My Wife Is A Woman

According to this website, the GenderAnalyzer:

We think http://fauxmos.wordpress.com/ is written by a woman (77%).

Make of that what you will.

It’s time to come out

Another excellent guest post here on the fauxmos, this one by Jenny the Trucker. The original can be found here

I think the time has come to talk about my own gender. I have talked about being a woman in a man’s world. I have talked about masculinity in the workplace, both mine and that of my male colleagues but I have never actually made a concerted effort to write my own gender, to narrate, if you will, my own gender identity.

So here goes.

I’m scared.

I have always had a pretty strong masculine side. It was always something I both revelled in and was ashamed of, aggressively ramming it down people’s throats to cover my own shame. All the time I secretly thought it would be something I would grow out of, once I’d sorted my head out, and grown up, that kind of thing.

But the fact is, I am in my mid-30s, pretty happy and sorted in life but it’s still there. I stopped doing a manual job a couple of months ago and since then my upper body has got weaker, I am losing my muscles. I started to think, maybe that’s ok, maybe I don’t need them any more, maybe that phase is over. But I decided at the end of last week that no, it’s not ok. I swam a mile on Saturday, kayaked for 2.5 hours on Sunday and am planning a session on a rowing machine for Wednesday. I want my muscles. I get a kick out of being strong.

I also get a kick out of having long curly hair and hour glass curves.

I could go into the psychoanalysis but I’m not going to. It doesn’t matter how I came to be here, this is where I am and that’s fine. It’s not about fighting men. I like men, I fancy them and when I’m in a relationship, I like to feel like I’m the girl. Very few people have ever suggested that I am a lesbian. It’s not about sexual orientation.

It’s just that the gender binary doesn’t work for me. I don’t like my behaviour and my choices about how I earn my living or spend my time to be defined by society’s perception of what I should do because I have certain body parts. I don’t like the conflation of femininity with incompetence in spatial tasks. Spatial awareness is a skill that can be learned like any other. Professional male cricketers can’t catch as well when they first start at school as they can after years of training. Builders don’t put up shelves as well when they are apprentices as they do after 20 years on the job. Truckers of either sex are generally rubbish at parking when they first start. So you learn.

I recognise that the male and female minds and bodies are different to a certain extent for evolutionary reasons but they are nowhere near as different as society deems them to be. They are nowhere near as different as society wants and needs them to be. The binary is convenient for society, it’s that old line in the sand thing. You’re one of those, I’m one of these so we need to act like this.

It may be convenient for society but it isn’t very convenient for me. I’m me, I do me things and I act in a me kind of a way.

I don’t really attach a label to my gender identity. I don’t really know what labels are out there, I’m quite new to this whole debate (I was going to grow out of it remember!). I tend to just think that I am a strong woman, both in body and character, who is in touch with both the femininity and masculinity within her.

Smalltown Girl

‘You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case.          Alone on a platform the wind and the rain on a sad, lonely face’.

I was 14 when Bronski Beat’s Age of Consent was released. I hadn’t kissed any pretty girls at that stage, but maybe one or two pretty boys. My sexual experience was zero. I loved that album with a passion that many teenagers reserve for Manchester United, or Tanya from next-door-but-one, or The World Won’t Listen. Adolescent fandom is nothing new.

But, looking back down the tunnel of time, I do think it is a bit weird that I, as a middle class, Birmingham girl who was heading towards a life of heterosexual ‘normality’, was so transfixed by the music of a Scottish gay trio, who sang about gay alienation, homophobia and camp in a lyrical yet high energy fashion. What the fuck did they do or say that I could relate to?

Everything it turns out. I drew the inverted pink triangle from the album cover on my satchel (in black marker pen). I bought the songbook of the album and bashed out the melody to Smalltown Boy on the piano, in between practising scales and Bach Preludes. I learned about the actual age of consent, and how it wasn’t the same for gay men and straight people (and how it didn’t even exist for lesbians). I thought about Glasgow and Jimmy Somerville’s potato head.

The loneliness of growing up is universal, and we all find ways of making it less painful. Music was a great solace to me, as was politics. The Age of Consent was the first time those two things overtly joined hands, right under my nose, to the delight and excitement of my political, teenage heart.

The thing is it kind of made me want to be gay. I wanted to have a pink triangle to represent me, and my alienation and loneliness. I had been standing on station platforms ever since my parents broke up when I was six, and I had to travel the country to visit my Dad. Preston, Euston, Crewe, Birmingham New St.  I used to pretend to nosey passengers I was visiting my Gran. I think I earned a symbol to aspire to, at least.

