Editor’s Note: Like the previous article, this one offers what may seem a surprising perspective from the standpoint of 2012, a time when, as I have remarked, a kind of unshakable consensus has descended upon the GLBT movement around a set of core political issues. Those old enough to remember the 1970’s will recall the bitter “gender wars” that often divided gay men and lesbians in the movement—a contest that still flared up, as in this article, as late as the 1990’s. Here Kamani laments the embrace of what she sees as traditionally “masculine” styles and attitudes by gay men, a trend that only reinforces the rigid gender roles of American society.
When this piece was published in the Summer 1998 issue of the HGLR, Kamani was teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California, and had recently published a book of short stores called Junglee Girl. She currently does development work in the Dominican Republic.
IN HIS BOOK American Gay, Stephen O. Murray quotes Tim Vollmer in recounting the pre-Stonewall gay liberation scene in New York, which was characterized by a “strong streak of effeminism” and “dreams of future universal androgyny” (in “Why Gay Liberation Turned Against Us”):
What they found appealing in the Stonewall radicals was not their politics but the new gay role they presented, a role that was direct, active, and aggressive—in short, one that seemed masculine. Ironically, out of the revolt of the queens emerged not the androgynous individual of the future, but the butch gay man of the ghetto. … For all practical purposes, they were the rites and rituals of a quasi-religion, the glorification of the male.
In the same section he also quotes Barry Adam: “The paradox of the 1970’s was that gay and lesbian liberation did not produce the gender-free communitarian world it envisioned, but an unprecedented growth of gay capitalism and a new masculinity.” Such a “new” masculinity has been fully validated by gay consumerist clout in the 1990’s, and its images are everywhere.
But as I contemplate the perfected masculine look—young, buff, invulnerable: qualities the mainstream culture endorses as superior, powerful, and desirable—I feel strongly that the central tenet of being masculine, of being male, still rests fundamentally on being not female. The feminist movement began a process years ago that had wide-ranging consequences. The movement was for consciousness-raising, for bringing people out of their troubled isolation, sharing their experiences, recognizing the global nature of their problems, and evolving strategies for change, which involved making demands on the media, law, government, unions, corporations, and families.
I have several gay men friends who have very wholeheartedly embraced feminist philosophy and use all the strategies of feminist consciousness-raising in their evaluation of culture and society. The group includes academics who teach feminist theory and even teach feminist studies courses. They can analyze power relations up the yin-yang, when it comes to women, to populations at large, texts, theories—frankly, anything but their relationships to their gay buddies. That’s where the feminism ends with a thud. Because the minute two of these feminist gay men get together, the jockeying for power starts, and with this jockeying for power, the old paradigms re-surface, a certain kind of pigeonholing—who’s on top, who submits, who gives the insults, who gets the insults—who’s the bitch, the twat, the cunt. I firmly believe that there is nothing new under the sun except the history you do not know.
The buff, glorified masculine ideal stands in contrast to the growing awareness of men’s growing anxiety, insecurity, and low self-esteem, as reported in books like The Centerfold Syndrome, Men Confront Pornography, or The Myth of Male Power. These books attempt to show how widespread feelings of inadequacy among men, all men, about their masculinity continue to fuel a system of male domination. As the drug Viagra sells out and the mania for curing male impotence overtakes us along with the hypermasculine male ideal, I wonder what happened to the feminist strategies for consciousness-raising that attempted to force an examination of sexist power relationships as reflected in definitions of the masculine. Finally, I am struck by the inability of Western culture to get past sexist pairings of the masculine with assertive and invulnerable, and of the feminine with receptive and weak; and I look to arenas outside the West for a different set of conclusions about gender.
In India, where I’m from, there’s a different take on male and female potency. In the traditional concept of primal forces, male cosmic energy is rendered inactive, inert, without the supreme power of Shakti, which is female. Traditionally, issues of male potency in India have been associated with asceticism, with downsizing the male sex drive. In his essay “Woman Versus Womanliness,” Ashis Nandy writes:
[T]he concept of potency in Indian culture has always had a private, introversive quality about it … [having]nothing in common with the manifest extroversive concept of potency in the modern West. Brahmanic potency is “derivable,” in the same way as in medieval Europe’s monasterial orders, from displaced sexual potency through abstinence and denial of one’s sexual self.
In a twist that’s most unfamiliar to the West, the ascetic, cerebral Brahman provided the male counterpart to what Nandy (1983) characterized as “the more violent, ‘virile,’ active Ksatriya” warrior, which represents the feminine principle in the cosmos. The martial Rajputs bow before the goddess Kali, who embodies the ultimate authority, and who must be propitiated by the Ksatriya “through symbolic or real aggression against his own self and by identifying with what he sees as the passive, weak, masculine principle in the cosmos” (Nandy, 1976). This Indian cultural impulse came into direct conflict with the British colonials, as Nandy (1983) further observes:
The colonial culture depended heavily on Western cosmology, with its built-in fears about losing potency through the loss of activism and the ability to be violent. Fantasies which underlie these fears … have accompanied the Western concept of manhood whenever Western man has gone beyond his narrow cultural borders to civilize, populate or self-improve.
