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October 06, 2002
Mermaids is one of my favorite movies
Mermaids is one of my favorite movies, and there's tons of stuff like that about me. When I was a kid, I knew I wasn't like other boys, but I never had a sense that I was the wrong sex. When I was a teenager and started learning about appropriate sexual roles and behavior, I figured I must be gay. But that made no sense. I'm attracted to women, I relate to women and I want to be with women, as friends and partners. So the last thing I want is to be in an all-male world, even if gay. I don't want a woman's body; I don't want men for sex. But I do want what is considered a woman's role in the world. (Some feminists will say that's naive, that I wouldn't really want it if I knew the trade-offs involved. They're wrong.)
So, what is it about Mermaids? It's very simple. First, I relate more to girls' coming-of-age stories than boys'. Really, I barely relate to boys' coming-of-age stories at all. I find them inscrutable and somewhat annoying: annoying because I think the construct that is the modern American boy is a repugnant thing. On the other hand, in the girls' stories I relate to the struggle against disempowerment and, as importantly, the struggle with having strong feelings of sexual desire but not knowing how to handle them in a world that gives you no information to understand them, and in which sexual encounters that do occur are awkward and kind of scary, and in which you don't really know what to do to make them happen so you rely on others to make them happen, and suffer when they don 't or when they do in a way that selfishly serves the other. I have always been jealous of women because at least they can count on the fact that boys will make something happen (no matter how imperfectly.) I on the other hand, as a boy, could not count on girls to make stuff happen and so, not much did.
But the other reason I love Mermaids so much is that at the same time that I'm following the Winona Ryder character's story with great empathy, I am also devastatingly attracted to her. I have thought Winona Ryder was one of the sexiest women alive since I first saw her in Beetlejuice1, and the character she plays in Mermaids is one of her most appealing. This combination of feelings — attraction to the same gender I relate to, attraction even to the same person I relate to — is part of why I have for years jokingly referred to myself as a lesbian in a man's body. Lately, though, I have been questioning the idea that only women in our society are allowed to feel the way I do.
One of the first books I read totally by choice — as opposed to it being assigned in school or provided by my parents — was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. I don't remember how I came about it but there's no question that I chose it, at 12 or 13, and that I read it through voraciously, and reread the sex scenes over and over. Fear of Flying is about a woman choosing to put herself in anonymous sexual situations, commitment-free sex. Of course in retrospect there's a bit of a naive 1970s free-love tone to it all, but the message was clear. Like its trashy contemporary Emmanuelle2, Fear of Flying was about women being entitled to enjoy sex, to not be intimidated by it, to not have their pleasure limited by their male partner's inadequacies or selfishness. This was not lesbian literature, but it was about female sexual empowerment. As with the idea of women finding sexual power through stripping, many feminists challenged these stories, seeing them as demeaning. But when I read them, I found, as many women did, inspiration to break out of a fear of sex that is rooted not in lack of control of the external, physical, but in lack of control and understanding of the internal, mental.
And I continued this exploration as an adult, finding more inspiration in sexual self-help books aimed at and written by pro-sex feminists — most notably Exhibitionism for the Shy by Carol Queen, Talk Dirty to Me by Sallie Tisdale, Full Exposure and other work by Susie Bright, and Public Sex by Pat Califia. Not that any of this bore much fruit for me, since to become a reality I would have to find and make myself known to like-minded hetero women. But in this, I am not at all unlike many, many women who've read these books but been unable to follow through. So, my sexual story is nothing exceptional, except that it's nothing exceptional for a woman.
My suspicion, though, is that there are lots of hetero men who share these feelings, but most think they are not macho enough — that they are failures — rather than recognizing they have the right to question the rules. And some younger men who feel this way self-identify as bi or pomo, simply as a way of distancing themselves from straightness, but without any real homosexual feelings. (Often without even having had a single homosexual experience.) They aren't really bisexual; they're simply not straight. Some are, as I say of myself, hetero queers. But even that definition is oppositional; 'queer' doesn't so much challenge the definition of straight as set itself outside of it. The real challenge is not to redefine gender or discard it, but to understand that there are gradations and mixed combinations, and that, really, none of it matters that much. People should be able to just be who they are. As with all things, the closer we are to honesty about our feelings and motivations, the more fulfilled we will be able to be.
1 VHS version
2 Most people instead know the silly though occasionally hot movie version (DVD) (VHS) of Emmanuelle.
© 2004 Philip F. Rose
Posted by experiential at October 6, 2002 07:56 PM