Daddy I’m a man!

Exercises in masculinity

Father and Sons (1-4)

[JP]

Taking up space. Women dominate significantly less space than men, closed in on ourselves. Sat down across from us reading a menu, sit two men, their arms spread out as if there is a lump of stone in front of their chest. We try to replicate and it feels awkward and heavy limbed. It gets cold and I feel my legs wrap around myself, I have to force them to stay open. We play back a video of us talking; my fingers self-consciously feel for my lips and my mouth purses, feminine. My posture is tight to my body, I wince at my girlishness. The second clip I am transfixed with my own reflection, like a badly acted porn film, I cannot tear myself away from the gaze of the camera, I follow its eyes with a self-conscious vanity. I still cannot sit like a dude. I am all flailing arms and fingers, eyes agog at my little elfin head as it animates before me.

I don’t feel confident, we’ve watched various you-tube videos that tell you that men sit, walk, stand with confidence. My attempts without this assured confidence are paltry. I just feel like a fake, I am so obsessed with trying to ‘pass’ as a real, true, bona-fide man in terms of looking right that my masculinity has no real character, no real meat and bones. AnnaMaria (aka Adam – my pseudo name is Jens) and I spoke the other night about what we were trying to do, about our failures, our insecurities, phobias and desires. I had been so preoccupied with this physical transformation that I had almost forgotten about the ‘man’ that I had wanted to become. This self-assured, sex-driven, hideously misogynistic man, whose very being exuded his sexual prowess. I need to find him. I need to become him. He is in there somewhere, lurking beneath the surface, just begging to come out to play. But how do I coax him out? I suggested that firstly I need to mature through adolescence before I can find him. Do I need to act out the teenage dude, the randy perspiring little geek who no one ever picks for the football team, was that me? Yes, that was always me. Skinny and pasty, with a propensity for selling porn, and dad’s tuna sandwiches, my lunch sold like hot cakes as my stomach slowly growled on empty.

Adam said that I don’t necessary need to be a man, that there are women out there with enough balls and masculinity. I can stop shedding every selfhood and security that I ever built, about my body not being ‘right’ and ‘enough’. All those years of slaying insecurities, of growing into my body and learning to love and accentuate what is there, instead of desiring for another body. I think that is why this shedding of my femininity and my attempt to step into maleness left me feeling so adolescent, so robbed of all my being, my body was not mine because I did not want to lay claim to it. But I am taking it back, I am taking back my tiny waist, and long lanky legs, with breasts that lie like the ‘tiny upturned bellies of fallen sparrows’ – I think that was a recital of a Leonard Cohen line, a self-titled ‘ladies man’ – and my little face with giant eyes. He showed me pictures and videos of female bodied masculinity, beautiful and raw in their virility. Androgynous creatures, that lie on the cusp of gender, neither male nor female. I like this in-between-ness, my whole practice resounds around this theme, and so I slip inside and embody this duality with a wave of welcoming pleasure.

[AMP]:

3. I am silent and heavy. I don’t say much. I speak some but I don’t say much. I don’t need to say much. My decisions just come across, I just come across. Inside me is written ‘MAN’, in yellow and brown. That is privacy. I have some serious problems understanding how others receive me in life. I make mistakes all the time. But I have this private certainty. A secret.

Something more adventurous is at play than how I carry my secrets around when I pass as female. I know how to pass as female, though i sometimes fail.

[AMP (AnnaMaria Pinaka)]:

Yummy.

I don’t believe anyone. I am not exactly depressed I just don’t like myself. My wife and two kids are well and that is what is important. I don’t like being pushed. My name is K.P.

Well, usually in writing I d try to be ‘honest’ but I don’t know what honest is at this stage. I imagined that I would go to a place where silence makes sense but it seems that sense comes out of choices. Do I have any choices?

The bike-rides remind me how much of a scared bastard I am. Though I am not a phobic man. I am a man that has forgotten something. Manhood at this primary stage is about forgetting. I ve kind of forgotten what I wanted to say.

Looking at the boys on the streets I don’t know if I find anything attractive in them. Some of them are cool but the kind of coolness I look to embody (male or female) seems ridiculous. How does one come to perform a detail of themselves to impress a crowd? A detail so important that cam become monumental in an art context in a point in historical time.

Getting lost like when falling in love, admitting a lack and everything. A lack that is an illusion. I guess we are looking for something that is constant. And what will happen if I die? If I was to die it would mean that everyone has lied. Shit.

I got a message from some man that fucked me 5 or 10 times 4 years ago; he says he is sorry about how he treated me. I am tempted to write back and point out how sex with him was dissatisfying. But then there is all this talk about satisfaction.

And what is commitment all about?

The first days was basically a deconstruction of our identities based on releasing or letting go of our female charms and undressing off our identities. That pushed me to some mental edge pretty quickly and I wanted out of that pressure. I decided to become someone expressive in filth. Fuck, I ve missed writing so much. I though I need to hold on to my sanity somewhat so I can deliver. The limitations of my body are pronounced. Not my tits or my curves but how I hold, carry it and how I feel about it.

And there is something major about exchange and dependence going on. The lack of time. The more there is the more it is not enough.

Three aspects:

1.Volcano. He is a guy that usually doesn’t know what’s going on, he is careless. What I like about him is that I don’t need to put much thought in him cause he himself doesn’t think much. I am also playing here with mocking somewhat the artist Del la grace Volcano who I should note I admire very much. The artist is nothing like my Volcano guy but I am drawing from the word volcano, explosive and aggressive, ready to spit out fire, if I ever wake up after centuries of sleep. Volcano is to do one thing at the moment, sing a song showing us all what he’s got which is: his unique ability to disassociate. As a kid he stayed focused to an imaginary world under all circumstances, he is a committed man and he will tell us his truth:

You spin me right round, baby
right round like a record, baby
Right round round round
You spin me right round, baby
Right round like a record, baby
Right round round round.

2. F. , my mother’s lover. He is a painter. He lives in the 80’s where he is freshly divorced and has a son my age. He has a studio where I sit and watch him paint abstract. It’s really dirty and he makes space for me to sit and watch. I ask him what something at a painting is but I don’t understand/remember what he says. I want to find out how he makes love to my mum, if he got her pregnant and if he broke her nose.