CLOTHES AND SKINS

Traditional warshirt

Note that the bottom is not cut off square,

but keeps the shape of the animal.

Chapter two of “Beautiful Bottom, etc.” is entitled “Cloth Wounds, or when Queers Are Martyred to Clothes: Debasements of a Fabricated Skin.”  The idea seems to be wanting to wear clothes normally assigned to the “other” gender, but I don’t think it works that well in a post-Chanel world where we all wear — or don’t wear — whatever we can get away with.  Anyway, the binary gender world gets ambiguous (men in skirts) and various when one takes a planetary approach, unless you’re talking about New Guinea penis sheaths which are definitely gender assigned.  

Anyway, I’ve been looking for a place to wedge in concerns of Native Americans instead of all the black/white stuff, so maybe this is the place.  The central dilemma of NA’s is not whether they’re male or female, but whether they’re NA or “white.”  I suppose “vanilla” still works and that it works for either the standard Euro mode (on top) or the standard kind of sexuality (assigned holes), though in fact both race and gender (certainly gender/desire) use vanilla in similar ways.

So for the NA (and let’s stick with “he” because most vanilla people are already totally confused and misinformed about NA’s in general) the real question is how to reconcile being NA and being assimilated/educated, and it is often presented as being about clothes.  A pre-contact NA would have had only a breech clout, if it’s warm enough, or pieces of clothes: a long fringed shirt, accompanied by tie-on sleeves and leggings, all of which can be adjusted.  If an NA man were active, for instance hunting, he would just wear the shirt, which was quite long.  

If you went up to the Heart Butte high school and looked around, you would get the impression that anyone under eighteen is in black sweats, like ninjas.  Or if the weather is warm, shiny to-the-knee basketball pants that look like skirts.  In the Sixties players wore shorts so short that the Pentecostals considered them indecent.

What Stockton suggests is that “plain style” is a Euro-convention that forces conformity by indicating respectability.  (That's the dark three-piece suit, matched.)  NA’s have an opt-out for ceremonial clothes, which means a full suit (Euro-style) made of buckskin and beaded in strips plus moccasins and a Sioux-style (fanned) eagle-tail-feather headdress.  The spectacular formal wear of an NA is therefore at the opposite end of the spectrum from tuxedos and indicates the opposite of shame or wounds.  (Does a cummerbund suggest a bandage?)

What Stockton, in her circumscribed academic world, doesn’t seem to know is that cowboys wear elaborate shirts with creative yokes and pearl snaps, plus jeans (quite stylized), silk scarves (NOT farmer bandannas) and what used to be wide-brimmed hats but are now more likely to be billed caps.  These confer status — even privilege and competence — as well as being practical.  But the wearers in movies seem to be “injun-haters”, shooting anyone with a headdress off his horse.

Temple Grandin, both sides of everything.

Leaving that, Stockton has another trope to explore that I don’t quite get, but I’m writing on Easter weekend, so maybe I can manage.  It is the “garment worn” — meaning wounded nakedness as in Jesus crucified, and then like his cast-off body/clothing thrown down into his mother’s arms, the Pieta.  As it happens, there’s considerable association with these figures for me because Bob Scriver made a sculpture of each, the Crucifix by commission and then the Pieta when his daughter died.

Bob Scriver's "Pieta"

The Pieta’s Mary figure stayed with us for weeks because when Bob was working on the folds of her robe, he needed “her” to stay still so they wouldn’t change.  I made the gown for the human model to wear and I also made an effigy form and put the gown on it after the model had left.  For a summer I was a costumer at a summer theatre so I used my Lucy Barton book to design what I hoped would be authentic, but used a fabric that was soft polyester so it would drape nicely.  After it had been there a week or so, one of the kittens began to sleep in its lap.  The clothes had acquired a comforting mother dimension, cross-species.

Garment as symbol comes up in the Easter story “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments (ta himatia) and divided them into four parts, to every soldier a part, and the coat (kai ton chitona). Now the coat was without seam, woven whole from the top down. Therefore, they said among themselves, let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, whose it will become. Thus the saying in Scripture was fulfilled.”  So the principle of “not-dividing” that which is whole is invoked.  

But since Jesus was nailed to the cross, had thorns thrust onto his head, and was speared in the side, he was certainly wounded and there are many symbolisms for that.  The wound as a speaking mouth, the wound as a place of entry for truth, the wound as stigmata, being marked.  Even a strange Euro myth about pelicans feeding their babies with blood from a wound in their side like that of Jesus.  Blood as milk.

Clothing a mastectomy scar with a tattoo.

In these times some have made our skins more splendid than our clothing and there are businesses who will remove tattooed skin, preserve it and frame it for the families to keep.  This counters the stories of Jewish holocaust victims’ skins made into lampshades but rhymes with the rumored books bound with the skin of the author at the author’s request.

Clothing as a second skin, deliberately ripped, purposely leaving exposed skin in usually shielded places, or — going the other way, homely fabrics studded with rhinestones — can be meant to turn away shame, to either suggest a working person or to demonstrate glamour even in a t-shirt.  But “high” sophisticated culture can be embarrassed by such efforts, respecting plain elegance.  Abby on NCIS exemplifies tacky "theme" glamour.

