Having It All: A Gender Post with Pictures

This picture was posted recently over at Male Submission Art:
A young man kneels on the ground in a forested area, his wrists loosely tied with a single thick rope to the stump of a tree. I think this photograph, suggested by Dorinda, is beautiful (albeit with sorry-looking bondage) and I like the vintage feel it has. I particularly like the shape of the model’s back, ass, and legs; the curvature of his lower body looks feminine while the trapezoidal frame of his upper body looks masculine, and I appreciate this aesthetic mix immensely; it’s pretty and manly. Much of the time, people refer to the mixing of genders as androgyny, but that word has etymological roots pertaining to being devoid of gender, of being genderless. While valid and attractive to me in its own way at times, this is subtly different from what I find most attractive: the presence of mixed genders. Rather than being half a woman (50% feminine) and half a man (50% masculine), why can’t we be all of both at once? A person can still have 100% feminine and 100% masculine wholes within themselves. -maymay
Forgive me for the overwhelming hubris of re-posting a link to a post of mine, but I wanted to take the complete text, as it is speaking to a subject dear to my heart. May‘s caption for the post reads:
A young man kneels on the ground in a forested area, his wrists loosely tied with a single thick rope to the stump of a tree.I think this photograph, suggested by Dorinda, is beautiful (albeit with sorry-looking bondage) and I like the vintage feel it has. I particularly like the shape of the model’s back, ass, and legs; the curvature of his lower body looks feminine while the trapezoidal frame of his upper body looks masculine, and I appreciate this aesthetic mix immensely; it’s pretty and manly.
Much of the time, people refer to the mixing of genders as androgyny, but that word has etymological roots pertaining to being devoid of gender, of being genderless. While valid and attractive to me in its own way at times, this is subtly different from what I find most attractive:the presence of mixed genders. Rather than being half a woman (50% feminine) and half a man (50% masculine), why can’t we be all of both at once? A person can still have 100% feminineand 100% masculine wholes within themselves.
I also want to say right here and now that that rope is pathetic and useless and the picture would basically be better without it since it is really only draped around and that’s just stupid and why isn’t he moving his hands or something and why does he have that pained (very hot) look on his face since he is not actually attached to that tree in anyway. Ok. /End rant. Back to gender.
I should state that I do, in fact, find androgyny incredibly sexy. This type of beauty-without-gender is embodied, to me, in Tilda Swinton‘s portrayal of the Angel Gabriel in the really and truly terrible movie Constantine:
.
.
It’s a lovely look, but it’s not one I’m interested in emulating, partly because I can’t. If you’ve met me in person, you might have noticed a certain … largeness … about my hips, a certain … not-so-largeness … around my middle section. I look like a woman, and no amount of binding will turn me into a svelte, effete androgen. The best I can hope for is barrel-chested drag-king, and while I may try it one day, I still won’t ever look like Tilda, more’s the pity.
.
But that’s ok. Because when I play with gender, I don’t want to play it down. I want to play it up. In my estimation, masculinity and femininity should be decoupled, two separate sliding scales. If you turn up your masculinity, you should not automatically turn down your femininity, nor vice versa. You can turn them both down to zero, in which case you wind up a Swinton-esque, androgynous creature, in the best case, and Pat-from-Saturday-Night-Live, in the worst. You can turn up one or the other,  or you can turn up both, and be something for which there is perhaps no word.
.
The closest approximation of what I’m looking for might be hermaphroditic. The word comes from the God/dess Hermaphroditus, born male, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. In a stunning gender-norm-reversal of the common Grecian story of desire and rape, the water-nymph Salmacis saw Hermaphroditus and was driven mad with desire for him. Although he had refused her, she hid behind a tree to watch him bathe, and on seeing him unclothed, seized him and embraced and kissed him, crying to the Gods that they should never be parted. Never ones to skip out on an opportunity to be overly literal and play a cruel trick on mortals, the Gods listened and joined their two forms, creating a being with both sets of genitalia, both a man and a woman. “Hermaphrodite” is now a somewhat un-P.C. term for “Intersex,” but is typically used to mean a person who is, as May said, 50%/50% Male-Female, rather than 100% of each.
.
Which is not to say that nobody in literature has ever had that brilliant idea before. I give you Neil Gaiman’s Anthropomorphic Personification of Desire:
.
.
This is not a particularly fabulous rendition; in fact, I find that none of the renditions, in the graphic novels or available on the internet, are really perfect. It’s very hard to draw a creature entirely male and entirely female; an entity that embodies everything you want. Everything everybody wants. But it does make sense that such a creature would be not part male, part female, but all there was to be of both of those, and more. Even in this picture, we see the suggestion of breasts at the same time as the suggestion of an adams apple, a strong jawline and soft lips, a whole lot of sex and a whole lot of gender.
.
I like that. Liking gender, finding masculinity and femininity both sexy, but more so when together, I feel like I just want to get as much gender as I possibly can. I want it all, all the time. I recently cut my hair short. Short so that my dad says “You look like a 10-year-old-boy” and my best friend says “You are so butch! Like a hot little elf!” (I’ll take her response over his, any day). I suppose at this point should not be surprised, but now that I’m masculine from the neck up, I find myself craving sundresses and floral skirts. I cannot be just one. I must have all, I must have both, the more I scale up my masculinity, the more I want to scale up my femininity to match. To keep a balance; all gender or none. Everything or nothing, baby.
.
There are, of course, questions to be asked here, and one that has been rattling around in my head has to do with how all this lovely gender is expressed. When I talk about being feminine, masculine, both, I talk first and foremost about clothing, from a tailcoat and a bowler hat to a motorcycle jacket to a flirty, fitted dress to a red satin pencil skirt and pumps, gender is something I put on to go out and peel back off when I come home again. The multiplicity I talk about comes when I add red lipstick to the bowler and tails, put the motorcycle jacket and the sundress together, wear a collared shirt and tie with my red skirt and heels. Some of it comes with my hair… when a few months ago it was long and feminine, I could put it up or take it down to suit my mood. Now, it’s a fixed point around which my gender expression can turn.
.
So my question, for another post, and harkening back to how I felt when I made love to May in the post he’s linked to in his caption, is how one expresses gender without the props? How can I be a man when I’m naked, how can I be masculine-and-feminine at the same time when I haven’t got my lipstick, my fedora, my toolkit of gender signifiers? How can the lovely boy in the Male Submission Art picture that started this look so feminine around the curve of his back and ass, so masculine in his shoulders, his face? What is gender-in-the-nude? I’m not sure. If you’ve got thoughts, let me know – I will keep thinking, and tell you when the pieces fit together.

