Consider the essays you’ve read this week about the potential influence of something like gender on writing. Does your gender in any way influence what you write? In what ways?
I've never given much thought to how gender affects my writing. Maybe that's due to being a man in a society that still largely treats masculinity as the default. But as I'm looking back, I can see a few threads that might be enlightening to tease out.
First is the fact that I have never been ideally masculine. Not in the sense that I've actively rejected it. But as a small, weak, underdeveloped, socially anxious teenager, I hit very few criteria for what a boy should be. This stage in my life coincided with my initial attempts at writing, and also my initial infatuation with it. And when I look at these early attempts—stories of violence with tough, unfeeling male protagonists; poems that are almost always impersonal, describing concepts I hadn't encountered with words I borrowed from others; essays that lack any hint of emotion—I think that they're ways I distanced myself from my emotions (or even from my own thoughts) in order to make myself more acceptable.
When I was younger, I believed I would never amount to much in a physical way. I was gangly, slow, uncoordinated, and generally not physically capable. I don't remember caring much about my appearance at the time, but I was also short, and small, wore glasses that were occasionally taped because of how often I broke them, and had braces that looked like they were hanging on for their lives as my teeth leaped out of my mouth in fifty different directions. So there were two ideals of masculinity I was clearly not going to meet: physical ability and appearance.
Thus I took refuge in what I thought to be an alternative way to lay claim to social capital and masculinity: intelligence and academia. This was what I was already good at. I was used to getting praise from teachers, being the first to answer questions in class, and spending my free time in the library. So I think I convinced myself that writing was going to be my ticket to being something, to being a kind of man, in the world. As I've discussed before on this blog, I embedded this idea so firmly that even as I lapsed in actual writing, I considered myself a writer.
But things changed for me in the last two years of high school. To utterly disregard Lad Tobin's bemoaning of the "conventional male narrative," sports were in fact a transformative part of my life. I'd run cross country since fifth grade but never been any good. Now I was succeeding, and finding in the process that people looked up to me. Others respected me, not for being smart and getting A's, but for something I had done physically. And it felt good.
Since then, my self-image has become much more balanced. I still strive to achieve my best in school, and I'm still a bit of a nerd. But through coming to accept my body and my physical abilities as an integral part of myself, not a lesser thing to be discarded in search of academic validation, my writing has also improved. It's become less pretentious, more emotional, more involved with who I am, not just what I think about. I'm not a brain in a jar, but a person with a brain. Paradoxically, as I've come to be more traditionally "masculine," my writing has become less so—more vulnerable and emotional. Because once I accept that I am a man, I'm free to explore what that means beyond stereotypes. Instead of trying to grasp at something to fix a deficiency in myself, I recognize that I was never deficient. Only my view of myself was.
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