Gentle boy sent into the fray
BEATAMINES & DAVID JACH - HOW NEVER
My mom's been listening to the Zoo Brazil remix of this song for at least a decade now. I saved it to my personal library around 2018 or 2019. The lyrics have always reminded me a little of Simon from Lord of the Flies. "You're my gentle boy sent into the fray," specifically.
Sigh. I love Simon and all the boys who are like him. Soft, thoughtful, whimsical, out-there. Charlie enamored me when I first met him because of how he embodied some of those traits. Awkward, mostly quiet, very quirky, wore ornately patterned sweaters. Car trunk and bedroom full of books. Brightened up whenever he got to talk about music, had a very... unique diction while talking about it. He's come out of his shell a lot since we first became friends. Not as stifled in his expression, more aware of and receptive to emotions; he's found his footing as a human being, it seems. It's a wonderful thing to observe.
Masculinity's been a point of intrigue for me since early adolescence. What it looks like through different lenses, how our conceptions of maleness affect the human beings it's applied to... What's the opposite of a gender essentialist? I am whatever that is. Yes, gender roles have been ingrained in human society ever since we shifted from hunting and gathering, but that does not mean these roles aren't man-made. We still created them and consciously sought to abide by them, even if this happened quite some time ago. It's delightful to learn about other cultures where males exhibit (what the West would call) "traditionally feminine" traits, and vice versa.
I love all children, I love the concepts of "child" and "childhood", I love the experiences and ideas of children, but there is a particular fondness I hold for boy children. For boys who have not yet internalized society's expectations of masculinity, who have not yet been tainted by heteronormativity or the desire to mimic male dominance and aggression. Even the boy children who do try to act out their perceptions of manhood, there is a fondness, because at that point they are simply replicating what they see, what they feel is normal and expected of them— they have yet to wholeheartedly assume the social identity of "male." There is a certain fragility to those boys, a sacred one, which envelopes my heart in pure love and tenderness. The temporary nature of such a state adds to the importance of it.
On the contrary, I love when girl children are loud and unruly. Girls who insist on being the boss when they play, who get angry and violent as a retaliation against perceived weakness, who don't understand why they aren't seen as just as powerful, if not more powerful, than boys. Haha, yes, this is the kind of child I was, so there's likely some bias in my praise here, but truly, there is such value in these types of girl children. I definitely experienced a weird form of internalized misogyny growing up. Would that be the right term...? I didn't dislike girls/women, really, but I hated femininity. I resented girly girls, I was uncomfortable with passivity, and when I got to middle school, I developed a distaste for the "overly sensitive" types, which the media I consumed often pinpointed as a female trait.
Of course, now, I very much enjoy femme anything. I love to see it in others, I have no trouble embracing it within myself, and it saddens me to realize how common it is for girls to despise femininity because of the patriarchal notion of it being lesser and undesirable. Don't get me wrong, I am such a teenage boy; I love jacking it to boobs and consuming violent media and saying off-color things and roughhousing with my buddies, but I don't possess those traits in spite of femininity. Besides, who's to say all those things are just for guys? ;)
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(Side note about my transness: I have a vivid kindergarten memory of thinking about the gendered bathrooms at school. I internally questioned why I had to use the girl's room. What made it any different from the boy's room? What if I had male genitals but everything else about me was the same? Could I use the boy's room then? What if I asked to use the boy's room just to see what was different? I was very, very curious, but I didn't bother talking to anybody about it because I already felt like enough of a weirdo.)
(Side note about my early childhood thoughts: I also have a vivid preschool memory of using the bathroom and thinking about the Pyramids of Giza at the same time. At least, I think I was thinking about the Giza pyramids. I was definitely thinking of desert pyramids, because on top of the mind's-eye visual I distinctly recall, I also remember making up the pun "pee-ramids" at the same time. That never escaped my mind, though, because I figured it was too inappropriate to say.)