One of the Girls: A Post-Christian Journey through Gender and Sex
Content warning: sexual assault
In a specifically lit basement, Brad Pitt’s topless character in Fight Club stands up after defeating his opponent, leaning back just enough to flex his eight-pack in glorious display (his stomach is a character unto itself in this film). Church youth group constituted my entire social circle in adolescence, and we were genuine Jesus freaks, which mandated homophobia. So, when my peers ogled at Pitt’s abs in this scene, and everyone did, we all assumed the boys merely aspired to his fitness - they hoped their own torsos would look like his someday. I only later admitted that my own fixation included a different type of longing for a figure such as Brad’s.
More than any other “sin,” it really seems like our youth pastor’s principal worry was that the boys would turn out gay. My sex education was simply to refuse it, but in order to validate the hormones accumulating in our bloodstreams, church staff would acknowledge just how tempting the girls can be. “Collar bones are sexy,” our pastor pointed out from the lectern one Wednesday night, shaming any young woman whose neckline didn’t choke her and upping the boys’ attention to girls’ appearance quite counterproductively. Of course, Church maintained, sex itself belongs to marriage - and once you’re wed, your wife’s body is quite literally her husband’s domain - but we know you’ll fool around en route, so just make sure it’s not with your friends.
My still-Christian heart softened on “the gays” when I befriended them in college. During freshman year, an especially dear friend came out to me while remaining closeted in public, which ratcheted up my stance from tolerance to advocacy. I lamented that my church remained so cruel to my newfound loved ones, many of whom remained committed to Christ all the while. Following me into grad school, the inner voice suggesting I was one of them piped up ever so subtly.
My 25th birthday would pass before I finally came out myself. I had found employment in homelessness advocacy alongside many queer co-workers organized around a policy failure interrelated with homophobia and transphobia. I kept meeting people who would admit that they read me as gay on first impression, and those who’d known me since childhood, while leaning on stereotypes, remarked that I was presenting more queer over time. It gave me permission to honor that voice and investigate it further. I recognized myself in some definition of queer online, latched onto its breadth in comparison to the binary view of sexuality from my upbringing, and promptly informed my closest work-friends that it described me. They cheered. But I was married to a cis woman at the time, so this new descriptor bore minimal consequence, it seemed.
When I eventually divorced, dating men moved from abstract to prospect… though it never quite fit. I found myself at a gay dance club in Baltimore, for example, and while the dancing itself was magical, I awoke the next day disturbed by how much I’d been groped and kissed in my drunken stupor, and how I’d failed to request consent myself. I selected the “open to everyone” option on Bumble, but it turns out even gay men’s profiles can reek of toxic masculinity. I admired their bodies but not their personalities. When I swiped them away, I shamed myself for my internalized homophobia so incongruous with my values, but I was admittedly turned off. It’s as if my body was intrigued and my mind on board, but my heart did not feel safe.
PATRIARCHY IS THE NOUN
It continues to amuse me that the official title for my first job in college was scooper. And I excelled at it, charming the ice cream shop’s patrons with eye contact and warmth. Until one who demanded I smile as he approached. A stout gentleman in his 50s and accompanied by a woman of a similar age, I invited him to taste-test any flavors, and he asked if he could sample me instead. The customer is always right and improv class instructs yes/and, so I suppressed my discomfort and mimed as if I might hop over the counter to give him the chance. He settled onto a barstool with his selection and summoned me when the line had diminished. His companion seated on his left, he guided me to his right. His ice cream cone perched delicately on his fingertips, he pried about my personal life and remarked about my “beautiful skin.” Noticing my unease, he permitted me to attend to other customers and concluded our interaction by palming my inner thigh, barely avoiding my genitals, which I noticed in real time. I remember wishing I’d not chosen such short shorts that shift. And I’ll never forget how the woman beside him never looked up from her dessert, as if this happens all the time.
Men are unsafe. Sure, hashtag not all men, but if your Camry caught on fire half as often as men abuse, you’d never drive Toyota again. Not to minimize the preceding anecdote - the tremors as I typed it confirm how traumatized I was - but it is drastically less violent than what women (especially trans women) experience at the hands of men every day. Nearly every woman I know well enough to discuss such matters has experienced some kind of harm by men. And to offer just one datum to illustrate, the single-most common instigator of homelessness for women is interpersonal and domestic violence. And homelessness grows among women and families exponentially, which suggests that male violence has retreated little, if at all.
