#masulinity

Jackson dress by Orttu

Albert Einstein

Sincerely, Aki @akishisen

I was recently and very gently smacked over the knuckles by a friend for something I wrote more than three years ago.    It was a sketch about rejection, that began with the object of my affection reified as a muse and ended with me imagining myself slapping her across the face I zipped up my pants in embarrassment.     From perfect being in my mind's eye, her humanity begins to bleed through into reality, paint-stripping my fantasy of mutual lust down to a seedy, colourless adolescent crush.            My defense against the accusation that male frustration instinctively, or unthinkingly, looks to violence as an expression, was that the sketch charted a figurative illustration of two extremes common to romantic objectification: the figure of muse versus that of the whore.    The TV-style all or nothing equation of a heteronormative, masculine logic we are all familiar with that unrealistically divvies up the possibilities of affection into a sharp binary: if she bows to my advances she's an angel, if she's doesn't she's a bitch!    Think of ukushela: Boy sees girl. Boy whistles, cat-calls, howls. Girl quickens her step. Girl thinks twice, three times.    If she stops and allows the conversation boy wins. She doesn't lose but he wins. If she walks away boy wins she doesn't lose. The game is rigged, it has been for a long time because her role is perpetually that of receiver, risking either affection and of insults or both.    It's a crude little anecdote that could benefit from some polish but the point is about the stakes of each predetermined gender role: both boy and girl begin in default positions with a handful of options, one a little shittier than the other.        My second defense was just that.  The space that exists between stimulus and response. Google Victor Frankel, as I did,  and you'll find this quote:    "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."    By depicting the gulf between the extremes of muse and whore I wanted to underline that space, while using the imagined slap for shock value, to dramatise without straying to far into cliché the expected appearance of violence.    Many of these things struck me long after the writing, a fact that highlights the ineffectiveness of the language I used then. And this then is one of many revisions, reappraisals, that any writing or idea you may deem worthwhile must suffer.    The same seems true of ideas about relationships and gender and violence. They are not static things and hardly ever manifest in neat predictable patterns, not if one of one is willing to take closer, longer look.

These are things i find so attractive in men but they also make me never wanna talk to a man I find attractive in person cause they scare me at the same time.