Wrestling Buddies and unicorns: a personal reflection on gender

This post is for the Hack Gender project, a collaborative online exploration of gender.

The Wrestling Buddy was the first hint I was doing gender wrong. I was six or seven years old, and I had "Wrestling Buddy" at the top of my Christmas list, because hey, Wrestling Buddies! They were these awesome stuffed dolls in the shapes of WWF wrestlers, and you could pound the crap out of them without them complaining (unlike my little brother) or get a pony ride from them while Dad was watching TV (unlike Dad). On Christmas morning, I tore into my presents, fully convinced that I'd have my very own pro wrestler BFF in minutes. But no, there wasn't a Wrestling Buddy under the tree for me.

There was, however, a Hulk Hogan Wrestling Buddy under the tree for my little brother, who hadn't even asked for one.

How could life (and Santa) possibly be this cruel?


I asked my parents how come my brother got a Wrestling Buddy and I didn't, and they said, "Because he's a boy."

I sat with that thought. The unspoken corollary was quick to sink in: "Because you're a girl." Girls, evidently, didn't get Wrestling Buddies. We also didn't get (if my Christmas list vs. Christmas loot was any indication) Tonka trucks or Ninja Turtles. We were also supposed to wear (if my family's Christmas photos were any indication) skirts and dresses for formal occasions, whether we liked them or not. There were rules to follow - rules I didn't get.

Being a girl wasn't something I thought about much as a kid - beyond the toy-related injustices, anyway. I lived in a patch of nowhere just outside a suburb, I was shy and awkward, and I'd much rather draw during recess than play with the other girls in my class. Gender didn't seem all that important at that age.

Then middle school hit, and gender was everything. Boobs happened. Dating happened. Cliques happened. Suddenly, if you came to school presenting any kind of flaw, it was like asking to be pecked to death by a flock of chickens. The flock saw a laundry list of flaws in me, which they picked at daily, most of them relating to my gender presentation: I was slouchy and uncomfortable with my overweight body, I wore boys' jeans, my haircut was utilitarian instead of trendy, and I didn't wear a bra.

I wasn't a tomboy; I just didn't care enough to present myself as A Girl. And so they pecked.

Secretly, I wanted to run away with my brother's Wrestling Buddy (which he still slept with every night), bind my boobs, and live the rest of my life as a boy.

Even more secretly, though, I wanted to be a girl - and not just any girl, but a capital-G, trend-setting, epitome of femininity, datable, respectable Girl. I had the right biological accouterments. I had the right level of socialized self-consciousness. Thanks to my parents' unintentional sexism around the holidays, I had the right toys in the back of my closet. What was wrong with me that kept me from being a Girl?

Near as I could tell, other girls had access to some sort of mythical well of girliness - some ace in their perfectly pressed sleeves that I didn't have.


I felt like I must've been out sick on the day they taught How To Be A Girl in school. Once I found that missing element, I thought, I'd be just like them - a perfect Girl.

And I tried. The funny thing was, every time I thought I had finally had it down, the definition of Girl seemed to shift. Gender was like fashion, and I was always a year or two behind.


There was a secret no one was telling me, but it wasn't what I thought. It took me a few heavy Women's Studies textbooks to figure out, and years after that to really examine in terms of my own actions:

Gender was just a performance. There was no binary boy/girl system, but rather a whole spectrum of ways to present gender.

I was putting on a show, hoping to mimic the people I thought represented the mythical Girl. There was no one true Girl - the girls I'd looked up to as examples were just putting on a show, same as I was. They had their own idea of what being a girl meant to them, and they shaped their appearances to reflect that. I didn't have to share the same idea - I could invent my own idea of my gender.

Slowly, I learned not to compare my version of my gender to other people's in a critical way, and slowly, I stopped feeling like I was somehow doing it wrong. I'm still developing my own presentation of gender that's just mine. I'm not femme. I'm not butch. I don't really identify with any sort of label - and not because I'm hard to categorize, but because I'm still figuring out how I want to play this part. I care about how I look because my presentation of gender is a way that I express myself, not because I'm worried that I won't fit someone's Girl mold.


Or at least, I'm trying. Gender is weird and amorphous, like so many other intrinsic parts of human life, and I find it difficult to talk or write about. Maybe someday I'll feel confident writing about it without illustrations to distract from my only partly-coherent written observations.