I suppose this is where “camp” comes in, when sophisticated wealthy people violate expectations for fun.  In “White Mischief”, about African colonialists, the corrupt swankers cross dress.  Charles Dance in an evening gown and earrings is not to be missed. (I couldn't find a photo.) Or if one is enslaved, it can be a point of mockery to wear exaggerated goofy imitations of fancy dress.  Though sometimes, like toddlers in high heels, they are “trying it on.”  The maid trying on the ball gown of Miss. Scarlett.  A transvestite is crossing over vestments, changing clothes, but a transsexual may be changing sexual skin, with the healing wounds of surgery instead of the stitching of clothes.

Christian imagery would say that the flesh shirt of the body is torn off at death and thrown down like the skin of a snake into the embrace of those who love, as a memento, a mere keepsake of a changed being.  And that those in hell are trapped in their burning flesh, unpurified.  Pretty drastic stuff, but that’s the point of religious symbols.

Socially, something as small as which side your buttons are on can be gender significant.  White people could hardly rest until they got the girls of Heart Butte into “proper” glamorous ball gowns for their senior prom — echoing the British custom of “coming out,” a formal declaration of readiness for marriage.  They thought they were making life wonderful for those girls.  But were they inflicting humiliation?  When the girls leave the rez and discover they are not equal after all?  And the feminists tell them they were acting like sex objects, not valuable marriage partners.  (They have to give the expensive dresses back after that one night.)

SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Squibbie

Free associating on the Sunday morning before Christmas, though Christmas has very little to do with it.  An open winter.  This morning is bright, as has been promised for a week without arriving.  The occasional thud of a car door as the Baptists arrive at their church next to me.  Cats were up at 5AM in the dark wanting food, which I should not have provided because now they’ll be up at the same time every day.  It works in the summer.

The Striped Terror rather likes the maternal vibe of Crackers and slips up to bury his nose in her yellow fur, but the old duchess hisses hard to drive him off.  Still, she lets him be close.  And then comes the Dust Bunny, who has a big crush on the Striped Terror though he’s only half as big, and he wraps himself around Stripes in a hug as wide as he can manage.  Until I stick my head out, which freaks him so much he bails over the footboard and crashes to the floor.  He’ll be back.  Meanwhile Squibbie sleeps in dignity under the cat warming light bulb out by the computer.

The Striped Terror restraining the Dust Bunny.  Sorta.

I’ll try Gendlin’s “Focusing” technique, imagining an attic or a threshing floor where one can identify issues and put them aside to clear a space for something important.  It turns out this is actually how the brain works, except it’s impossible to understand without metaphors like floors and crates and boxes.  “The Working Platform” they sometimes call it.  I won’t number the issues I’m pushing aside because then you might consider them “listicles,” and they’re not.  They are true concerns.

A pressing issue is “infrastructure”, both physical like the sewers and power poles and political like the deterioration of prior assumptions and arrangements about reservations and small towns.  Reservations cannot now be as separate as intended when they were so different that they were still adjusting to horses -- very successfully.  But they can’t just be thrown in with everyone else without losing their identity and their rights.  Small towns were once organically generated when there were enough people to need services like stores, schools, churches and police.  But now that the numbers are sinking, we’re in an awkward place.  Put that crate over there.

The transition between “things” that are assumed to be self-contained units, including people, and related to each other mostly by confrontation and domination, have given way to reconsiderations of everything from boundary to core in terms of continuums.  Gender, for instance, has escaped cultural polarizing into “male” vs. “female,” so that now “we” (educated Westerners) see sexuality as fluid, responsive to environment, and self-determined -- with the physicality coming along however possible, even with the help of surgery or molecular intervention (hormones).

Why isn’t this also true with identity in general?  As a culture we’ve always been interested in multiple personalities, not just differences in presentation in order to adapt to a situation, but actual organized “persons” with names and styles, sometimes forming a kind of family in which the stronger protect the weaker and the wicked tease the virtuous.  What if all this theatrical role-inhabiting were seen as variations in a natural spectrum or continuum of “persons” depending on the connectome of identities in the brain, a sliding scale.  It becomes clearer and clearer that identity is not one permanent named entity (ID-entity) but that everyone reassembles their identity all the time, because so much of identity is in relationship to something outside themselves: weather, work, friends, travel, reading, political coups, war, disease, falling in love, inheriting money, having a baby . . .  It’s scary to think of a person having no center -- surely they must have something that corresponds to the “spine” of a character in a play.  But what if they are jellyfish, drifting.  Jelly persons.

I suspect that jelly persons read in search of a spine.  They want arousal (the unification of energy, the focus of attention and purpose, the increase in awareness) and they want enlightenment. (What has been missing?  How do things work? Is there really anything transcendent?)  Life is a streaming event, a process, so we want to get the flow going and according to the research of Csikszentmihalyi that means doing things at one’s limits -- not beyond them, but AT them.  (If you look at his TED talk, notice that he’s a “leatherman.”)  https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en  

www.darceycroft.com

What happens then is that the true (deep, dark, limbic) mind takes over, the mind that is NOT in words but in interaction with the world: paint, gravity, sound, physical exertion.  The chatter of the word-mind shuts up and the 200-plus kinds of awareness are engaged in unity to do or make something.  Paradoxically, this can be done while writing, but only if the writing is AT your skill limit and your courage to investigate.  None of the struggling writers I see on Medium.com ever talk about the ecstasy of writing.  Sometimes they say it’s therapy.

