Rubberband Boundaries

In our gender block diagram we see a black line running from top to bottom. Imagine that black line is a rubberband.

That rubberband represents the line society has drawn between genders. In fact in many ways you can say it represents popular society itself. What happens is this, when a man or women tries to cross that line they can’t just step from one side to the other. The best they can ever do is push that rubberband farther over into the other side. But the farther they push, the more tension and resistance they get.

Imagine that the closer you get to the word masculine or the word feminine, the more masculine or feminine you are. As you can can see in the diagram, the feminine side spans the whole range. Lesbians, bisexual women, bicurious women and straight women. They can either be right up against that line as tomboys or really far to the right and thus really feminine. If I were to redraw this diagram I’d probably make the far right princess territory and the far left the Bro zone.

You can see that for women all the lines are blurry. Society as a whole accepts these blurry lines for women. Allowing them to make much more fluid transitions.

This diagram isn’t perfect. You have to view that blurry line between tomboy and the four sexualities to mean that there is no hard link between being a tomboy and being straight or lesbian or anything in the middle. The feminine side allows a female to move up, down, left or right all the way from full femininity on the far right, straight to the gender line in the middle.

On the left side is masculine. What a different picture. We see that according to society no straight men lean up against the gender line. In fact to even get close to the gender line, you must be gay… right? Gay men are the only men with the full range of masculinity left to right. Even bisexual and bicurious men are forced to fall into the gay man area because society as a whole doesn’t really believe in bisexual or bicurious men the way it does with women. I can’t tell you how many gay men have told me that bisexual men are just guys who haven’t fully come out of the closet yet. So even among the gay community there are still those who don’t believe in bisexual or bicurious men. As a result there is a hard line between straight and gay men.

This diagram is not entirely proportional. But it’s really only meant to illustrate the point that women in our society have more freedom of range in regards to both gender and sexuality without the two needing to be tied together. Straight women can ride right up against the gender line without their sexuality being called into question. They are simply called tomboys in a loving way. As a result they don’t even need to push the gender line because of the designated tomboy area that already gives them a sandbox of masculinity on their side they can freely play in.

Men on the other hand don’t have a designated Janeygirl area (or whatever you might want to call it) that allows them to freely explore the feminine without pushing the line.

So for straight men to even get a taste of the feminine, we have to push against that rubberband boundary. Even getting to that boundary means we’ve stepped into the gay zone according to society. Further pushing that boundary puts us into the area of the weird, perverted or whatever demeaning word society wants to label us.

The goal of this website is to try and help restructure the masculine side of society to closer resemble the structure on the feminine side. To try and wedge out a janeygirl area where that vertical gay area now exists. Then blur the lines between all the areas.  The benefits are not just for men either. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve talked to who want women to have the full range but want to deny it for men. This always strikes me as strange. Society is currently structured in a way that states masculine is good for everyone, but feminine is only good for cis-gender women. Look at pop culture and movies as a perfect example. Women are kicking bad guy ass, taking care of the kids and in the next scene prettying themselves up in a dress for a night out. But men in fem style are undercover or lost a bet. Either way it’s presented as comedic. If I were a woman I would take that as a slap in the face of feminism. Because on one hand they won the right to wear mens clothing styles, kick ass and still be pretty. But on the other hand a man dressing up as a woman is funny because it’s degrading. That’s just wrong and our goal is to help change that perspective.

This is a huge uphill battle and can not be achieved by a single website. But we aren’t alone. There are others with different or similar approaches coming at this problem.

How do we approach it here?
We begin by disregarding the gay statements altogether. Through education people will begin to realize that it’s not a mater of gay or straight, it’s a matter of gender identity and choice and that’s a different thing. Rather than pushing against the gender line like so many crossdressers do, we instead begin importing feminine into the masculine side. We build up a janeygirl area on a masculine side that is acceptable for male behavior. Just as tomboy is acceptable female behavior. But in order to get the female stuff, we’re going to need to push against the rubberband boundary enough to grab some stuff and bring it back to our side. We just can’t push too far too soon or we’ll get a lot of resistance.

If this is all sounding kind of strange to you, let me put it into perspective.

The problem with male crossdressers in our society is that they are pushing the rubberband boundary too far too fast. As men they are full of bravado and get exicted. So they make a mad dash for princess territory on the far right. This is how we end up with unrefined Jerry Spinger style tranvestities, drag queens and so on. They have no regard for the fact that they are still men who usually don’t look very good going full female overnight and in a half assed way. These are the people who push the boundaries based on sexual fetish instead of pure likability. And that is where we here draw the line between casual crossdressers and transvestites. CC’s aren’t doing it based on sexual fetish, although we may get some thrill out of it in that way, we’re doing it because we genuinely like pink and romantic comedies and dresses and other things reversed for the feminine. We just want choice.

There is nothing wrong with those type of transvestite crossdressers. They will do what they want to do and that’s fine. But as a result they are going to get a lot of resistance from society. This puts us casual male crossdressers in a predicament because we end up getting thrown in with the lot of them. Now suddenly we don something feminine and our sexuality is questioned and we get labeled as wierd or perverted because that’s how society sees them.

We need to be the gradiant on the masculine side that both establishes a janeygirl area and disassociates ourselves with sexuality.