Masculinity and Femininity: My Mom and Dad

Me as a Child

My Dad was born with the male sex organ. He got married with my mom who was born with a female sex organ. I was born from the union of their egg and sperm cells. That's how 'scientific' it gets. 

Having a female sex organ like my mom, wearing female clothes like a dress  with 'flowy' designs, I bonded with her when I was growing up and copied more of the feminine roles she took on consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously.

In this blog, I will bring the memories back here of when my dad was with me - in my childhood so I can see how I changed my expression when I was with him to when I was with my mom. 

My experience with my dad is straight forward. He provided financial support for the family by going abroad - to work as an Engineer. He was not with us all the time when I was growing up. He came and stayed sometimes but most of the time he worked abroad.

He was 19 years older than my mom when they got married according to stories I heard from her. She said my dad did not ask her her to get married but he asked my grandmother permission instead. Then, when my grandmother conceded, she was assumed to 'yes' as well.

Their courtship was filled with stories about how my dad treated my mom and other relatives to the island where he lived and worked. 

My mom's story will be in my next blog. 

Money, Femininity Masculinity, Lapdance and Strip Clubs

Related Blogs 

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/10/sex-gender-identity-and-money-part-1.html

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I was raised in a catholic household. We were taught how to behave as a woman.

What does that mean? 

What makes me a woman?

According to the dictionary, a woman is someone who produces eggs

and gives birth.

What if the woman had some sickness that made her incapable of producing eggs and giving birth to babies?  Does the woman stop being a woman? 

No.

That definition is limited.

We have to expand this definition so women see themselves as who they really are and expand to their utmost potential. 

A limited definition leads to a limited seeing of oneself.

Let''s look at strip clubs here.

In the strip club women presents themselves with less clothes than normal to the point of getting naked from the waist up (sometimes totally). That body is made from the dust of the earth and it is being used for the purpose of exchanging money with men for entertainment purposes. An example of this is doing a  lap dance  for the males - the result of which is arousal for one or both. 

Even women go to the strip clubs to watch other naked women and they even give them money  

or insert money in their g-strings. The music plus the view of naked bodies entertain both men and women. This is now normal for most and 'bad' to some but it is not really 'bad or good'. This is a problem that comes up when we see things as how they are advertised by the media. 

Example:

Come and watch 'Bancy' (pseudo name) pole dancing in this Strip club (blah) dropping down from 20-30  ft. from the top - for example.

This creates pictures in our mind - of Demi Moore for example, in one of her movies.

So the entertainment happens in our mind but in reality, these women are trying to earn money to survive. The men and women who comes to the club to be entertained willing to give money in exchange for what will entertain them because they spent their time working all week and in the weekends, they want to be entertained in the strip club. 

This is all about money.  

There is a categorization here. 

The men pays (sometimes women pay to watch too) while the women gyrates to the music. In gay clubs, this can happen too. 

There are roles being played here by both men and women.

We assign values to the men and women stripping depending on our mind 'likes and dislikes' that is either more or less than who they really are. The values are normally based on how they see the structure of their bodies compared to someone or something else. It is never about their true value as a human.

Let's open this up

 The essential value of each of them is being missed.

The women's body is made from the dust of the earth

Money is made from plants which come from the earth

The male's body is made from the dust of the earth.

The muscle that gets aroused is part of the body of the males and females that comes from the dust of the earth.

The value of each of them is =  to the dust of the earth, which is therefore = to life.

So, we have to restore the value we give each of us which gets devalued inside the strip club. Given music and movement, we become mesmerized that we forget the real value of each of us - that our real value = life.

Let's create a scenario here:

All of us receiving the amount of money each month that is enough to guarantee our survival plus extra money if we work. Let's say this money will be financed by a body (can be cfor example, corporations who profit from the earth's resources like water which belongs to all of us)

Will women and men stripfor money?

I do not see that happening.

What i see are men and women who dance to express themselves within movement for ones own enjoyment of oneself.

This is what changing the money system on earth will do.

Sex, Gender, Identity and Money Part 1: Masculine

"Your sexual identity should not define who you are.”

...

It is an expression that you are living for a moment in this lifetime.

but it shouldn’t be more or less than simply just that.

Life Review

Sexual and Gender Identities

My previous blogs about 'femininity' (links below this blog) brought a lot of things out. I realized I cannot face the word 'feminine' without facing the word 'masculine'. 