Now the Striped Terror has recognized that I’m awake for good (as opposed no good) and is out cavorting in the snow with the Dust Bunny.  These cats are clocks: they insist on a daily routine.  They are a safeguard against drift into mental and emotional jelly. 

from "The Best Offer," a recommended movie

Still in bed, half asleep, hypnogogic, I walk through rooms.  They are the rooms of the many films I watch.   Some opulent, some empty, some cozy, some traps.  I reflect on my lack of interest in maintenance.  Dusting, replacing, shaking out, straightening, reshelving.  It makes me feel lazy and disreputable when I’m aware, but the truth is that most of the time I’m not.  I really don’t get too bothered even about a toilet that doesn’t work properly if I can think of a workaround.  (A bucket.)   When company comes, I suddenly see through their eyes and am a little shocked, but then go to defiance.  I’m an artist, see, and I don’t have to accommodate anyone else’s culture.  That’s why I needed a house after years in apartments.  But years in apartments didn’t teach me how to maintain a house.  Hmmmm.

Sharp awareness: the internet is not going to remain the same.  Blogging is not going to remain the same.  Is it really enough to accumulate all these proto-books in 3-ring binders?  Maybe it is.  Maybe books are transient the same way people are.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  But that’s from the point of view of a writer.  From the point of view of a reader, I WANT those books.  I want to know where they are and how to get them.  I’ve learned to look through used books, not new books.  So far I’ve not pushed on to ebooks, whose key seems to be listening while driving.  Hmmmm.

Coffee.  Hot coffee gets me up.  A quick flash of my mother craving hot coffee in her old age.  It never was quite hot enough.  Life . . .  is life ever hot enough? 

A TRILLION TINY BITS WITH NO MORALITY AT ALL

Now that we are able to “read” the double helix of chromosomes -- or for that matter the single line of code in half a chromosome or the reverse transcription of that code or snippets of genome or even the epigenome (that I envision as a sleeve on the chromosomal string) which can turn individual genes on and off, interposing the environment on the expression of this and that -- the world looks like a very different place.  It looks as though viruses, which are sort of free-ranging code, and bacteria, which are more like single cells with viruses as nucleus inside, are everywhere -- crowding the world with their teeming.

“Lousy Sex” is an anthology of short essays about this sort of thing, written by Gerald N. Callahan, who is billed by his publisher (University Press of Colorado) with neither Ph.D nor M.D., but identified as a microbiologist (though many of his subjects are SUBmicro), an immunologist and pathologist, and a teacher of creative nonfiction.   (In fact, he is a Ph.D.) He could also claim some credentials as a “sexologist” so long as you were talking about genetics instead of technique in bed.  He is the author of “Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes,” which is bound to throw a spanner into the sprockets of even the people who have embraced the myth of marriage as two people of opposite accoutrements who intend fertility.

Animal alternatives are considered in the essays.

1.  Animals with a full complement of chromosomes, one set of which is specific for controlling reproduction -- like us.  If the combination of the two halves is an X gene and a Y gene, the result will be a “male” creature which produces sperm (nucleuses with tails for traveling).  The means of delivery can be as simple as releasing in water or using some sort of device  attached to "papa."   If the two halves are both X, then the creature will specialize in being the receptor and gestator, though the eggs may be nurtured inside the body (mammals) or outside (eggs of some kind, as with shells) or in some compromise (marsupials).

2.  It’s possible for confusion and stuttering to produce an XXY, an XXX, or some other wretched excess but never a YY or YYY because there’s no egg.  In addition to that, X genes have some basic information encoded on them that is vital to survival.  Y’s are smaller and therefore Y’s are more vulnerable, with less information.

3.  The ovum or egg also includes mitochondria which appear to be “captured” one-celled creatures (bacteria) which have their own DNA which is invariant.

Bacteria flash mob

4.  The reason for the teasing title of the book, a publicist’s little joke, is that it was first discovered by studying pillbugs (wood lice) that bacteria could get into an ova and suppress the Y chromosome so that from then on the bug could only produce females full of the bacterium, which we would pejoratively label an “infection.”  There’s no way for them to “infect” a Y since Y’s don’t carry baggage -- just that whip of a motor.  If antibiotics are used to “cure” the ovum by killing all the bacteria, then the Y chromosome becomes operational and there are male bugs again.

5.  We’ve long puzzled over ants and bees which pattern some females NOT to reproduce and dump males early.  No new info on them in this book.

