I want to be a dead poet

Hello,

As I waited for the last metro home, I began to venerate masculinity.

There was a man dancing at the mouth of the station for his friends as they rode up the escalator. Their laughter rang through the night as the sole source of music. On the platform, underneath a placard about the vestiges of the Bastille, a group of painfully French-looking men leaned against the railing, joking and jostling each other. One of them was carrying a plastic bag of emptied wine bottles, which clinked together with every wide-swung arm.

This awe, this want, isn’t gender envy exactly, but it does spring from a desire to be a man within a group of men, borne from reading too many male authors in my impressionable youth. It’s Jo March in Little Women. It’s Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing — “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place.”

These boys, these lads, were all in black — some in leather, some in coats, Wallabees and Chelsea boots. They looked Beatnik, artsy. They looked happy in comradery with each other. Within the heteronormative paradigm, men change how they act the moment a woman is in their midst, and I want to experience Dead Poets Society. I want to be a rockstar à la the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, so that all my messiness can be subsumed by the inherent wildness of masculinity. It’s what divorced Dad rock venerates, it’s every bildungsroman, it’s the portrait of the artist as a young man. It's the kernels of boy-turned-man, which have captured the imagination for centuries now.

At the risk of sounding reductive, I romanticize the nuts and bolts of masculinity — the aesthetics and the performance of it. I don’t believe that there is a way anymore to delineate a static category of the masculine or the feminine. Gee, wasn’t life simpler back when women weren’t allowed to wear pants? It has become more common to delightfully fuck gender sideways, but I think we all continue to possess vague conceptions of which line items we consider masculine or feminine. We are not so advanced yet to be able to eschew these categorizations entirely; mainstream society forbids it.

“Gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion.”¹ To this end, here are some non-conclusive, stylizations of the body that I adore: cowboy jeans, short-cut hair, Hugh Grant’s oxford shirts, the oft baseless confidence with power tools, the variations on toughness, the artistic melancholy.

I remember being 19 and desperately trying to pay attention to a lecture on feminist manifestations in Brazil, but all I could focus on was the back of our lab manager’s head. She had recently elevated from a bob to a full crop, and I was captivated by the downy hairs at the nape of her neck. Here is a part of the body that would normally be obscured, but suddenly with this Newsies boy hair, it was revealed to the world. Within the apparent masculinity of a short haircut, a spot of softness is tucked next to it. I loved it. It was where the corner of a heart could live.

There is a rumbling of discourse within gender studies as to whether masculinity studies can or should constitute a legitimate sub-field. Of course, there are the genuine concerns that it would divest already limited funding away from existing scholars, or that it would become a vessel for Men’s Rights Activists and their ilk, or that there simply isn’t anything to cover in a separate study of masculinity that isn’t already discussed in the discipline and a siloing of masculinity and femininity within academia would be counter-productive to dismantling the binary. I tend to agree with these reasonings, although I don’t claim to be a gender expert by any means, and I’m not trying to argue theory here.

I only raise this point about masculinity studies to say that I am trying my own version of it. In recent years, I’ve tried to move beyond hating men, and I am using masculinity as an entry-point. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always very good at keeping this promise. On an abstract level, I understand that there is something antagonistic about this mentality, that it is perhaps a disservice to the men in my life that I love. However, some part of me struggles to believe that the average man is capable of understanding me within a heteronormative structure, and that is at the core of my frustration and my desire to try out being a man like a costume. I think men reserve the best parts of themselves and their regard for other men in their lives; women are left to piece together the scraps.

I venerate masculinity as an entry-point, as an escape, as a funhouse mirror, as a love letter, as an anthropological study, as an exercise in becoming.

Tune In: Volume 1 by Mark Lewisohn

An absolute behemoth of a music biography, it is only the first volume of what promises to be a three-volume deep-dive into the formation, the fame, and the fall-out of the Beatles. You might think that this recommendation is taking the piss, but I seriously mean it when I say that this encapsulates some of what I find so fascinating about masculinity. First is the idolization that led Lewisohn to embark upon such a project (I believe that this type of idolatry is reserved for men). Second is how the biography manages to capture boyhood in a post-war Liverpool and the haphazard path to becoming gods among men. You can see the contemporary modes of performing masculinity by a group of young men whose fame would be largely driven by young women.

I have a lot more free time now, so you might be hearing from me more often. Too often probably.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie