Masculinity and Me.

Before reading this, I suppose a small introduction might be necessary. First, writing this triggered memories and experiences for me, so it might trigger things for you. Second, I was identified as male when I was born. I was raised male my whole life. When I was thirty, I finally had my first physical examination. After a series of test, the doctor "diagnosed" me as intersex-- hormonally, possibly chromosomally-- I am not quite XY-male. It took a little bit to figure out what that meant for me. Ultimately, it means that I am still me and still very much male. I consider myself fairly masculine, but at the same time I have my queeny moments.

The essay here presents little snapshots of my masculinity, through both fictive and non-fictive moments. I won't pretend to speak for all men, or even a majority. I also can't claim to give voice to all those who are not men, but identify as masculine. I can only speak for me and how I have been made to feel over my life. Hopefully it will do some good. 

“You’re too butch to be gay,” my mother would tell me anytime I would affect a Paul Lind/Charles Nelson Riley-esque speech pattern. Honestly, at the time, I had no idea what gay was or that these two men and the way they spoke was associated with homosexuality. It just felt sort of natural at times. Without any knowledge about what being gay was, being chastised made me feel like I really didn’t want to be gay. I just had to figure out what gay was, so I could avoid being it.

“No one likes a crybaby,” a boy told me on the playground. It wasn’t the first time I was told this, but the voice echoes in my mind all the time. Before then, most adults I knew described me as “sensitive,” or the adult equivalent of saying a child is emotional. Until then, I had no real problem with crying and demonstrating my emotions in front of people. After being told over and over about being a crybaby, I stopped being able to cry in front of most people. Being emotional became a private affair and in time even those tears dried up.

“There are three genders in singing: Men, Women, and Tenors,” said the choir director of Capital High School. When my voice changed, I had become a tenor, specifically a first tenor. I loved my high voice, before cigarettes and testosterone changed my voice a bit. But, she and her students were great to remind me whenever we had cross-town choir events that I wasn’t a real man, nor was any tenor. Men are baritones and basses. Boys could be sopranos and altos. But tenors were something quite different.

“What is that thing?” The third time I attempted to have intercourse with a woman, she was less than impressed with my endowment. She was still laughing as she left my apartment. I knew I wasn’t really into women, but I wanted to be straight. I wanted to feel normal. But, not only could I not be a straight man, but my endowment meant I wasn’t a real man, at least not to a random woman from the bar. The next morning, I woke up in a bathtub of cold water. Thankfully, my attempt to kill myself failed.

“I’m sorry, but you won’t be able to father any children.” My world crashed down when my doctor told me. Growing up, the one consistent dream for my future was that I would be a father. When I turned thirty, I finally had a physical examination. The doctor was concerned when he had difficulty finding my testicles and explained that I had hypogonadism. After a battery of tests that found that my testosterone level was significantly lower than the “normal” range for men. The hormones for body hair was perfectly fine and all of the other pituitary hormones were fine. This was the first time the word intersex was used to describe me.

“Well, I’ve found one of them,” the radiologist had been called in because neither the student tech nor the regular ultrasound tech could find my testicles. I had slipped on the ice the day before and due to gravity and the size of my body, I had managed to dislocate both testicles. A few months later, I was given a choice: “We can leave them where they are, We can open you up and pull them down and stitch them into place, but they won’t be able to protect themselves. Or, we can remove them completely. If they can’t regulate their temperature, there is a higher chance of cancer, so you may need to have them removed anyways.” Right now, they are still dislocated.

“Don’t be such a pansy.” While I have spent almost three decades subduing externalized emotions, such as tears and crying, I can be quite passionate at times. She, my boss at work, didn’t realize what she said or how it might affect me. I had made the mistake of voicing emotion, even without tears in my eyes. But it was clear that as a man, I shouldn’t feel anything. Or if I do feel something, I shouldn’t say anything. No one wants to hear a man express his feelings.

“You know that’s not healthy.” After being told by several friends that I should go see a therapist, I finally decided to reach out and get help. It was easier to talk to her about being raped by a friend and that my father abandoned me when I was quite young, than t talk with her about crying. As we were finishing our work on the primary concern, I told her I have only cried three times as an adult. I know it isn’t healthy, but I don’t know how to do it any more. Even if I did know how to do it, who would care?

