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Masculinity

Long before I could understand the language, adults, mostly grandmother types, started drilling it into my brain from every angle that I was a boy and not a girl. While petting my head or squeezing my face, they'd ecstatically scream, "You're a boy! Yes you are! You're a little, baby boy, boy, boy."

From their tireless, frantic repetition, I understood that my being a boy as opposed to a girl was super-important. So I started scrambling to find out what the exact difference was. Hanging in the air was the vague threat that, if I failed to figure it out, I might somehow turn into a girl! And that was very bad.

All I knew for sure was that boys didn't cry or wear dresses... until one day, carpooling home from school in the back of my mother's car, a boy in a higher grade asked, "Show me how you cut your fingernails." Problem was, I'd never cut my own nails. Best I could do was hold out one of my hands like I did when mama cut them--palm down, fingers fully extended.

He looked pityingly at my hand and shook his head. Oops! Wrong answer. "A man cuts his nails like this." He demonstrated, holding his hand palm-up with the fingers curled back to make a loose fist. "If you cut your nails the other way, it means you're more like a girl than a boy!" Well, happy day!

Sure, I was embarrassed. He was a jerk for tricking me like that in front of the whole car pool. But I was grateful to him for giving me the first piece of solid information I'd gotten about how to be a man.

My best guess up to that point had been that I'd eventually have to beat someone up. I didn't want any part of that and, as it turned out, it wasn't necessary. All I had to do was turn my palm upwards while grooming and... Hello, manhood! Nothing could be easier. What a gift! After that day, I wouldn't let mama cut my nails any more. I never explained why. I'm sure she'd have been happy to help out by trimming my nails with my palm in the man-making, upwards position. But seeing as mama herself was a girl, it seemed rude to throw in her face my eagerness to avoid at all costs being girl-like, much less to involve her in the fingernail cutting ritual designed to prevent my girlness.

And there was the danger that mama was not the helpful, competent manicurist that she appeared to be. Maybe she herself had been born a boy but through years of faulty nail trimming had turned herself all the way in the opposite direction. It was one thing to carelessly ruin her own chance to be a boy, but to ruin mine? That wouldn't just be clumsiness; that would be cruelty.

Then, my most terrifying thought: What if mama had been deliberately cutting my nails with my palm turned the wrong way because she wanted to turn me into a girl? Stop! I won't hear another word of it! Not my mama. All the same, better safe than sorry. Mama would never hear about the nail problem.

I struggled for months with the awkward palms-up, half-fist position before giving up on it. All that effort and I still didn't feel like hitting anyone. I knew there had to be something, but no way did it involve personal grooming equipment. By my teens, I'd learned enough about my world to know that there was almost no necessary difference between men and women. Then a couple of years after I'd given up on looking for it, I finally found my personal solution to the masculinity dilemma--fucking.

By center-piecing my penis--the most obvious part of being a man--fucking upstaged any stupid socially constructed concept of masculinity! How could I possibly feel manlier than when I was pushing my cock into someone? So in the end I just fucked. Problem solved.

"You're a boy! Yes you are! A little, baby boy, boy!"

Yeah, I get it now. I'll take it from here.