Quite Simply the Dumbest Paradigm of Gender Relationships

Ladies, Gentleman, trannies, genderqueers and rad people everywhere, as promised, your Reconno(trans)Man attended his first ever all-male event. Touted as a men’s dinner with a guest speaker, I finally quelled my long-standing aversion to male events and dove in, feet first.

While I’d like to tell you I almost drowned, really, I almost died from boredom.

Any event where the main speaker begins his talk with “good to see your wives let you out tonight” is destined for failure. Misogyny? Check. Homophobia? Check. Jokes about masculine women? Check.

The operating paradigm of this  group is that men and women are vastly different. Men are incapable of maturing and participating in emotional friendships with other men. The consequence of this paradigm is, of course, an unacknowledged fear that getting teary-eyed with your guy friends may mean

U R a fagz!!!!!!

This fear was evidenced in the number of men who appeared terribly uncomfortable in their bodies and an overwhelming need to sell every upcoming social event with “hey, then we’ll drink some beers.”

Right.

But I guess they need the beerz because they can’t emote with each other unless they are a little bit drunk.

Let me say again that this particular story of male/female relationships (and there are many) rests on a kind of enlightened sexism where girls have cooties and boys think that if they don’t clean their underwear and drink beer a lot that means they are manly men.

The speaker referenced a  nostalgia for the easier days of the fifties and sixties when cyber stalking and Miley Cyrus didn’t exist.

The future horizon of this dumbest of gender paradigm diminishes to nothing, so the fake past becomes the hallmark of true masculinity. Right. The same past that

• barred African-Americans and many poor whites from voting;
• criminalized abortion;
• institutionalized sexual harassment;
• fired migrant workers when they attempted to organize;
• institutionalized extreme homophobia;
• provided little to no medical access for trans people.

Of course times were simpler then! Any variance in human behavior or desire to achieve full emancipation and participation in u.s. society was squelched.

It was easy to me a man in an echo chamber. But it sure was, and still is, boring.

The Quite Simply the Dumbest Paradigm of Gender Relationships by Jay Sennett, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.