press pause

Hello! I live in a new city now. A month in, I feel like I am sort of finally learning to breathe again.

I am writing now mostly out of a sense of obligation. It’s weird to leave people hanging when they have paid to see your thing in their inbox every now-and-then, right. This whole professional-level-of-performance thing has always messed with my head. I don’t like doing anything out of obligation, unless it’s something I have decided already is worth the effort, and laboring for some kind of livelihood has (tragically for me) never been on that list.

Of course moving to a new place ushers in a period of change, and I am still figuring out what that change looks like. Of course I am (as I do every 4-6mo or so, moving or not) having an existential crisis about art. What am I even doing & why? Does it matter at all? What the fuck can I do that might “work,” whatever that means? Everything is so hard, is anything ever going to be “worth it”? etc etc.

Writing a blog has been the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt like it was maybe kinda okay to just go off about whatever is fucking with my head this week, even if it requires a few passes of editing and hard-thinking before I’m willing to put it where anyone else can see. It’s been very cathartic to me, and to at least a handful of others— I occasionally get messages from (both trans and cis) men who feel buoyed by something or other I said in here, which is very nice. I hope I’ve been helpful to them. Sometimes nice ladies I went to school with even tell me they think I’m kinda smart, which is very very kind of them, and is at least good for 24hrs of dopamine. But it seems that is all I can really achieve here. I wonder, what sort of person would I have to retroactively become, to make more of a dent than that?

I think I am sort of growing tired of what I’m doing here. The Art Of Gender only exists because I felt compelled to vent my frustrations about trying to live in the world, in a “post-feminist” trans scene that seems hostile to my existence. I’ve pulled some fragile sense of purpose out of feeling like I am, by just dumping my brain somewhere, maybe at least doing something useful for any hypothetical someones who are Like Me— who feel how I feel, who have struggled to believe that life is worth living in our current sociopolitical mess, and who could maybe benefit from thinking differently about gender and creativity and the tension ever-present in both of these things. You know, maybe writing the things I would’ve liked to hear a decade ago when I went to art school or started my transition.

Anyway. I’m at a point where this “project” has sort of run out its usefulness to me. I have no fantasies of “becoming a writer,” spiritually or career-wise. I am yucked out by the sense of obligation that comes from allowing paid subscriptions, one of my many desperate choices I have made to try and squeeze blood from a stone so that I can hypothetically scrounge some small percentage of my rent off of things I already do compulsively anyway. I just fucking hate doing anything for money.

More than that, it feels like the thing I am trying to do here is mostly futile. Without ever really meaning to, I’ve written a lot of criticism of pop feminism (or cultural feminism, or liberal feminism, or capitalist feminism, or whatever we want to call it this week), a lot of it centered around how terrible I think basically everyone is at understanding what men think or why we do anything we do, & begging trans culture to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to acting on our supposed collective principles. Everyone is so obsessed with incels, manfluencers, and chads, oh my, and I am sick to death of hearing about them. I keep begging anyone to have more interesting thoughts and, god forbid, to stop writing about men as if we are a bunch of selfish morons who have never done anything for any reason other than to grab desperately at power. But, y’know, it really hasn’t paid off, financially or otherwise. It mostly feels like I am shouting into a void.

So I’m tired of holding my breath and waiting for the culture— particularly the vague miasma of liberal/leftist, trans-feminist culture— to notice what is actually going on with men. To do anything about it that isn’t just vengeful or self-defeating or both. To come up with any explanation or possible future that wasn’t already stale a decade before I was born. To perhaps consider, for a second, that someone like me might exist, hear what they say, and try to participate in this conversation. At this point I really don’t think any of that is going to happen, no matter how much wailing and gnashing of teeth I do, and it’s pretty hard to convince myself to do things when I feel like they only lead to a dead-end. I am just not in a position to convince anyone to care, about me or any of my boys, and I am just very tired of pleading for it. It doesn’t do any real good.

I am generally tired of begging women and nonbinary people to stop ~constructing masculinity~ in the most unhelpful way they possibly can, blaming men for all of our own sociopolitical problems, telling us how we ought to think and feel and operate— politically, philosophically, interpersonally— and then going “no, not like that” when we try to directly follow their advice. I’m tired of begging my friends to stop making shitty jokes at me about my gender and to maybe try to digest anything I’ve ever written about the social construction of gender and its destructive effect on the boys I try to look after. I’m tired of having panic attacks every time I post something publicly. I’m tired of worrying so much about whether I am doing something evil by trying to be interesting and critical and think harder than I see from the people around me, to address the questions that it seems everybody else is too scared or too lazy to touch.

I’m tired of pointlessly criticizing a culture that does not give a fuck about a broke freak like me, which will certainly never change its mind about my worth as a human being, let alone offer me the support I need to get by— not within my lifetime, anyway, and not as a result of any labor I am capable of doing. It’s too much for my delicate faggot heart, to try and compete for this shit. I’m just not a good enough writer or thinker to really get anywhere when I combine my own fretful personality, my standards, and the difficulty level of the task at hand. It’s unclear to me whether my attempt has made me better or worse, but I’m certainly not moving any needles, here.

And, you know, at some point you’ve got to at least get bored of begging the people who hate your guts to pretty please have a heart, and you’ve got to do something else instead. You bang your head against a wall until you learn just how hard it is, and when you realize that steel is stronger than your skull, you perhaps consider a different strategy. That is just how it goes.

So I’d like to try and spend less time talking about art (and gender) than I spend making it, for a while, and see if that gets me anywhere that at least feels better. Two or three years at a “project” isn’t much to be proud of, but it’s a lot for me. At this point I feel like I’m mostly repeating myself when I try to write something new anyway, so might as well cool on it before I wear out my welcome and/or drive myself more insane. If you want more, feel free to let me know or pay me for it— otherwise, I suppose I’ll be back the next time I think I have anything new to add.

Thanks for everything,

xoxo jesse