“You’re a misogynist.” All I said was that I am frustrated by the #MasculinitySoFragile movement. We are all fragile. We can all be broken. Treating all men as if there is only ONE form of masculinity misses the point and puts us all in a box—often a box we don’t belong in. This isn’t about #NotAllMen. We’re told that people understand that it is a small majority who are toxic, but too many people lump all of us into toxic masculinity. They don’t seem to realize the microaggressions that take place every day, the little jabs that happen every day. But we have to toughen up, soldier on, no matter how much the constant bombardment of images, memes, hashtags, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, words. They hurt, but Chin up. Don’t let them see that they are getting to you. Don’t let them win.

“I can’t believe he’s gone.” There was a time when I hoped someone would say this. While I am not suicidal these days, there is someone who is. Someone who has been told over and over that he has to fit into a box—a box that is now belittled—that he never fit in. He has to sit and listen as people poke and prod at who they think he is because of his beard, his chest hair, his penis. If they only knew that at night he wrote poetry that he was too afraid to let anyone see. He cried himself to sleep because no one would listen to him. They always said he was the tough guy, because he stood 6’3” and spent time lifting. Thing is, he lifted because it hurt and pain was the one way he knew he was real. His sweats are crisscross scars from years of cutting. In death, maybe someone would notice that he’d been hurting and no one allowed him to heal.

We worry about toxic masculinity, but we forget how toxic our criticism can be to those who experience and live other types of masculinity. We reach out and slap others down for trying to put people in a box, but then we put certain people in a box and label them. We want men to be able to communicate, but silence them. We want them to express emotions, but we offer little compassion. In order to heal the toxicity, we need to help men be the people we want them to be, not tear them down for any perceived flaw. We need to remember that just as there is no universal sisterhood, whereby all women can be lump together, there is no universal brotherhood. There is no set standard for masculinity that all men can be judged by.

This should not be construed as a Men’s Rights Activist manifesto. Men have plenty of rights and privileges conferred on us just because we have a penis. Instead, this should be read as an appeal. That many of us are hurting and feel trapped. We can’t deny that we are men, but we also don’t like that our bodies lump us into a box that seems so terribly despised. I understand, there are some that specifically want men to feel as powerless as women have felt. To be universally treated because of your sex/gender. What does a win look like from that perspective? Men lashing out because no one taught us how to deal with our emotions? Suicides because we feel trapped?  How do we get it to stop? To begin the healing?

The Shaved Chin: Cultural Imperialism and Gender Norms in Dwarves

William C. Riley

The International Conference on the Fantastic in Art

March 18, 2016

                       

            Before delving into the heavy topics of cultural imperialism and gender norms, I would like to reflect a moment on J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” where he shares that he discusses the nature of Fairy-Stories and Secondary Worlds— “Inside it, what [the story-maker] relates is ‘true’” (Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader 60). And it is this truth, within his Secondary World, that we should situate ourselves as we consider Tolkien’s Dwarves and their beards.

            From the Poetic and Prose Edda to Snow White, Dwarves have labored deep in the earth, carving their way into European folk traditions.  Tolkien pulled from these old stories when shaping Middle-Earth and crafted the prototype for Dwarves that continues to permeate fantasy literature. Instead of constituting them as simply humans of smaller stature, Tolkien created a unique race devoid of sexual dimorphism so common among various creatures in our primary, earthly, world. In “Durin’s Folk,” Tolkien describes Dwarf-women as “in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on journey, so like Dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other people cannot tell them apart” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 360). This lack of sexual dimorphism produces a culture that challenges our semiotic understanding of beards and presents fantasy authors rich source material through which they can interrogate Western gender construction.

            Many fantasy works, unfortunately, have eschewed the opportunities presented by Tolkien’s prototype, and subordinated Dwarves by framing them into Western notions of gender. In doing so, Dwarven women in fantasy literature have been both literally, as seen in the comic Rat Queens, and metaphorically, in various other works, “shaved” of their beards. Often, this “shaving” is framed as an act of feminine liberation when, in fact, it is an example of cultural imperialism, whereby we, as authors and readers, impose our own understanding and ideals of femininity on this foreign culture.

            Under the auspices of Tolkien’s belief that fairy-stories should be presented as true, I will contrast the semiotic understanding of beards in EuroAmerican and Dwarven cultures. Through the use of ethnographic comparison on the effects of cultural imperialism on gender construction among non-European, I will also demonstrate the act of “shaving” the Dwarf-woman’s beard is an attempt to control and subjugate a race that outwardly appears queer, due to their lack of phenotypic difference between genders. By critiquing the beardless presentation of Dwarven women, I am also challenging future works to consider alternative ways non-hegemonic gender construction might appear in fantasy literature and to explore the meaning of gender in this unique race.

