As I keep reflecting on my night out as Nicola last week there are a lot of questions and ideas that are swirling around in my head.
One is, whether my brain has a “girl mode”, because I felt so different and behaved in ways that were unfamiliar to me.
The really distinct difference in how I felt this time was that I didn’t feel like I was a man in a dress at all, I just felt like me. I remember thinking that this is what it is like to be “inhabiting womanhood”. Evidently I have ridiculously pretentious notions after a few drinks, but it was what I was feeling. This is what it is like to actually be a woman. Less pretentious.
An odd thing, but one which does make me wonder if my brain has some kind of “switch”, is that I looked at women differently. I am exclusively attracted to women and I am attracted to boobs and bums as much as the next man (cringe at associating with being a man). I know it is impolite to stare at a woman’s chest, and I make a conscious effort not to do so, but am instinctively drawn to noticing a woman’s body. I don’t like that instinct and it is one thing that I hope hormones and surgery would free me from. Thinking about this night though, I didn’t look at the women that way. I was drinking and that would remove inhibitions usually but not this time. I was not distracted by boobs, or whatever, my interactions were with faces, eye contact and full attention. This is a much more female behaviour and I seemed to switch into this through feeling that I was a woman in this scenario. I know that it isn’t possible that my brain switched to female mode, just because a group of people treated as a girl for an evening. There’s brain chemistry and hormones and stuff which doesn’t just change.
Then there’s my reaction, or rather lack of reaction, to a man flirting with me. As a straight man (that word again), another man flirting would see me making my excuses and an exit, or feeling uncomfortable at very least. That didn’t happen. What is really strange is that I allowed the sorts of things that I am very conscious not to do with women and which I am offended by when I see men doing it; unnecessary touching, hand on the arm when speaking, touching a knee, arm going around the shoulder when leaning in to talk. I know that I have been guilty of all of that in the past, especially when I have had alcohol, but I also know it is wrong and make a conscious effort not to do that sort of thing and be respectful of personal space and boundaries. Strange then that I allowed it. What is really strange though is that I responded to being treated as a woman and it made me feel more female somehow. There was a time I would have questioned whether this meant I was gay, but that doesn’t worry me now.
Not just the man made me feel like a woman (probably not what Shania Twain had in mind), also how the girls were behaving with me, treating me as one of them; not how women behave with men, but how they are with each other. This all felt very natural, and through a combination of a male treating me as female and the females treating me as female, and maybe with the aid of tequila, my brain just accepted that I am female and my behaviour switched to female.
I certainly felt like a woman when I was walking to the underground and the woman with the flowers spoke to me. I was feeling female, but I’m not under any illusion that I was “passing as female” and she mistook me for a woman. Yet she responded to me as female nevertheless, and that reinforced my feeling. This was when I felt that I was “inhabiting womanhood”. I hope that I didn’t say that out loud at the time! Another of the things I hate about being male is that a lone woman walking at night, if she sees me as a man walking the same way will naturally feel wary. I hate that anyone might see me as a threat in that way. For this lone woman walking at night to see me not as a man and a threat, but another lone woman to keep her company and offer some safety in numbers was a wonderful feeling. If anything, that acceptance was even more valuable to me.
I think that I might have felt truly myself then, and that this was something new to me. Inhabiting my womanhood.
Comments
Post a Comment