I know this is ridiculous. Wanting to be gay in the 1980s was a bit like wanting to be a leper. The AIDS adverts with their big stone letters and the associate links with heroin users kind of put me off, anyway. Years later when I had a partner who was ‘gay’ in many ways, hearing stories of being beaten up in the playground and wandering the streets alone ruined the romance of it too. Frankie says Relax. Gobshite says ‘poof’ and smacks you in the face. I think I had it easy in comparison.

I didn’t get the guts to go and see Jimmy Somerville till the Communards came along. By then I had had actual boyfriends, I’d ditched the satchel with the triangle. I’d got into Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. Maybe I ‘sold out’ early. Maybe Jimmy got a bit too safe too quickly for my taste. But I still love him and what he meant to me.

Runn away, turn away, run away, turn away…

Sometimes I Have Been Mistaken For A Pretty Girl

I don’t know what it is about me but here on the internets my identity seems a bit, well, fluid. If you met me in what you probably still inaccurately refer to as “real life” you’d think I was fairly straightforward and boring, and you’d be right. But here on the internets, where my only representation is a cartoon Japanese dog and the words I write, things get a bit more confusing.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been mistaken for female. I would have thought my name, although not being my actual name, was good enough to give me male credentials, and it isn’t as if I write about typically female topics. In my eyes, I’m a fairly obvious man who might occassionally mention chocolate pudding.

In “real life” I’ve been mistaken for somebody who is French and somebody who is Jewish, but not by someone who was themselves French or Jewish. This changed when I was mistaken for being Spanish by a Spanish person.

In the world of the internets my whole world view was blown apart when I was mistaken for a transvestite BY AN ACTUAL TRANSVESTITE. More than once.

But then it hit me: maybe the internets identity is actually more realistic than the “real life” one. Am I secretly a cross-dresser without even realising it? I don’t think I’m THAT repressed, must just be a mistake.

But it makes my head hurt.

Dear Caitlin… A letter from a fauxmo

Dear Caitlin,

SCREAM! Let’s do lunch sometime. We can drink Rose out of the bottle and then use it to masturbate with. SCREAM!

But first, I would like to talk to you about a couple of things.

Much of what I read by you suggests to me that you think of yourself as an honorary ‘Gay’. You out-camp, out-dress and out-SCREAM even the screamiest of queens. So I wasn’t surprised to read your latest column in the Times, stating how ‘every woman’ needs that most vital of accessories: The Gay Best Friend.  You calculated that due to statistical imbalances, gay men must be doing double shifts to satisfy women’s need for a GBF, going on

‘ lunch dates with one straight female “best” friend, then karaoke with another from 8pm, fitting in a bitching session on Skype between 6pm and 7pm’.

So far, so mildly amusing. But your humourous observation reveals a much more serious point. Not all gay men are as camp as Christmas. Not all gay men want to spend their leisure time with screaming queens like you, Caitlin. And not all women are desperate to ‘bitch’ and preen with a character out of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Your version of both gay men and straight women is insulting to all of us. It trades on lazy gender and sexuality stereotypes, that to be honest, I thought were rather passe by now. Some of us do have friends who are not the mirror image of our own gender and sexuality identities. But this is not a matter worthy of a column in a weekend lifestyle magazine.

While I am here, I thought I’d mention something else too. I have gathered that you are SCREAM! writing a book about feminism. I am glad you consider yourself a feminist. You are a talented journalist who deserves the success you have achieved alongside your male counterparts. I want you to support the movement that has enabled you to be rewarded for your hard work.  But I don’t know for sure how much you think feminism is about gender equality for everyone. You promoted the Stranger review by Lindy west of SATC2 that labelled Samantha a ‘prostitute’ with a ‘withered vagina’. Your influence on twitter meant that article reached thousands of people’s desktops. Its misogyny and the endorsement of its misogyny by people like you made me feel despair about feminism for the first time in a long while. It certainly made me seriously doubt whether you have anything useful to say about feminism in the 21st century. I hope you prove my doubts to be unfounded.

I know you are a serious journalist, and a seriously able one at that. I am sure you are a feminist at heart. I know that women in male-dominated careers have to find strategies to survive and flourish against the odds. I expect your camp persona is just one of those strategies. But you have made it. You are respected and influential. You can take the facepaint off now, love.  Sit down. Have a cup of tea. And please, listen to some of the voices apart from the one in your head that just SCREAMs at you to act so SCREAMingly ‘Gay’. I couldn’t hear myself think if I were you. I don’t think you can either.