            As readers and writers, we need to consider our own, human, semiotic understanding of facial hair and consider how it shapes our reading of beards. As a secondary sex characteristic, androgenic hair is common in both men and women after puberty, though its placement will vary between sexes. In considering the history of beards, physician Allan D. Peterkin points out in his book One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, that the growth of a beard, along with the first shaving of the face, has been a rite of passage facilitating the transformation from boyhood to manhood since antiquity (Peterkin 63). At various times in history Peterkin notes the presence, and absence has been “a much required, enduring religious, political, and masculine symbol” (130) allowing us to clearly signal to others our allegiances and even our class standing. The shaving of someone else’s beard has been a declaration of war (19), as well as a sign of ownership (21) or defeat (20).

            Unlike men, however, Peterkin notes there has been “no historic edicts, laws, or papal decrees” governing the growth of female beards (98). Egyptian queens, like Hatshepsut, would wear “lavish fake beards of gold and silver” (17) during rituals and celebrations, and our myths and legends contain a select few women whose beard growth symbolizes “piety, sexual purity, or fidelity” (99). Despite the lack of formal laws, EuroAmerican culture, shaped by patriarchal influences, has suggested that female facial hair is unwanted and essentially non-feminine. Professor Elizabeth Grosz, in her paper “Freaks” points out that hirsute women have been categorized as freaks and relegated to sideshows to be ridiculed and mocked for the entertainment of others as a “problematized” intersection between sexes (Grosz 25).

            Unlike humans, Tolkien, in The War of Jewels, describes Dwarves as having “beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike” which changes the nature of their connection to their beards. Instead of being a sign of one biological sex or another, the Dwarven beard becomes a symbol of their innate Dwarf-ness and a cultural marker that sets them apart from Man or Elf. In fact, “this strangeness they have that no Man or Elf has ever seen a beardless Dwarf— unless he were shaven in mockery and would then be more likely to die of shame than of many hurts that to us would seem more deadly” (205). While shaving a human may function as an act of symbolic castration, the removal of a Dwarven beard is an act of hewing their spirit from their bodies.

            It is difficult, then, to believe that any Dwarf would visit such injury on themselves willingly. Yet, in the pages of the comic Rat Queens, we find Violet, the beardless Dwarf. When first encountered, (Rat Queens Vol 1, 12) it is difficult discern her race. Even when standing upright (14/1) she could easily pass for a young human female in comparison to her teammates, who are obviously elven and human, though the illusion of youth passes quickly as she points out, “We can sit around and bitch or we can make some monsters bleed. And my sword is hungry for blood” (16/2). Violet’s racial identity is finally disclosed in passing as the narration “[skips] past the part where Violet sang a Dwarven forest adventuring song of old” (22/1).

            In a flashback, Wiebe connects Violet to Tolkien’s prototype by providing a full image of a bearded Violet (Rat Queens Volume Two 57). In this flashback, after being consigned to model her father’s armor line instead of being allowed to fight in a tournament, due to the dictates of tradition (63/3), Violet meets a fellow Dwarf-woman who is shaved and permitted to fight (66/8 - 68/4), Violet decides to “fuck tradition” and shears off her beard (74) with her mother’s help (76).

            Violet’s shorn beard works, on terms that follow Dick Hebdige’s work with subculture, as a “construction of style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt” (Hebdige 3), but only within the confines of human cultural behavior. Acts of rebellion work within cultural codes set out by the culture being rebelled against, by creating norms and permissible avenues of defiance against them. While human males, whose interest in their beards may wax and wane depending on its cultural importance in time and place, Dwarven beards are a salient part of their cultural and racial identity, much like an Elf’s pointed ears. While Wiebe’s Dwarves may not “die of shame” should their beard be shorn, it is clearly a cultural marker, as noted by Violet’s mother during the shaving: “I remember when you first started to grow your beard. It was my proudest moment. The little girl becoming a woman” (75/5). Its removal is not just a refusal of tradition; it is also a denial of her racial identification and a rejection of her transition from girl to womanhood.