6.  The most sensational and rarest news is that the ancients’ notions of chimeras appear to be real, though not cross-species unless laboratory induced.  But evidently even in humans an egg, fertilized, can merge with another egg, fertilized, to produce a community of cells that develop as one adult instead of twins.  We discover this in humans when mothers have DNA at variance with their children, when genomes must be matched for transplantation (chimera make good receivers -- double -- but bad donors -- half unmatched) and sometimes when surgery reveals that internal sexual organs are not bilateral, even male on one side and female on the other side.  But chimeras can also develop as “mosaics,” mixing the two kinds of cells the way a tortoiseshell cat mixes at least two colors of fur.  In fact, some suggest that tortoiseshell cats may be natural chimeras. 

7.  Once we leave mammals, and especially when we get to fish and other marine creatures, the necessity of special packaging that dry land imposes is no longer a limit, and the possibilities are -- shall we say -- swimmingly various.  Individuals can be true “switch-hitters” going back and forth between producing ova and producing sperm -- after all, the difference is only baggage -- or just sticking with the old fav: mitosis which is splitting or budding, or mixing mitosis with meiosis.

by Malczewski

Now comes Callahan’s deepest question: to what extent does our “self,” our internal construct of behavior and preferences, respond to this same situation?  Some people “feel” female but have XY chromosomes or might go the opposite way or might combine their cultural identities in various ways as a mosaic.  Some are male for part of their lives and female other times.  Our rigid moralities are either shaken into a shambles or -- a more vicious solution -- the person is suppressed at the least and destroyed at the most.  Hetero-homo divisions are revealed as constructs -- and yet, are they really?  

The concept of “split personality” or even “multiple identities”  has been reworked and exploited so many times by movies and books that we almost believe we know something about them that is fact -- even useful.  We “know” that it is the product of abuse, particularly sexual abuse at a young age, or other trauma that forces “dissociation” which is a more defined state, something like hypnosis or fugue, a kind of detachment and translation to another place and state.  We think of this as pathology but is it?  Why isn’t it a positive skill?  Maybe we only know about such cases in terms of discomfort because the ones who find it effective and happy just go their own way, stay out of the lab.

I can envision a sci-fi story in which there is a planet where all the writers are chimeras, mosaic people, shape-shifters if you like.  Maybe there is a non-chimera who wants to be a writer, but his writing is so atypically flat that he cannot succeed.  It’s the shock of expectations not being met that makes the trouble.  But expectations draw us out, develop us, as much as they suppress us, deny us.

For humans and maybe dolphins, whales and elephants, these matters that begin in molecular patterns can end in consuming yearning.  Once I went to apply for a job in a zoo and was asked to wait for my interview alongside a tank that held a beluga whale -- not a "blackfish" but a white mammal with a big forehead like a baby.  The whale came to me, making sounds and trying to lead me like a pet that wants a door opened, but urgently.  A passing keeper told me that the whale was trying to get me to open a gate into another tank where there was a female in season.  His near-Wagnerian aria was meant to convey to me his yearning, his overwhelming need to get to what could only be called his lover.  I heard him, I felt him.

Much attention has been given to Tillicum, the brutalized Orca stud who kills humans, but I have not seen a movie about whales who love whales.  Or is it just lust?  They say that cetacean whales have a whole big brain section (that humans do NOT have) that is devoted to emotion and because they are in water, they are in direct contact with the emotional vibes of another creature.  Even humans, as some women who swim with dolphins discover with some distress and a loss of romantic constructs.  But the Greeks were wrong about a chimeric child resulting.  The yearning does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L44Ml8K_mDg

"THE MAN WHO WOULD BE QUEEN" by J. Michael Bailey

As I accumulate and work through materials about Alvina Krause, the legendary acting professor at Northwestern University, I keep running into aspects of sexuality, first that AK was in a “Boston Marriage” with a woman and second the premise that homosexuality has covertly dominated the School of Speech, now re-named “Communication Arts” which includes everything from stage theatre to hearing problems.  The actual “communication” courses are heavy on social theory, including that of sexuality.  This is evidently what evolved out of my dear old “language and thought” programs, though discussion skills seem to have been quashed.  There’s a new exciting program in Qatar where it appears one can study modern media while wearing a burkha.

By these roundabout means, I discovered that J. Michael Bailey, a sex-role professor (Gender-Bending and Transsexualism) had an office in Swift Hall, which for a while I thought was the same as Annie May Swift Hall which is the theatre building or was when I was there.  AK’s office was upstairs.  I supposed that Bailey, who’s a bit notorious, had been given a hideaway there, but it turns out that was fantasy, alas.  There WERE a few queens in that building, some female and playing a role, some female and NOT playing a role; some male, one way or another.  AK was either an empress or a witch, depending on how your life turned out.

Bailey’s controversial, readable, and absorbing book is called “The Man Who Would Be Queen.”  I suspect he didn’t choose the title.  The text is about “feminine” little boys (pretty, slight, and fond of dressing like princesses) and whether they grow up to be gay (yes and no), but also about men who want to be women, maybe because they are gay or even if they are not.  This book is ten years old and things move rapidly in such a “hot” (sorry) field but the contents of this book remain useful and thoughtful -- a good place to start.