Yours, very quietly, and in frustrated sisterhood,

Quiet Riot Girl

Caitlin Moran on GBFs:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article7141683.ece

lindy West on SATC2: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas-and-birkins/Content?oid=4132715

Let’s Mosh! Hardcore Punk and Homoeroticism

Taut muscular torsos, glistening with sweat, rub against each other in a frenzy of movement and passion.  I could be describing any amount of gay porn film scenes or I could be describing the mosh pit at a Black Flag gig.  Give young males the chance to strip to the waist and get intimate with each other and they go for it in a big way.  Whether it be the mosh pit or the communal bath after a football match, guys aren’t short on opportunities to bond.  But how many of them would identify this behaviour with sexuality and what does it matter?

The american hardcore punk scene of the late 1970′s, early 80′s was typically confused.   On the one side there were skinheads, ready to beat the crap out of any gay kid or hustler who was unlucky enough to get in their path.  On the other, were the openly queer and in your face bands such as The Dicks and MDC.  The mosh pit was often an explosive melting pot of the two.  There are some valuable anecdotes in Steven Blush’ ‘American Hardcore, A Tribal History’ (Feral house 2001).  This from Gary Floyd of the Dicks

There was a lot of queer shit going on – tons of closet cases….A lot of straight guys were getting their dicks sucked and I was sucking a little bit too – because it was happening.  It was every place, people were just doing it.

As with all scenes, whilst some good souls were breaking down barriers, there were others who didn’t get it and used the violence of the music as an excuse for violence against anyone who they perceived didn’t fit in.  Then, of course, there were the lowliest types who would beat up fags by day and fumble for cock when the lights went out.

Women did not feature heavily in the hardcore punk World; did this have something to do with the confusion over sexuality?  Holly Ramos (a rare female in the New York scene) is quoted in ‘American hardcore’

It was a real guy thing; I think a real gay thing too.  Girls weren’t involved whatsoever in bands…….There was that whole male bonding/sweating/being-naked/doing that dancing going on.

Perhaps the absence of women, coupled with close proximity, bare chested moshing enabled guys to explore sides of their sexuality that would have remained dormant in less aggressive more gender equal surroundings?

Sexual ambiguity has certainly played its part in most of the youth cults that have shaped our cultural landscape.  From the “long haired” bi sexuality of the rolling stones and Bowie, to the gender bending of glam rock and the new romantics and on through to the loved up experimentation of the E generation.  Even recently with the Emo explosion, young guys can be seen wearing their skinny jeans so that half of their arses show; inviting for who, if not for someone explicitly interested in that part of their anatomy?

These days homocore has its own sub division of the hardcore genre.  Bands like Limp Wrist, Pansy Division, Queer Mutiny and the wonderfully named Black Fag are loud and proud but mostly preaching to the converted.  I think a mixed scene, for all its confusion, is much more useful to the kid who doesn’t necessarily identify them self as queer but who realises it’s OK through the music they love.

Fuck off “Fabulous”

I realise this and my first post make me look a TAD football obsessed and I will focus on the sex side of stuff next time. Honestly…

This is a blog post dedicated to how ridiculously shit the News of the World’s magazine, the so-called “Fabulous” was this week. Apart from the fact that the gay community should probably sue the fuck out of it for being such a lie (it is not, on any level whatsoever, actually Fabulous,. It’s not even Quite Good), this weekend it scaled new depths of utter pantsdom.

I would like to first point out I didn’t purchase this offending article. My lovely Twitter friend Korun and I were in Brum for gay pride (I was a total lightweight and for that I truly apologise) and we went to get papers on Sunday. I went for the Observer and in a moment of “I need sleaze” madness, the Mirror. Korun wanted the NOTW. I tutted a bit but secretly wanted to read it. Well the paper itself was as Korun said “fucking shit; why do I buy it?”… but the magazine just took the proverbial piss.

Entitled a “World Cup Spesh!” the publication featured Gerrard’s bird Alex someone on the front.  The sappy interview with her wasn’t what riled me.  What did frankly fuck me right off was the patronising, “no-real-woman-actually-likes-nor-understands-sport” crap that was allegedly penned by some vapid Sky Sports airhead by the name of Charlotte Jackson.

