In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large man came sloping in, one of those outsized softies whom I never used to see in Ghana, nor, for that matter, in Berlin: tall and stooping, strong but run to fat, crouching over his table as though he feared being forbidden to sit down. The same waitress came to him, scolding.
“You’re late! You’re usually here way earlier than this, what have you been up to?”
Meekly he explained whatever personal thing had altered his day. Doctor’s appointment, tenancy inspection. Once he had humbled himself to her aggression she softened, and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re here now, no need to make a fuss about it.”
The double-whammy! I sat back, impressed. She went on waitressing, he went on crouching and mooning, I went on writing, and then when he got up to leave and he and I had exchanged a wry smile I put out my hand as he passed by my table. “Can I say something?”
Sure, he said, submissive to the death. In an undertone I told him, “You don’t have to explain yourself to the wait staff, you know.”
He looked startled, then submissive once more. There is manhood there, but it’s lurking underneath. “Oh,” is what he said, “it doesn’t bother me.” And as I watched him shambling out of the cafe into the rapidly clearing afternoon rain I thought: It’s going to bother your next girlfriend, though: I’ll tell you that right now. Having to stand up for you, having to do all that mothering. Having to nudge you towards the manly adulthood without which she is unprotected in your relationship. Unprotected from sassy wait staff who like to subtly keep their customers hopping. Unprotected from other men.
Tag: manhood
-
a man of mouse
-
a trans man
Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real was to do with age – “at 54 if I had been born female my menstruation would have stopped by now, anyway.”
He is a kind man and would never intrude himself into female change rooms or bathrooms but has appeared in local films and performances about vulvas and about womanhood. I was nearly in tears, we both were. He explained how much it hurts him that I cannot accept that his dysphoria, with which I empathise, makes him female. And I explained how much it hurts me for him to think he knows what it is to be female better than I. I told him it made me feel like to him I’m invisible.
When he was telling me I surely don’t believe I get to define him, and I was dealing with the familiar, programmed feelings of feminine accommodation and trying to think clearly, it all of a sudden came to me: it’s not me sitting here telling you I know better than you do who you are.
It’s you. You are telling me, telling the world, telling yourself you know better than I do what makes someone a woman. You think you, born and raised male, a man whose very skeleton if dug up a thousand years after our lifetimes, whose dental records show you to be male, get to tell me, tell all women, what we are. And that we daren’t exclude you.
I told him all women experience dysphoria. All of us are told constantly our bodies are wrong. It was a very sad and painful conversation and I told him I admire his courage for living radically outside the masculine patriarchal role. Nevertheless he interrupted me repeatedly, grew angry when I disagreed with his pronouncements on reality, and claimed greater ownership of science. Male, male, male. And he seemed very preoccupied with the difficulties of living outside the male role and had not one thought to spare for the scorn and violence experienced by butch lesbians who eschew the performance of femininity.
-
May Day, May Day
Two people made fuck, out on the concreted area in front of the apartments. I recognised the act by her cries. He had her sprawled over a car bonnet with his hand around her throat, and for a few minutes I watched clenching my fists. Were those cries of despair? Is she ok? Do I need to rescue this woman from rape?
But then she got up and staggered before him for a minute and lifted away her skirts on either side like a ladybird’s tissuey inner wings. The pale curves of her bottom and thighs were perfect with youth, like two slices of soft long pears from a can. She presented to him her hindquarters and bent herself forward with yearning. He drew her back into his lap and then, skewered, she twisted herself round to kiss. Now and again someone walked past them and they simply froze in place, his place just now being immemorial. A couple of girls strolled by with their cell phones lighted and I feared a filming, an aggression, a posting which would attempt to shame, but the girl walking just ahead lifted her phone and continued a conversation without, apparently, noticing the two there who were holding down the fort. He lifted her jumper to cup her breast. It is cold. They rearranged themselves again and she spread herself on her back on the shiny car, her legs like searchlights. Next morning I went down to buy bread, because we are Germans now, and passed the chalked square for a parked car where they had set each other alight. The big sprawling dark car was gone and in its place a tiny blue and silver rechargeable, as though the yelping congress in the night had already borne its fruit.