Bailey asserts that the evidence shows in every culture between one and three per cent of men are “gay.”  He identifies set-aside communities of she-males (men being women either by cross-dressing, role, or possibly surgery) in many cultures, even those that have none of the modern ability to actually change the gender of a person.  He distinguishes between men who desire men and want to become female in order to fulfill that desire, and men who desire men but fulfill that by being tough, honed, “leather” men.  He does not discuss “bears,” hairy working class or bearded intellectual guys with tummies.

Some time is spent trying to understand why same-sex desire would persist in the context of evolution since theoretically they don’t have children.  I think about evolution (even more than sex), so I have some ideas not represented in this book.  One idea is that gay guys contribute artistically and as uncles to the quality of life of the whole.  Bailey doesn’t consider them as extra warriors or as part of the support system of warriors in a context without women.  (Young men taken along for sex and as servants.)  There is an evolutionary justification of female menopause that holds up the value of grandmothers as contributing to the life of the tribe and therefore the survival of the children, as well as being carriers of culture which tends to help survival.  Maybe gay uncles are parallel.  In some tribes, uncles are more important than fathers in the lives of the children.

Genetic considerations seem so far inadequate to Bailey, but the book was written before the discovery of the epigenome, which does not remove genes nor mutate them, but can modify them, using a process called methylation that can persist over several generations.  This would help to explain identical twins in which one is gay and one is not -- in spite of identical genes.  One may have acquired a epigene that the other did not.  Bailey does recognize that biological processes after the ovum splits do not necessarily affect both fetuses.  Also a force like extra testosterone or adrenaline in the mother’s blood will have a different effect if it’s early in the pregnancy than it does later.  He does not seem to be aware that whatever causes homosexuality on a biological level, it exists in most animals at rates not so different from humans, even though some of the animals are domestic and culled if non-breeding.

Evolution in birds is a vivid demonstration that mutations can persist even if mildly detrimental so long as they don’t actually get in the way of survival.  What Bailey has not looked at here are gender-related characteristics that tend to affect survival of babies in a NEGATIVE way.  He does talk about male violence entwined with sexual jealousy, which is expressed in lions by the male killing all cubs with different fathers.  We are accustomed to newspaper stories about jealous and violent men beating women to the point of causing miscarriage even of the man's own babies.  

I’ve been following the Good Man Project on Twitter where we are hearing about fathers who deliberately arouse their small sons with rough-housing at bedtime, follow it up in the night with actual forced intercourse, and then displace their guilt onto the child with horrendous beatings.  Such aggressive and potent men are likely to be successful and sexy enough to attract women, maybe women who want the man enough to neglect the ensuing children.  He might be a good battle leader, an alpha guy.  Marrying a gay man, who tends not to be jealous or violent and who seeks other men for extramarital sex rather than a girl-like boy, seems like a good option for survival of the child.   The consequences for boys in either situation are only beginning to be explored and expressed.

A nurturing man who loves babies and protects children in the way we think a mother ought to, would be the most likely of all to produce surviving children unless he is so distracted that he doesn’t earn a living.  I think of Walt Whitman. This nurturing quality is partly what I respond to in “bears,” alongside intelligence.  Think of Professor Bhaer in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Men.”  I’ve heard the character mocked by people who think a woman who loves such a man is afraid of “real” men.  Indeed!  See the previous paragraph, which is the way many women picture ideal men.

Bailey spends little time on women so he’s not helpful in thinking about AK or myself.  I think we are not un-alike though not lesbian in the way most contemporaries seem to think of it -- that is, either bull-dykes or boy-sexy.  But for us I think the factors most important are impatience with nonsense and the demand to be self-determining.  I do have a taste for cross-dressing, which caused me to spend time musing in front of the display cases at a high-end men’s clothing store when I walked my dog past late at night: beautifully tailored tweed suits with suede detailing and antler buttons, cashmere scarves in muted colors, soft fedoras with wide brims.  But I would have to be slim and flat-chested to wear such clothes.  (Katharine Hepburn, Coco Chanel, neither lesbian.) If I’d really cared, I could have whittled and dieted myself to that shape, but I didn’t really care that much and didn’t believe that it would attract people I would desire.  Anyway I’m busy thinking.  Walk on.

So much of gender thinking is about confrontation, striving against each other.  And then these men on Twitter claim they yearn for intimacy, real sharing -- even fusion.  But that’s nurturing stuff and to many people nurturing equals neuter.  Still -- back in the old days of the School of Speech we were inclined to nurture each other, gay or not.  Some of us have successfully raised some exceptional kids.  My prime example that you might recognize is Paula Prentiss and Dick Benjamin, still madly in love after all these years, still a little wacky.  

Ross and Prentiss, the offspring.  Who needs royalty?

MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM

Back in the Eighties when I first entered the Unitarian Universalist ministry, the PNWD ministers had organized a study group for themselves which they called “Humptulips” because it sounds naughty and because it was held in a little town on the Washington coast with that name.  Actually it was a Native American name that meant a cold and rainy place, which it was.  Part of the mild “hazing” that this bunch imposed was assigning new ministers a topic for a scholarly paper that was meant to challenge the person.  So they assigned me the problem of defining the difference between male and female based religions.  It was the time of goddesses and all that, but I didn’t go there, and they knew it.  They were curious about how I would react.

