When you look like me, you get an odd insight into the average male American psyche.
Follow me on this thought experiment, if you will.
If you don’t know how I look, imagine a certain stereotype for how the American media seems to illustrate that women ought to look in order to fulfill a certain Western standard for female beauty. The tall, slim, blonde stereotype.
I have long hair the color of dead grass but shinier, and blue eyes with that inviting, vacant expression that comes from a busy life of cultivating an outlook that wit can be replaced with eyelashes. I walk with my elbows in and my knees together trying to be demure although I have only a vague idea what that means, and my hips swaying with the certain knowledge of where my real power lies.
Stereotypical runway model.
Bullshit, in short. Nobody needs to look like that. The view that it’s any kind of ideal is the product of warped marketing. Love yourself. Seek acceptance. Move forward.
I look like that. With the wrong reproductive equipment. But leaving that aside, for now.
Put that picture in your head.
For the second part of the experiment, imagine you’re the type of powerful, masculine man who’s been trained to find that stereotypical image of female beauty attractive.
Men whose pride in their high school football days lingers into their fifties.
Men who spend their evenings in caves. It’s always been caves, since the invention of man, because men are not allowed to have imaginations.
These Man Caves have been the same for hundreds of years, not because anyone likes it that way but because men do not make suggestions to change things. If you make suggestions for changes as a man, you’re suggesting that you might think there’s a problem with how the pack is run. And you can’t do that — you can’t either deviate from what’s right or suggest that you’ve got an imagination. You always talk about how you could survive alone in the wilderness, but you only have the confidence to talk about it because you’re so paralyzed by the fear of facing the world alone that you never deviate from “permitted” behaviors that qualify you to remain a member of Team Man.
Imagine you’re one of them.
It might help if you put a rolled-up pair of socks fresh out of the drier between your legs. It will be comfortable, and there’s nothing that can generate a self-satisfied smirk faster than that. It’s a real-world demonstration of where these guys find the center of their self-worth. Try it now. Don’t even wait for a drier. Microwave some socks — clean socks, obviously, think of the children — and shove them down your pants. I guarantee that you’ll begin ignoring salad bars and smirking in no seconds flat.
In the mindset?
Good.
Now imagine I walk towards you. More of a shimmer than a walk. Like a cascade of golden glitter promising a sparkly but so satisfying sneeze.
The sight engenders a state of profound confusion for a few seconds while you figure out what’s wrong. Then you look away abruptly when you do figure it out, apparently hoping that nobody noticed. Hoping that nobody noticed your moment of doubt in the principles fundamental to the system that formed you.
I watch this happen at least three or four times a week.
I think the reason I make these guys uncomfortable is that I represent their worst fear.
Their worst fear, it would seem, is doubt. They survive entirely on the certainty that they hold an unshakable position in the world. By looking how I do and at the same time being what I am — that is to say male according to all the evidence available — I encourage a situation where they think strange thoughts, and I encourage questions that they might usually try to avoid. Questions about their masculinity, such as whether they ought to admit that they cried at the end of Yentl.
That’s not the main reason I keep my hair long, but I don’t mind it.
