Radically abnormally Male

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."

Mark Twain - Notebook 1898

I recognize that I am far more radical than conservative if we use Twain's definition of these terms. But the truth is I'd rather be seen as neither radical nor conservative because both are just normal tag lines for the normal ways we all tend to think.


 I don't want to be a normal Man!

He-man was a cartoon character with mythical power in a mythical world. Everything about him was unbelievable. He certainly wasn't the first mythological male hero to be used to program young minds into accepting societal expectations of gender roles. She-Ra joined him to ensure girls knew how to fit societal models for women just as He-man confirmed for boys what was expected of them. Cartoonish characters for cartoonish gender roles.

My gender is incredible diverse and complex. Attempts to narrow down gender roles to a handful of caricatures demeans all Genders into an unbelievable group of two dimensional cartoon characters.

Gender is complex! That is a radical idea. The Male Gender isn't simple! That is another radical idea. Men and Women come in all sizes and shapes. Some men are more nurturing than the majority of women. Some Women are more competitively task orientated than the majority of men. It is almost too complex to categorize and that is true even if you only have two genders in the discussion. When you broaden your life experience to include the minority of people who are conflicted about which gender they identify most closely with, then you find the complexities of the subject to be truly mind boggling.

I am a man and in some instances I conform to societal norms for my gender. In other areas I am an extreme outlier for my gender.

I've never met a normal man. I've met average men, but I've never met a man who dreams of being called average.

There are some big gender rules that seem to apply to the majority of each gender but at best these are only statistically common descriptors and not prescriptive points created for that gender to slavishly follow.

I think it is part of my male gender to want to be respected more than I want to be loved.
I think it is part of my male gender to react in certain preconditioned ways when faced with conflict.
I think it is part of my male gender that makes the female gender so often unfathomable to me.
I think the biological constraints of living in a male body predispose me to certain characteristic behaviors that are then labeled as male.

But despite what I think about being male, I hope that being male is only one small part of who I am and that I can mature sufficiently each day to transcend my gender's limitations and so become a healthy contributing member of my Species, and from there I can transcend my species to become a spiritual being that has matured enough that I can transcend time and space and enter eternity.

It is a complex subject. The average isn't considered to be the sought after goal for any remotely ambitious person, that is until we change the word "average" to the word "normal" then it becomes Nirvana like for all of us who ache to be accepted.

The conservatives in this conversation tend to hold unto the old stereotypes for gender until they wear out completely. The radicals tend to brandish the new stereotypes for gender but only brandish them until they get a little worn.

I confess I am tired of all the stereotypes, whether they be conservative or radical. I think my world-view doesn't consider gender to be such a huge issue in eternity, so I wonder why we think it should be such a huge issue now?

I'm passionately trying to avoid being considered an average man, and I try to approach people assuming they are not an average anything. I then change the word Average to Normal and then I try hard never to be normal and I try to believe the people I meet could never be normal.


Do you want to be seen as normal?