When I looked at both the literature and at personal experience, especially with small experimental groups like the PNWD UU Leadership School group, I decided that the main difference was that the women wanted emotional fusion -- what I called a “hot tub” -- while the men wanted rationality -- what I called a glass phone booth.  (This is not new.)  In practical terms it meant that when it was time to cross the threshold into liminal space, the women went too quickly while the men held back.  (Suddenly they had to make a phone call.) but when it was time to end, the women dawdled in their seats while the men rushed out to pack the car for the drive home.

This matches up somewhat with Simon Baron-Cohen’s studies on the hormone called testosterone, which is often joked about, even unscientifically defined as a poison.  The general scientific indication -- with MANY qualifications about the variations and the impact of culture or personal experience -- is that high testosterone IN THE WOMB for whatever reason generally means high testosterone in the infant, regardless of whether it’s XX/female or XY/male.  (YY babies cannot survive.)  There are at least twenty-five genes that influence the production of testosterone, and it’s estimated that the molecule accounts for maybe forty per cent of the differences between male and female babies as they grow up.  The most salient difference between high and low testosterone babies (regardless of whether they were formally female or male) is that the high testosterone babies better understand systems like math and “hard” science but the low testosterone babies have more empathy and eye contact with humans.  (Given the usual bell-curves, of course.)

The wild card is one of Baron-Cohen’s primary interests:  is there something about testosterone that encourages autism?  More boys than girls have it.  Autism is a spectrum disease, meaning that you can have it a “little bit” or a lot, but it tends to affect boys more than girls.  It is diagnosed by behavior rather than any lab test, and behavior is always much affected by environment and personal experience, so there is nothing very “hard science” about this.  The study I’m drawing on is discussed at:  http://edge.org/conversation/testosterone-on-my-mind    The situation is complex because even if a body is drenched in testosterone, the molecule can’t do anything unless there are testosterone receptors in the body.   (I’ve always understood that high adrenaline in a mother who is carrying a baby will cause a female baby to have higher testosterone than usual but can discourage the development of testosterone in male babies.  I followed the issue when tests years ago showed that I was high androgen.  But I was also high cortisol, which can be a result of trauma, and I got more interested in that.  Especially in the city one often sees low-income, overweight women with male pattern baldness -- the results of stress cortisol.)

This Edge discussion was particularly interesting because it did NOT link testosterone to aggression or violence or sexual potency -- only to high comprehension of systems and lower empathy.   Though there was an interesting observation about the possibility of a “high system” person being able to figure out social patterns well enough to seem empathetic.  This would be an advantage for, say, a lawyer.  Another interesting question was whether a person could have too much empathy -- the expert opinion was that a person could feel what everyone else is feeling to such a great degree that they would neglect themselves.  No one noted that highly empathetic people can seem invasive. 

It’s quite usual for liturgies in many cultures to separate male from female.  No doubt there are many different reasons, depending on the circumstances.  For instance, the women will have the children with them and so be likely to be distracted or even to have to leave.  But also, when religion is defined as systems, reasoning about the gods or ethics, then those “superior” professorial types are likely to run headlong into the more emotional, elastic and case-by-case approach of the women if there is no separation.  Often the reason given for even curtaining off the women is that they are an erotic distraction.  This sounds like men’s self-congratulation to me.  Are they so easily aroused?

During the feminist movement among the UU’s, it became the fashion to perform liturgies restricted to women.  They were often patterned around merging, like pouring water together, and emotional attachment, like bringing the water from some beloved place.  When this ceremony was performed with the whole congregation in Bozeman, one man managed to evade emotion by bringing water from his kitchen tap and -- when it came time to testify about his connection -- explaining the city water system.  But it was a young boy who brought his jar of water with a living creature in it.

The Humptulips study group fell apart when braininess was valued less than it had been earlier and possibly also because there were more and more women ministers.  The earliest ordained females tended to be from the congregations of those ministers, to be older women, divorced (though not as many times as the male ministers), and to have had to work through some major challenges.  The men tended to have come to the ministry young, to have had wives who supported rather than competed, and so on.  But in the days when the ministers were all male, they took the occasion of “study groups” to become emotional, usually with the help of alcohol, and did a lot of ad hoc counseling with each other.  They dropped their testosterone curtain, one might say.  Even got into actual hot tubs.  It’s the thing to do in a cold and rainy place.

BOY/KID/LAD: A Bit of Sorting

How should we think of young men?  I return to this question now and then.  Off and on I ponder the difference between “the boy” and “the kid.”  I’ve decided part of the difference is that the “boy” is English and the “kid” is American.

The meaning of the boy in English might be in part because of the primogeniture laws which made the gender of a baby of such enormous political importance, esp. in terms of inheriting the throne or other prestigious entitlements.  These inheritances affect many lives because the oldest boy, the inheritor, would not just grow wealthy from his holdings but also govern the people within his “patch” whether a nation or a land-grant within it.  Their lives will depend upon his wisdom and diligence.  Also, men were the key to the Brit colonies.  No women did the semi-military work of governing foreign peoples.  (If they had, colonies would have been quite different.)

