Love and Feminist Loss in The Trump Age of Masculinity
We still don’t fully understand everything about why the Orlando shooter did what he did. We know some things though. We know several people allege that he was not straight. We know he beat up his first wife, repeatedly. We know his father was profoundly homophobic. We know an alleged former lover said he was afraid of HIV infection and wanted revenge on “the people” who had exposed him. We know he loved Black and Brown men and also hated them. We know he targeted a Black-Brown community with his violence. We know it was easy for him to get guns.
We know the common denominator in all of these horrific mass shootings.
Men. Masculinity. Males.
I’m queer and agender and often mistaken for Puerto Rican and love to dance and often when I go dancing it is with gay men and that could have been me.
I have not slept through the night since Orlando. Yes, I’m traveling halfway across the world and jet lag is terrible, but I should have adjusted by now.
I have not slept through the night since Orlando. I have nightmares. I dream of death.
In my daytime, I attend conferences. Last week I gave an invited talk at the Pacific Science Congress about intersectionality, gender, and science.
Yesterday, I gave a talk about particle physics theory at the Patras Workshop on Dark Matter.
I have walked into both talks tired and anxious.
I feel anxious all the time.
My past experiences with abuse have become more vivid. The boyfriend who choked me and smacked me. Being afraid to tell anyone because his dad was a professor. (Even at 18, I understood academia’s power dynamics intuitively.)
I’m now almost twice as old and not sleeping through the night because I am terrorized.
And I am thinking all the time: patriarchy is killing us. Patriarchy has been killing us. Patriarchy is going to get us all killed. Masculinity is going to get us all killed. We are all going to die because of stupid fucking patriarchal masculinity.
For the first time in my life, I feel deeply and strongly rooted in a feminist concept of myself, like my life depends on feminism. Because it does.
I’m a third generation feminist activist. I’m not the first, not the second, but third generation in my family to receive an invitation to talk about feminism on the international stage. And even so, I am discovering that I need to commit more deeply to this process we call feminist analysis. Like my life depends on it.
And I think about the times that I compromised myself in big and small ways to satisfy a man. People told me that they loved me and then asked me to do things like: stay in the closet, don’t talk about my ex-wife in earshot of his family, don’t even mention the city we lived in. I have been expected to believe that a man respects my feminist analysis skills but that they seem particularly off when applied to him.
I’m a third generation feminist activist who is looked to as a leader on the topic of gender and race in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by people all over the world.
Thanks to a combination of tremendous familial and personal sacrifice, luck and privilege, I have a lot more social capital than many other agender/women of color.
And even so, in my love life, I have struggled to find partners who could actually handle being with my anti-racist feminism. In my inner emotional life, I have questioned myself over and over because men questioned whether my political orientation was good for them. I have questioned the value of my mind, of my analysis. I have questioned everything.
An internationally recognized third generation expert on feminism is still persistently worried that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because men who don’t know jack shit about feminism are convinced that her confidence in her feminist analysis is misplaced.
Because when you’re dealing with men, they threaten not to deal with you unless you let them undercut you when they feel like they need to.
No, of course #notallmen. But enough men that it’s too many men and it’s sufficient men that they are part of a culture that’s killing people, and any man who is more concerned about whether it is statistically in fact 100% of them than the fact that it is enough of them scares me. Because he’s not out there acting as a barrier for me. He’s picking at me while I just try to live, just try to engage in self-defense.
There are a lot of these kinds of men in my professional communities, physics and astronomy. They are just asking questions, they say. They are just being scientific, they say. Would they question Steve Weinberg’s understanding of General Relativity? Probably not, but Steve has a Nobel Prize, and I’m just a 33 year old who has spent 33 years being on the wrong end of patriarchy and studying it intensely and trying to end it because I hate being on the wrong end of anything that could kill me.
