Good Evening, y’all.
Yesterday, after texting about Marvel, the Suez Canal, and other topical issues, a friend – a rather prescient friend – texted me a screen cap of tweet that reads: “It’s so horribly telling that, so often, as soon as a woman realises you’re gay you can sense a reduction in hyper-vigilance. The threat level has fallen. I often find myself making my gayness very clear ASAP for this reason. I don’t know if straight men realise the extent of this.” Most of the week, I had been thinking of the flipside of this statement.
Photo by Kristine Hansen / Mug: Illi Art Collection / Gift of Michael and Eric.
I saw a female friend post something about women’s obsession with serial killer podcasts and shows that was meant to be funny. And for me it isn’t funny. There is a through-line from the statement “[Cis] Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” to women’s obsession with those podcasts and shows. Watching them is about knowing the worst – What if a man murdered me? What would that be? Would I be able to survive? How would I get out? In my own home, what are the ways out? Where are the knives? Anything else I could use to defend myself? That’s what that obsession is about.
That fear, the fear that men will kill us, is a trauma we carry from young ages. I cannot tell you the number of men – and I mean MEN – who asked me if I was a natural redhead from the age of nine or ten onwards. In high school, a fellow redheaded female classmate and I would discuss this and how best to respond.
At the age of 45, I still tell my woman friends to text me when they are home safely, regardless of their ages. We are all still hyper-vigilant about our personal safety. That doesn’t change with age, wrinkles, weight, or strength.
When I’ve felt most safe among men is among my gay male friends. Dancing. Having a meal. Having a drink. By safe, I don’t mean I expected any one of them to throw themselves in front of a punch or fight someone. Rather, I felt they wouldn’t harm me. I know I’m not alone in those feelings.
Until my friend texted me that screencap, I hadn’t thought about the shift of the emotional weight of it to our gay male friends. Toxic masculinity transfers hypervigilance and fear, and the trauma from both, to women. We in turn let that trauma and fear go in the presence of gay men. And those gay men who sense our hypervigilance and fear – at risk to themselves – feel the need to make their gayness known clearly and early so that we will let go. These men take on that emotional weight. How beautiful and loving and heartbreaking.
All of which is to say we need to kick toxic masculinity to the curb to save us all the trauma and the emotional weight we shift among each other.
That’s the evening tea.