The Last Word on Femininity and Masculinity

It seems that guys get really defensive about their masculine card getting checked. Yesterday I posed an M3 Bear Essentials video entitled “Where Have All The Real Tops Gone” and I was not surprised when outrage started to pour forth. I chose a provocative title because I wanted people to participate in the discussion thread on the post and possibly watch he video. I figured once they watched the video the meaning of the title would be understood.


The question in the title is one I suppose a lot of gay men ask when they look around the gay community. I wanted to examine where those attitudes come from. A lot of people took issue with the words “real top” in the title because they assumed I was questioning their manhood, but all I was doing was mirroring a question asked throughout the gay community. When someone acts a little feminine they often lose most of their attractiveness, at least to a large segment of the community. We then hear all the complaints about there being nothing but bottoms, but the reality is there are plenty of tops that no one is interested in.

In this video, I wanted to examine our limited notions of masculinity and femininity to get at what is really going on when we bottom shame and try to pull someone’s masculine card. It seems to me that if we embraced out femininity a little more we wouldn't be so afraid of it when we find some in another man. I argue in the video that all gay men express at least one irrefutable feminine trait; our attraction to men. It’s not that all gay men act like women, but we do have something in common with he vast majority of women. We seek the attention and fall in love with men. By definition, at least by the definition that I'm using, our attraction to men is feminine. It’s about time we embrace that fact, stop being afraid of our femininity and stop deriding those who are more feminine than we are.

I’m very much attracted to masculine men. It’s what it is, but after embracing my femininity I found myself more attracted to feminine men as well. I started to see the duality of masculine and feminine that lives in all of us. None of us is without both traits. So to me, hiding from your feminine side makes you less than whole. People who aren't whole try to break other people who are. Those gay men who are comfortable with their femininity and express and celebrate it fully scare and offend others because they don’t value felinity in general and especially in men. I think part of changing that patterns starts with looking inside ourselves and embracing those feminine traits.