In the end, I can’t sleep. But it’s not Omar Mateen I’m afraid of. It’s the men who won’t stop him. It’s the men who won’t make room for feminine men. It’s the men who won’t make room for masculine homosexuality. It’s the men who won’t ask themselves why they won’t wear lipstick or think that men who wear dresses are strange. It’s the men who are terrified and hateful and cruel when they discover that they are attracted to trans women as well as cis women.
It’s the men who trust the gut instinct that they developed in the context of a heterocissexist patriarchal society more than they trust the sharply honed mind of an agender/woman who has spent their entire life trying to burn that heterocissexist patriarchy to the fucking ground.
I’m the one maximizing objectivity, you guys. Not you. Because at least I can see reality. My mind is liberated.
These men remind me though: thank god I married a man who told me how much he disliked heterocissexist patriarchy on the first date. I will also add that he engaged in a massive heterosexist fuck up on our first date. Actually more than one. But he gave me enough information to know that I could work with him, and he wasn’t going to fight me on it.
This post isn’t to valorize my husband, though, because he’s not perfect, and he’s still a straight cis man who is going to fuck up in large and small ways because society was structured to encourage him to. And I have struggled with my willingness to commit to a relationship with someone who by social definition was not my equal but rather in terms of power dynamics, my superior.
Even so, I am proud of myself for having managed not to end up with any of the men who came before him, the ones who loved my fire, loved how feisty and free and smart I was, until they realized that it meant I could see not just the world’s problems but theirs too and I was free to say something about it, free to not let it go just because it was convenient.
Jaclyn Friedman captured this perfectly in an interview (with my friend Amanda Hess!) when she said
What happens to me that drives me up a tree is this: The guys who respond to me and are like, ‘You’re awesome. You’re kind of a hellcat.” They think it’s cool and kind of bad-ass that I’m outspoken and passionate about things. They think that’s really hot. They’re into it. But then when that outspokenness gets applied back to them, it’s suddenly game-over. You know the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl? She’s light, and quirky, and she has no inner life of her own, and just there to serve our hero’s development and erotic interests. I sort of feel that I get cast in these dudes’ narratives as the Hellcat Dream Girl, there to prove how bad-ass they are because they’re dating such a bad-ass woman. They think it’s cute or sexy. But when I use that smart, outspoken bad-assery to challenge their own perspectives, it’s suddenly not sexy at all. It happens when they say something that I disagree with, and I act like a person and not someone that is playing out their particular fantasies.
It’s happened to me a million times . . . they want it as a trophy. “Hey, look at my bad-ass girl.” They don’t want to deal with me as a person. It follows this pattern where it usually comes from a person who seeks me out. They try to seduce me. They think I would be an accomplishment to conquer or something. They seek me out and try to get me interested in them, and then I am, and then they flee. . . . I feel like the same thing happened with the guy I dated for two years. He liked the idea of being a guy who would be with someone like me, but ultimately it turned out that he wanted someone who wouldn’t challenge him as much, a person who was easier and quicker to sweep away. I got evidence of that when, within three months of breaking up with me, he was dating a 23 year old who lists her political views on Facebook as “moderate.”
Of course, I never ran into this problem with women.
Not to say that women can’t be deeply invested in heterocissexist patriarchy too though.
But I never ran into this problem with women, never had to fight my ex-wife about feminism or try to explain to her what it was or send her an article or ask her to do some reading.
And I feel confident that she’s not part of why Orlando happened.
But cis men: I’m not so sure about you. Are you doing enough? Are you? How much are you making us work to survive around you? How much?
Making us work to survive is too much, by the way.
If you find yourself around a genderqueer/woman that you think is a blazing hot goddess, then love the fire, especially when she engulfs you in it. Trust that her feminism is an instrument of glorious salvation, even if it singes your privileged feathers off.
That is part of how we will stop this fuckery with men — of all colors because patriarchy does not have a color line— getting a gun every single time they are mad or sad or hurt.
That is how I will start to sleep better.
That is how we will all start to live better.
Feminism is meant to save us, but it can save you too.
