I'm not the only one!

[gryphonsegg]

I've spent years and years dealing with this seemingly weird situation where the people around me read me as a woman (and sometimes as hyperfeminine!), but I hate it and never feel like a woman, but there's nothing I can do about it, and I like the idea of being non-binary/genderqueer/genderless in theory but wandering into those waters on the internet makes it clear that I don't look like the right kind of non-binary/genderqueer/genderless person for reasons that have nothing to do with my chosen "presentation" and everything to do with the way my body naturally is. I don't want to get too TMI about my body dysphoria and how it is (contrary to expectation) not all about losing weight and how even if I could lose enough weight to be considered "healthy" by random onlookers I couldn't possibly lose enough to be considered androgynous and still remain genuinely healthy because my body just doesn't roll that way. Suffice to say, I try not to look at or think about my appearance except in terms of judging whether my clothes are appropriate for whatever I'm about to do. The reason I'm posting about my body issues yet again is that I just found out there's at least one other person who has pretty much the same kinds of body issues. this post from Meloukhia got linked at Womanist Musings, and hours after reading it, part of me is still reeling from the discovery that there's another one like me out there.

Comments

[holyschist]

Halfway through your post, I was thinking, "Have you met meloukhia? Yeah. Ou articulates this stuff really well. (I think you would like meloukhia's writing in general.)

Visual androgyny (much less gender identity) should not be defined as "skinny and boyish," but a lot of people sure seem to treat it that way. :-/

[gryphonsegg]

Yeah, a commenter on my LJ linked it with hatred of anything associated with women, that is to say, what Western culture calls "androgyny" is really more like a "softer" or less threatening form of masculinity than like a true mix of masculine and feminine traits. I think that's probably a big part of the problem, and I wonder if another part might be due to contemporary US culture's raging fat-hate. You know how it is, the leaner the better, and if you're not trying to attract stereotypical cisgender heterosexual men with your breasts or currently incubating a baby, you have no excuse to have a single ounce of fat more than you need to survive.

Of course, the two prejudices might not be separable in our society; Liss at Shakesville did this very intriguing post a while back about why she thinks one of the reasons for the fat-hate might be that extra fat exaggerates traits that have traditionally been associated with women (softer bodies, less angular faces, larger breasts on people who would otherwise have smaller breasts or masses of fatty tissue resembling small breasts on people who would not be expected to have breasts at all). Then again, people who are read as fat women do get shamed for being not feminine enough; right now, being feminine entails being small and sexy, and being sexy entails being slender. Current US society also views breasts as erotic and not maternal, since using breasts to feed babies isn't the norm anymore, and also views them as separable from the rest of a person's body. So we've ended up with a culture where the ideal "sexy" body is small and thin and lean, with medium-sized breasts (which don't respond to gravity as breasts that naturally do, because saggy breasts make you look fat and old) tacked on as an afterthought. And the ideal body for a "good" and "classy" and attractive-but-not-slutty woman is as small as possible in every way.

Now I'm also thinking about the connections with this culture's youth obsession, fear of aging, and disregard for elders (bodies tend to get softer as they age beyond young adulthood), as well as its (possibly increasing?) negativity toward mothers (If you're not perfect, your children will hate you forever, and if you are perfect, you're a controlling, no-fun harridan, and they'll still hate you to some extent, as will your partner and everyone else!) and racism (some ethnic groups have more angular-looking features than others). Hmm . . . maybe there's an element of promoting the idea that "androgynous" can look good and respectable, with subconscious perpetuation of the idea that looking "good" and "respectable" must mean looking young, thin, lean, not too feminine, not too maternal, and European-featured.

[holyschist]

Yeah, I think it is all very tied up and you have a bunch of really important thoughts here--I have, um, issues about the kind of denigration of anything traditionally feminine in some queer circles, and how androgynous is treated as "butch" or even "soft masculine" (I don't think either is bad, and I am actually mostly a fan of butchness, but...I think "androgyny" should be a broader, more inclusive term that INCLUDES femininity).

