he-man-women-haters-club

I’d like to talk for a bit about what I’ve been calling (in my mind) “The Man Club.” What is this “Man Club?” you may be wondering. Well, it’s not a real thing, it’s just a way for me to try and understand the ways in which I’ve been treated differently as of late. And I must admit, I’m not altogether a huge fan of being a part of this club! Allow me to explain:

Since arriving in Amsterdam, as you may know, I have been presenting as male and passing very easily. I had never met any of the people I began interacting with at school and out around town, so no one knew of my past or my transition. Dropped into this new place as a male, I began to feel like a spy, like suddenly this whole world of male-male interaction opened up and I was allowed into the “boys-only” tree-house for the first time. The guys I met at school talked to me about things that guys had never really expressed to me before. From what I’ve experienced, it seems as if most of what guys in their late-teens/early-twenties say to each other involves the way girls look, trying to find a girl, having sex with girls, various types of sex-related jokes, and their various interests; music, movies, video-games, books, sports etc. The number of comments other guys have made to me since I got here that involve the objectification and sexualization of women ABSOLUTELY BAFFLED ME. I’m serious people. I was not prepared for this.

seriously??

A few weeks into the school year I went out for dinner with a couple of guys from school. We sat in a pizza restaurant near Centraal Station (“centraal” is Dutch for “central”) awaiting the arrival of one of the guys’ friends from home. She was coming from his house and would arrive on a bus across the street. He informed me that she was his best friend from home, and that she was a girl, and so she was cleaning his room and doing his laundry. He gave me a sly smile after that last part and laughed a little. I didn’t know what to say, so I laughed a bit as well and added, “you should probably learn how to do your own laundry you know, it’s kind of an important life-skill.” He just laughed some more.

This is weird, I thought,

Is this normal?

Do most guys expect their female friends to clean up after them??

I hope not.

This was the first time I was caught off-guard in the man-club, but it certainly wasn’t the last.

Later that night we were walking down the street, discussing the start-of-term party that the school had thrown for all the students and faculty. The theme of the party had been throwback/80’s, and so one lad discussed his costume;

“Yeah I dressed as gay for the party,” he said.

“Dressed as gay? What does that mean?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory.

“Oh you know…body glitter, tight pants, open shirt.”

“You can’t tell if someone’s gay just by looking at them you know...” I answered, trying still to keep my tone light.

“Oh yes of course of course…” And then everyone just kind of looked down and the conversation died and someone started to talk about something else. 

It struck me later that when it came to conversations such as this, I just didn’t know what to say. I had never exactly run into this scenario before. Sure, people have been making offensive sexist/homophobic comments for ages, but up until now, I had always been responding as a female. And, as a young female, and then later a gay female, people had generally just known not to make sexist/homophobic comments within earshot of me, and when they did it was always pretty easy for me to express my disapproval. I used to be able to just shoot an agitated glare in the direction of the offender and they would pretty much get the picture. Even when I was among a group of people who were all laughing at a stupid sexist joke, I could tack on an un-amused, “you’re an idiot” to go with my disapproving stare and that would usually diffuse the situation. I never needed to come right out and explain to people why their comment was stupid and irked me, because they already knew that it was sexist/homophobic, and so just by my being female/queer, they immediately knew why I was displeased and often became apologetic/embarrassed without me having to brow-beat them.

But now.

Now I wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

And it’s not as if the obvious aim of the majority of these types of comments was to degrade women, but they certainly came out that way. Much of what guys say is to express how attractive they think a girl is; unfortunately, most of the “compliments” I heard involved objectifying said women. I was talking with some friends one day after class when they asked me if I’d met any girls here at school that I was interested in. I hadn’t really, but I thought that the girl who sat next to me in jazz history was kind of cute. (This may have been because she had been the only girl in class who had started a conversation with me thus far, but I told them I thought she was kind of cute anyways.)

“Her, oh no man,” replied one.

“What, yeah come on,” retorted the other, “I would totally fuck her.”

Whoa.

That escalated quickly.

