Beauty, Self-Image and Gender

I've been reading back through some of the posts on here. It's always a bit cringe-inducing, but what struck me more was how feminine it all seems. At times it's in the mould of Morrissey or Mark Twain (obviously without the wit or talent). I'm a straight male, for the record - so that's not what I was going for (lol). However, I think there's something about writing that lends itself in this direction. Especially when it's this daily, journal-style blogging. I think you have to have a touch of the effeminate to even consider doing it. I suspect this is why many right-leaning commentators overcompensate with the edgy memes and fashy takes. It's an attempt to eek out some respect and manliness as they sit with their little gay quills.

To some extent we all care what others think of us, but I think I tend to care a little less than the average person. For me I tend to worry more about misrepresenting myself than I do about how I'm judged. I don't like the idea of giving a false impression, but if I give a truthful account, and people think the less of me, I can live with that. I'm a straight male, but I'm not an especially manly male. I have some of the flowers of the female aspect. This is just the truth.

(The Knight of the Flowers

- Georges Rochegrosse)

I think the modern left and the modern right both go wrong on this. The left have their 67 varieties of gender, but in doing this just force humans into boxes. The right reduce everything to the binary extremes of uber-male and trad-wife. There's no nuance. I think history and storytelling have much better archetypes - the knight, the troubadour, the poet, the mad scientist, the witch, the maiden, the Amazonian woman. The balance of the biological dials gives rise to all types of humans.

If you watch Star Wars you might relate more to Han Solo than to Luke Skywalker if you're a more blokey bloke (or to Princess Leia if you're a bossy madam). We tend to gravitate towards the characters that reflect our own personality settings, or self-image. This is why successful things often have an array of characters to choose from. Going back to the 90s we had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If you were a smart, geeky kid you probably wanted to be Donatello. If you were a bit more cheeky your favourite was probably Raphael or Michelangelo.

Similarly, for girls, you may have been more of a Baby Spice than a Sporty Spice.

Even these archetypes from art and pop culture can never perfectly reflect the nuance of real life though. In fact, often we find ourselves pulled in multiple directions.

Beauty vs Attraction

In fact, one of the problems that can arise is when notions of beauty come into conflict with the desire to appeal to the opposite sex.

For instance, if you're a straight male you'll naturally see the female form as beautiful.

Take long hair as an example.

We all want to be beautiful. So if your notion of beauty is long flowing hair, you'll then see yourself as being more beautiful with long hair. In essence your admiration of women can lead you to imitate them.

This is an issue I have. I much prefer the way I look with long hair. When I have short hair I find it very ugly, angular and dull. So naturally I've always tended to have long hair. However, it's only as I've aged and developed a bit more self-awareness that I've realised that what I find attractive isn't what other people will find attractive - and that my notions of beauty are skewed by my own personal preferences.

I wish someone would've explained this to me when I was younger: "You might like having long hair, but girls like men - that look like men. They might not want a boy who looks like a girl."

Once you realise this then you understand that you have to make a choice (or at least some type of compromise) between appealing to your own aesthetic tastes and appealing to other people's.

(Of course, in reality these things aren't straight forward - some women may like long hair, so it's complex. Plus, what is sexual beauty, and what is true aesthetic beauty? Is there even such a thing as true objective beauty? If you're an intelligent or arty person it may be that you care more about the ideal than your love life.)

I think this is one of the problems that some male-to-female transgender people have, especially the ones that tend to be on the autistic spectrum. People will say these people fetishize being a woman - which I'm sure is true for some of the adults. However, for the children and teenagers that get sucked into it I think it's much more an admiration or idolisation of the female, that then gets confused with desires about self-image.

This is why it's so dangerous to push these ideologies on to children. It's far too easy for children to become confused, and for the lines between role model and crush to get blurred.

A Very Masculine Morrissey

In fact, as a good example of how children often get the wrong end of the stick we can bring it back to Morrissey. I'm a huge Smiths fan, however, I was introduced to the Smiths long before I was fan. I was born in 1982, and the Smiths arrived in the charts not long after. My uncle and my mam were both huge fans, so as a toddler I was immersed in the music. Along with nursery rhymes it's the earliest music I can remember. Certain songs still bring back recollections of being at my nanna's house as a small child even now.

It was only when I was about fifteen/sixteen that I rediscovered the music for myself, on my own terms.

Anyway, as a child I was aware of who Morrissey was, but only in a very vague way. Much like I knew who Margaret Thatcher was, or Nelson Mandela. I'd heard grown-ups talk about them, and I'd seen them on TV, but was more concerned with Thomas the Tank Engine to actively pay much attention. I knew Morrissey was a singer, and in the images I'd seen of him he was always either completely bare-chested, or had some loose-fitting collared shirt; and he had short hair with a quiff.

So naturally I just viewed him as a very manly figure. In my child-like mind he sat there in the same subconscious space as He-Man, Mr. T and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Again, short hair equalled man in my basic shape-sorter way of demarcating the world.