13 comments

  1. That’s really very interesting, I’ve never thought directly before about additive sexuality. It’s hard for me to decouple male from female and have both exist at the same time without one subtracting from the other. Also interesting about all the ways you have to express dual genders! For me, non-cis-genderism is mostly confined to only an emotional response or an attitude, rather than clothing/appearance. Perhaps if I had a more androgynous physique I would explore it more in other dimensions!

    • Hi Mike!
      I’m glad you’re thinking about gender in new ways! A lot of people have trouble decoupling gender. I hadn’t thought to use the word ‘additive’ for it until our earlier conversation, but that’s a nice way to think about it. There’s no reason that adding masculinity should get rid of my femininity. I also think it’s really neat that your approach to differing your gender has emotional or attitudinal. That’s the sort of clothes-off gender exploration I’m having trouble with, but would really like to learn more about!

  2. Re: expressing gender performatively without props –

    Have you thought about body language here? Not only individual body language, but the play of touch and stance between people? My experience with gender play has led me to change the way that I stand, the way that I touch people. When I’m turning my masculine side up (I like this additive idea a lot, by the way!) I take up more space, laugh louder, and hold my body differently. I use my hands more directly and firmly. I choose different sexual positions too.

    Maybe this is something you can play with? Picking up on and dissecting gendered body language is one of the reasons I like people watching. If you explore the performative side of gender through multiple modes of expression – including and beyond clothing – maybe you’ll find that some of those nuances work for you when naked.

    • Sara!
      I most certainly have thought a bit (actually, quite a bit) about how using and positioning my body can affect where I am on scales of masculinity and femininity. During one of the times in recent memory that I felt most masculine, I had done nothing performative with my clothing or planned expression at all. Within the context of actual sex and play, this makes a lot of sense to me, but actually I’m not such a fan of it out in the world. It would be ok if I could guarantee that in becoming louder, more vocal, in taking up more space, the added notes of masculinity did not detract from my femininity, but as the world today stands, I know that’s not the case in the eyes of most people I interact with. And that, frankly, pisses me off. Why can’t I be a strong loud out-there feminine creature? Or perhaps I’m holding myself back because of my notions of the perceptions of others. Maybe I could be everything I want to be and send my signal strong and clear, if only I wasn’t so sure that I could not? Either way, it’s a tricky question. Thanks for bringing this up, though! Gendervariance-in-the-nude is a topic that needs more discussion.