As a side note: I am not a fan of treating breasts as being "for" babies any more than they are "for" sex, though; they are "for" whatever a woman wants them to be for, I feel, and I get this uncomfortable feeling when people bring out the baby thing that I'm Doing It Wrong because my breasts are never going to be used to feed the babies I'm not having, by choice. I don't feel that breasts erotic OR maternal, and that if they're erotic that's automatically oppressive and if they're maternal, that's empowering. Sometimes mine serve an erotic function for me, which makes me happy (and if they incidentally please someone else, cool, but that doesn't make pleasing someone else their function); mostly they are just there, a part of my body like my elbow or my shoulder. They are not for feeding babies; someone else may well feel hers are, and that's fine, too. /peeve

[gryphonsegg]

Right, no part of a person's body can be accurately said to be "for" anything. I was thinking in terms of changing cultural perceptions of female/feminine bodies, not what real people's bodies or body parts are "really for." As an example, I remember doing a bit of art history and seeing paintings from past eras in which abstract concepts were personified as women (which is another kind of sexism in itself), and some of them were shown in very dignified, even heroic, poses, and also shown with rather full breasts partially or fully exposed. In the artistic idiom of the times/cultures that produced those works, the bared breasts symbolized bounty or nurturance rather than sexual availability. I'm not saying that's any better in practical terms for real life women. I'm just thinking aloud about the cultural shift toward seeing breasts as being all about sexuality, especially a particular kind of brutish, earthy, and profoundly heteronormative sexuality. Yes, there are women who find breasts beautiful, sexy, and attractive, but in media characters with large breasts are coded as sexy for the most stereotypical kind of cisgender heterosexual man, not for other women or non-binary people or even non-boorish men. When a character or actress or whatever gets hailed as "the thinking man's sex symbol" or when pop culture deigns to notice that lesbians exist in real life, the woman who is held up as attractive to women and/or to a more intelligent and sophisticated sort of man is someone with smallish breasts, and she usually is presented in outfits that de-emphasize the breasts. That thread has been around a long time, of course, but it appears to be especially prominent right now, and so deeply entrenched that a large, or at least very vocal and not terribly small, segment of the population views being breast-fed past six months or so as something that will having damaging psychosexual consequences on children.

I probably will never have children, and I don't view breast-feeding as empowering. I view it as neutral. I just think it's odd that I live in a culture where

[holyschist]

I was thinking in terms of changing cultural perceptions of female/feminine bodies, not what real people's bodies or body parts are "really for."

*nods* It's just a kind of twitchy issue for me.

In the artistic idiom of the times/cultures that produced those works, the bared breasts symbolized bounty or nurturance rather than sexual availability.

Or purity, often.

That thread has been around a long time, of course, but it appears to be especially prominent right now, and so deeply entrenched that a large, or at least very vocal and not terribly small, segment of the population views being breast-fed past six months or so as something that will having damaging psychosexual consequences on children.

I probably will never have children, and I don't view breast-feeding as empowering. I view it as neutral. I just think it's odd that I live in a culture where

Agreed, I think--although this is cut off?

[gryphonsegg]

I was just going to finish by saying I think it's odd that I live in a culture where the breasts=sexual-and-only-sexual has become so extreme.

[holyschist]

Definitely agreed. Also pretty frustrating, IMO.

[gryphonsegg]

By the way, I just realized lately that I put a lot of characters with androgynous personalities and heavier/softer body types in my original fiction-- mostly female-bodied characters with curvy shapes (often including rather large breasts) in contrast to the more typical "skinny" or "boy-shaped" fantasy heroines, but there are a few androgynous-but-not-slender male-bodied characters (at least one of whom is psychologically scarred by bullying that included classmates giving him are hard time because they said he looked like he had breasts), plus an intersex character who soft and very round-featured, although still pretty small. I knew I was doing it on purpose with some of them, but my reaction against visual androgyny and gender identity being equated with looking skinny and angular now appears to be more far-reaching than I realized.