but forget about boxes that you feel you should fit into. The point is that you don’t feel that you do and so attempting to fit into boxes will inevitably end badly. I don’t think many people feel they fit into boxes. Can you try and elaborate on how you feel?
Oh, it just seems like a lot of people don’t struggle as much, getting people to understand them as a person. They’ve found a role, that fits them well enough and just go with it.
Sometimes I feel like, it’s going to be difficult building a relationship, when so many important facets of who I am are beneath the surface.
The ‘alpha male’ thing pisses me off.
It pisses me off when women talk about their ‘alpha male’ submissive because it feels a lot like chest thumping that is so very akin to the 50s version of ‘I am judged by the man I am with’ schtick where they have to claim that their man is the manliest of men in order to big note *themselves*. That is, “I’m so special and domly that this alpha male submits *only* to me!” I always want to say, “Right on, sweetie, until you break up and he submits to whoever comes next, you ain’t that special…” Gee I can be a bitch sometimes…
It also pisses me off when men talk about *being* the alpha male (ugh grunt more chest beating) because I hear “I’m not comfortable with my submission, so ima gonna insist that I’m the exception to all of ‘them’, those sub-standard non-manly submissives. I’m a *real* man you know!”
Ugh.
I agree with you with the Highlander reference, “there can be only one”, and I’m pretty damn sure that that guy, yes him, the chest thumpy one, yeah, he ain’t it.
I also agree with lipstickandligature in that what most people probably mean is that their man is confident, self assured, comfortable with himself etc, and the term ‘alpha male’ is used without any understanding of what it actually means.
“I just feel a tad self conscious about my passivity, that it will be seen as unmasculine, that it will count as a strike against me”
I think the term ‘passive’ tends to be taken quite negatively because it means ‘Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance’, and to me, it implies a lump of boring. Submission is not passive, it is actively embracing her decisions, responding with delight to her needs, going out of your way to make her happy, bouncing with joy at following her lead etc. The word ‘passive’ conjures up none of that.
Saying “I’m a great follower” or something of that ilk is much more positive.
Ferns
Submission is not passive, it is actively embracing her decisions, responding with delight to her needs, going out of your way to make her happy, bouncing with joy at following her lead
Someone needs to put that on a pillow.
Great follower, that might be a better way to describe myself. Even still, since I’m looking at dating vanilla women, (and hoping to find a Domme there) I feel concerned that the knee jerk reaction to hearing that “I, the man, am a follower” (as opposed to my culturally allotted role of leader) is going to be negative. And yes, if she reacts poorly to that, then she probably isn’t a latent dominant, but, I’d like to be able to showcase this aspect of myself without fear of rejection.
I have to admit that’s a hot fantasy (captured warrior king anyone?) but in real life I think an actual alpha male would irritate the hell out of me. I don’t really want to hang out with anyone who has to take the lead all the time and be better than everyone at everything.
I agree with Ferns–passive and submissive are not the same. There is quite a bit one can do with pro-active submission. I also love the “follower” bit–when asked to describe my ideal submissive, I said “A great lead on the dance floor and a great follow everywhere else.”
Great follower is a good way to put it. Or supporter?
Maybe examples are a good way to explain – I can’t think of any American examples, but UK examples of socially supportive men would be Dennis Thatcher (to Maggie Thatcher) or Prince Albert (to Queen Victoria). Or even the current Duke of Edinburgh (to the Queen).
I guess this comes back to what Tom Allen was talking about – what do we call male submissives that doesn’t sound like a wormy, pathetic, etc.? Prince consort is a nice phrase – suggesting importance but that he’s not the main event; he’s in a supporting role to his Queen.
Ooooo,
I think I rather like the sound of that…
“and this is my prince consort…”
I could definitely live with that.
It would look good on a pillow too. Especially with a matching (bigger) one saying ‘Queen’. 😉
How about “sidekick”? 🙂
I genuinely like very manly and strong men. I love how I can make them agree to virtually anything by manipulating their sex drive then use it to control them completely. I literally gush when I hear an exceptionally manly man accept my strapon deep in his rectum and I regularly have orgasms from the pressure of the strapon on my clit the harder it pound it into him.