  3. [B]ecoming louder, more vocal, in taking up more space the added notes of masculinity […] Why can’t I be a strong loud out-there feminine creature? Why can’t I be a strong loud out-there feminine creature?

    As I’ve begun to look at it more closely, this is precisely what frustrates me with the way in which people perceive masculine versus feminine behavior. What you are saying and what Sara seems to be implying is that taking up more space in the world, being more vocal in a louder manner is “masculine.” Where did that construction come from, really, and why is that the connection toward masculine activity. I have come to believe that it is not femininity I am expressing when I am quiet, silent, or make myself physically small. These actions are, in my view, completely decoupled from ideas of gender. Women can be large, men can be small, and the physicality of their behavior does not correlate to their gender presentation but rather simply their current social stance.

  4. May,
    I absolutely agree, many of the behavioral signals that society attributes to Masculinity and Femininity are constrictive and seemingly arbitrary. They come, of course, from generalizations based on the roles men and women have played in society for a very long time, but they really don’t leave much room to define oneself outside of gender roles. I think it’s really important to decouple things like “small” and “quiet” and “shy” from Femininity, and things like “large,” “loud,” and “strong” from masculinity. The question is, what’s left? If we take away the markers that clothing gives us (too obvious, too showy, too difficult to pair up with sex and nudity), and we take away the markers that society gives us (too restrictive, too out-of-date), what are we left with? What becomes the measure of a man? What remains within the woman’s realm?

  5. Ah, Tilda Swinton. One of the better things my highschool ex-gf introduced me to. And since the topic is gender – Tilda was in a movie version of Orlando (early 90s vintage, so you’d have to look for it on VHS I imagine) which showcases her androgyny to great effect.

    So many thoughts on this subject, on naked bodies that are decidedly masculine AND feminine, on body language during sex, on why I want to get over my aversion to the sight of unshaved legs in stiletto shoes (adding gendered traits doesn’t seem to be working in that instance. But i want it to!).

    • Thinglet!
      I have been meaning to contact you for ages. SUCH things I must relate to you, such stories.
      Thanks for the heads-up on “Orlando!” I will most certainly check it out, although I must admit I never actually finished the story. I got a bit bogged down around the part where the Thames froze.
      I see what you’re saying about unshaved legs in stilletos. It’s an odd thing… I think I’d go for it more if said legs were attached to a primarily male-bodied person, rather than to a primarily female-bodied person. This is a gut reaction, and I’m not sure what it says … I fought with myself for years over my own decision to shave semi-regularly, but what I came to, in the end, is that I like the way it feels, and I like the way it looks, and I was therefore mostly doing it for myself, so it was ok. But I worried I was somehow I bad feminist for liking the way my smooth calves felt against each other, and I too have been trying to make myself entirely comfortable with whatever other female-bodied types choose to do about their body hair.
      It reminds me of a male friend of mine, who took the opposite approach. Because he did not like body hair on the women he was attracted to but also did not want to hold them to a double standard, for years he shaved the majority of his own body. I find it admirable, but wonder if perhaps some of this wasn’t just because he also liked the feel of sheets on his smooth skin.
      Being tough and interesting about gender shouldn’t ever stop us from liking what we like, you know? And it likewise shouldn’t force us to try to like what we don’t.

    • Madam Harkonnen – That’s so wonderful to hear! Thank you for reading, and I’m glad you enjoyed! May I ask what particularly you find interesting about it? I do want to keep my content quality up…..

  6. You guys are getting a little over my head. Why can’t someone be 100% masculine and still be able to appreciate both the male and female bodies? The idea of being 50% one or the other doesn’t work for me.

    • Hi Dick,
      Thanks for commenting! One absolutely CAN be 100% masculine and appreciate both male and female bodies. This post was about those people who don’t want to be 100% masculine or feminine – or who, perhaps, want to be not 50% of each, but 100% of each. The idea I’m getting at is that one’s masculinity and one’s femininity should not have to have a causal relationship with each other. Should a person want to have more of both, there’s no reason they ought not be able to. That said, not everybody wants to and that is totally fine. Who you want to be and who you want to be with don’t have to have a causal relationship either.

Leave a Reply to Helio Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.