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brideoffrankensteinI don't mean anything about 'values' or 'when men were men' or anything crappy about how the world has gone to shit (spoiler - it was always shit).
I don't know if I really do have a gender and I don't know if 'man' is that gender. So I don't know that it makes sense when I say that to a certain degree my dislike for one and need for the other is primarily in the aesthetics of it. The aesthetics - in the wide, literature jargon sense, that's not just how-men-dress but how they look and sound and act and what they (what the current social ideal man) evoke - of modern masculinity are completely at odds with how I feel, in my bones.
The aesthetics of vintage and antique masculinity - and there is more of a distance there, as you can't throw yourself back there in full and really get a sense of it - have a higher chance of feeling right, in my bones.
It's the soft and the delicate and the queer and the sepia and the gaslit and the intense queerplatonic homosociality; it's the unmanly and the flamboyant and the rich and the French, and the quiet and the unstated and the lost and the hidden. It's the crisp starched quality against the overwhelming feeling.
I don't have a point here. I don't know, if I was there in 1888, that I'd feel like a man unequivocally, if I'd be a trans man in a way I'm not quite now. But what it means when you say you're a man has changed; what gender means to people, how we divvy up the words 'man' and 'woman' and 'neither' changes dependent on its society. And being a man now is different to being a man then. I might be a man; but I am not a modern man.
I don't know if I really do have a gender and I don't know if 'man' is that gender. So I don't know that it makes sense when I say that to a certain degree my dislike for one and need for the other is primarily in the aesthetics of it. The aesthetics - in the wide, literature jargon sense, that's not just how-men-dress but how they look and sound and act and what they (what the current social ideal man) evoke - of modern masculinity are completely at odds with how I feel, in my bones.
The aesthetics of vintage and antique masculinity - and there is more of a distance there, as you can't throw yourself back there in full and really get a sense of it - have a higher chance of feeling right, in my bones.
It's the soft and the delicate and the queer and the sepia and the gaslit and the intense queerplatonic homosociality; it's the unmanly and the flamboyant and the rich and the French, and the quiet and the unstated and the lost and the hidden. It's the crisp starched quality against the overwhelming feeling.
I don't have a point here. I don't know, if I was there in 1888, that I'd feel like a man unequivocally, if I'd be a trans man in a way I'm not quite now. But what it means when you say you're a man has changed; what gender means to people, how we divvy up the words 'man' and 'woman' and 'neither' changes dependent on its society. And being a man now is different to being a man then. I might be a man; but I am not a modern man.