Okay, are you intending to connect those two ideas (“very manly and strong men” and ” I can make them agree to virtually anything by manipulating their sex drive”) or are you just expressing a preference for this “manly” type of man, and saying that it is possible for them to also be submissive?
Furthermore, do you really feel that power exchange should revolve around his sex drive? For me, that smacks too much of this transactional nature of sex that is so often played up in our culture. I feel like that is a pretty damaging trope that leads men to feel undesirable (and feeling desirable is a major part of what makes submission attractive to me.)
Yes, I love to control more powerful men in the same way that freud thought that young girls liked to ride horses, to control that which in other circumstances could overpower you. Plus, I like to find men who have no idea that they have a submissive side and introduce them to it. I’m not as excited about someone who comes to me already submissive (all other things being equal) because I like to break my men partners (consensually, of course).
Second, I don’t exactly believe that power exchange should revolve around sex drive. But I like to use a man’s sex drive to get him to a place where he is willing to consent to what I ask. For example, take a man who expresses a desire for anal sex with me. That’s not going to happen. But I’ll let him think it might if he passes all my “tests.” What he will find, however, again with consent but some fear, is that it is his rectum that will be penetrated just to see how he likes it and the mine will be penetrated, if at all, by his tongue.
Now, some very special men are allowed straight sex with me. When that occurs, I like it very hard. That is used to cuckold my regular BF and to satisfy my need to be filled at times. But I digress.
In the end, I am not a domme outside the bedroom. I am not interested in a man who wants to wear a collar and lease outside the bedroom. Inside the bedroom, however, it is all about sex, at least for me. I have domme friends who are different and I respect that. But each of us is different. Each of us was imprinted with a different “love map.” I hope you can respect mine as much as I respect yours.
The thing is, this is real for me. I don’t do it for money, I don’t sell videos, I don’t need to broadcast myself as some kind of expert on all this. It’s just how I get off.
I hope this helps you understand me.
Uh, if this works for you and your partners, great! but to me it sounds, (I don’t want to say dishonest) just less forthright than I would find acceptable in a relationship. Especially with the amount of trust I need to have in a relationship, not communicating one’s true intentions would be highly unacceptable, most likely relationship ending.
And I really don’t do poly-anything (especially not cuckolding.) I don’t see why PIV sex (I assume that’s what you mean by straight sex) couldn’t be an act of submission for the the penetrating partner. That’s definitely a trope I’m unhappy perpetuated in any context.
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We are unique individuals with different love maps and different desires. I don’t question you. I accept you. I do have 1 long-term, live-in partner who is dominant in all of the rest of our lives (outside the bedroom) and 2 regular female partners who live a bit distant but when they travel we usually get together. My man and I have been together for 7 years and he hasn’t expressed any desire to alter our relationship.
The rest of my activities are more isolated with men (and, occasionally, women) I meet in a variety of contexts. EVERYTHING is ALWAYS consensual. And, while I may be, technically, manipulating men through their sex drives, my response is that I believe men have the power to exercise control over that drive, though many allow it to control them. If a man chooses to allow his sex drive to control him, then, most likely, I am not his biggest concern.
Like I said if it works for you great. It’s right on the edge if what squicks me though, I’m OK with a lot of extreme play, but certain ways that people express their dynamics will always bring out a strongly negative emotional reaction from me.
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This is a bit disheartening, I admit. But people can’t help who they’re attracted to. And the vast majority of women (with a few exceptions, of course) want to be involved with someone who has everything in his life under control. It is a tall order I’ll admit, but then life is never easy.
A better way to think about it would be that it’s good for you to have your life in order (regardless of your sexual orientation). It’s good for you to be in good (mental and physical) health. It’s good for you to have a minimum of complications in your life. So it can be framed in terms of self-improvement rather than some ideal that you need to live up to.
