Hold Your Horses, Real Men

If you are ever around the blogger-spheres long enough, you will eventually run into blogs that serves as shrines dedicated to all sorts of bodies. These serves as the blogger’s ideals and desires about the human body and can range from celebrating androgynous people to hyper feminine/masculine. In of itself, there is nothing wrong with expressing your tastes in human bodies. We have our preferences; I tend to prefer varying expressions of masculinity. I like muscular men, as well as hairy men, and non-hairy men. I have preferences, but I don’t force others to conform to those preferences. What is troublesome is when you assume your tastes in body should be the default – that it is natural, or inheritably more desirable. Because then you place far too much value on the body and you begin making implications about the bodies of others. Often, these are unfortunate implications. As a gay man, I often run into blogs raving about “real men’s” body. First, let me say this is a real man’s body:



This is a real man’s body too:



And this:


And these:









These are all real men body, because these are all men. A man is not limited to a certain set of physical characteristic. Men and their body are dynamic, gradient, and negotiable. To say that the first picture is a real man and the others are not is exclusionary and ultimately detrimental – especially to gay men. Let’s take the first example. There are those who claim that a “real man” must be hairsuite. That statement leaves out so many other men and makes them to feel inferior. What of those men who cannot grow body hair through genetics? Can you really deny them as “real men” simply because they were born that way? As far as men go, all the people featured above are men. They aren’t prepubescent. They don’t identify as a women, though they may embrace femininity or have female reproductive organs. They are men, but classifying men under one physical archetype undermines that. Instead of being inclusive, we open ourselves to hierarchical thinking. We play into the very institutions that have oppressed us. Remember, to some people gay men aren’t real men. So how can we complain about the heternormative hierarchy denying us our manhood, when some of us will deny manhood to a feminine man, an androgynous man, a transman, a shaved man, a skinny man, a fat man and all other type of men?

Transphobia and video games

In general, our society is still very transphobic. There's elements of it that lingers in the LGBT community, because all to often people don't want to remember the T part. Video games are no different. More often then not, it reflects the gender normativity of our society that often portrays androgynous or abigious people negatively. I can't claim to know much about the transgendered experience, but I try my best to understand their posistion. (And don't get me wrong. I love the RE series yo. But I can love them and critique them at the same time.)

In Resident Evil Code: Veronica and Resident Evil Dead Aim, transgendered people are portrayed as in the stereotype of being obsessive (which is why they changed their gender), vain, and untrustworthy. Alfred for RE CV is the obsessive part. He's crazy and obsessed with becoming what he's not (his sister). The idea that transgendered people are what they are "not" has been used to justify the vilification of them. Morpheus is also an obsessive who transform into a female like creature in order to obtain beauty, which is another stereotype of transgendered people (that they are always trying to be beautiful). Sometimes, transgender chose to change their sex because they are trying to become what they truly believe they should be. They're not doing it to become what they are not, because to them they are that way.

Archäologie

Sometimes it's easy to assume that a large tomb is a that of a king or a male ruler. Because of our current culture, we tend to associate the ruling class with men. It's all part of our blindness to the privileges we give to masculinity. However, through out history, men did not have the monopoly on power.
The Silla Kingdom of the Three Kingdoms period of Korea, was one of the countries vying for supremacy on the Korean peninsula. It's was largely thought that the tombs left behind by Silla was of male rulers. However one of the tomb has been argue to be a female co-ruler based on historical accounts as well as the images and goods left in the tombs.
The assumption that the tombs of the rulers were all male is an example of how our ideology can bias archaeology. We assumed that the Silla rulers were all men because we falsely correlated power with masculinity.