Maybe someday I'll buy my own Wrestling Buddy on eBay and we'll skip off into the sunset together, like it was always meant to be.


Postscript:

Nicole grew up to collect cute secondhand skirts and do crossplay at conventions.

Her brother is twenty-two, and the Hulk Hogan Wrestling Buddy still lives on his bed.

No one has heard from the unicorn since the makeup party at WisCon.

Sketchy: Asif riding a unicorn

My coworker bought me a desperately needed energy drink and sugary things to go with it. I traded him a sketch of himself.


I think I need to engage in this form of bartering more often.

Rainy day comic.

Click for big.
This never happens when I'm singing along to AC/DC or something that will make me seem cool. Only Miley.

This blog is now about Misha Collins.

Once again: not dead. I've just been buried in revision and...erm...things.

Oh, hell. No use trying to skirt the issue.

I've been doing Supernatural fandom crap. Fic writing, fan art, collecting animated gifs like they were precious metals - y'know, the usual crazy fan-person stuff. It's sort of eating my free time right now, and I'm sort of happy to let it.

In my defense, Misha Collins made me do it. He busted into the series last season as a dude named Castiel who quickly became one of my favorite characters in the series (possibly of all the characters I'm watching on TV right now). He basically dragged me into writing fan fiction for the first time since high school, totally against my will. I didn't mean to write it. I just stared too deeply into his eyes on the screen, and when I came to I was covered in Cheetos dust and I had a pseudonymous LiveJournal account* with like five fics posted on it.

So you can see how it's not my fault. Things just happen when you stare at Misha Collins for too long.


Things like this:


I haven't had the motivation to finish a digital painting - even a speed painting like this - in ages. Not, apparently, until Misha Collins spent a whole scene illuminated by firelight.

So, let this be a lesson to you: DON'T STARE DIRECTLY AT THE MAN. Just don't do it. For your own self-preservation.

(I think maybe you can stare at him if you use a hand mirror, but I haven't tested this theory, so don't blame me if you try it and find yourself making LOLMisha macros at 4am.)

*All my fandom crap is under a pseudonym because I'm not sure I want the name I'm trying to get published under to come up with a bunch of crack!fic when agents Google it. But one of these days I'll have to write an essay on why fan fiction is an incredibly useful practice.

General update

Eyeballs-deep in work and novel WIP right now, so I might not have a proper entry here for a bit. Here's the gist of my current projects:

Writing: OYMB first draft is coming along nicely. This weekend I smacked a character in the head with a baseball bat and got my protagonist into a car on the way to Climactic Plot Events. Current status: 52,481 words, 9/13 chapters. I've got a couple days' worth of pay saved up, so I'm going to take two days off in the next week, lock myself in my apartment, and plow through the end of this book Misery-style. (But with an elderly terrier instead of Kathy Bates.)

Knitting: OH DEAR GOD. I can't work on any one project for more than a few minutes without getting fidgety like mad. It's infuriating. I've gotten a few inches done on the back of my Sylvi coat, a few rows on my Garter Yoke Cardi, a little bit of a scarf, a little bit of a sock, a little bit of another sock - and the list goes on. I've never been terribly project monogamous, but rotating a small army of knitting projects every five minutes is just ridiculous. Maybe it's because I've been so project monogamous in my writing lately, and my brain is staging a creative coup.

Spinning: Getting better. I've got a handful of little finished projects that I don't have pictures of. Here's one back when it was on the bobbin:


Also, I think I managed to infect my friend Lisa with the spinning bug, and I've got a pound and a half of bulk fiber en route to my apartment right now. Some of it has tencel in it. I'm excited.

Art: What? I've been doing art? Holy crap!


False alarm, I'm just dicking around with my oil paints.

Domesticity: I've been doing a ton of stuff in this realm lately, so I figured I'll count it as a project thing. In the last couple of months, I've been learning to cook and bake, and I've been decorating a little (the Supernatural motel room themed bathroom is on hold until I find the proper shower curtain, if you're wondering).