A main preparation for upperclass careers was the school system, which concentrated the upper classes in all-male boarding schools, an arrangement that was a little like curing youth by forcing adulthood, very hierarchical, punishment-laden, unforgiving, no-child-left-behind because we throw out the ones we break into pieces.  A boot camp.  In fact, it has deformed generations and was, of course, the model for the notorious boarding schools for Indians in America.  Religion and patriotism dominated all lives.  Suffering was a virtue.  (Escaping on adventure was a deep yearning that was one of the rewards of the colonial administrator.)  Sex got all mixed up.

"Boy” is one of those words that can be praise or blame, depending on the context.  Technically, it only means a young male human, so the vibe it gets has to come from the circumstances.  In many times and places “boy” meant someone who had to do work that was trivial (“boot boy”), dirty (chimney sweep,), tiresome (forge bellows operator, organ bellows operator), exposed (paper boy, messenger), and risky (coal mine pit pony tender).  The pay-off was learning the world, not in the way a school boy would, but in a far more realistic underfoot way.  If he could stick with it, he might become a formal apprentice and really begin to learn how to be a shoemaker or metalsmith or printer.  Something real.  If he had bad luck -- well, boys are expendable.  There are lots of them.

Nowadays boys are criticized for inhabiting fantasy worlds, gaming.  It strikes me as good preparation for modern life.

“Boy” in the States might be a “kid.”  Quite a different sort of role.  At first there was no pre-existing assignment of inheritable land, education was haphazard and local, and on the frontier “kid” slipped away from being gender-specific.  The English system persisted to some extent in the south, but with servants and tutors, which would produce quite a different person.  Of course, as in England, those without wealth were nothing.  In fact, slaves were not allowed to read or write.  Not that it stopped them.  Up north were the imported major universities, but “professionals” had to rub along with “enthusiasts” who simply seized their Bibles or healing substances and went out to do what they did. At first the work of lawyers was probably as much creating laws as interpreting them.

I suspect there was a strong counter-current of informal -- may I say “organic” -- education from African to white, from Indian to white -- the whites being of several sorts depending on origins and economics.  This would be in the beginning.  Later the whites were even more polyglot immigrants and the schools were supposed to iron (as in rod) it out of them as though they were Indians.  They had better success with immigrants since they WANTED to fit into a new country.  At this point the women had to be educated so that they could teach what passed as culture to the children.  The Indians had education thrust upon them, and, anyway, book learning was not a proper education for a frontier where one survived by hunting.

I’m just doodling around here, but it would be interesting to think about the degree to which today’s Republicans are still trying to become landed gentry in the English style, while the Democrats combine the defiance of Ulstermen with the pretended compliance of the indigenous peoples.

It does make a difference when a girl can be a “kid.”  England had it’s stage tradition of male actors taking on the parts of girls who are pretending to be men.  Pre-contact indigenous America had a melee of roles, all practical more than idealized.  Until less than a hundred years ago, a high proportion of women died in childbirth, leaving their girl children at the mercy of whoever was around.  They were well-advised to masquerade as boys, even to the point of enlisting in the army.  

As soon as a girl was reproductive, she was no longer a kid.  Maybe that’s true of boys, too.  Part of the transformation of adolescence is going from kidhood to adulthood, but a boy can be a boy -- well, some are boys all their lives.   I got to be a kid until I was 27 -- that’s when I married and then I was a gal.  It was a mistake, but there’s no going back.  After I was divorced, I was a broad.  Now that I'm old, the local men call me, sarcastically pretending they are being complimentary, "young lady."

Returning to the Brits, what about a “lad”?  Oh, lads are wicked!   Australia is packed with them.  I found these definitions on the Internet.

"An Australian term used to describe teenagers who wear a nautica, polo or nike white hat, tilted upright revealing the front of their hair with the strap at the back done up tight so it is dangling out the back, a striped polo or nautica shirt with the collar popped and either saucony or nautica trackies or shorts, topped off with nike Tnz which are fresh. These lads think they are tough but are generally small and skinny and travel in packs trying to roll other innocent bystanders for their worth."

A lad is a male who specializes in creating and distributing exquisite banter. Though most lads are youngish (late teens and early twenties) age is not a defining characteristic and you will find both young lads and old lads. Some special skills of lads include, but are not limited to the following:

- Binning Pints  

- Exposing genitalia and getting naked in public places 

- Throwing up after copious alcohol consumption 

- Spousal Abuse 

- Getting kicked out of pubs/nightclubs for being overly offensive

Excelling in all areas will earn a lad the title of "top lad". There is no higher praise that can be bequeathed upon an individual.

The British version of guy

A male person of any age between early boyhood and maturity

Origin:  Middle English ladde

First Known Use: 14th century

Brit : a man with whom you are friendly : fellow, chap   In British English, a man who is a bit of a lad does things that are considered a bit wild, such as getting drunk and having sexual relations with many women.

Can a lad be gay?  Is a lad always involved in sports?  Can a lad be an effective military man?  So much is context.  What’s the American equivalent of a “lad?” 

Boy!  Boy!  Bring me my dictionary! 

