Back in the 1970’s we had the idea that most men had a feminine side and most women had a masculine side, the degrees varying among different folks. We straight men had a lot of freedom in terms of gender expression. This was the glam rock and disco era, and we could do all sorts of crazy things without getting called gay. The assumption was everyone was straight until proven otherwise, which makes sense to me. No one talked about homosexuality much. Gays were not much out and consequently you hardly saw one or heard about them. Obviously they were walking about invisibly, but one could almost delude oneself that homosexuals barely existed.
If I wore now those crazy outfits I wore back, people would insist that I was gay. This would be a proven fact and no amount of arguing could convince anyone otherwise. This would also be the case if I acted as androgynous now as I did then. I always had a strong masculine side, but I had a strong feminine side running along with it in such an incomprehensible mix that a lot of people threw up their hands about my sexual orientation. I can’t tell you how many times people asked me in exasperation, “Are you straight or bi or gay or what!?” I didn’t make sense.
I was able to be a much softer, gentler, kinder, man, and I connected to women much better. Most of my friends were women because it seemed like I thought like them and that made it easy to click with them, and frequently macho males often made me sick. I used to joke that guys either wanted to fuck me or beat me up and sometimes both.
I’m angry and sad. I enjoyed having more of my feminine side out. It’s a beautiful part of me, and it softens a lot of my typically male aggression. I adopted a hard, tough, Alpha masculine role, and while I could do this, I had to lower my feminine side to do it. Hypermasculine is not bad and a lot of women like it, but I often feel that I don’t act like myself anymore,
The rise of gay rights also reduced a lot of gender expression for straight men because straight men began constricting their gender expression to hardening the masculine and reducing the feminine as a way to not be seen as gay.
If you want to know why men act hypermasculine, here you go. I am straight but I have been gay-bashed three times, once with a baseball bat. He was beating me in the head with the bat and screaming faggot. Also, people often thought I was gay or bi, and radfems might disagree, but this is not a good thing for a straight man in straight society, as it causes a lot of stupid problems that never seem to go away. And gay men won’t leave you alone.
You can solve all of these problems, avoid getting beaten by bats, and keep gay men at much more of a distance if you just macho it up to hypermasculinity. We men are not stupid. We don’t act hypermasculine to scare off women or hate women. Often it just makes life so much easier.