Entitled “the Fabulous Girl’s Guide to Football” it contained such gems as explaining the offside rule by using credit cards and shoes (what in the name of fuck??).  In response I swore a lot and proceeded to explain said rule to Korun using, you know, the correct footballing terms. Ball, “when the ball is passed”, defenders, that sort of nonsense. This did make Korun laugh and it was her reaction that made me think, “hmmm, blog post time?”

Then there was some utter bollocks about “soccer speak” (apparently we’re now in the USA!?) which gave key phrases to help poor silly girlies converse with ball scratching football blokes. Apparently a “tricky Brazillian” is not a weird beauty treatment involving ripping off all your pubes whilst in an undignified pose. Who’d have fucking thunk it eh? The idea I don’t know what a bloody nutmeg is is just enraging. A spice?? A SPICE?? Do I look as if I use spices? (Italian herbs aside; that’s just good sense.)

Apparently sitting through a game of football and understanding the offside rule makes you a goddess. In that case the numerous men who have dumped me in spite of my allegedly goddess like status must all be throwing themselves off Beachy Head as I type. Oh, hang on a second, of course they bloody aren’t. Loving football is a curse as a woman a lot of the time. I get weird/evil looks from women who think I like it to nick their bloke (so not my style sweetheart), even odder looks from men, bamboozled as to how this creature with tits is sitting discussing the League One play-offs like y’know, a MAN.

Of course the fact that so-called football expert Charlotte wossername is posing in a tight kit with knee high white socks says it all about this “article”. And no, I’m not jealous of her looks. I’m just sad the far superior and in my opinion better looking Clare Tomlinson wasn’t allowed to write it. At least she wouldn’t have come across as a patronising twat.

Anti-Fauxmo

Fauxmos. Let’s Huddle. Yes bois and grrls, it’s Team Talk Time. High fives all round! Go Fauxmos! And relax.

Remember when we first started talking on twitter, me, Billy, Anwen and Jenny? How we got so excited about sharing our feeling of isolation from ‘normal’ hetero/homo/bi society? We drink pints. Yay! We like football. yay! We wear nail varnish. Yay! We haven’t kissed enough pretty girls. Boo! But yay for admitting it! We said we felt like we were ‘home’. When we found ourselves a word: Fauxmos, the world suddenly seemed like a friendlier, more accepting place. We have even made some new friends.

Fauxmos is all about rejecting fixed sexual and gender identity. It is something I have been doing, and you probably have too, for a very long time. But the problem with any ‘anti…’ identity is it can end up as a fixed identity itself. Just look at the Gays.

I used to think it was worthwhile arguing and campaigning along identity lines, just to support the minority in question, get them some exposure and rights. We could sort out all the complicated stuff later. I did it with Lesbian and Gay rights. I did it with Feminism. I did it with Transgender politics. But now I have had enough. It doesn’t work. As soon as someone starts to identify as part of a distinct group, as opposed to the dominant group, they are on a fast track course to being fucked up the ass. And fucking others up the ass. And not in a good way.

One of my ultimate Fauxmo heroes is James Baldwin. He wrote:

‘People invent categories to feel safe. White folk invented niggers to give white folk identity… Straight cats invented faggots so they could sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves’.

I don’t want to feel safe. Well, not at the expense of someone else.

The beautifully ironic thing about fauxmos is that though there are only a handful of us using this blog, there are fucking millions of us out there. We are the biggest ‘minority’ since ‘women’. For every raging queen at Heaven, there are ten men sat at home wishing they had the guts to talk about their sexuality. For every perfect Nigella type working mum, there are a hundred harassed, unconfident inadequate women, struggling to fit the mould. For every super-sexy trans woman, strutting her stuff, there are many many people confused about their gender and how they fit in the world. We are everyone and no-one. I want to keep it that way. It is what makes us special.

I love the line in our manifesto: ‘We are not a community’.  I am tired of ‘communities’. I don’t want to be part of a community. I just want to be ‘myself’, whoever that is.

So, as a teenager who loved Morrissey but was too aware of the implications to tell anyone, as a woman whose main relationship to date was with a queer man, as a lover of Christian Bluegrass and Stella Artois. As a writer of feminist pornography. As a quiet riot girl. I declare myself an anti-fauxmo.

Fauxmos is dead. Long live the fauxmos!

With much indebtedness and sincere apologies to Mark ‘Anti-Gay’ Simpson.

Dear Gok… A letter from a fauxmo

Dear Gok,

We need to talk. Not about the lack of structure in my ‘nude’ above the knee tunic dress no. And not about how to get a whole outfit from the High Street for the measly price of £200 either. We need to talk about you, Gok.

