Welcome back!

This is part of my ongoing series of interviews with men on masculinity. I am sorry for the long hiatus in posting these. The travel I have been doing has gotten in the way a bit.

This interview is actually with a kinky, female, top who has been one of the most steadfast commenter on this series. Trinity (who has a brilliant blog) discusses how her BDSM role relates to her perceptions of masculinity and her own performance of it.

When was the first time you remember being aware of masculinity? How old were you? What was the cultural climate or influence?

Aware it existed? I don’t know, other than just a vague sense that men were threatening coupled with a vague sense that I wanted to do the things that our society said was sexually reserved for them. Feeling like I was an alien for being female and wanting those things. Wondering, years later, when I found a trans man’s website about sex, describing some of the things he did and wanted to do and how he did them, if that was me. Feeling like I’d finally found descriptions of sex and sexuality that fit.

I was more aware of femininity and how it didn’t fit, and how everyone either tried to convince me to fit it or called me “he.” I was very unhappy with either of those options. (I don’t so much feel uncomfortable with being read as male nowadays. I kind of like it. I wonder about transition, but I’m not sure I’d feel any more comfortable on the other end of the gender continuum than I do on this one.)

As far as really thinking about the word, not until a Women’s Studies class in college. The point was the social stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and how stifling they are, but I felt weird and attacked even though I understood. I felt like I was being described as this enemy to women, when as far as I could tell I was one. I didn’t like the word—as it was presented it described some pretty icky people, it seemed—but I liked what it was supposed to represent, and came to see myself as on the masculine side of androgynous.

Which I still do, and that’s part of why I wrestle with whether or not I qualify as “butch.” (That I’m queer but not a dyke—I tend to date men—is the other.) I dress in a way I’d call butch when I’m wearing clothes I feel good in, I fuck in a masculine way, I go by Sir in the leather community and wonder where the matron is when someone says Ma’am… but I wonder how much of that is sexual persona and how much is my essence. They’re definitely intertwined, but there’s a lot of kink in it all. Which sometimes makes me fear I’m trampling on the toes of people who have it harder, since they’re not “just” folks with a fetish.

Do you think of yourself as masculine? Why or why not?

I have kind of a love-hate relationship with the term. I use it because I still feel I’m a little too androgynous to be “butch,” but I’m not sure if I’m too androgynous to quite qualify as “masculine” either. “Masculine female” is the closest bad approximation when I’m trying to say that look, my sense of my gender and body and role and what I want from those things is not like what I see most women wanting.

How does your masculinity relate to your sexuality (be it your orientation, preferences, or expressions)?

I’m a stone (most of the time) top. I’d much rather penetrate than be penetrated, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily masculine (femmes with sparkly strap-ons under their skirts are yay, and no less feminine), for me it fits with my gender and my sense of myself in a way that I do think of as masculine.

While it may not be popular in Feministlund to say this, and I definitely don’t think it’s true of everyone, I actually do suspect that I was born this way. I knew from a very, very young age that what people told me females were designed to do sexually was wrong for me, and what people told me males were designed to do sexually was right for me. It caused me great distress as a young child, as I knew nothing about strap-ons or whatever else. I thought I was crazy, and tried desperately to try to make myself feel that bottoming sexually seemed natural and right. I was angry at my body for not being equipped to have sex right, though I didn’t think of myself as a boy.

Though I’ve also seen some references to studies that suggested that girls who had disabilities grew up to behave in ways considered more masculine as a way of coping with being impaired or sick. So who knows.

At any rate I think this is a part of who I am and not something that should be laid at the feet of society.