Following on from my last post about sex and fantasy, I thought we’d go one step further with a trip around gender; or at least my take on it! I don’t want to get into a debate on trans rights. I am a firm ally, that is all you need to know.
A lot appears to have changed in the nearly 52 years around gender, or has it?
The initial inspiration for this song was Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wildside, but it was also quickly followed by Motley Crue’s Wild Side, which is the opening track for the Girls, Girls, Girls album. Perhaps these are very seemingly different tracks released 15 years apart, but I feel there is a connection somewhere.
Released in 1972, Walk on the Wildside is full of lyrics which explore the underground subculture of New York at that time. The players in the song are all marginalised in some way and are heavily intertwined with queer culture. Most of the characters are trans, and for the general populous of the time they would still have been a rarity on the streets.
Just three years after the Stonewall riots, being anything other than a straight white male in America, was still a dangerous path to walk.
In 1987 Motley Crue released their fourth album, with our opening track. Whilst the lyrics talk more of drugs and violence than sexuality, the band themselves are what stretches the boundaries of what it meant to be male in the 80s. Many of their publicity shots of the time saw them with enough hairspray to damage the atmosphere and lashings of either lipstick or lip gloss and a hefty dose of blush. The glam rock scene of the 80s at its finest.
Of the two, the ‘characters’ that made up Motley Crue would have been generally more acceptable than perhaps Holly and Candy.
But why?
Personally, I think it’s because Vince Neil et al were all hetero males who played on certain aspects of femininity whilst Holly and Candy fully embraced their feminine side. There is something about the latter that many people cannot handle, especially the aforementioned hetero males!
Gender is not so clear-cut.
Take me, for example. I identify as a female, I have no wish to be male. However, if you look at my attitudes and interests, many of them are heavily on the male side of the scale. I have straight male friends, who equally have a lot of traditionally feminine traits. I also have many queer male friends and trans friends who are a delightfully complex mix of all of the above.
I struggle with people being put in boxes. It may be that because of my musical tastes, and my love of subculture. I was surrounded by people who stretched the boundaries of what was possible, or it may just be that we’re not that simple.
If you look at fantasy, which we briefly touched on in my last blog; there is a whole array of beautifully colourful fantasies that our brains come up with. Both straight men and women fantasise about experiences, that if they acted out, would put them in the queer camp. But for many, that is just a dream that stays firmly inside their heads.
Does that not tell us something?
If you look at the WHO definition of gender, then it is just something that we’ve made up. It is a social construct which was penned down after a bunch of people came to a consensus about what made us male and female.
I can imagine a bunch of old white men, sitting there with their clipboards deciding what is classed as desirable male traits, and anything that did fit, was firmly added to the female list. Perhaps that is why men, in particular, seem to have more issues with people who don’t fit the nice neat demographic of males?
What makes me sad about this, is how many of us will have been ridiculed for our traits that are on the opposite side of the list? I’ve been called butch for my behaviours many times, and it is like water off a ducks back now. But I can see how that has been incredibly damaging for young people.
It’s still damaging people now.
What I do want people to do is to be more forgiving of themselves. Make peace with a past that may well have persecuted them for being different, or non-typical. I loved my Matchbox cars as a kid. I loved the men who embraced their feminine side (Adam Ant, I am looking at you here) and in my goth days, I also loved a good corset and a heaving bosom.
There is something exceptional about those of us who are happy to sit with our contradictions, and also incredibly dangerous.
So 53 years after the journey of Candy and Holly, and if you feel safe to do so, I encourage you to take your own walk on the wildside. You never know what you might find out!
Not Middle Aged 