Manhood
Dear Masculinity,
Who do you love if not me, nor men, nor women?
I’ve seen the way you treat my mother and my sisters*
The way you scowl at me when I look at them. Full of pride. Full of respect. Full of human.
I know you hate me because I am a product of them.
Man molded by,
In need of
Women.
Those women are short in stature. Small in mass. Soft with voice. Yet they are the strongest people I know. You had me believe that power comes from a penis but it does not. The most powerful people are the ones who are told they are powerless and choose not to believe it.
Dear Masculinity, I don’t believe you.
Dear Masculinity, you ain’t shit.
Dear Masculinity, why you so scared to lose? What is it that you have that’s worth fighting for anyway?
Dear Masculinity,
What does your ideal world look like?
I imagine it to be barren. A dried desert dipped in death.
There are no ovaries
But blood is shed monthly.
There is no silk.
Only puffed chests woven with rough
patches of hair, similar to a body stuck under water (help me I’m drowning).
Deep under water.
But your world is barren, so that body is more similar to one
stuck underground (help me I’m suffocating). Deep underground.
Coffin style.
Dear Masculinity, I was going to make this letter funny but then I realized you’re not allowed to laugh.
Dear Masculinity, sometimes I watch you from across the room and I realize that all your football talk, and your locker room butt slaps, and the porn you watch is gay as hell. And I love that you hate that about yourself.
Dear Masculinity, my homies probably think I’m soft just for writing this letter to you. The funny thing is that they’re too scared to confront these feelings themselves. You’ve made them blind. Convinced them that if they deny you then they are less. It’s ironic because a lot of my homies don’t have strong father figures. They only have mothers who have raised them into the “powerful” men they think they are. How is it that women can instill strength in men only to have that strength turn against them? At what point do you get my homies and make them think they are stronger than the mothers that raised them? At what point do they get the girl down the block pregnant, turn her into a mother, have her raise their child just like their mothers raised them, only to call that woman a bitch by bedtime? At what point does Boy become patriarchy, and Mothers and sisters and wives and girlfriends become bitches? At what point do you start taking the humanity away from everyone?
Dear Masculinity,
Don’t you see the irony in me
addressing you as a human?
Love,