“What do you want in a woman?” she asked him. It was his turn and he dreaded it.
He looked at the others in the circle, afraid.
“What I think I want,” he began hesitantly, before remembering to breathe, “what I want is a woman who loves—I mean, desires the male body, but hates men.”
For a moment, no one said anything. His eyes darted around, worried no one was responding. “I mean, hates how men are in our culture. So she is really, strongly attracted to the male body, but despises men, despises their cultural…personalities, their…” He stumbled for the word he wanted. “Their masculinity.”
Everyone remained quiet, processing or perhaps preparing their rebuttals, he didn’t know. He added, “And I know I’m tainted with it too. I’m despicable. And I need help escaping. But…”
“You’re okay,” someone said.
He tried to continue his thought. “If a woman loved me as a male body, accepted me that way, maybe it would give me a path, you know, to throwing off our culture, male culture, and like you say, becoming okay.”
“Well, that’s a good answer,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s a start. I feel like there’s another part, too. I want a woman who also throws off modern culture. I mean, regarding expectations of female beauty. To me, the female body is inherently beautiful, you know, and wonderful. Shaving hair off, wearing makeup, cutting eyebrows, I feel like those expectations are toxic to women. Why can’t we just be ourselves, our human bodies? Why must we be made to feel our bodies are inadequate?” He stopped, realizing he was dominating the conversation—up there on his soap box acting like a know-it-all.
Mansplaining.
“You should stop there. Men should not be dictating beauty norms to women.” This was one of the women in the group who had gone before him.
“I agree. But we do—men do—we have done this all along, through male-dominated culture. To the point where women constantly feel their bodies are inadequate. They weigh too much, have too much body hair, the skin pores on their faces are visible.” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking.”
“No, you shouldn’t. It makes me angry when men lecture women about how they should look,” one of the other women in the group said.
No one spoke for a moment.
“I know,” he jumped in again. “The weird thing is that men don’t even need to lecture because women have internalized all the male-generated beauty rules through our modern culture. We’re all trapped.” He shrugged, knowing he was going too far. But he hated it all, modern culture, modern beauty propaganda. He despised it. “Why can we just be ourselves, our bodies? Male or female?”
“Or trans.”
“Or trans,” he agreed. “Our bodies are us. Why does culture make us hate ourselves, what we really are?” He was talking too much. He hated himself.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I probably don’t belong here.”
“Yes, you do.”
….
[Later]
“You said you want a woman who hates men,” one of the woman asked him. “But you’re a man.” She open up her palms in front of herself. “So how does that work?”
“I’m also a human male body,” he explained. “So I would hope she loved my body, but hated all my cultural male stuff. You know, hated my masculinity and maybe helped me escape it. But loved me as this body I am.”
There was silence for a moment, so he added, “You know, hated my soul but loved the physical me.”
She shook her head. “That’s backwards. Don’t you want someone to love your soul? That’s the real you.”
“I hope not.”
“Now you’re being scary.”
“I guess I use words differently. I dislike modern culture. I think it’s wrong about just about everything, especially about this—about what we are. I’m not a soul, I’m a body.”
“But you have feelings, right?”
“I’m a body with feelings that represent it, or at least should represent it. Would, if culture and religion didn’t get in the way.”
“But you have feelings. That’s your soul.”
“Right,” another woman added. “Feelings are the most important thing about you. They are you!”
“Yeah, that’s not how I see it,” he responded. “The feelings I have are tainted by the culture I live in, grew up within, and this taints my personality so that it can’t represent what I really am, this human body, like it’s supposed to. I have to learn to throw off toxic culture, the toxic parts of modern culture, so that I can discover the real, unadulterated feelings that well up from my body, that actually represent me, or are supposed to.”
He hated himself. He was always talking too much and he knew it. Yet he didn’t know how to stop trying to explain what his body needed him to explain.
….
Walking home, he went over the basic problem in his mind.
He had come to recognize that he was his body, that his body was him, that his so-called mind was not him. He was a body with thoughts—yes, thoughts meant to speak for the body, for himself; but still, his thoughts were not himself.
He was this male body walking around in the midst of a world of similar bodies—but strangely the other bodies seemed to have all been hijacked by their minds. It created in him an extreme feeling of estrangement from everyone else.
It was a specifically cultural estrangement, one that constantly felt like a state of falling off a cliff into nightmare. And the nightmare was minds controlling all the bodies around him; human bodies enslaved to their minds, to thoughts, to disembodied culture in the broadest sense.
His estrangement was pretty extreme. He was a male body like half the bodies around, but for them maleness seemed to be a mindset, not a body-set. A mindset utterly alien, at that. Like other boys he got erections, nocturnal emissions, he masturbated. But unlike them he had always empathized strongly with girls, and growing up could rarely empathize with fellow males. “Boys are dislikable, girls likable,” he had written in his journal when he was sixteen.
Males who weren’t gay talked about females in a manner he strongly disliked. Males almost always had interests he disliked. TV shows, movies, music—what was popular rarely appealed to him. Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, Friends, whatever, it was not interesting to him. He liked Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; he did not like sci-fi, super heroes, explosions, car chases, horror, zombies, dumb and dumber comedy.
The males he knew played computer games, talked talked talked computer games— Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Steam, Xbox, Minecraft, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Switch, he didn’t know all the names or even clearly which was game and which was game platform.
Females seemed generally to play nicer games, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, Mario Cart, Sims—but even so he could not fathom the appeal. Yes he could discern that computer games tickled minds, and that somehow controlling an avatar of a self in a game appealed to everyone’s rogue, disembodied mind.
But how could games with imitation selves appeal to the actual bodies that generated the minds playing the game? —this he couldn’t figure out.
Only, somehow reality had flipped into a nightmare where disembodied minds—acting as if disembodied, at least—thrived on the entertainment value of controlling avatar bodies, avatar selves, much as they yearned to control their own actual bodies, actual selves.
Because, somehow, the control these minds sought over their host bodies could never be fully successful or satisfying IRL, therefore the appeal of avater-based games?
He just didn’t know, his mind simply could not fathom the draw of mental disembodiment or desire for mental control over everything.
“Culture, which is inherently mental, controls us when we ought to be controlling culture for our mutual benefit,” he wrote in his journal when he got home. “Us” and “we” to him meant our bodies. But for everyone around him, “us” and “we” meant our minds. This was the essential problem. He wasn’t quite sure how to explain it to anyone.
“Why is there a body below us,” he wrote. “Why is it not us?”
How, he wondered, did our consciousness, our mentalities, get so disembodied? Did bad religion do this?
His own body seemed full of religious feelings. But the religions everyone believed in seemed always built on body-denying thoughts. Souls separable from bodies, separate.
Even, it seemed—or especially—religion had been hijacked by thoughts, thoughts complicit in a disembodied rebellion that had taken over human culture and vainly tried to control us.
Nor did it seem a coincidence that the boys on the football team, and other sports teams, were the most religious people in school. For them, control over their bodies to the point of mastery was necessary for success in competition. A disembodied mind would thus bring more success than an embodied mind, especially true in the weight room.
Disembodied religion made mind over body mastery more likely. So it seemed.
It was not for him. He didn’t want to be famous, didn’t want to be a hero. Didn’t crave accolades or adulation; he just wanted to be a happy, healthy himself with an embodied mind that knew its place in life.