Courage

I've been doing some thinking lately, and I've decided to fold two different trains of thought into one. This results in a blog post with twice the insight and half the writing!! Hooray!

In any case... courage. Recently, courage has taken on a new meaning for me. To me, courage is the willingness to be vulnerable. Instead of explaining myself right away, I'm going to make a confession.

I am uncomfortable with actively taking steps to threaten my masculinity. Such action can take many forms, and one of them is wearing nail polish. If you know me, you know that I've worn it before. In fact, I'm wearing it right now. One reason that I do it is to make a statement about gender roles. But a bigger reason is that it makes me uncomfortable to wear it everywhere. I mean, sure, I'm not the most masculine guy you can think of. But people notice bright nail polish. Being a privileged heterosexual man, I'm not used to walking around worrying how people see my sexuality/gender because of my appearance. And sure, nails seem awfully petty to make a fuss over, but you should try it and see how it goes.

I work with children during the summer, and one thing you can always trust children to do is be straightforward. Children say things that adults keep to themselves, or give weird looks for. And children ages 6-12 that attend the summer camp I work at have a lot to say on the subject. I cannot count the number of times my campers have called me a "girl", as if that were some kind of insult. One young boy asked me if he was supposed to go out with me. Even apart from that, I had my boss have a talk with me about allowing my girl campers to paint my boy campers' nails because my boss didn't want to anger any parents. After that, when I wear nail polish in public, I find myself constantly wondering what other people think about me. I expect strange looks and even comments. I've even tried to hide my fingers around strangers. Such are my efforts to combat my masculine ego that I don't want and supposedly have deconstructed. How did it make me feel? Vulnerable.

Back to courage. As I have discovered, even something as small as painting your nails and wearing it proudly takes courage. I'm doing it because I'm trying to free myself from participation in the exploitative and idiotic system of hegemonic masculinity. I'm doing it because it's hard. But I want to draw your attention to something.

There are people who do not have the choice that I have. Having cisgender privilege allows me to cast off my nail polish as I wish and instantly be free of those problems. Not everyone has that luxury. For example, take transgender people or people who are genderqueer. They have to put up with this bullshit all the time. They have no escape. I have the greatest respect for them, because it takes true courage to live your life in a society that reviles you. Of course, it's not like they make the decision to be courageous and combat prejudice. Whether they want to or not, they have to. So I don't want us privileged folks to start condescendingly congratulating people who are forced to live like this. Especially when we ourselves suffer from transphobia. I know I do. I have spewed disgustingly transphobic statements without even meaning to, even after I knew what transphobia was and hated it. I regret them to this day. Anyway.

My point with all of this is that it takes courage to stand out from the crowd. It takes courage to speak up and speak out. I say this because I am not the sort of person to make a stand against anything. I don't like conflict and I want everybody to be my friend. So I'll make a deal with you. I'll be more courageous in the future when advocating for social justice if you will. Because if we live in a world where some people are forced to be courageous or be crushed, we've got a serious problem. Us privileged folks need to show a little more courage.

Edited to fix language