In this blog, I want to look at the word 'masculine'. When I look back, the one person that opened up this word for me was my dad. 

Since I was a child, I looked at my dad as the symbol of masculinity. 

Here are some of  the characteristics I found I defined as masculinity as per what I saw my Dad as,

He had more defined muscles, and more money.  He had authority to say 'something had to change' or 'something should not change'. 

I defined my dad as masculine, I saw him as someone wearing pants and shirt, and someone wearing a male undergarment like a 'male brief'. This of course was influenced by the media ads i watched on tv giving messages on what a male wears. Mostly, this is motivated by money as most ads are made to make money.

If my dad wore a dress, will I judge him as gay?  

Yes. But that was my limited perception of the word 'masculine' in the past.

Let us create a scenario here:

What if that is the only garment available because everything was lost in a fire? 

The limited definition I gave to masculinity needs to expand. So I have to look at the definition that is commonsensical. 

Dictionary:

A male is someone who produces sperm cells. 

A male is not defined within what he wears according to this definition.

My dad contributed to my genes having given my mom his sperm to unite with her eggs. His spermatozoa helped create this female body I have now. 

The body is hosting me - as the breath here in this body I am in.

Though my definition of  the word 'male' is associated to some physical part of me, I also associated it to a mind definition of him and his moods - strict, conservative, reserved etc. - that constitutes some of his masculine personality traits which is part of my computation of what a masculine personality is. 

This is of course unreal because who i am as that personality was created by me in an alternate reality - my mind - but let me open this up here so it can be opened for correction.

I saw him as a person who had the right to get angry and saw him as someone who had the right to punish 'wrongdoing'. This is my perception of him in my mind.

Both of us have equal rights as humans living this one life.

But my perception of him having more money than me in my mind lead to me defining myself as inferior to him which of course led to me suppressing  my self-expression

I associated his rough skin, short hair, skinny but muscular thighs and low calm voice as part of his masculinity which I defined as exclusive to men. 

He had very little hip movement when he walks which contributed to how i defined him also as having masculine body movements.

What if he had a situation in his life where he had hip bone problems or movement problems that make him sway his hips more? 

Will he still be considered gay? 

No. This is using commonsense - not ideas and beliefs I connected to what masculinity means.

Another idea that I had of him was that,

I believed that he was someone who had the right to tell us what to do, where to be and how to behave.

I know he  did not know how to cook tasty meals, but meals are here to provide nutrition not pleasure. 

Enjoyment for me is awareness of the physical sensations in my mouth when I am chewing food without judgment and experiencing it going inside my body. But we are usually not aware of these physical sensations because we are usually thinking about whether that food is tasty or not. that's the limit of our (mind )awareness. 

I remembered one day my mom went to a convention and he was left to cook for us for 3 days. I must have it mixed up in my memory . It was not as if he did not cook us some food. He cooked us some food - something very easy to cook - he fried small dried fish and cooked us steamed rice for 3 days. That was all we ate. 

I forgot that food is not about taste. It is about nutrition. Dried fish has nutrition too and so does rice.

One that i cannot deny is that he was the one who gave my  mom money so she can buy what the family needs - food, pay for our education, etc.

Let's change the scenario for a moment,

What if we all have money coming our way every month just by virtue of being born in this world (let's just say for example, from corporations who profit from natural resources given to all of us by the earth) - for guaranteed survival, where we also get additional money if we work.

 Will this change my perception of my dad? Yes for sure.

This paves the way for expanding my self-expression. 

I do not have to ask money from my dad to spend in going to school. 

Not only will this change my perception of my dad, but my perception of myself - from inferiority (asking money from my dad) to an equal and one relationship with him.

This will pave the way for my dad and me to walk as equals on earth. 

This will also pave the way for me to stop defining him as having more money than me.

Finally, we both can see each other for who we really are - as equals. 

Another benefit is that the equal amount of money coming every month will guarantee both our survival even if we work or not work for some 'valid reason.'

The fact remains - we are both here on earth living this one life  to express and expand ourselves .

This is what living a meaningful life means to me.

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Links To My Previous Blogs

Femininity

1

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-part-1.html

2

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-part-2.html

3

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-part-3-cooking.html

4

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-part-4-nurture.html

5

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-part-5-filipina-mystique.html

6

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-in-community.html

7

http://junejourneytolife.blogspot.com/2015/08/femininity-6-school-dance-music-movement.html

Check out the blog site: atransgendersjourneytolife.blogspot.com