You seem like a nice chap. I like TV presenters who aren’t balding overweight white men in slacks. Or teenagers. I love your enthusiasm and energy. I think you are pretty good with people. But please. You have got to stop banging on about bangers. It’s just not on.

How To Look Good Naked sounds like a good idea in principle. It encourages women of all shapes and sizes to feel good about themselves and their bodies. To look themselves in the mirror and like what they see. But your programme, and its sister ‘Gok’s fashion fix’ are really just another way of telling women ‘it’s not who you are it’s how you look’ and I don’t like that one bit. You are kind of like Trinny and Susanna’s nicer, gayer little brother. Prodding and criticising, humiliating women and their inefficient clothes collections, however nice you may be you still manage to reinforce the idea that if only we could sort ourselves out with a 24 piece ‘capsule wardrobe’ everything would be all right.

Also Gokky my love, my darling, my angel, I thought you were supposed to be Gay? Your claim that there is nothing you don’t know about femininity makes me worry a little bit about your sexuality. If you have been spending all your formative and adult years pouring over vogue and dreaming of the perfect angle of uplift for a pair of bangers, when have you found the time or inclination to er, get cock? I know it is fashionable to be gay these days, and gay men seem to do remarkably well in the fashion world, compared to, say, football, where the last professional footballer to come out as gay ended up topping himself. But if there is something you want to tell us, we won’t hate you for it. Could it be, that actually, you like a bit of titty and pussy as well?
I mean, you can’t keep your hands off the women on your show. Naked or clothed.

The fact is, you probably are as gay as you make out. It’s ok. I can handle it. But if that is the case, could you go easy on the claims of what an expert you are in women? I suspect for example you don’t know much about period pains, or menopause symptoms, or female ejaculation.  Some straight men actually have quite a lot of interest in and knowledge of these kind of things, gained by fucking, loving and living with real live women.

I think you fetishise an ultra-femininity that is all the rage in the current culture. You dress women up as drag queens then tell them they look fabulous. It gets right on my bangers. I wish you’d do a ‘How to look good naked’ about men. But then you might have to face up to your own sexuality and to the problem that only women’s bodies are deemed acceptable viewing on prime-time television. Cocks are not ok it seems. But you could at least do a Gok’s fashion fix for blokes. That wouldn’t be so difficult would it?

Come on Gok. Be a man. And start squeezing some balls instead of all these bangers.

Yours, fabulously,

Quiet Riot Girl

On behalf of all fauxmos everywhere

Toon Temptation

I’m very pleased to introduce our second guest blogger, the fabulously Fauxmo ChicaLolita. She went from a girl who watched He-Man to a woman who watches football, but what she really wants to be is a cartoon…

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a cartoon. You can say this is because I prefer the hyper-reality of something obviously fake rather than an airbrushed photograph or that these female forms clearly go against all laws of gravity, not to mention the cheesecake pin-up’s uncanny ability to have the breeze sweep up her skirt at just the right moment. It might just be because these images are so cheeky, silly and – well, cartoonish – that it’s impossible to take them seriously. Sex, gender and eroticism lose so much of their fun when locked down to traditional identity. It must be exhausting to maintain the constant sunken-cheeked pout of a Calvin Klein model.

 It’s no wonder burlesque has suddenly become so popular in the mainstream as a way of boosting women’s self-image. It takes the poe-faced solemnity out of sex, is fun to both watch and perform, plus it puts curvy girls at an advantage. The same cannot be said of pole-dancing. Ironic really that pole-dancers are in constant movement, yet don’t seem to actually move. Their flesh doesn’t jiggle delightfully, their facial expressions do not change to a cheeky grin or an ‘oops’ when they catch you looking. If gender is a performance, you may as well play up to it and acknowledge the gaze.

The ultimate fauxmo female in my view is Jessica Rabbit. How I wanted to be her when I was a child! Come to think of it, aged 33 that ambition hasn’t changed one little bit. She is the Tex Avery girl filtered through the way Frank Tashlin filmed Jayne Mansfield, herself playing a cartoon in flesh and blood all the way from her little girl squeaky voice to blonde wig and a body shape only ever seen in drawings. Jessica is hyper-real sexuality dropped into the real world of Bob Hoskins’ character, all tiny waist, huge bouncing bosom and impossibly long legs. She’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way. I’m not bad, I just like to draw myself that way.