Females-- we've been over out-of-place females as a culture. Women that look like men? Fine. Women who perhaps share just a tad of both? Still okay, by the social rulebook. But what about men who decide not to play by those rules? Not just drag queens-- no, men without an identity of gender at all?
Our society at least can contend with drag queens because, gay or not, they take on a specific role. A female role, yes, but one so solidly embroiled with our cultural dualism of man and woman that a self-contained population of flamers doesn't threaten anyone's sensabilities anymore.
A much more dangerous-- and smaller, for the same reason people feel threatened by it-- is the born-male who casts off his cloak of societally-donated dominance over his ''fairer' sex' and sits outside the casual border of masculinity and femininity. It's no longer the fight between men and women, media-controlled bout that declares 'his' and 'hers', but suddenly hallowed, untrodden ground, an ironic no-man's-land without demographic or description. Why is our culture so afraid of immasculine men? What is it about boys in dresses, unabashed by either their manliness or their androgyny, men in skirts and nail polish without remorse for breaking social convention, that scares us so much?
I don't know. I'm not really ashamed to say that, but all I have is my ideas. One, is a lack of exposure. We don't see immasculine men much, and when we do, it's suddenly something foreign and strange-- especially as acculturated as we are by the media to the duality of the masculine and the feminine. Which is my other point: the media doesn't like the androgynous either, so the one-from-billions time you see a trans or 'different' person on television or in advertising, it's a negative-- nay, insulting-- portrayal. Without exaggerating, I can say that every one of the few times we see a genderfuck male in the media, it's a worse portrayal than if he simply had been omitted like every other TV show, advertisement, and movie.
But that omission's still not good enough. Instead of villifying the androgynous male, why not use the media to normalize this harmless sect of our own culture with the rest of our unthinkingly-dualistic ways?
The only way to go from here is up.
