Cure The Fauxmos

It sounds positively retro doesn’t it? The idea that non-heterosexual gender normative people are somehow deficient, and should be corrected to avoid dangerous  tendencies in later life, such as drinking cocktails and calling everyone ‘darling’.

But doctors in America are treating pregnant women with hormones that they think will stop their girl children from developing unwanted non-feminine traits, like not being desperate to get married and have children, or wearing Dr Martens. I wish I was joking about this but I’m not.

I found out from Dr Petra Boynton, @DrPetra on twitter. Then I told Mark ‘Fauxmos Daddy’ Simpson. He was so outraged he wrote a blogpost.  But, being the generous soul that he is, he sweetened the pill by including some lovely fauxmo-friendly news, about some cool androgynous kids in China. Thanks to Petra and Mark for sharing this information, and challenging the myth that any child who does not appear to be careering to heterosexual heaven is ‘abnormal’…

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/30/chinas-avant-garde-androgyny-and-americas-retrosexual-medication/

Here is my response to this depressing story, with some more information about how it relates to ‘intersex’ children, and in particular, how the drug being developed seems to aim to remove ‘genital abnormality’ in intersex children. Before they are even born. Whichever way you look at this story it is very disturbing.

http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/the-world-wont-listen/

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.

Tags: blogging, transvestite

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.