This weekend, my former roommates moved in downstairs, so I finally got my kitchen table back and completed my kitchen! Am unreasonably pleased with my doofy 50's-tastic table and its classy DIY decoration. (The flower is fake, the vase was a hand-me-down from a former roommate's mom, and the table runner is a modified obi from a costume I wore to an anime con a couple years bac.)


I've learned to make a couple of tasty recipes. The tastiest by a wide margin being Blueberry Boy Bait, which I made for a second time yesterday. Here's Kiah demonstrating how awesome Blueberry Boy Bait is.


And the finished Bait.


And that is what's up with me.

Sketchy - Dev vs. the firefighting llama, Luca on a post-it

To my "What should I sketch?" conundrum today, Bex answered, "A llama. That is also a firefighter. And has a secret obsession with digital watches." When I asked for a character to pose with the llama, she gave me Dev, my millionaire hermit/bully.

This is what happened:
Fun fact: neither of them wears pants on a regular basis.

And to keep this from being completely ridiculous (too late!), here's a sketch of Luca, one of the main characters from my summer project. I've been struggling to pin her character design down for weeks in my sketchbook and digital paintings, but the moment I started doodling on a post-it note, there she was.

Sketchy - Seb character design

Cart master: "Bring out yer dead!"

Muse: "Here's one."

Writer: "I'm not dead!"

Cart master: "'Ere, she says she's not dead."

Muse: "She is!"

Writer: "I'm not!"

Cart master: "She isn't?"

Muse: "Well, she will be soon. She hasn't written anything usable in a week."

Writer: "I'm getting better!"

Muse: "No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment."

Cart master: "Well, I can't take her like that. 'S against regulations."

Writer: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

Anyway.

The moment I'm no longer buried in school, I'll start writing Seb and his godawful sandals.

Sketchy and then some

The weekly sketch, Dorin and Qui:
Dorin would be easy to babysit. You just say, "So, Dor, what do you know about frogs?" and she'll entertain herself for three hours drawing crayon diagrams to show you all she knows about frogs.

And the trailer that salvaged my week:



This book was a staple bedtime story at my house when I was a kid. Seeing it translated into live-action so beautifully makes my inner child so, so happy. And I'm not the only one - there is already talk of people at my work arranging a trip to see the movie on opening day, even though it's not out until October.

Also, I may be doing a knit-along with work-friend Kate, both of us knitting hoodies based on Max's monster suit. I'm thinking an Elizabeth Zimmerman cardigan design with an added hood and the ends of the sleeves adapted into fingerless mitts, like on Max's suit in the movie.

Childish glee abounds.

Sketchy - Kovan won't wear shoes

He's probably not welcome in convenience stores.

Sketchy - happy Tiern circa book 3

While the dude I posted last week never stops looking cheerful, it's rare that my protagonist comes out in sketches with a smile on his face.
I've spent entirely too much time writing first-person from this kid's POV. Drawing him smiling puts me in a good mood immediately.

Sketchy - Moda

I used to draw a lot. When I was a little kid, I thought I'd grow up to be a famous animator or some other type of artist (or a circus performer, or a mermaid - a girl's gotta have options). Eventually I hit eighth grade, started scribbling down story ideas for this now three-book-long fantasy thing called Sixth, and my drawings turned into character designs and illustrations.

This story effectively killed my career as an artist, and I'm not complaining. From the time I started doing character sketches, I couldn't get myself involved drawing any other subject. I tried, but there wasn't the same sense of satisfaction drawing trees or whales or setups in the art room. So in high school, I drew almost exclusively scenes and characters from this story. I learned to use colored pencils and oil paints not so I could be a better artist, but so I could more accurately portray my protagonist and his entourage.

Occasionally my art teacher made me paint wildlife. Those were not happy art days, and I still get angry whenever I see a pintail duck. But most of the time, I just churned out illustrations. In college, where I had to draw concrete things instead of images in my head, I started to lose my interest in art. Grad school has all but snuffed it out due to time constraints. Almost nothing ever gets finished. But I do sketch pretty often - almost always my characters.

I'm going to try to post some kind of sketch here once a week or so, just to keep myself drawing.

That said, here's an unfinished digital painting from late 2008:

Who d'you think you're smirking at, Moda Sams? Oh, shut up, hiking boots are a perfectly valid choice in winter footwear. At least my favorite jacket doesn't have rhinestones on it. Smirky bastard.