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.
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