If I Were a Man: What it Means to Have a Gender in Modern Society

If my gender was suddenly changed and I was a man, who would I be? What would my life be like? It's an interesting question. What exactly is masculinity or femininity, and how would those characteristics show up in my life? I think these questions would be easier to answer if I start with who I am now, as a woman.

I have never felt a strong pull towards my own gender. I was never a girly-girl, interested in high heels and makeup and frilly dresses. My mother says that even when I was a toddler I would cry unless I got to wear my favorite clothes-jeans and a sweatshirt. I was a tomboy, and my friends in school were as likely to be boys as girls. If I had been a boy, my name would probably be Joe (my mother says it was her first choice as a boy's name), a name that sounds very much like the name I have as a girl-Jill.

As a man, I would probably be pretty much the same as I am now, with the added benefit of never having to shave my legs. I don't think of myself as feminine. I don't think of myself as unfeminine either. I just think of myself as Jill. I think, as a man, I would probably find that same middle ground between masculine and unmasculine. In fact, when I think about who I might be as a man, my thoughts drift to a friend of mine named Tyler. Tyler is a great guy, popular with his coworkers and known for throwing parties that rival anything Vegas can come up with ("What happens at Tyler's stays at Tyler's"). He is also caring, soft-spoken, sensitive, a great decorator, a media hound, a cook, and a loving father. I realize that there must be people out there who would look at him and immediately think that he must be gay. However, I look at him and admire him for the balance he has found in his life and in his character. He is strong and masculine without having to exaggerate it, and without having to prove anything to the world. If I were to become a man, I think he would be a good example for me to follow.
The reason I chose Tyler as an example is that we have something important in common-our personality types are very similar. Most people can be categorized fairly easily. They are introverted or extroverted, playful or disciplined, wise or childish, smart or naïve. Tyler and I are not like that. In studying creativity, I have found that not only does everybody have the capacity for creative thought and the capacity to expand their natural creative abilities, there is also a specific personality that is not only able to create art but can also lives in such a way that their very lives become art. These are artists, the people we celebrate through their paintings, films, books, music, and architecture. Artists have the unusual aptitude to be two seemingly opposite personality traits at once. They are rebellious but steeped in tradition, energetic and quiet, passionate and objective, and all the other contradictory pairs of traits listed above.

Artists are like this because in order to make art, they have to live in a place between what already is and what could be. Their lives are continual searches for new solutions, and their lifestyles are expansions of the creative process. Their lives require that they be outgoing at times and alone at times, humble at times and proud at times, and masculine at times and feminine at times. For example, I am a writer, and as such I often find the need to be in the heads of all my characters-the men as well as the women. My being not overly feminine allows me to wander into the mind of a male character as easily as into a female character. Actually, it is probably the need to spend time alone that helps to create and maintain the ability to transcend gender stereotypes, since so much stereotyping is communicated and emphasized through social situations and relationships. So my changing gender would not change my life much-I would still be the same basic jeans-and-sneakers person with the same set of strange, contradictory personality traits.

However, just because my process of creating art stayed the same, I can't help but wonder what might change after I release the art into the universe. I want to write a lot of different things, from magazine articles to children's books. However, two of my favorite treats to write are both in male-dominated fields-screenwriting and humorous essays. In fact, to demonstrate just how male-dominated humor writing is, a glance at FiercePajamas, an anthology of humor writing from TheNewYorker, out of the 139 pieces that made it into this anthology, only 21 were written by women [these pieces were originally published from 1925 to 2000, so some of the male dominance does come from the fact that society itself was male-dominated for many of those years; however, I don't think that the writings from the last thirty years shows that women have caught up in this field yet].

Almost ten years ago, I took a screenwriting class taught by a man named Steve Womack. At that point in his career, Steve had written and sold a script for a made-for-tv movie and several mystery novels, one of which won the Edgar (the top writing award for mystery novels) and had been optioned to ABC for them to make into a movie. He had been teaching the class for many years and had a smart self-confidence that made me think he had been carried to class on a high sedan chair carried by virile young men, but that he had stopped them half a block down so as not to seem too pretentious. I was young and naïve at the time, and I believed worshipfully that he was a great writer who could accomplish all of his dreams with a wink and a smile. When I lost track of him a couple years after taking his class, he was moving out to L.A., where I was certain he would find all the success he could ever want.

In the years between now and then, I have occasionally wondered what happened to him, where exactly his path had taken him. As I got a little wiser along the way, I realized that his easy self-confidence may not have been as based in reality as I had been certain it was. He was when I had known him, after all, a screenwriting teacher in Nashville (not one of your main film producing cities), and a sometimes freelancer for the Bible publisher I worked for. In other words, all he really had on me was one sold tv movie, some mystery novels-not even particularly received until about his fourth one, and a lot of swagger. Just out of curiosity, I Googled him the other night to see what he had been up to and where he is now. I was not entirely surprised to find out that he was back in Nashville, teaching screenwriting again and with another mystery novel about to be published. He did go back to school and get an M.F.A. in writing, and he got married and had a couple of kids, but there were no new screenwriting credits to his name. For all my confidence in him and his swagger, it turns out he is just a regular guy who can do some things well and not others. That sounds an awful lot like me, like everyone. Finding out that his self-assured swagger may have just been a show made me wonder if that was his way of coping with being an artist and a man-if perhaps it wasn't so much an indicator of how good he is at his work as it was an indicator that he understood being an artistic man in this society equals being gay or weak or unmasculine and this was the best way he could figure out to deal with that. Now that I have a little more maturity and some distance from the situation, I see that Steve and I are really quite similar-we're both talented writers who have yet to reach our dreams of screenwriting success.

I bring up this long story of Steve because of both our similarities and our differences. While he was annoyingly overconfident at times, he was also a great teacher and a kind soul. He was always so passionate about screenwriting, about writing in general, that his spirit was infectious. If I were a man, I think that I would see a lot of Steve in myself, but without the self-overconfidence that characterized him. I have never cared much what others think of me (outside of my family, whose opinions were always of the utmost importance to me), so I would not feel the need to pretend to be more than I am. Even as a man, I would attribute others' misguided judgments of me to be more about them than about me. However, I still wonder if I would have found more professional success along the way, just by virtue (if you can call it that) of being a man.

What is the essence of femininity and masculinity? Society had always had very specific ideas for these. Stereotypes of women and men still pervade television, books, magazines, advertisements, government, schools, and our thoughts. But for me, it's just another label that we use to compartmentalize ourselves and others. Certainly some of the traits generally specified as feminine would apply to me, but so would masculine traits and neutral ones. To me, "woman" is nothing more than a tag I use to describe a small part of my whole. Unless I am talking to my doctor, I wouldn't want anyone to see me simply as a woman unless I know for sure that their definition is broad enough to include all the parts of my character. Maybe it's my own proclivity to think of myself more in spiritual terms than physical ones, but gender terms never meant all that much to me. Some have used the fact that I'm a woman against me, to belittle me, hold me back, objectify me, or treat me like a second-class citizen, but until I start to believe that being a woman is second-class, it will never matter. All that matters is that I am.