When I was sixteen and I listened to the music with a slightly more adult understanding I remember being like: "Why did I think Morrissey was like He-Man??" 😅

Even at sixteen though I still didn't understand half the references. A few decades later things are clearer still. Thank God I grew up in an era when such misunderstandings weren't pandered to and preyed upon by ideologues.

Descendant of Immigrants - What Does It Mean In Reality?

Immigration is a big topic at the moment, and from the left we constantly get this refrain of, "Everyone in Britain is a descendant of immigrants."

Of course, in the strictest sense this is perfectly true. If you go far enough back then everyone's ancestors arrived here at some point. That isn't really what people mean when they use the term in common parlance though. What "descendant of immigrants" means generally is someone whose immediate ancestors arrived here relatively recently ..and relative is the key word.

We can't strictly define what recently means. It's always going to be relative. Some people's ancestors have been here for "a long time," but naturally, something can only be long relative to something else. Four hundred years might be long in comparison to forty years, but likewise it's short compared to four thousand. (The Huguenots can be both ancient and recent depending upon who's framing the argument.)

The left tend to be quite disingenuous on the topic. When they make the technical argument that, "Everyone is a descendant of immigrants," they're trying to discredit the fact that there's been a long (again, relatively long) continuous chain of people living here going back centuries. They understand perfectly well what "descendant of immigrants" means in a general sense - the term would be utterly pointless if it just meant everyone - but they feign that they don't. They falsely appeal to the technical definition of words, ignoring the spirit of the words and their context.

(Think the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, and lawyers trying to catch people out on technical infringements.)

However, by the same token, people on the right can be just as disingenuous. Insisting on the reality of some pure-in-blood English nation, when they know in their hearts that even settled peoples have a medley of ancestors, and a peppering of immigration.

So, how would I define "descendant of immigrants" ?

I kind of have my own way of looking at things. Personally, I like to root things in the real, lived world. So, for me, it's all about intergenerational experience.

Most humans tend to have a limited knowledge of their personal antecedents. You have direct experience of your parents. You also tend to have direct experience of your grandparents. If you're lucky you might also have known your great-grandparents first-hand. Very few people get to meet their great-great-grandparents however.

Of course, as you live alongside your parents and grandparents you may hear stories - second-hand - of older relatives you never got the chance to meet, which adds to your knowing of them, but that tends to be the extent of it.

Consequently, if you ask a random person in the street to name their great-grandparents most will struggle. This is perfectly natural, as we live in the here and now, and without first or second-hand experience we simply won't know this stuff without appealing to written records of some sort.

So, after about three generations there's a natural dislocation, where our personal history disappears into a general fog of culture. Therefore, I would say that after about three generations of living in one place you can discard the "descendant of immigrants" tag.

(As an aside try to imagine how much this would've been the case before written records. For instance, Jewish people have one of the oldest written records. The biblical genealogies may sound a bit dry and boring to the modern ear - so-and-so was the son of so-and-so, this person begat that person. However, imagine you live in a tribe where you only have first (and perhaps second-hand) knowledge of your personal ancestors, then someone comes along who can reel off a list of their ancestors going back centuries. It would be quite impressive.)

My Recent Ancestors

Sadly, my family history is a little too boring to provide a good example, but it might serve for one final illustration. As far as I know everyone on my family tree is British, however within that there is Scottish as well as English, so we can pretend Scotland is a truly foreign country for the sake of argument.

My grandmother was Scottish (my other three grandparents English). She died when I was about seven years old. So for that first seven years of my life she was a direct influence on me - I heard her Scottish accent; was exposed to her Scottish cultural mores. It no doubt had some effect on me. Likewise her Scottish-ness will have left an even bigger imprint on my mother, who lived for forty odd years in her presence - and that, in turn, through my mother, will have influenced me somewhat too.

On top of this I have the countless stories about Scotland, and about Scottish relatives, regaled to me by my mother.

So, even though I've never lived in Scotland I'm a bit Scottish through this direct experience. How much is impossible to say, but it's enough to register as something significant.

However, if all four of my grandparents were English born, and instead, it was one of my great-grandparents that was Scottish born, this influence would've been massively diluted. I'd have never known a Scottish born relative first-hand, and the drips of family lore about Scotland would be third-hand, not second - if I even received them.

If we pushed this Scottish born ancestor back a further generation still, I might not have even been aware of the Scottish ancestry at all. I'd have just assumed that I was wholly English.

Of course, things would be quite different if a multitude of my recent ancestors were Scottish, and not just one. Plus, things would be much more pronounced if these Scottish people had a language, religion and culture that was significantly different to that of the English people they'd came to live amongst. Still though, as far as place is concerned, once you get removed a few generations from the people that had first-hand experience of living somewhere else you're gonna be fairly rooted.

As ever, it's the integration of different cultures that's the tricky problem. Not so much the rooting of people to the geography.

(As a final aside, though it's good to pass down written history, it can also be a huge barrier to integration. Once cultural values get written down - as religious texts, for example - it becomes easier for them to be retained and passed down - as with the genealogies. It makes that culture more rigid and less flexible, so when it comes into contact with other living cultures it's harder to blend or assimilate. So historical knowledge can be a burden to people, as well as an advantage.)