I made the mistake of reflecting on masculinity by way of literature today, because I made the mistake of looking at twitter for longer than 1 minute, because we're caught in a re-litigation loop of the last fifty years because almost everything was wrong with the last fifty years. It has never been a good time to read Infinite Jest, even and especially if you were its author, who had words squeezed out of him compulsively, past-due juice bursting from unhappy citrus. If you start reading one of the ten billion books and don't mesh with its voice, the fault is always the book's. But that's my unasked-for masculinity hissing condescension I only half-mean.
I typed "making and unmaking." What did I mean by that? Oh, yeah. I was watching a video of St. Vincent playing guitar and thinking things about gender that I don't have good words for. The things I admire in her, I would hate in a man. The attitude, the emptiness, the prowess. That confidence in a woman is earned and admirable, while confidence in a man is unearned and loathsome — and that this is almost always true. That women have to make themselves(?) while the task of a man in this moment is to unmake himself; to strip away the monstrous layers of sedimentary masculine nastiness.
Or that's how I find myself thinking about it; that I've spent most of my conscious life trying not to be a ""man"" because almost everything about the concept is repulsive. I've unmade myself for so many reasons, almost all of which have to do with inadvertent manifestation of the toxic. I've been the obnoxious, too-talkative lit dude; but I've grown through it and tried to replace haughtiness with enthusiasm to keep listening. Whenever I try talking about this, though, and raise any complaint about my position as "the dude" in any situation, there's understandable raising of queer hackles that I might be going MRA. No! There is no defense of the obelisk; it must be torn down. It's too much to talk through. All I want to say is that I feel, acutely, that I have been made to carry the insistent clawmarks of manhood, that I've put so much effort into rooting out the enculturation that makes all my favorite people less trustful of me, that it is excruciating to have enjoyed in any measure some of the books on a "red flags list" at some point in my accidental life, and to choose not to defend those experiences, that there is a vast desert of my life that was none of it what I wanted and that I read Infinite Jest not (entirely) because of my gender but because I was jobless and briefly had a roommate with a different set of books than I had access to, and it kept me occupied for a month when I was 22 and needed desperately to believe I wasn't going to be poor forever (spoiler alert: I was), and it was a powerful experience precisely because of the ways it ripped and tore at the fabric of convulsive masculinity, the pressures of performance and speechlessness and disconnection and the illegible torrent of words that want to come out except you're supposed to sit there, politely, and let the old men decide your fate based on whether you fit. And even now I don't want to talk about it, because it's not important to me, and the likeliest thing is that, regardless of my personal experience, invoking certain objects casts me in a light I reject but can't evade.
This renders jagged chasms of my life unspeakable, and I am having a hard time right now with (among everything else) how much of my life feels like a story I either hate or have trouble speaking!