Some crusty gender musings
These are just some things I've been thinkin on for a while about how I experience my own gender and how it relates to crust punk. Mostly drawing on my experiences being nonbinary and having hyperhidrosis.
Any feedback welcome :)
Femininity can be described as the behavioural and performative component of the cisheteropatriarchal conception of womanhood and it is deeply tied with heterosexuality. It is the unwritten set of rules, behaviours, expectations, and others, which women, and people that are maliciously ore ignorantly misread as women, are expected to conform to in order to correctly be a woman. How we speak, how we dress, how we act, how we carry ourselves; all of these things and more are under constant scrutiny and are policed so that we are, at all times, supposed to be a woman correctly.
It's then the right of those of us who don't sit so comfortably in this stifling box to reject this femininity, and for some, womanhood entirely, and to find as many ways to rebel against it as we can. In a world where our bodies are so closely watched and where ridiculous standards are expected of us, there's relief, joy, and power in being ale to just let our bodies do what they do.
And one of the most upsetting (to cishet and class society_ things our bodies do is smell.
We're bombarded with propaganda every day telling us we need to Smell Good™ at all times in order to be socially accepted. For people cisheteropatriarchal society shoves into the box labelled "woman", it comes with even stronger expectations that we must smell perfect, like roses and lavender, at all times in order to be appealing and sexually available to men.
For those of us who refuse to fit into this stifling, destructive box, one of the easiest and most upsetting ways we can rebel against this is to stink. Openly, comfortably, and happily stink. To abandon the deodourants and perfumes and sprays we're told must be vital parts of our everyday wear. To not shower every single day. To rewear clothes as long as we want if we can't be fucked changing them.
