The Masculinities of Queer Women

Written by Bella, Strasbourg, France

“How do you deal with toxic masculinity, MacKenzie?” 

I knew when I asked the question that he wasn’t going to give me the answer I needed. While MacKenzie was a man and I was searching for an answer from a man, about being a man, he had never displayed the traits that I so desperately wanted to extract from my psyche. I asked him anyway.

I was shaking on the concrete steps of our back porch, cowering under the chill that relieves D.C. on lucky summer evenings. After a night far longer than I had expected, I was strung out on cigarettes and three cans of red bull, absentmindedly plucking at my fraying nerves like fingernails. Less absently, I was searching for answers. 

Helpful roommate that he was, MacKenzie jumped on the opportunity to explain his personal approach to toxic masculinity.

 “I try to let my partners do what they want, and not force my fears or insecurities onto them,” he explained. It was clear from his grin that, for him, this was a moment of connection between budding friends. A lowering of walls over joints after a hectic night out. Shivering and dampened by my own sweat, I couldn’t have possibly felt more isolated from him, even as his attention washed over me.

MacKenzie and a kind friend of his, whose name I struggle to remember, offered me thoughtful counsel that night. It was advice that on any other occasion I would have written down in a diary or filed away in the “coping” archives of my mind. But glazed over as I was, their words beaded up and ran off me, pooling uselessly at my feet. Even if I had managed to absorb their advice, I realize now that the toxic masculinity they spoke so thoughtfully of dissembling was not the same one I needed to crack.

As MacKenzie’s friend described how he erected boundaries with his homophobic father, my thoughts wandered to a downtown Minneapolis bar and to a girl I knew I would never willingly speak to again. I stared over his fold-out camp chair at one of our backyard’s two scraggly trees. In the bark I picked out faint dents – barely discernible to anyone but their creator. The night before, I had taken to the middle aged oak with my fists and leather work gloves. Later, when my knuckles grew sore, I picked up a baseball bat. 

I considered pointing out the scarred oak to MacKenzie and recounting how, cheeks flushed and wet, I had snuck out the back door to have at the tree. But I didn’t feel strong enough to tell him about the girl whose memory led me out back – about how our open relationship dissolved after mere months and how, in the heat of the rupture, she revealed she had been seeing someone behind my back.

Explaining the eye-pricking, searing pain that shot through my body that night seemed both uncharacteristically barbaric for a queer woman like me, who should be ruled by feminine understanding, and at the same time disloyal to the fury itself, somehow nullifying it by recognition. I would ultimately never feel open enough to show him her texts, the ones claiming she had considered us “over” for a month before finally notifying me.

Despite withholding arguably all pertinent information, I still held up this pulsing knot of naked nerves to MacKenzie’s nose. All I wanted was for him to take it in his hands and, with the power bestowed upon him by the gods of masculinity, deftly untangle it. He, at least, had training in how to harness these impulses, how to tame and release them at the appropriate times.

What I had expected, or rather wished, was that he and his friend would convene over my puzzle and together dig into their wealth of masculine knowledge, emerging with some sort of “why.” Why, when I learned that she cheated on me, had I wanted to tear that sweet tree out of the ground? Why, when she gaslighted me in what I saw as a particularly feminine way, had I wanted to crush its wood and grunt as I pounded it into sawdust? I wanted them to tell me why women make me feel this way, and why men just don’t.

Dig they did, but not one word they struck rang true. When I finally dragged my body to bed in the early hours of the morning and let it deflate in on itself, it was with no answers from MacKenzie or his nameless friend. And it wouldn’t be until months later that I began to excavate my own answers.

Looking back, my mistake was consulting the wrong elders. My pain stemmed from a deeply wounded masculinity, yes, but I had yet to realize that cisgender men don’t hold the secrets to the inner workings of the masculinities of queer women. Their experience of desire – desire for women, for interpersonal power, for respect – is fundamentally different from my own, and their solutions therefore a world apart.

If that night I had truly been looking for answers rather than cheap self-help tips, I would have turned to the wisdom of queer masculine folks, like butch women and trans masculine people, who have been deconstructing these concepts for decades. I would have inquired into why my personal construction of masculinity is so violent, possessive and ultimately fragile. I would have questioned whether the masculine models that I grew up imitating are really masculine at all.