I often quote the following bell hooks phrase because it represents my analysis of how oppressive structures are co-constitutive: imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. An emphasis reflective of hooks’ academic discipline, but it strikes me that (hetero)patriarchy is the noun in this sequence, that which other adjectives of oppression modify. Far from pitting criminalized groups against one another, the violence to which hooks committed her life’s work primarily pertained to men and masculinity. The harm so characteristic of men in the home manifests itself on a global scale: genocide would scarcely exist without patriarchy.
It’s the Space Between Us
In daily life - let us step back from the heavier subject matter - I more often experience male unsafety through the vacuity of our emotional intelligence, or, rather, our dearth of emotional safety. I wish any reader who isn’t privy to conversations among presumably straight cis men could hear how they talk to one another. To paraphrase:
“I know stuff.”
“Oh, I know stuff, too.”
“Cool! That reminds me of some other stuff I know.”
“I don’t know that stuff but I know this unrelated stuff.”
“I can also do stuff.”
“I can do stuff, too. Some of the same stuff but also some different stuff, I can do.”
“I would like to teach you the stuff I know and do.”
“I will agree to that if I can also teach you my stuff.”
“Let’s do stuff together so we can stop talking.”
“Yes, that way we don’t actually have to learn anything about one another.”
And they don’t. Hardly anyone asks any questions. No genuine curiosity. Barely any self-awareness, tenderness, nor accountability. Any vulnerability is often transactional, coercing his interlocutor into a more supple pupil to his intellect, as I risk in my own writing. Hyperbole, but it is miserable. And I want out. I value the capacity to relate to literally anyone, reflected in a tattoo that depicts Maya Angelou’s quotation “nothing human can be alien to me,” but men seem determined to put it to the test.
A single parent, I feel more like a mom than a dad. I hasten to clarify that I claim no sympathy with childbirth nor misogyny, though such things do not define motherhood unto themselves. I mean that I relate more to moms than to any dad I’ve ever met. It’s the way moms feel about their children that resonates so deeply: the pain I endure when my kids are away; the bliss when my daughters and I form a pile on the couch on family movie night, our limbs indistinguishable; how my heart leaps when my oldest calls me from her other house to say goodnight like clockwork; the bottomlessness and intensity of our trust and affection; the sheer volume of space they take up in my head. Yes, my kids benefit from a wonderful mom already, and we parent collaboratively, but they’re not with her half the time, and I can make no assumptions about their environment when they are. I am compelled to become a fully competent, whole parent myself. Moreover, even the most generous archetype of cis dads pales in comparison to what we expect of moms, and I aspire to the latter.
I am coming to believe that the nonconformity of my sexuality and my gender are the same phenomenon, which has less to do with my sense of self than mere human connection. It has very little to do with sex and everything to do with intimacy. It’s about the space between my body and others’. It’s to do with the fortitude of the fibers between others’ hearts and mine. And far more often than not, the sturdiest heartstrings are with women and femmes. God, I love women. No connection compares to the tenderness, joy, empathy, and care that characterize my friendships with women. That my all-women friend groups permit me into their space is a miraculous and fragile gift. That they seldom seem to edit themselves in my company is a privilege that I do actually tend to take for granted, inasmuch as being surrounded by women is utterly comfortable for me. My friends make me feel as if I am one of them, and it’s my favorite thing.
In turn, nothing makes me sadder than when women mention their period, or whatever, then regretfully catch themselves remembering they’re in “mixed company.” It is not on women to change anything about how they engage in friendships with men. Trust is earned. Indeed, if any women do distance themselves from me, they wouldn’t tell me so or why. And I do know of one who ended our friendship for reasons related to how I showed up in my masculinity. That breakup gutted me as much as any romantic one and I think about her every day. I am also responsible for harm.
I’m definitely not straight. I don’t really feel cisgender either. I’m not not nonbinary. But for me to disassociate from my maleness would feel, to me, like signaling a lived experience of marginalization that has never existed. Little appeals to me about using different pronouns. To be sure, it is helpful to popularize lesser-known terms to describe experiences of gender and sexuality that have always existed but can feel so lonely when unnamed - I am grateful to have discovered demisexual, for example. Maintaining my grip on the umbrella terms, I am still queer: boys, I am counting your abs and I am fond of a collar bone, it turns out. But for me to partner with men would require a higher hurdle than most could ever scale. As one of my favorite female friends helped me articulate recently, all I know for sure is that I just want to be one of the girls.