But somehow, that is how it always seemed to go. While I liked to describe attractive girls as cute, other guys seemed to either consider them fuckable or unfuckable. Which, I think we can agree, is not really the same thing. I hadn’t thought at all about having sex with this girl who I’d spoken to for a combined time of probably seventeen minutes! This happened to me several more times over the course of fall semester; someone would ask me if I’d seen some girl from one of our classes or something or if I thought she was hot, then I would reply, and they would answer with something like, “yeah, I’d totally fuck her.”

get your mind out of the udder! i mean, gutter.

This was not the preferred choice of words for everyone I encountered, however. I was sitting in the concert hall one afternoon when a classmate came and sat down beside me. A couple of minutes into out conversation, he craned his neck over to the left to look at a couple of girls who were settling into their seats and pointed one out to me, “Man she’s hot! Check out that ass!” My reply was just to laugh, and we continued talking. A minute or so later he leaned in to say, “that girl I pointed out before? I take it back; I got a look at her face.” And out of some stupid reflex I answered, “a buttahface?” (but her face, if you will.) He laughed and laughed; “yeah man exactly! She’s cute, buttahface!”

Aaaarrgh no!

I was assimilating!

This was not good. This was the kind of thing I had said among friends before as a joke, and so it just kind of came out as the only thing I knew to say that seemed appropriate for the time.

This was hard, because as much as I hate sexism and stupid comments and objectification, I really wanted to fit in! I had always wanted to be “one of the guys,” and now that I really had the chance to really be “one of the guys” without any feminine history, fitting in was a lot harder than I had anticipated. It seemed to be that in order to be one of the guys I had to say all these things that guys apparently say to each other, even thought I didn’t want to, and even though I didn’t really find a lot of their conversation remotely interesting.

What’s a boy to do? I’m not sure, but I resigned to hanging out with my two nice roommates and my American-grad-student friend as much as possible.

who says we can't have fun staying in?

I hoped that the whole degrading-woman habit was partly just an age thing, and that most of the guys I met would grow out of it over time. I met a few slightly older guys with whom I could engage in satisfying conversation, but most of the guys I met in class were my age but were just starting their first year at the conservatory. This being the case, I hoped also that some of it was just macho over-compensation in the face of a new environment and all new peers to try and impress. I think that I’m partially right, but what scare me are the counter-examples that prove me partially wrong…

Some of these types of comments even came from teachers. Being a music student, and a jazz drummer at that, I have been used to studying in a male-heavy environment, and had often been the only girl in a music class, or at a rehearsal or gig. But now, I was a part of the majority in these all-male classes, and I was taken aback by some of the things that my male teachers said to a room full of male students.

The teacher of my modern jazz combo class this semester was prone to repeating himself, and he gave us the same lecture about playing to your audience several times:

“You have to play for women,” he would say (for the 57th time). “You can play all sorts of hip, complicated shit for a really small audience, or you can play stuff that sounds pretty, for a big audience.” He had this way of forming a sentence or two, and then looking around the room and smiling as if he had just said something really eye-opening or funny. Which he coincidentally never did.

“If you want to fill the concert halls, you have to play music that women will like. You can play altered scales and odd time signatures and intellectual shit, but then you’ll just have guys in the audience. And these music guys aren’t the ones who are gonna make you money, they’re gonna stand in the back and look real hard and talk about the chord changes you’re playing. You have to play pretty melodies and stuff that sounds romantic for the women. When a guy wants to bring his girl out for a date, they’re gonna go see something that she wants to listen to. So if you wanna make money, you gotta play something this guy can bring his girlfriend to.” #eyeroll

Talk about not knowing how to respond; I didn’t even know exactly what to say to my peers, what in the world am I supposed to say to a teacher, especially when he thinks he’s humorously sharing very profound information. #AAGH! #frustration

It seems as though dishing about women is also used as some sort of male-camaraderie-building-device. And I don’t necessarily mean sitting around complaining for hours to your buddies about your girlfriend; these types of comments are just made casually, at any time of the day, and for seemingly any or no reason. They were so off-hand much of the time that I’m sorry to say they stopped surprising me. I was sitting in the living room one afternoon eating lunch when one of my roommates walked out of the bathroom holding a copy of Women’s Day magazine. “Shit man,” he said, “women are so crazy.”

Um.

Right.

What am I even supposed to say to that? How about: If women are so crazy, then why are you reading Women’s Day magazine…?