And to get to that kind of self-sufficiency and control in your life, you have to be at least a little bit assertive (or dominant, so to speak). I don’t know if it was the environment or culture I grew up in, but I learnt that in my youth. It makes your life a lot easier. I am certainly happier now than I was as a naive teen. A lot more cynical too, but that comes with age anyway. But I had to learn to be like that. It didn’t come naturally. I don’t see it as an achievement, but as something you need to do well in life. Passive people get taken advantage of. That is not fun whether you are submissive or not.
Would I be happy to find a sugar mum who takes away all my financial troubles and accepts my depressed, out of shape self with a hundred issues going on in my life? Absolutely. Is that ever going to happen? No. (Just for the record, I do have my life under control and my domme likes it like that).
Not suggesting that you don’t have your life in order, for all I know you probably do. But is some degree of assertiveness a requirement to lead a fulfilling life? In my experience, it is.
“A better way to think about it would be that it’s good for you to have your life in order (regardless of your sexual orientation). It’s good for you to be in good (mental and physical) health. It’s good for you to have a minimum of complications in your life. So it can be framed in terms of self-improvement rather than some ideal that you need to live up to.”
I don’t disagree that these are good things, but Is this all it takes to add up to someone who might be framed as being “alpha?”
I don’t feel that my submissiveness, (which might be best described rather as a desire to be submissive, rather than a constant and default state) prevents me from being assertive when I must, I find it less comfortable, but I’m certainly capable of taking the lead when I have to, to get the job done.
All things considered I’ve got my life in pretty decent shape, I got a good job that I enjoy, though it is by no means a career, I’m fairly self aware for my peer group, I’m working on getting into better shape, and I know what I want and am actively seeking it out.
I typed that because you said your passivity might seem unmasculine. So, I stressed on the importance of assertiveness.
The simplest definition for “alpha male” comes from zoology and it is used to describe a socially dominant male. For someone to be socially dominant, there must be others who are socially submissive to him. Basically any kind of competition with other people (preferably other men) where you end up higher in the social hierarchy. And assertiveness is what you need to achieve that.
And there’s no one way to achieve that. People do it through petty politics, through developing talents or skill, through fame, through personal achievements. Anything which makes other people admire or look up to you. That is the gist of it, IMO.
And it’s not like you have to go looking to do that. That kind of social competition is an everyday thing. At work, among relatives and friends. You can’t escape it. Might as well try winning some of those social games.
Ok yeah, that makes sense. I suppose passitivy might not be the best way to describe it, or at least I need to clarify that it is a comfort issue. I’m more comfortable having someone else in charge, but I can be assertive when I need to be.
I think it’s perfectly all right to like the gender presentation of “Alpha” type guys, but things become a problem when people seem to assume that expressing gender that way is the only way to be *strong* as a man. I don’t believe that. Personally I’m drawn to men who are strong in ways traditionally coded feminine — kindness, patience, endurance, capacity to nurture — with geekery thrown in (getting really excited about things, being linguistically playful, having an extensive and joyful knowledge of whatever they enjoy). It is radical in a way to say that a submissive man can have traditionally butch gender expression. But it’s also radical to say that strength for people of all genders can come in many different forms and just because a man is not butch does not mean he’s not a very strong person. I mean, as a Christian I think of Jesus — self-sacrifice is traditionally coded feminine, and God embodied as a man saved the world through that. So apparently God isn’t obsessed with butchness, at the very least. 😉 I remember the first boy I ever had a crush on was the quietest, sweetest kid in 1st Grade. All the other boys were roughhousing and acting like total dicks, and there he was off to the side looking kinda thoughtful and sweet. I can still remember his face. 🙂
So I agree with most of what you’ve just said, I would be pleased as punch if everyone just let everyone do their own thing without all the judgement.
but “self-sacrifice is traditionally coded feminine” doesn’t sound right to me, there are tons and tons of male and very masculine male martyrs in both history and popular culture.
Of Christ’s characteristics, I think it is his subservience, that is traditionally coded feminine. Ask a dude to wash his buddies feet and see what kind of reaction you get, I’d venture that guys who say they’d take a bullet for their friends in a heart beat would have reservations about the foot washing.
