Dear Reader,
I really wanted to send you another letter before the month was out, and now it’s the last day of August, and my thoughts are still pretty scattered. Oh well!
I’ve been working on a cheeky and ambitious thesis that I like to call “Who Fucks Who In the Patriarchy.” I may return to this another day because I feel like I haven’t quite strung it all together yet. But at a start, a little terminology-setting: I’m using “the patriarchy” in the sense of the culturally entrenched dynamic of cis, straight men disproportionately holding a greater share of political and economic power.
And just to get this out of the way: sure, it’s not true that any given individual man has more power than any given individual woman, or that any straight cis man has more power than any specific queer person. Obviously that’s not universally the case, and no one is saying that it is. So we’re not going to play straw man games arguing about whether the patriarchy is “real” because sometimes men have women bosses or whatever.
Like, if I were going to launch into a discussion of fried food and health, I could pretty much trust that no one is going to question whether “fried food” is real. I mean, that could mean such a variety of things, and some things are made in a frying pan that aren’t actually fried, and it’s not the fried food that’s even the problem since everything’s fine in moderation, and anyway some people have Air Fryers now so really fried food is an outdated notion that we’ve basically moved on from as a society, right? That kind of quibbling is just silly and tedious. “Fried food” exists and is sufficiently widely understood for the purpose of discussion. So too with cultural patriarchy.
One of the things that contributes to the persistence of patriarchal structures is a cultural tendency toward binary thinking. Either this or that. If not A, then B. And then map that onto questions of who has power in a given situation; who is in charge and who is subordinate; who demands and who yields. So over time we’ve developed this unwritten script of countless attributes, and which attribute dominates which, mapped to the cultural construction of the gender binary but encompassing all sorts of things that we know—we know—have nothing to do with gender. Yet they get gender-mapped anyway.
Quick thought experiment. I’m going to list a bunch of random terms, and you’re going to assign them a label of “masculine” or “feminine” based on how you think they commonly show up in culture:
* Pretty
* Gruff
* Beer
* Booty shorts
* Sparkles
* Manual labor
I think we all agree that literally none of the above are inherently masculine or feminine, but if pressed to put them in a culturally-assigned category, we’d probably all come up with mostly the same labels.
Now imagine a pretty, gruff, beer-drinking, booty-shorts-wearing landscaper who enjoys sparkles. Would you guess (here’s another fake binary) that this character is straight or queer? Again, there’s nothing here that inherently speaks to sexuality or gender. These are just memes.
The trouble comes when you hit things like the conservative nonsense about feminists or queer people being “dangerous,” or that redefining or relaxing or decoupling from our conception of gender is “dangerous.”
There are people who sincerely believe this. I recognize their sincerity. You can be sincere and also wrong.
People who are worried about dangerous feminism and dangerous LGBTQIA+ activism are deeply caught up in the framework of cultural patriarchy. For them, it’s a key cornerstone of what brings order to the world and keeps society functioning, and if you do away with that framework, then you’re inviting total chaos. I can feel a sliver of compassion here, because you have to be living under such a constrained and tiny worldview if you feel that civilization could crumble under the weight of men wearing booty shorts or sparkly nail polish, or women running companies. If you’re so desperately worried about who fucks who, it has to be because at heart you fear that any departure from established norms might lead to a sudden unwelcome dick in your ass. Which is purely ridiculous. The notion that adherence to the conventions of the patriarchal order somehow protects people is laughable. See: literally everything.
It’s absolutely true that we could break down the very idea of gender as we know it by continually pushing boundaries on what work or dress or hobbies are allowable for whom. Is that actually “dangerous”? Why shouldn’t we? The constructs that are normalized today are contemporary artifacts that exist in time and place, not enduring universal truths. It wasn’t long ago that pink was a color for boys, and small children used to wear dress-like smocks regardless of sex. In some contemporary cultures, it remains the norm for men to have very long, carefully coiffed hair, or for women to wear highly structured straight-brimmed hats. Gender norms are contextual. I very regularly wear pants in settings where a hundred years ago (or not even that long) it would have been shocking to see a woman in trousers. Now they’re boring.
People should have the freedom to express themselves and hold out their identity to the world as they choose. And really, nobody’s gender is anybody else’s business except for the purpose of politely signaling recognition of a fellow human being through use of language, or as may be relevant to one’s own intimate personal relationships. But nobody owes the world information on what they’ve got in their pants.
Ok, that’s probably enough of a ramble in the direction of the patriarchy for one missive. Probably I’m going to come back and read this later and think, “Oh god, was that what I wrote?” — but I’m ok with that. Years and years ago, I read an interview with a yoga instructor who was releasing a book, and I don’t remember her name or the book’s title, but I will forever remember the comment she made that we should keep in mind, “our thoughts are something that pass through us, but they are not who we are.” Ideas are things to hold lightly and let go. They’re worth musing on and sharing and evolving, but they are not who we are.
Enough philosophy. Let’s do books. The theme is big nerd love.
Recently I read K.M. Neuhold’s Love Logic trilogy, which was very cute. The first book, Rocket Science, introduces PhD student Elijah who’s had a longtime crush on his best friend’s brother Pax. The second, Four Letter Word, is a poly romance among four men, three childhood friends (who of whom have been locked in a bitter feud since their senior year of high school) and one sexy bartender who helps them see each other, and themselves, differently. The third book, By the Numbers, pairs up the remaining two friends of the group, Elijah’s childhood best friend Theo and his best bud in the PhD program, the cavalier genius Alex. These were fun, low angst books with likeable characters. I did have a few “huh?” moments in how some of the PhD program stuff is discussed, having picked up a few things by osmosis from doctoral candidates that I’ve known. Also, these are very much on the sexy end of the street, and by the third book I was a little bit starting to glaze over at just how, um, damp every interaction had to be. A quick word search for “precum” shows that the term occurs 15 times in the first book, 23 times in the second, and 19 in the third. Which, bonus points for lots of sexy arousal, but maybe could have varied some of the word choice.
Also in nerd territory, I finally read Charlie Novak’s Roll for Love trilogy and really enjoyed it. It starts with Natural Twenty featuring a tattooed and physically imposing but very sweet florist and a lively pierced-and-tattooed bookstore owner who is just getting his business off the ground. Charisma Check is an enemies-to-lovers romance between cosplayers. And Proficiency Bonus is a meet-cute story of a pink-haired personal assistant with ADHD and an actor on a popular fantasy TV series whose life turns deeply stressful when his network unexpectedly declares the show to be in its final season and proposes a homophobic ending that would break the hearts of its queer fandom. The characters appear across all three books as their lives intertwine, but the three stories are really quite distinct and could really be read in any order.
That’s it from me. Goodbye, August. Hello, autumn.
Love,
Beas