Part of what the British did in India was to characterize whole ethnic groups as being “masculine” or “effeminate” and to create colonial policy based on those delineations. Martial groups were re-configured around the colonial ideology of “true Indianness.” Indian culture, being as old and as layered as it is, found room to support the concept of martial valorizing and hypermasculinity brought by the West, and its acceptance in turn became associated with one of the strongest collaborationist tendencies under British colonial rule.
Continuing with Nandy’s line of thought, he contends that the Indian strategy of survival includes a “certain permeability of boundaries to be maintained in one’s self-image.” Most schools of Indian spiritualism “give meaning to a controlled inner schism which, instead of threatening mental health, contributes to a peculiar robust realism.” The culture in fact protects itself “by projecting the idea that the Indian is compromising … [and]retains his latent rebelliousness and turns even the standard stereotypes others have of him into effective screens.” This style was best embodied by Gandhi, who was able to pull off a mass movement of resistance through engaging the “cowardly,” “compromising,” and “feminine” (by Western standards) cunning of the weak and victimized (Nandy, 1983).
In the fight against British rule, Gandhi played heavily on the British colonials’ anxieties of male potency when he called for mass participation of women in the freedom struggle. As Nandy (1976) points out, this act of equating womanliness and political potency denied “the Western association between maleness and control over public affairs and statecraft,” thus rupturing the association between femininity, passivity and weakness.
In contrast to the hard-and-fast division in the West between male and female, gay and straight, Indian culture has always held bisexuality in high regard, even linking it with saintliness or godliness, while teaching that gender is a division to be transcended. Indeed, as John Stoltenberg has observed, in India the whole “idea of personal membership in the male sex class would have no identifiable meaning.” In American culture, in contrast, the concept of losing one’s gender identity leads to the ultimate discomfort, the never-never land of bisexuality. I think it’s safe to say that everyone is suspicious of bisexuals—gays, lesbians, and straight people. But I think our inability to deal with ambiguity is a function of our insecurity around both sex and gender. “To change power is to change sex,” wrote Marjorie Garber in Vested Interests. “To change sex is to slide along a power differential.”
We are born into a physiological continuum; male and female bodies are more than ninety percent similar in composition, and the rest of that small percentage, we have fetishized and polarized the difference. Not every culture endorses the equation of the feminine with the passive and penetrable. Following the feminist enterprise of the excavation of early human culture, we observe all over the globe a pairing of the feminine with power and strength. The myths and folklore of these societies demonstrate that male envy of female procreational abilities is much older and more powerful than penis envy.
In the pre-Stonewall era, effeminacy and androgyny were meant to signify resistance to the sex-and-gender system that kept gay people oppressed. The emergence of the butch male as the standard gay image is in true colonial form, a collaboration with consumerism and with those who harness hypermasculine strategies in a post-feminist age.
A Twelve-Step Program to Treat Gynophobia
1. First, something basic. Fetishize the limp penis. Get hot all over and feel out of control at the sight of limp penises.
2. Next, acknowledge that the shape of the heart, that symbol we use to express love, derives from the triangular form symbolizing the female genitals, the yoni.
3. Acknowledge that the architectural construction of churches, dark, deep, cavernous, with an altar, reflect the topography of the female genitals.
4. Call mom and thank her for having a vagina. Express envy and sadness that you don’t have one too. Ask for details of what your birth was like for her.
5. Play make-believe games with young boys about growing a baby, going through labor and giving birth.
6. Wear a sanitary pad in your pants, painted to resemble a bloody rag. Acknowledge this as your symbolic wounding once a month.
7. Become a brood male, join your cycle with that of a pregnant woman, learn to endure the cramps, the back aches, the peeing every fifteen minutes. Attend a delivery, take on the care of babies.
8. Project your body through an anal birth—under hypnosis, if required.
9. Have a clitoral orgasm. Have two, have three.
10. Pass as bisexual. Learn to lay down with your inner woman. Smear some sardine juice on your genitals.
11. Pass as a woman without any use of wigs, make-up, heels, sequins, feather boas, fake eye lashes or nails.
12. Go out and recruit others to the cause.
References
Adam, Barry. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. Twayne, 1987.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Routledge, 1991.
Murray, Stephen O. American Gay. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Nandy, Ashis. “Woman Versus Womanliness: An Essay in Speculative Psychology,” in Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, ed. B.R. Nanda. Radiant Publishers, 1976.
Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery Of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford University Press, 1983.
Stoltenberg, John. Refusing To Be A Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. Penguin/ Meridian, 1989.
