Essays From The Shadows
Volume One
I am noted among my friends for being metrosexual. I wear clear nail varnish and I do not do football; I neither understand it nor care for it.
I can throw a punch with my trainer at the gym while gossiping and bitching. I have always stated clearly that I am not gay, but I am happy to help them out at busy times.
My masculinity is not something I question, but others struggle with how much of my feminine side can be revealed. Shall we go with fluid and not give a fuck about labels?
My father wanted me to like football and fishing; he wanted me to learn how to strip an engine and collect stamps. I had no interest in any of it, and I am sure I was a constant source of disappointment to him.
I can remember from a young age thinking that these were things he liked and had nothing to do with me. It’s not as if I was playing with dolls or wearing makeup.
I liked reading books, riding my bike, and being shagged by boys.
I’m joking. It was a joke!
The problem with being raised by a misogynistic, sexist, violent man is that you are never quite sure about the masculinity that is being presented to you. Your immediate reaction is to recoil from the idea of being like him.
Some of it is a product of the times you were growing up. The 1970s were my formative years, and it was all about hairy chests, opening car doors for ladies, punching someone on the nose who disagreed with you and drinking pints of beer. I can’t think why that didn’t appeal to me.
If you add to that all the nonsense about men not having feelings, or crying, and stiff upper lips and having a very straight back and just facing up to things, it becomes suffocating.
This isn’t about sexual orientation or being one label or another. It is just this one-dimensional version of a man that was presented as if that was who we all had to be because it was a law.
A good example is that my wife earns the money, not all of it. I have had jobs and a payslip, but for most of our adult life, she was the main earner. She did it very well. I saw no reason to interfere; she seemed to have a handle on it.
It has resulted in an interesting forty years of dealing with other people’s comments, opinions and assumptions.
I have more than once had people ask if it makes me feel less of a man, and most think it is funny to tell me I am a kept man … to which I ask if their mother was a kept woman when she was raising them?
I have been asked if I had a proper job yet. My friends comment that I am spending my wife’s money again, and complete strangers ask me how it feels to have someone else pay for everything. When we discussed us getting married with the vicar, his wife asked me how I could think of myself as a man. (Well … the penis … big clue)
My opinion can be dismissed because I don’t live in the real world (I have had jobs, one of them paid more than yours does, you muppet).
Sexism is alive and well and living just under the surface.
It is interesting that so many of the remarks are aimed at demeaning me on the basis of my masculinity. Not that I am lazy, have no skills or that nobody would employ me because I am workshy and useless. They just jump to the conclusion that it says something about being a proper man. Whatever that is.
You would think it would change as attitudes shift in the wider world, but what is interesting is that when you do a complete role reversal and there are no children in the equation, it highlights how unequal their own parents were. That unsettles people.
I was never going to be defined by my father’s version of being a man. I asked too many questions. I refused to see the world the way he tried to impose it on me.
It helped that I left home by the time I was 15, and I was free to decide things for myself. It is not that I made any decisions one way or the other. My childhood was hijacked, and my worldview was disrupted and muddled by violence and sexual abuse. All of which can confuse how you see yourself.
In the end, I probably landed in a place with a softer, more thought-through understanding of how to include kindness and grace while disregarding the conventional idea of being a man.
It is not revolutionary, but I settle for being me and stay away from boxes, categories, and labels.