Guard and Regard
Anyway, yeah, I am starting to disentangle the ways that the things I feel and the way I feel reflect my basic principles about how to relate to myself and others and the world—how it’s all part of a whole human, each strut supporting the rest. (Including the horniness, yes.) There’s some greater thesis of self behind all of this, and I’m getting closer.
My voice class last night, in the full group the professor briefly went over cursory elements of body language again, then dumped us into smaller rooms. It struck me then, as I gabbed about my difficulty with eye contact and the way that neurotypicals tend to misexplain social expectations in terms of their apprehensions of the behaviors themselves rather than the meaning that they serve to communicate in context—gender, to the extent that it’s a social construct, is all about relationships. It’s a bundled set of signals that serve to demonstrate your basic attitude toward yourself and others, and the world around you; your expectations, your considerations. A lot of that, both the signalling itself and the relationships it serves to affirm, is based in stupid power structures, yes; modes of control or deference. More concretely, it’s emotional.
Much of the basic behavior we code as feminine serves to signal recognition of, regard or care for the other; making connection, making room. Touching base. (To my mind, it’s basically about not being an asshole.) Masculine-coded behavior is mostly about the self: commanding space, showing basic disregard. Showing that no one can tell you what to do. It’s mostly subconscious, right, but all these signals add up to this intangible sense of genderliness that indicates presuppositions toward the way the other will treat you, and will expect to be treated. This basic perspective on life, right.
There are a few other components, of course. Some of it is subconscious signals about, say, anatomy and its implied social, sexual, biological implications. The way that people move, e.g., their gait, suggests some things about their musculoskeletal structure, right. That’s also essentially relational, if a bit more concrete. But really, the interesting thing for me here is the philosophical element; to what extent that gender as a cultural construct (specifically) reflects at least a performance of one’s anticipated core principles and attitudes. Whether or not that performance is genuine comes down to the individual and to circumstance; one can blunder around through space and be the kindest person on Earth, or spend all one’s energy connecting with others only to control them.
Me, of course, I can’t carry enough weight to pretend about anything or play games with people, so I am basically unable to force myself to think or behave in any way that feels unnatural to me. When pressed so my natural responses are closed off to me, the best I generally do is to freeze up and panic out of the stress and confusion. So these basic considerations behind gender coding as we understand it, in my case what they reflect is in fact my genuine expectations and principles about so many modes of relation—which in turn reflects on all these recent ruminations about my sexuality, my sexual role, and so on; on the way that all these pieces of me conceptually fit together and reinforce each other, the more that I dig down and strip out other people’s garbage and figure out the basic truths of me. It’s all surprisingly coherent. There’s a basic underpinning of philosophy here.
I need to mull this all over more, but there are all these synapses, right? I’m getting closer to assembling this puzzle of me.