“I don’t really worry about gender” I said to a friend, which of course is the thing a straight white guy can get away with. “I don’t expend much effort on it.” I continued.
But then I remembered that I do spend a lot of effort on it. Not worrying, but combatting aggressive impulses that seem to be the purview of my gender. Namely, the impulse to copulate, to humiliate, and to battle.
For instance, there’s not a married woman alive, who when I first meet them, I don’t check out their husband first, to see if I can beat them.
Beat them at what? I dunno— art, thinking, fighting, skateboarding… like Brando says in The Wild One, Whaddya got? You name it, I’m good at everything.
And thus sized up, if I can beat them, then I know I am free to befriend the wife. And if I can’t, I befriend the husband.
When husbands get together, they talk about their wives, usually about how much they don’t like their own. She makes me clean, she doesn’t get me or how hard I work. She’s castrating.
Wouldn’t it be better if these wives were invisible? We should cover their hair, their faces, their ankles, their calves, their damned cleavage.
Then men could finally be friends with each other, and collaborate in the way men were meant to. We could make stuff together, we could do business together, we could make civilization, without trying to battle each other and take each other’s trophies…
We could even love each other.
I discovered recently that Miranda July, an artist I adore, has a husband who is attractive, and a filmmaker.
Naturally, by impulse, I had to see his movies, to see if I could beat him. If I’m somehow cuter, more clever, more artful, more sincere.
I’m not.
Thus needless to say, I’m making it a mission to befriend him, because then when something does him in: time, age, disease or say a knife to the throat, I’ll be next in line. I have to be patient…
But I’d have to make a plan. Strategize, assemble assistants.
I’d be putting my other plans on hold but it’s gotta be done. There will be lots of destruction.
And yes I’m wasting all this energy I could use constructively, what if instead we could be friends? What if we could collaborate?
We don’t have to hate.
Oh if these women were invisible, not there at all. What a world us men would be able to create together.
This is just great Tom. Love this confession- it's so real in an internal way. Love the vulnerability.
As a cisgendered woman, I have spent my life sizing up other women in the room. Am I the prettiest? Now that I am 71, I look around the room I am in, find the prettiest and think; "Huh, that used to be me in most rooms. So happy to be too old now." Life does get better.
FINALLY reading this, and holy moly! Between the what-did-he-just-say text and the what-is-happening-here POPEYE cartoon panels, I'm just...I don't even know... All I know is it's brilliant.