Was this an offer for us two guys to bond over the mysteries of the opposite sex? Well, I wasn’t biting, that’s for damn sure. This type of comment came as no surprise from the guy who continually referred to women as “bitches,” and told us all that he was going to “fuck as many girls as possible,” while he and his girlfriend were apart attending their respective universities. Just to give you a bit of background, this roommate and I did not get on terribly well. The first night I met him he made a racist joke, then a homophobic joke, and then a sexist joke. For the first several weeks we were living together, he bragged constantly about how much he could drink, sometimes offering me one of his gigantic German beers and trying to coax me to drink with him. I would usually end up saying something like, no, it’s Tuesday, I have class in the morning, and then he would call me a pussy American, and talk about how he’d been drinking since he was thirteen and how he could drink forty-million beers and twelve bottles of vodka and blah blah blah. It was an altogether very irritating display of machismo. One night when we were all eating dinner together, he told some story about snowboarding and drinking and something happened where some guy who worked on the slopes told them to stop acting up or something. He described this authority figure as a “faggot.” My fork stopped mid-way to my mouth as I shook my head and said sternly, “don’t say that.”

“No, I will say that, because he was a faggot.”

“NO. DON’T. SAY. THAT.”

you should see the other guy...

He was constantly making himself out to be manly by putting down my other male roommate and I. BUT, when it was convenient, he would “team up” with us on the basis of our masculinity. Although I really couldn’t stand living with him at all, it had been an interesting sort of pseudo-sociological study on masculinity. I feel like my whole semester abroad has been an interesting study on masculinity, gender, and society, and although I have not been pleased by all of my findings, I have been surprised many times.

I observed an even more interesting male-bonding experience when said roommate had four of his buddies come and stay with us for the weekend. #torture

They arrived late on a Saturday night and immediately began drinking. I was awoken very early the next morning when they stumbled in from the cold and began to drunkenly cook food to loud house music. When I went upstairs to tell roommate to turn his music off because the rest of us were trying to sleep, he responded with a scoff and a “no,” and I could only assume that he was trying to look ultra-cool in front of his buddies.

Later in the morning when I got up for real, I walked into the kitchen/living area to find four half-naked guys sprawled about the couch and floor. When they finally woke up in the early afternoon, I was surprised by some of their antics. For instance, my roommate ran up behind one of his friends with a 2 liter Coke bottle in hand and then shoved it in his friend’s backside like he was pretending to sodomize him with it.

…

Well then.

Slightly homophobic as they seemed, I found that a lot of guys made various gay-vague jokes and comments. Whether it was pretending to bum their buddy with a soda bottle, or making jokes about sleeping over a friends house and sharing a bed and raping him during the night (I apologize for being so crude--any manner of sexual assault jokes are always in extremely bad taste--but so many came up that I feel I need to mention them here) it seemed as though maybe the reason these kinds of comments came up was to mask a slight discomfort with homosexuality. I don’t actually know, but along with objectification, I noticed that an alarmingly vast majority of the time, the topic of conversation somehow found its way there.

I was discussing the “Man Club,” over dinner one night with some friends when they brought up a very good question: they asked me if my distaste for all the male behavior I had experienced made me question my transition at all. Despite being rather put off by guy-to-guy conversation and behavior, none of it actually made me question my transition. In fact, over the past few months I have put together the clearest picture of my own identity that I’ve ever had. I’m definitely a guy, but I’m also no “macho-man.” I don’t care if everyone knows that I’m not ultra-masculine, either. What I do care about, is people respecting my identity even though it may not align with their picture of masculinity. I’m scared of spiders, don’t follow professional sports, don’t know anything about cars, don’t like to objectify women, and would prefer staying in to read or watch a nice documentary as opposed to going out to bars all night to hit on women. But that doesn’t mean I’m any less of a man. A big part of transitioning for me has been the realization that I really don’t need to conform to anyone else’s expectations or standards, and although it can be difficult and scary to break away from societal constraints, I am a lot happier and more centered when I allow myself to be free of these types of pressures.

there's just no substitute for self confidence

So in short, I’m definitely not questioning my transition, but I am constantly confused by my place in society and the world and by the actions of others.