Warning

I ask this: why is it more socially acceptable for someone born biologically male to hate men and reject masculinism than it is for someone born biologically female to hate women and reject feminism?

And why do I feel like such a horrible person for asking?

I know part of the answer. I know that maybe as few as forty years ago, the reverse had been true for centuries: it made perfect sense for a woman to find her sex inferior, but God forbid a man be unhappy with being a man! I know that shit of that sort absolutely sucks. I know that gay liberation and feminism have changed so, so much for the better, and I love those movements as much as I appreciate their effects on my world.

BUT does that mean that what was true in the 1970s, or even what was true in the 1990s, has to be true today? Do we really have to think in the same way?

Am I fucking obligated to favor, love, and be proud of women more than men in order to rectify centuries of it being the other way around?

Why can't I just forget the past? Why can't we move forward into a place where the past, and what was true in it, don't fucking matter?

My dad ruined a song for me last night, and the worst part is that I'm the one who feels guilty. The song is Incubus's "Warning." It's a song about not letting "life pass you by." It's a song, I always thought, sung to Americans to get up off their lazy asses and stop living lives that are pre-cut to go down easier.

My father informs me that this is not possible. He informs me that because the song is sung about a "she," it's clearly about the female experience. It's about women not letting men run their lives for them. It's about Thelma and motherfuckin' Louise. It's a song, my father tells me, sung to women to get up off their lazy asses and stop living lives that are pre-cut to go down easier.

I love Thelma and Louise, but the movie's almost three decades old. Come on.

Like the whiny child I am, I sneered at my father and said, "Well I always thought it was a song about humans, not women."

"But he says 'she!'"

"And why can't 'she' be a neutral pronoun?!"

"Yeah, whatever," my dad finishes.

I shut my door because my dad was annoyed with me that I was annoyed with him being a good feminist. He doesn't realize (he never realizes) that I hate that he thinks I should be his child most embracing of such arguments. And he doesn't realize that my door almost slammed because I was afraid that he's right.

My dad and I always fight over Brandon's lyrics, and Davey's too. In my mind, both of these writers occupy a superior position in which gender is completely arbitrary.

In other words, they are my ideal.

Brandon sings about a "she" because a "she" is just as good at representing humanity as a whole as "he" has been for centuries. Brandon sings that "To resist is to piss in the wind" because he's giving humanity a cock, not limiting the power of resistance to males only, which is my dad's criticism of the song "Get up From Under." Brandon sings about his own "woman's intuition" in "Just a Phase" because the sexist decades of history for the phrase simply don't apply here: he's female, male, human, who-gives-a-fuck-what.

But to my dad, Brandon is a masculinist male who is consciously forwarding the cause of the other sex: women.

I see my dad's position as sexist, because he's the one still differentiating between the sexes, whereas I am able to forget their existence altogether. I am truly post-gender. I can see with blissful blindness to history.

All those "I" sentences: they're fine for bouts of self-celebration in a blog before dawn on a summer morning. But I would never tell them to my father. Why?

Why am I so afraid of being called sexist? It's probably because I am. Most people would probably tell me it's sexist not to give women the advantage, not to favor them as the superior sex, not to apply a sort of Affirmative Action program to women throughout life, because they've been the underdog for so damn long.

What my father told me last night bothered me the whole time I slept. I had bad dreams, and I woke up with that song in my head, and guilt in my gut. I am a bad representative of women. I have failed my sex.

But I never wanted to be of this sex!!! Sometimes I want to scream that so loud that it aches in my chest and brings tears to my eyes to hold it back. I hate being biologically a woman. I hate being constantly forced to be socially a woman. I wince every time my mom calls me "chica!" I am so fucking tired of being expected to be a representative of a population I don't feel I belong to.

See how I'm failing even more?: Instead of immersing myself in my group and bringing them up to a place of equality with my efforts, I'm leaving behind the group and just jumping to that imaginary place of equality all for myself. My post-gender idealism is just me being another apathetic young American who doesn't want to face the facts of continuing sexism. I'm nothing but a lazy, failed feminist.

But, for the first time, I think I'm starting to grow the will to say this: I don't care.

There are times when you have to struggle in order to get through, and there are times when you just have to let go, because you're too close to a situation to see clearly. If I were born biologically male, the subject of feminism would (for reasons I don't like) be something I wasn't born with, and that I could actively, consciously, take up as a passion.

But I wasn't born with a dick, so somehow that means I'm supposed to be more invested in feminism than anyone who was.

I know I'm not being reasonable, and that in the future, I'll probably regret a lot of things I've believed. But I really need the mental space right now to say, "I am not a woman. I am not a feminist. And I don't even particularly like women." Right now it doesn't matter that it's also true that I'm not a man, nor a masculinist, and that I don't particularly like men. That wouldn't be carving a mental space out of the solid rock I've been handed. But disliking the gender that's been weighing me down for twenty-one years? That's creating mental space for myself.

Maybe it's just a first step. But it's a step I need to take.

And it's all because my dad won't let me believe that an Incubus song is about a person, not a woman.

I fucking hate gender.

I'm pissed off, and I'm going to try to go back to sleep.