Impenetrable Masculinity

This is sexy.  Or, at least it’s about getting sexy.  Oh, also I talk about internalized transphobia

I’ve been a top my whole sex life.  I have always initiated sex; I’ve always been the one to explore my partners’ bodies, to listen and watch and tease them until they just ache to come, and I’ve rarely had others do the same to me.  Now, when I was identifying as a woman or a girl, being a top was a gender rebellion as much as it was and is just what I find hot.  To a culture that taught me that I was supposed to wait and be acted on, I said fuck you, I’ll go get what I want, which was and is fucking people until they shake and see stars.  During that period of my life, envelopment in a variety of forms was sort of expected of me, and it seemed consistent with the way that I topped people to take them inside me.  I thought very little of it.

The context of all of this changed when I started identifying as a man, because I don’t want to define my femme masculinity by having power over others.  Dominant culture values and assigns power to topping and penetration, as associated with masculinity, but systematically devalues (and denies the active existence of) bottoming and envelopment, as associated with femininity.  If I am a man who only tops and penetrates but does not bottom or envelop, I feel like I am perpetuating dominant cultural power dynamics.  I don’t want to be that guy.

For me, the need to re-evaluate my complicity in gender power dynamics  is  most salient in my sexiness with cis and trans women, and other trans and genderqueer people.    Recently, I’ve bottomed a couple times, and it’s a little strange for me.  For the first time, I realized for that bottoming is an actually active role: I mean, I don’t know how to let someone else just pay attention to me and adore my body.  The closest I had ever been to that was in mutual topping situations, and that’s far different.  Until I tried bottoming, I never really understood it, but now I think maybe I’m a perpetual top because I haven’t developed the capacity to bottom.  I’m not sure whether I should work on bottoming to avoid contributing to patriarchal cultural currents, or if I can be a man who mostly tops because that’s what I like.  Loving my body and expressing my desires is radical in a world that does not acknowledge or support my existence, but I don’t know how to separate myself from garbage romantic comedies and beauty magazines that shaped the clinging remnants of the romance myth in my mind.  I can’t claim not to be a product of my culture, no matter how hard I work against it.

When I’m getting sexy and I  listen  to my cravings pulsing through me, I usually want to be inside whomever I’m getting sexy with.  That’s a culturally expected and valued way of doing masculinity.  I’ve found, even with the queers I have sex with, that some people have assumed that I would prefer penetrating them and avoid envelopment.  But I usually want them in me as much as I want to move in them, so I ask them, but I worry about whether they’ll remember that I’m a man after they’ve slid their fingers in my cunt.  And it feels comfortable and hot when cis and trans women and other trans and genderqueer people fuck me that way, because I feel like heteropatriarchy doesn’t have as many scripts and expectations for the way my body should fit with theirs.  When I’m having sex with people who experience gender oppression, envelopment still feels like a gender rebellion, because I’m refusing to play the privileged exclusively penetrating role.

Because patriarchal culture denies my existence as a man, when I get sexy with cismen, I feel this anxiety knot in my stomach that if I do anything but top them, they will forget that I’m a man, and they won’t remember that I’m male-bodied.  So, the meanings of my desires change depending on who I’m getting sexy with, because it seems as if it’s easier for people to assign me to the woman category if I’m getting sexy with a cisman.  A  while ago, I was getting sexy with a cisman friend, and he asked to lay himself down between my legs.  And holy fuck, I wanted to wrap myself around him, so I did.  And it felt so good to move with him and feel my hard clit slide against him.  And he asked if it felt good, and I was just intoxicated on the hotness between us.  Even though I was topping at that moment, that position holds cultural value as a woman-assigned position in dominant culture.   In that position, I’m anxious that I could be destroying the social legitimacy of my masculinity, even though I don’t usually attempt to present in a dominant culturally valued masculine way.  I mean, it is just no fun to be mis-gendered in my own bed.  Even if a particular person is supportive and respectful, the memory is real, and the threat feels present.

I don’t know how to separate my desires from internalized transphobia, that is, defining myself by dominant cultural ideas about my body, and accepting woman-assigned sexual roles.  I don’t want to perpetuate some boring hetero sexual trajectory, but there are some things, like wrapping my legs around my partners, and taking them inside me, that I don’t want to give up.   I don’t know how to get what I want outside of patriarchal socialization that makes me want what I was going to get any way.

Tags: body love, bottom, cultural criticism, experience, femininity, feminism, feminist, ftm, gender, gender identity, gender presentation, genderqueer, internalized oppression, internalized transphobia, male-bodied, man, masculinity, men, patriarchy, presentation, privilege, queer, self-determination, sex, sexuality, top, trans, transgender, transman