Pdxfashionpioneer wrote:Dillon, and Carl for that matter, please take a look at my photos and tell me I look feminine. My soon to be ex- insists I didn't come across as feminine when I was a full-blown crossdresser and trying to present myself as a woman.
You don't look feminine in the photos I've seen, and I'm hot insinuating that looking
somewhat "feminine" is necessarily a bad thing. Of note is that most all-out crossdressers -- no matter how hard they try and how many airs they put on -- are usually fairly easy to recognise as men.
The point I was trying to make is that unless it's made perfectly clear that adopting skirts and dresses by men who identify as men is acceptable and "normal" the notion won't stand a chance of getting off the ground. Without the ability to unashamedly stand tall and be a man in a skirt/dress skirts/dresses will remain the province of women and the trans-* class(es).
[...] I do not consider myself some sort of psychological hermaphrodite. But I acknowledge that I have a more "feminine" bent to my personality than the statistical norm for American males. And that doesn't make me any less of a man [...]
What it means to be a man has changed quite dramatically over the past several decades. Men used to be allowed to be sensitive and caring. They were allowed vastly more leeway emotionally than now. Fathers were allowed to be fathers and coddle their children. Look what happens today. Society sees a man hugging a child and the cops get called -- and the man better hope that the cops knows that he's the father. "Big boys don't cry" is a frequent mantra of man-haters; in point of fact, men do cry -- and it's healthy. Men suppress emotion at their peril. 'Tis better to embrace and use emotion as a guide but not to be a slave to it. Gentility used to be a male hallmark, hence the term "gentlemen": it's the ability to remain sensitive to things, not "act out", and to retain an open mind. Do any of these traits I describe really only belong solely to the female of the species? I posit not. Strip a man of his ability to
feel and you've emasculated him as surely as if you've lopped off his genitals.
[...] I've been told I "look beautiful" in my 'Sunday go to meetin' clothes' and that I'm "gentler." Neither of which make me any less of a man; all of us by going out and about in skirts are living exactly what you said Carl [...]
I've been called "beautiful" a couple of times, and it's a grand compliment. Embrace it if you receive it. Recall, though, that "beauty is skin deep" and that the corollary is that "ugly goes straight to the bone". True beauty must emanate from deep within, and that, too, is not solely the province of women. It's just that fairly recently our brains have been conditioned that when we see a physically attractive guy who isn't buffed-out-studly that we automatically think, "trans-*". That's media and societal pressure at work, and that maze of misinformation needs to be unwired from our heads.
So while I agree that there are darn few of us who want to be women or mistaken for one as we go out and about, I stand by my original point, if we weren't at least a little more feminine, as it's arbitrarily defined by our society, than the average guy, we wouldn't even think of wearing skirts or dresses, let alone in public except to express disdain for women.
I underlined the key piece of that thought above. Not only is it arbitrary, but it's also a moving target that's having components that men have long enjoyed taken away from time to time. The "box" really is shrinking. At what point will it vanish completely?
Once we own that we are fundamentally different from most red-blooded American males, let's move on to Caultron's point and the place that Moonshadow is getting to: that labels or categories are useful only insofar as they help you understand and accept yourself and once you achieve that stop stressing about the moniker and revel in the joy of being yourself.
But
are were all that different from our brethren in jeans and wife-beater t-shirts? I think not, and I also think that lots of other men think the same thing -- they just don't dare act on the thought less they get slapped with a label they find uncomfortable (or, sometimes, worse). I do not view what we're doing as opening new ground, but rather that we're taking back our birthright as men to be sensitive, to be caring, to have
fun.
And lighten up fer cryin' out loud.
Indeed.
PDXfashionpioneer and I are likely a lot closer on this than many might think. My primary argument is that unless a place-holder gets created for guys who identify as guys and want to expand their horizons without getting a trans-* label slapped on them nothing will go anywhere save for the retrograde direction it's been going in for the past 35 years.
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