There’s the good of making the world right by force and aggression, which is traditionally coded masculine within Western culture, and then there’s making the world right by letting people kill you and that really does not read traditionally masculine to me. In fact, the moment in the garden where Peter pulls out a sword and cuts off that guy’s ear articulates a masculine response in the terms that the dominant Roman culture of the day would have understood it, and terms which have been filtered down to us through European culture(s). But what’s Jesus’ response? Healing the guy and letting his arrest happen. Early Christian martyrs can be seen as transgressive of gender as well. Um. There’s this excellent book “Unheroic Conduct” by the academic Daniel Boyarin that touches on this. He’s actually looking at constructions of gender within Jewish communities in Europe, but he talks about Christian communities as well:
“By suggesting that the Jewish man in Europe was a sort of ‘woman,’ I am not thus claiming a set of characteristics, traits, behaviors that are essentially female but a set of performances that are read as nommale within a given historical culture/ This culture can be very broadly described as Roman in its origins and as European in its cope and later history. It is a culture of romance [by which he means the word in the traditional combat related sense] that, while always contested–in large part by “feminized Christian religious men–maintained hegemony as a male ideal, ever gaining intensity through the 19th Century and beyond.
Bernadette Brooten has described well the Roman origins of this culture: ‘Active and passive constitute foundational categories for Roman period culture; they are gender coded as masculine and feminine respectively. In their representations of a wide range of sexual behaviors and orientations, astrologers often categorized an active sexual role as masculine and a passive sexual role as feminine; for this reason they descried passive men as effeminate and active women as masculine.’ This paradigm can be asserted as the dominant fiction of Roman cultural engendering.
Like any dominant fiction, this one does not necessarily represent the ‘real’ experience of Roman subjectivity. […] Both early rabbinic Jews and early Christians resisted the Roman imperial power structure through ‘gender bending,’ thus marking their own understanding that gender itself is implicated in the maintenance of political power. Various symbolic enactments of ‘femaleness,’ as constructed within a particular system of genders–among them asceticism, submissiveness, retiring to private spaces, and interpretation of circumcisions in a particular way–were [used] variously by Christians or Jews as acts of resistance against the Roman culture of masculist power wielding, This point is made by Virginia Burrus about early Christianity: ‘For men, the pursuit of Christian [asceticism] entailed the rejection of public life and therefore the hierarchies of office and gender; in this respect, their opponents were not far off the mark when they insinuated that male ascetics were ‘feminized’ through their rejection of the most basic cultural expressions of male identity. ”
Boyarin’s entire point with the book is that, while the Roman construction of masculinity is so ingrained in our cultures in the West that it feels natural, men acting in ways that read as “feminine” are not necessarily failing at the dominant construction of masculinity, instead they might be *participating in an entirely different system*, with different values of what it means to be a good, strong man.
He cites academics who’ve looked at gender roles for women in the early church, too:
“I offer a brief case study from the work of Virginia Burrus on the shift in Christian discourse of gender from the period before Christianity became imperial to the time after its domination of the Roman Empire.
In a series of recent articles, Burrus has been analyzing the transformation of the gendered effects of early Christian discourses of martyrdom as Christianity became dominant within the Empire. Burrus provides the following schematic account: ‘It was a favorite story in the post-Constantinian church, when the days of imperial persecution were for most Christians long past: a trembling young girl, brought before the magistrate, courageously defies her male oppressions; shattering expectations of age and sex, she manages against all odds to preserve both her virginity and her faith, an audacious act of self-assertion finalized by the welcomed death of the executioner’s sword.’ Burrus shows through her intertextual reading that the meaning of the female martyrdom has been refocused by this period via the increasing emphasis on a different Roman cultural model specifically for virtuous women, one that reinforces female passivity. In the second century, we find Perpetua, who is marked as a Christian resister to the Roman culture of gender bt her ‘ ability to stare directly back into the faces of her persecutors, not with the elusive demeanor of a proper [Roman] “matrona,” an ability that ‘broke with the normative body language in a way that signaled an aggressiveness that was not one of conventional femininity.’ And slightly before her lived Blandina, whose ‘fortitude and endurance were compared o those of a victorious male athlete.’ By the fourth century, we have the trembling Agness. No longer the victorious, valorous, virilized gladiator, the virgin martyr is now molded on such types of passive, fmale virtue as Lucretia or Polyxena. Burrus traces the discursive modes through which is achieved ‘the literary transformation of would-be “manly” women–“viragines”–into femininely docile “virgines.'”
