I began exploring my femininity as a teenager. I’d never really felt like “one of the boys”. I didn’t care about sports in the way that they did, I felt uncomfortable in their changing rooms in ways that they didn’t, and I couldn’t talk or feel about girls in the ways that they did.
For me, exploring my femininity meant hiding a crumpled skirt and thigh-highs under my bed and wearing them when my curtains were closed and I was absolutely certain that nobody was home. It felt, even at that age, like something I should hide from everyone. It was something that would get me bullied and laughed at in school – something that made me less than.
Masculinity as a Prison
Sometimes you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to be perceived as feminine as a man: Be too sensitive, spend too much time on your appearance, or even just cross your legs whilst seated as a man, and you will be perceived as feminine.
What will follow, almost naturally, are questions about your sexuality. Femininity within men is often associated with homosexuality. Studies on homophobes suggest that they tend to perceive gay men as deserving of disdain, in large part because they engage in behaviours that homophobes associate with women.
As a person in a gay relationship, I have lost track of the amount of times somebody has asked me,“so, who is the woman in your relationship?”. I’m not sure if the strangers, friends, and relatives asking this question are aware of how much implicit baggage such a question brings with it. A lot of the homophobia is directed at the “woman”, who is perceived as lesser than the “man” in gay relationships. Femmephobia is a uniquely powerful predictor of anti-gay behaviour, as one 2023 study shows.
Another study by the University of Sydney shows that men, regardless of sexual identity, prefer masculine-presenting men in leadership positions. “This homophobic bias is putting pressure on feminine-presenting gay men to conform so they might be passable as a heterosexual man”, one of the researchers says. In other words, it is your perceived masculinity, or lack thereof, rather than your sexuality, which will make you the target of homophobic hate crimes and see you bypassed by more masculine-presenting colleagues for promotions.
Femininity as a Threat
If whether you cross your legs or not could literally affect your career, how do you think society treats men who wear women’s clothes? Where a woman in a suit is empowered, a man in a dress is a crossdresser: a word that is often deeply tied to fetishisation and humiliation.
Patriarchal views on gender mean that femininity is seen as lesser. This translates to many different ways of using femininity on men as humiliation or punishment.
For example, in the movie Sorority Boys (2002), the main characters pretend to be women to join a sorority and go to ever-increasing lengths to hide their identities, often despite their discomfort.
Fetishes such as petticoating and feminization, which put men into women’s clothing, often with the express purpose of punishing them, make the message very clear: to be a man in women’s clothing is meant to be deeply wrong and humiliating. So if you enjoy wearing a skirt, it can not just be a piece of clothing that you choose to wear because it is comfortable or pretty to you. Instead, it is an admission that you are less of a man.
Trans people often face the worst elements of this harassment. Movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), make it pretty clear that, to a disappointingly large part of the population, trans women are really just men. “She’s a man”, proclaims detective Ventura at the grand finale of the movie as he confronts the female villain, leading to everyone in the room barfing and scraping their tongues in disgust.
Other times, the transness of a character presents itself in their predatory nature. Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is a murderer who kidnaps women to turn their skins into a suit in order to transition into a woman. Even though the protagonist, Clarice Starling, proclaims that trans people are docile and harmless, the type has been set: a man who idolises femininity to a homicidal extent.
You, dear reader, may need to sit through a transphobic tirade by your drunk uncle this Christmas and you will be 100% within your rights to roll your eyes and call that person an idiot. But it is crucial to acknowledge how deeply ingrained the notion of feminine “men” as predators is within our society (eg: debates about trans people in bathrooms).
Luke Correia Meme | Photo: Clone High
The Imperfection of Exploration
So what is left when masculinity is threatened by even the slightest hint of femininity, and femininity is villainized? Some men have gone down the route of hyper-masculinity. But that way lies damnation. Andrew Tate and his ilk do not have a healthy way of approaching their gender. Some may choose to put masculinity on a pedestal, to act and perform, to stick out their chest, and to lower the pitch and tone of their voices. And if someone genuinely feels at home with that version of masculinity, all power to them. But I think for many people, masculinity is an act that they have convinced themselves works for them.
When gender feels like a jail that has you trapped in its icy grips, it’s time for a prison break. For me, that meant learning to accept my own femininity, and finding comfort and space in my non-binary gender. What that means for you may vary. But I encourage you to listen, give voice to your more feminine side and, in so doing, reflect on how absurd it is that society villainises femininity.
Cover Photo: People Sitting | Gotta Be Worth It (Mitch C Myers) on Unsplash
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