-
hungry in Spain
I saw three Spanish boys doing parkour in the gardens. I have run out of money and am hungry: it’s temporary. To a Spaniard gardens means a large, bare, gravelled expanse with formally clipped hedges and dark, clotting trees. The smell of the cyprus is familiar from home. I sat on a bench under the trees and watched these boys for half an hour. They were trying to climb a sheer twelve-foot wall using their speed and hands and concentration and willpower. To my right a couple in puffer jackets were smoking some excellent weed. I sat watching the three boys in their baggy grey pants intently concentrating, doing it for themselves, and was overcome with dark sexual longing. I adored them. They went at it over and over, always exactly the same, one of them actually scaled the wall and stood on top clutching the railing with both hands before he dropped lightly back to earth like an angel, I thought: were it not for tree-planting and feeding the hungry I think this would be the noblest pursuit a young man can throw himself into, in this messed-up, traffic-scarred, urbanised world.
A child of four or five threw his teddy up in the air again and again for his mother to catch and hurl back to him. His teddy-loving days, I thought, are numbered, and not high. Another couple hid inside the boy’s parka hood and with intense delicacy grazed on each other’s faces. I saw a man cycle past guiding with one hand the back of his child’s tiny bicycle, he had a large paper butterfly she had hand-painted with sparkles attached to his backpack and flapping. Spanish girls with their luscious long hair. On every corner a hairdresser, a pharmacy. The underground train which is livid with voices laughing, chatting, like a big, relaxed club. The five elders sitting side by side, four men and one lady, formally attired and letting the last drops of sunlight fall on them along the lip of a large statue, in granite, of some soldier or some prince.
-
manhood: let’s rejoice
Six beautiful teenage men were doing parkour across the roof of the sunken restrooms by the harbour. Ropes gently knocking against masts, land-passengers drowsing at cafe tables in the sun, and this buoyant half-dozen pruning their dedication, lightness, skill. It was wonderful to watch. They do it in total silence, wearing soft shoes and baggy trackpants. You see a guy size something up. He makes an internal decision: ok I’m going to take a run up from back here, leapfrog that bollard, then run up that wall and stand upright without using my hands. He goes and does it, successfully. Or, he falls back into a relinquishing roll and laughs softly to himself. God, they were beautiful to watch. I loved how they tried again and again; how they lept across danger and scaled things without a word; how they never paused to congratulate themselves nor erupt in applause, nothing aggrandizing, nothing loud, it was for the skill and the joy of it and utterly silent apart from the brown-haired boy who always said to himself, in English, as he made the last effort: “God, someone’s after me, Oh no! someone’s after me.” Manhood is not extinct, let’s rejoice. Manhood is instinct.
-
you want a peace of me
Tonight I intervened in somebody’s love mess and may well have made things worse. I had cycled through the lit tunnel under the bridge four times for the sheer joy and came out blinking into the stormy-seeming piled sky, alongside the frozen-over river. I heard a shout. A tall man was dragging his much smaller girlfriend by the collar of her coat, shaking her like a puppy, while she cowered and pled. It took a second with her face hidden and in the dark to ascertain this wasn’t mutual horseplay. Hey, I shouted, then really bellowed HEY! Leave her alone!
She was shrinking inside her clothes and he was a shrunken king, big in the body but small in the soul. Hey! I cried again, and he paused in his torment to shake a big fist at me. I don’t know what “You wanna piece of me?” sounds like in Danish, but then again, I think now I do. I was yelling to her, trying to speak slow and clear, praying all Danes understand English: Walk away! You, girl, please! Just walk away. Two other women huddled in the bus stop asked, what was going on. By now the fraught couple had retreated (first rule of evading attack: do not go where he leads you) behind a big tree and she was crouching on the ground like a servant, in her fur-lined parka, her supplicant head bent as he yelled down at her and she took it. After a while seeing he was being watched the coward started gentling and soothing, he crouched opposite and the young woman in the bus stop said, naively, It’s alright now.
We daren’t go any closer. Their stronger-minded friend walked past, I didn’t catch her name but the other two girls called out to her and she said, Well, we don’t know what kind of guy he is. I said, I think I know exactly what kind of guy he is. Well, she said, but if he has a gun – or a knife –
They must have called the police because the three of them climbed on their bus when it arrived and moments later a police officer with a piercing flashlight lept out of a car. He talked to the ‘man’ and his female colleague talked to the woman, who had her back turned from shame, and the upshot was the couple climbed into his big black SUV and roared away. We can do nothing, the policeman said, if she stays. People are grown-ups. Yes, I said; she has to want to walk away. Exchanged cards with the lovely-faced Persian guy who had climbed off his bicycle and he said, Next time you come to Copenhagen, you don’t have to stay in a hotel. Nonetheless… I think I will. I think of that girl, home with him now, cowering and pleading. May she find the strength that’s inside us all. May he. And stop your bullying.