#sensitive masculinity

[alukardtheabysswalker]

I know it would be asking for too much given how we already got a masterpiece with SPOP but I would LOVE for Noelle and her team to get the rights to a He-Man show. Not only because of my Childhood ™ but because my little heart would explode knowing they'd make a show focused on sensitive masculinity and to see one of my childhood heroes as an Icon of Alternative Masculinity... 😭😭😭😭😭💜💜💜💜💜

[alukardtheabysswalker]

In this blog we love and respect the Icon of Alternative and Sensitive masculinity Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy himself.

You have no idea what it was to be a teenage boy with a lot of self loathing who was always bullied for "not acting like a man" and just catching this movie one day and be absolutely destroyed on the spot by this scene

[alukardtheabysswalker]

I think a lot of my own construction of what I want my masculinity to be is related to the love I feel towards women. More than just feel, a way to express and work said love that is different to the one presented in our current and previous iterations of love. You can see a lot of LGBTQII+ people who never saw representation of their own love in media. Not only romantic love and loving other people, also loving themselves in the most raw sense of the word. And of course on the contrary there is a lot of representation of straight love. But when it comes to making a new masculinity and new love, while I may not be straight and still thinking about that, let’s for the time being just speak as what I am at the moment, in many ways what I’ll always be. I’m a cishet white man. Granted I am latino and live with the racism that many of my people suffer, but it just so happens that my family is all descendents of Europeans, mostly italians. As anyone living in latinoamerica can tell you, racism is well established here too, and I see a lot of privilege just for not being part of the indigenous groups that still struggle to this day.

My love, be it for myself and others is well represented in media. But when you want to deconstruct and make your own identity separated from these standards then you can tell that no, I actually don’t want that, I am not that. 

It is important to mention that of course I can’t stop being privileged. The best I can do is question said privilege and act against it. So then it becomes a very personal work this construction of my masculinity and my love. And of course, the personal is political.

I can name a few stories that have been shown to make a very good or at least close to good representation of what I would rather be my identity and love. Pride and Prejudice, The Black Corsair, Lord of The Rings. None of these are perfect examples but anyone that has read them can probably tell what I’m talking about. Loving and caring cishet couples that fully respect each other. But the majority of cishet love in media and unfortunatley in our own lives is quite the contrary. I don’t like the love and masculinity that I see in media, it doesn’t represent what I want for myself, for this identity and love that's honestly been with me forever, I just have been ashamed of working on it.

Anyone that’s been in tumblr for a while, or has listened to Hozier, can see and admire all the very profound ways in which LGBTTQI+ folk write and talk about love and romance. It feels inspiring and makes you feel, well, it makes you feel intensively. This of course is not only very beautiful to see but also very much necessary. If they won’t rep themselves who will? Certainly not mainstream media.

So I find myself much like I was as a kid and a very depressed teenager. I want to love, so deeply and intensively, and I see people not only doing so but expressing said love in so many ways. In words that just take my breath away. But when I turn my gaze at mainstream media I almost despise what I see. I don’t want to be that, I don’t want to be that man nor do I want that cheap and damaging act that they pretend is the way I’m supposed to love, much less how to love women.

I want to give myself wholly, to admire almost to the point of worship, to make a life in which we both care, cherish and respect each other. Where we can talk, laugh, cry, rely on each other and understand each other. To, as Hozier sings, “Be felt by you, held by you, fuel the pyre of your enemies”.

I want to make, to write, to sing of a love and a life that is not the bronze painted dolls that I’m shown, but of a kind, caring, friendly and above all loving man.