A REFLECTION

By the time I got to retirement, I had decided that it would be worse to die regretting what I hadn’t done than what I had done.  I hadn’t had that much chance to get into trouble anyway.  Somehow the kind of thing that sucks other people under spits me out on the shore.  Bob thought that after he divorced me, I would end up a barfly.  He was startled and (he said) proud when I ended up in divinity school.  My mother thought the ministry was nothing but trouble for an uppity woman and she was right.  So I went back to Portland where I was protected on my clerical job by a strong union.  That didn’t work for teaching in Montana.

Old women with glasses, white curly hair and wide waists don’t get a lot of respect in the world at large unless they’re Betty White, Colette, or Gertrude Stein.  Then I found a new area to explore far away from old women like me: desirable young men whom I did not desire.  I was the only associate of Cinematheque in Paris who thought Catacombs were a Christian refuge or a persisting metaphorical myth, instead of a notorious bar in San Francisco that was more than just “gay.”  I was so unexpected that Cinematheque didn’t spit me out.

Since then, evading taboos, I’ve run into a category of risking women with whom I do not identify except that they are sturdy older women with Big Brains that they use, often to challenge gender categories.  Not only are they themselves often a rejected category, but I don’t fit with them comfortably -- which suits me.  I mean, I hate conformity-based groups.  They start out being “affinities” based on like-mindedness and soon turn into bullies like any political party you want to name.

The affinity of this group is even thinner-on-the-ground than Unitarians.  The last I heard, only two out of a thousand people is both theologically independent and interested in an institutional affiliation with the UUA.  We often talk about bell-curves, small populations (outliers) on both ends and a pile-up in the middle.  Now I’ve learned the name for the opposite:  barbell-curves, fat at both ends and thin in the middle.  That’s the way we see gender in our culture.  One’s imagined location on that continuum dictates the way one is treated and it’s supposed to be against the rules to change locations by, for instance, getting too much education.  The main thing about "female" is that it’s seen as weak, bland, and unimportant -- fit only to be under male control and severely punished for being uppity by being excluded from any risk, which is a kind of confinement in a grannie harem or on Pygmalion’s pedestal.

Some people get desperate enough to have surgical reconfiguration, either because they are females no one will take seriously, or because they are males who have been trapped in a persona that doesn’t fit them.  I am in sympathy, but I am not them.  Because I am in disguise and that works.  In an urban setting, doing clerical work, I’m seen as a dyck who can’t get any other job, a “loser.”  In Valier I’m seen as a sort of grand-aunt who is too interested in books, a “character.”

I have no idea how I’m seen by Cinematheque except that Tim treats me like an equal.  He does not patronize me nor does he flatter me.  To use lingo (I didn’t say lingual) he neither tops nor bottoms me.  This is rare.

Danger sucks Tim in.  Not so much war, but rather the human wilderness on this planet where children barely survive in twisted ways and women are simply disemboweled.  Disease is the Horseman of the Apocalypse that tramples the wilderness people and the nation/corporations keep that horseman under control by withholding the cures.  They know the jokes about escaping from a charging grizzly bear: it is not necessary to run faster than the bear, only faster than your companions.  So the corporations/ nations (it’s hard to tell the difference) throw cheap AIDS drugs and ag subsidy foods out behind the troika.  (Yeah, so I’m mixing metaphors -- this is a wilderness.)  Then one day they shut off the supply and even the wolves die of starvation.

Tim hardly notices if I talk dirty (I’m bad at it anyway) but he loves it when I talk rage.  Outrage is his machete in the jungle wilderness.  Of course, a path in the jungle only lasts a little while, but it was there.  The idea exists.  If you have to bribe the natives to help, at least they know the sensation of “helping.”  

I didn’t really risk much.  Tim and company are far away and the only contact is by email and blog.  But I realize that I’m picking up a bit of aura from them, the sensation of being “dangerous.”  Scary Mary.  I rather like it.  But healthy people who have friendships with infected people are considered so dangerous that they send some folks into a paroxysm of denial.  I don’t exist.  Neither do my books.

Probably the stout-hearted gender-crossing “women” or “men” who write so powerfully know that there are really two platforms for them:  the rarefied heights of French theory in some university grad schools and the street-level masses who zombie-walk with that Peggy Lee song playing in their heads, though they can’t quite remember the words.  You can sell them lots of porn.  Erotica is for the nice middle-classes who don’t take risks because they have children.  (What else are children for but taking risks?)  But what these writers are really doing is renewing the culture by planting stories.

What have I got to lose?   Wrong question.  What do I have to gain?  Let me think about it a little bit.  So far, what have I gained?  

Friendship.  Insight into a world I had no idea even existed.  Knowledge of powerful writers I hadn’t known about.  It turns out that though my religious base is not institutional anymore, it is strong and even helpful to others.  Now I know about the Catacombs and why men went there.  But I also know more about all the human labyrinths of desire that twist within us, usually unacknowledged except in hallucinations.  My besetting sin has been curiosity.  The punishment is much more harsh than I expected:  grief.  Awareness of suffering and death beyond any amelioration.

Tristan, the youngest boy in the original Cinematheque group and best beloved by all, died a year ago.  Tim’s post that day said simply,  “No more fear.”