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When I was eighteen…

…I was an MRA.

Okay, not really. Not totally! and definitely not consciously. But I had some interesting ideas about men and women.

In a recent post by Sabotabby, Amanda commented that she had “just started Julia Serano’s book that was partially inspired by this, and her theory seems to be shaping up to be that feminists—the very people who you’d expect from—all too often fall into the sexist habit of assuming feminine is lesser than masculine…”

This is what I thought when I was eighteen. I thought that the feminine had one good trait going for it, and that was being nurturing and caring. The majority of the women I knew seemed to either have no job or have very low-paying jobs that they and their families clearly could never have survived on. They cooked sometimes, and mopped and swept and wiped down furniture and appliances sometimes, but if there was a domestic job that involved genuine sweating, they told someone else in the family do it. And oh, they complained. If they weren’t afraid of the person they were complaining about, they did it face-front and dripping with venom; if they were afraid of that person, the venom was sprayed around in random directions, only sometimes hitting the actual target in displays of classic passive-aggression, more frequently striking others either as back-stabbing complaints or vented anger at innocent victims. And they cried. Some cried on a regular schedule; others did so less and if you were the person who Stimulated the Sacred Tear Production, you’d better take off somewhere else for the duration (and depending on the woman, the aftermath) unless you wanted to spend it kissing some serious ass instead.

Women who combined all this with nurturing and caring, though, were worth something. They had a point. Though most of the preceding thoughts detailed were below my conscious level of resolution, occasionally I would find myself contemplating a woman who did not also nurture and care for her family and wondering why the hell do they even keep her AROUND..? (Talk about a wasted space..!)

Now, the masculine, on the other hand…you notice I do not say Now the men on the other hand..! I had far, far too many examples of sorry, abusive men around to feel any particular desire to canonize men en masse. However, as I knew (from societal programming, of course) that women were supposed to be nurturing and caring, I knew what men were supposed to be like, and I did actually have a few examples of those sorts of men around and up close–my stepfather and my maternal grandfather. This is what the masculine had going for it: Brave, strong, loyal, hardworking, honest, protective, kind to those weaker than himself, and supports his family.

You have to admit, all that sounds a lot more attractive to an eighteen-year-old than “nurturing and caring.” All the MAN stuff makes you like, a hero! Since I was female, I accepted that I had to be nurturing and caring (rather grimly, but since it was clearly my duty, I set my jaw and stepped up to that plate) but what I REALLY admired was the male ideal, and that was what I decided to dedicate myself to becoming. (Interestingly enough, I had absolutely no desire to be a biological male nor did I sexually desire females–it was already quite clear that I was hopelessly heterosexual and had no problems at all with my own physical femininity–I was aware of its disadvantages in terms of some physical activities, but it had enough compensations that I liked it quite well overall. It’s funny how many people think that “male” traits have anything to do with biological manhood at all. Simone de Beauvoir hit that nail on the head decades ago.)

Of course, then I actually entered the realm of adulthood, as opposed to just hypothesizing about it based upon the superficial observations of a child. Now, to clarify where I was coming from even more–my stepdad and my grandpa were really the only men I had contact with day in and day out, seven days a week. I saw my father perhaps twice a year for a week at a time at most; my uncle less than that; I had no brothers or cousins or nephews or male relations of any other stamp as part of my close family circle. I grew up in proportionally female-heavy households. And while I had loving relationships with both my stepdad and my grandpa, I can’t say that we had intimate relationships; I didn’t know what they really felt about anything to do with women in general, or themselves as men, or really much about their personal thoughts and emotions at all–we didn’t share. It took me til age eighteen to actually start living with men, first in Army barracks, then as one’s wife.

I got to know men a whole lot better then. And my lopsided view of who and what they were, what “the masculine” really meant, got a hell of a lot clearer with that injection of reality.

All those “male” ideals and traits I so admired and aspired to? They had absolutely nothing to do with actual men at all. Oh, men talked a good game, as a group, espousing all that bullshit…when women were around or when they were speaking to one another in a forum where women might overhear them. But in a barracks setting, especially out on the tactical site where they were relatively free of supervision…let’s just say that the traits men admire and aspire to amongst themselves aren’t the ones I had labeled as masculine: Scaring the shit out of as many other men as possible without actually having to get into a physical confrontation where he might get his ass kicked by a bigger stronger man, getting as much pussy as possible without getting in any kind of trouble with anyone interested about it, and finding and indulging in as much reality-escaping enjoyment as possible preferably involving large amounts of mind-altering chemicals. And many of these men were as much as ten years older than I was–not boys, by any stretch of the imagination. Several of them were married with children.

So then, as I said, I married one–I suspect part of the reason I fell in love with that particular specimen was that he seemed much closer to my cherished masculine ideal than almost all of his cohorts. And, well, oh. For the first time, I began to understand better why, perhaps, the women I’d grown up around were such angry, unpleasant hags on such a regular basis. On the off-chance my kids ever happen across this blog, I don’t want to go into too much detail, though unfortunately my older son, at least, used to remember more than I wished he’d noticed while his father and I were married. Suffice it to say that while he, as my stepdad and my grandpa had, did indeed do his best to financially support his family…there was nothing there to admire that I didn’t already have myself, in greater abundance. It was awful to realize, in my mid-twenties, that I was more of a man, my ideal of the masculine, than any man I’d ever known, and especially my own husband. And funnily enough, he was just as good as I was at being nuturing and caring towards the kids.

After we divorced, I got to know many more men very well–became truly close friends with more than a few, which I hadn’t prior to age eighteen; married another, and am now living with a third–plus, thrown into the mix, my sons are becoming men themselves. So I find myself going from the overwhelmingly female homes of my childhood to the constant company of men as an adult. What I’ve learned is that intrinsically, internally, men and women are astonishingly similar. They are presented very early in life with very different societal roles that they are supposed to take, and this very much changes what they are willing to project externally as who and what they are–but internally? Very little difference in terms of innate ability to nuture, to care, to be brave, to be honest, to be strong, to be loyal, to be hardworking, to be kind, to be supportive. When you’ve known both men and women as well as I finally now have gotten to, you can’t avoid knowing it–especially if you know yourself best of all, regardless of your gender.

It interests me that so many grown women, well past the age of eighteen, could still cling so stubbornly to their perceptions of the masculine and the feminine–such utterly wrong ones–perhaps excusable in a kid, but completely impossible to reconcile in an adult of thirty, forty, fifty–but then I read the rubbish of Ann Coulter, or Phyllis Schlafly, or Michelle Malkin, or Charlotte Allen, and I see that they really are. If they had lived in a bubble, with no contact with men, it might also be comprehensible, but clearly they haven’t–if they knew themselves, truly, they most definitely could not believe what they say of “Men are–!” and “Women are–!” I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t trying so hard to advance the agenda of fucking over everybody, male and female–forcing the twenty-sided irregular polyhedrons that make up humanity into a square hole or a round one based on biological gender.

There’s nothing wrong with valuing all those masculine traits as much or even more than you value those feminine ones. What’s wrong is the inability…or refusal…to realize that none of those traits are actually gendered in the first place.