Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider
On heterosociality with cis heterosexual men
I don’t often spend time socially anymore around groups of straight men, but when I do, I make them watch music videos with me for hours.
I got to do this recently and came away with a strong feeling of empathy for the younger, self-punishing, cool-girl me that used to hang out more regularly with groups of cis straight men.
Because watching music videos with straight men is not like watching music videos with regular people! These men indulgently let me have the remote and I queued up some favorites, and then they proceed to behave like patrons at a strip club where Beyonce, Teyana Taylor, Ice Spice, and Jennifer Lopez are all employed, appraising each of the artists’ attractiveness as if selecting which dancer’s services to request for an individual session.
Like, what planet of self-unconsciousness is one transported to by being behind, rather than either subject or invisible to, the blissful handicap of the straight cis male gaze?
While this specific experience of being the only Other among straight men was…endearing? gauche? generally benign?, nothing makes me feel smaller than being the only woman in the attending dictation room every week, which is adjacent to the men’s locker room and usually full of male surgeons bantering, pulling out their dicks, and shitting abrasively on their residents and product reps like they are willfully trying to bully me off the computer or phone I need to use.
Spending time socially and professionally with groups of straight cis men, even when the group includes people whose friendship I treasure, or even when I know that I am surgically and professionally equal or better, often feels like regressing to a time when I felt unsafe in both my body and my mind, when I believed that my discomfort in situations like these reflected a defective thinness of my own gendered skin, that it was something I had to practice getting over. I feel for the me of half a lifetime ago, the young woman who punished herself for being humorless and overly sensitive and not cool enough to hang— but if I, now close to forty years old, now with vocabulary and a learned grasp of power dynamics and earned self-assuredness to know what is going on, can still be made to feel this way so easily and often, who am I really feeling for? Will I ever be a grown-up if I can still feel so small?
It takes a lot of work to unlearn the self-disregard that cis-heteropatriarchal compulsion teaches anyone who does not fit into the correct sides of it. For some people this work comes more easily than for others, and it has not come that easily for me. For me it took years of consciously choosing to only consume media created by women, for example. It took naming my experiences of sexual violence for what they were and writing about them. And if I continue to feel uncomfortable every time I am not in a queer or majority-femme space, I find myself wondering if safety is too much to expect or something I deserve. Or if it is “my fault” for finding myself in these spaces to begin with.
My palate cleanser in the aftermath of this recent sojourn into straightness has been returning to the peace of mainlining sapphic bops and sex worker anthems in the privacy of the skull space between the Jabra Elite ear buds that Wirecutter told me to buy, having a delightful astrology reading, and working on the next installment of one sentence reviews of every album in [it’s a surprise!]’s studio discography, which is turning into a series that has been very fun to work on.