Sorry for quoting at such length! But these selections speak to a couple points I was making. The first being that accepting aggression/violence as always and forever masculine is not required; sub-cultures within the Western tradition have had different constructions of gender. The second is that the behavior of Jesus in rejecting the sword and accepting his fate would have read as a radically feminized act within the Roman Empire he was killed in. And the behavior of early Christian martyrs, both male and female, has been researched as transgressive of gender. In the book, Boyarin goes on to say that “unmasculine” male behavior becomes safely closed off and rendered sexually inert by the way monks and priests were secluded from public life and made a different kind of man, so that mainstream men could continue to follow the traditional Roman form of masculinity. However, within Jewish communities in Europe, men who read as “unmasculine” to the mainstream were actually upheld as an ideal of masculinity, just a different kind of masculinity. So you have sexy poems by women about how they want a gentle, retiring scholar who will stay at home and such.
Anyway! I hope this was interesting rather than confusing. 🙂
I guess I was thinking more generally, rather than “traditionally.” I can think of a lot of masculine characters that are martyrs (and usually obvious Christ analogues) but I see what you meant. Also did the Romans just have an absurdly rigidly gendered culture or what?
It’s very interesting, I’m assuming this is something you’ve studied at length, and not just the research you did to comment here, because you’ve rather out-classed my exceedingly speculative post with your comment (which by the way is about 350 words longer than the original post.)
Books like Boyarin’s are kind of my version of highly niche porn, to be honest. lol. Certain passages, at least. And more than that, too. I’ve always been drawn to non-traditional gender expression. I’m kind of nerdy butch myself, and I like men and women with elements of androgyny in either their physical self-presentation or their personality. Reading books like “Unheroic Conduct” feels like validation. It’s like it opens up a conceptual space to understand and appreciate the weirdness I love in people and in myself. It’s deeply validating and so much *fun*. I just love thinking about these things. I love being about to do an end-run around the Alpha male and say, you know what? This isn’t *natural*. This isn’t mandatory. It’s some bullshit Greco-Roman culture came up with and, sure, it’s okay for people to like it. But it’s not *true* in any fundamental way. And men can be strong in many different ways than that, just as I can, as a woman, be non-traditionally feminine and still a worthy human being. Even if the wider culture doesn’t believe it, I feel better tracing how things are constructed so at least I can know that when someone judges the kind of man I love as a pathetic sissy because he’s strong in his own way *they’re wrong*, and here’s how. And when someone judges me as a cold bitch because I’m not traditionally feminine, they’re wrong about that too. I hope you don’t feel like I was just throwing a bunch of words all over your blog or trying to “out-class” you.
“Also did the Romans just have an absurdly rigidly gendered culture or what?”
Oh, yes! They were such a horror story in so many ways! And, yeah, they accomplished things, too. But a lot of our horrible cultural stuff can be traced directly back to their asshattery.
“Reading books like “Unheroic Conduct” feels like validation. It’s like it opens up a conceptual space to understand and appreciate the weirdness I love in people and in myself. It’s deeply validating”
I totally get that, I don’t read much non0fiction, but it is amazing when you come across a passage in a book that so perfectly articulates a thought or feeling that it seemed like you were the only person on the planet who had ever experienced it, and suddenly the world seems less lonely.
“I hope you don’t feel like I was just throwing a bunch of words all over your blog or trying to “out-class” you.”
No no, I was just a tad overwhelmed by the scholarly research being tossed at my ranty little post is all.
“Oh, yes! They were such a horror story in so many ways! And, yeah, they accomplished things, too. But a lot of our horrible cultural stuff can be traced directly back to their asshattery.”<
Damn them! I expect better from the people who gave us the toga.