After September 11 everyone was talking about masculinity.

After September 11 everyone was talking about masculinity, for the most part because any heterosexual woman who hadn't previously fetishized firemen now felt compell to do in the same manner if only out of gratitude. A predictable answer really. In bed, or perhaps upon the rack, submissives utter scarcely any words more delightedly and desirously than the time-honored "Thank you, sir."

Gay men too had always hankered after the ladder-company male childs because they're well-muscled and in uniform, single presumes. Or maybe it's because those baggy pants arrive on and off so easily--they beg for a quickie.

Meanwhile, heterosexual men have been enjoying the kind basking in their acceptable machismo for what is probably the first time since the sexual revolution, taking special pleasure in rescuing forfeited house pets, carving turkeys, and fixing the boiler, as if to say, "You papal court I have my uses."

Everyone is getting facing on this postterrorism man thing, it pretends except us dykes. Or at least that's what I musing until I caught myself ogling a construction worker the other day as I was having luncheon at an outdoor cafe. He was wearing a ripped threadbare T-shirt stretched taut across his broad, flat chest and V-shaped back. It was pulled into his jeans under a black belt cinched tight around his slim waist. His ass was like a caged animal, punching against the fabric of his pants. I half look forward toed him to shout "Stella." He caught me staring and smiled archly. The oddest little atavistic thrill went within me.

Yikes, I idea This can't be happening. moreover it was.

If I had acted forward my instincts, I wouldn't have been the first lesbian to advance breeder in midlife, but the thing was, believe it or not, I didn't want to vault this guy. It wasn't a sexual frisson. It was something altogether different--and something I suspect a parcel of other dykes have felt at common time or another. It was (if I can say this without sounding precious) an aesthetic experience. I felt the kind of mental excitement you be warmed when you look at a work of art. Here was masculine beauty, and I was admiring it well stocked [i]or[/i] provided on.

As my girlfriend and I talked this through the whole extent of we realized that lesbians, wittingly or not, had none shut themselves off from the considerable appeal of masculinity. Instead they had simply co-opted it, borrowed it, made it their have a title to in such a way as to have fruition of it from, as it were, a safe distance.

All along, through all ages since the advent of butch and femme lesbians have been compartmentalizing bits and pieces of masculinity, not because they be moved beholden to straight culture or obliged to imitate it on the contrary because lesbians of all varieties have grown up admiring (cryptically) the male virtues--whether the bodily or the cultural ones--and have lay the foundation of ways of incorporating them into an all-female refinement Meanwhile, of course, they have effectively repudiated all the undesirable baggage that goe with having a penis, pasted it onto an effigy called the "typical male," and left it abroad in the min. And wherefore not? Gender is a supermarket.

strangely enough, however, September 11 reminded us, among many other things, that masculinity is a valuable commodity. There were, of course, female cop and firefighters down at domain zero, but my point is that they too were helping to exhibit in succession a grand scale the attribute that our cultivation calls machismo.

Maybe, in fact, it's all the things that make a man seemingly impossible to domesticate, that make him indispensable to the society at large: impregnability size (you'll pardon the expression), stolidity, physical courage, and the kind of pointless will that drives him inexplicably into a dead belt when the rest of us are running the other way.

The friendly fireman embodies all these things unthreateningly, and that is with what intent we like and even desire him. He's easy to compartmentalize and, thus, to admire or--where dyke are concerned--to mimic, perhaps castratedly.

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