            Because of the stigma that would be generated from the act of shaving, it is difficult to believe Violet would readily remove her beard, much less get assistance from her mother. By ignoring the social stigma and treating it as no different than a contemporary adolescent human shaving their head or getting a tattoo, Wiebe is demonstrating the very EuroAmerican tendency toward cultural imperialism. Here the author, as representative of the dominant culture, is enforcing his own cultural norms and deviations on the subordinated, fictive, culture. Among human women, their choice to shave or leave their androgenic hair is a means by which they can claim authority over their own bodies, but they do so based on human cultural norms and expectations. Overlaying this action on a character from a different culture, albeit a literary one, and ignoring the implication of the action from their perspective is deeply problematic, as it carries with it implications that human norms are universal while utterly disregarding those of Dwarves.

            When examining ethnographic data collect regarding non-EuroAmerican cultures in post-colonial contact, a similar pattern is seen regarding gender construction and norms. Prior to first contact, many Native American tribes held cultural norms regarding both male-bodied and female bodied cross-gender people. In her book Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations, anthropologist Serena Nanda explains that at contact, Europeans “were filled with contempt and outrage when they recorded the presence” of cross-gender member, labeling them as berdache, “a term originally meaning male prostitute.” (11) By linguistically othering, these Europeans were expressing their disgust with actions they felt were abominable based on their own culture.

            In truth, cross-gender members of these tribes were not viewed negatively prior to contact. Nanda explains that “the association between spiritual power and gender variance occurred in most, if not all, Native American societies,” and highlights that “recruitment to the role was occasioned by a child’s interest in occupational activities of the opposite sex, supernatural sanctions, frequently appearing as visions or dreams, was also involved” (19). European cultural imperialism and the pressure on Native Americans to assimilate re-branded cross-gender members as repugnant, though contemporarily Native Americans are reclaiming their cultural respect towards gender variance and non-heterosexual members, using the term two spirit to describe them (Nanda 12-3).

            With our expanding exploration on the performative aspects of gender, it is time to use literature, regardless of genre, to explore its various methods of construction and interpretation. Tolkien provides fantasy literature and its derivatives with a unique race by which to do this, though this may not have been his original intention. Regardless of his intention, however, the lack of sexual dimorphism in Dwarves allows fantasy authors and readers to reconsider our expectations that gender and sex are directly linked to secondary sexual characteristics.

            An example of this exploration is presented in the Discworld books written by Terry Pratchett. In The Fifth Elephant, Pratchett explains “It wasn’t that Dwarfs weren’t interested in sex [...] it was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women’s work” (42). Deriving from Tolkien’s prototype, Pratchett explores the nature of Dwarven gender norms through the character Cheery, or Cheri, Littlebottom and allows her to explore and establish how she will perform her gender outside of her Dwarven home. She was the “first Dwarf in Ankh-Morpork to wear a skirt” and she “retained her beard and round iron helmet, of course. It was one thing to declare that you were female, but quite unthinkable to declare that you weren’t a Dwarf” (43).

            While outwardly, Dwarves may appear queer given their lack of sexual dimorphism, they present a wonderful opportunity to explore the ways gender may be constructed and performed. Perhaps, like Pratchett’s, fantasy Dwarves don’t make any clear distinctions between the sexes in public. Or, perhaps their beards may act as a symbol of both their race and their gender, presenting authors the ability to create distinct methods by which different genders might shape, groom, style, perfume, and decorate their beards. Doing so would allow authors to pay homage to Tolkien’s prototype while also providing a space to interrogate our understanding of gender.

Works Cited

Grosz, Elizabeth. "Freaks." Social Semiotics 1.2 (1991): 22-38. Print.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London; New York: London; New York : Routledge, 1991. Print.

Nanda, Serena. Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Second edition.. ed. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2014. Print.

Peterkin, Allan D. One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001. Print.

Pratchett, Terry. The Fifth Elephant: A Novel of Discworld. Mass Market Paperback Harper, 2014. Print.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

--- The Tolkien Reader, 9th ed. New York: Del Ray Books, 1979. Print.

--- The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion, Part Two, the Legends of Beleriand. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Print.

Weibe, Kurtis, J., Roc Upchurch, and Ed Brisson. Rat Queens Volume One: Sorcery and Sass. Ed. Laura Tavishati. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2014. Print.

Wiebe, Kurtis J., and Roc J. Upchurch. Rat Queens Volume Two: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N'Rygoth. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2015. Print.