The "Fuck It" Point: Turning 40.
- Southern Suitor
- Dec 2, 2023
- 9 min read
When I turned 37, I told myself I would set boundaries with people. When I turned 38, I told myself I would I would embrace being a "daddy." When I turned 39, I told myself I would stop apologizing for my body. So what does 40 mean?
This is a series of mini-essays in which I think about a milestone year: what it means to take joy in queer masculinity; pleasure in fetish and kink; and what it means to live without apology. I say “fuck” a lot.
Preamble: A Second Adolescence.
I turned 40 a few months ago. In the weeks leading up to that birthday, I thought a lot about what I have deemed the “fuck it” point. Many folks think of their 40s as an opportunity to start caring less and less about what other people think: it’s supposed to be a decade of self-actualization. The Guardian ran a recent piece about all of the different “peaks” we’re scripted to reach past the landmark of 40. I find such notions amusing, heteronormative. The straights love to tell us what our lives are supposed to be like. As queer folks, we are expected to bend the arc of our existence to some heteronormative shape. However, as the folks at the Second Adolescence Podcast point out, many of us as queer people cannot live our lives as straight people do. We don’t get to experience the same coming-of-age rituals as the straights: why else do queer people need second proms, after all?
And so, for me, the milestone of 40 has meant being more open about my kinkiness, expanding my kinks to include leather and bondage (hypnosis, even), attempting to wear more of my leather and suit gear in real life. Living more openly, more unapologetically; reclaiming my relationship with my masculinity and my kinks. Blossoming from fetish into kink has meant fixating less on the gear, and instead opening myself to experiences and community—and learning to say “fuck it” a whole lot more often.
Reclaiming Masculinity.
What does the “fuck it” point means for this blog? Should I apologize less, then? As I revised certain stories like “A Walk in the Park,” or as I wrote about my muscle growth fetish, I found myself overanalyzing, overexplaining—apologizing for having the kinks that I had, apologizing for my masculinity. I felt a great deal of guilt about it all, and I think that guilt came from a place of wanting to do better in the world, while still trying to reckon with what I considered to be the problematic elements of my kinks.
Much of this began in graduate school, in my late 20s and early 30s. It was in the early 2010s when I first joined MuscleGrowth, where I began exploring my muscle growth kink through fiction. If suits and ties began my fascination with masculinity way back in my teens, then my exploration of muscle growth fantasy represented an elaboration on those same themes.
However, the deeper I got, the more I started to realize that there was something poisonous and hollow about all of this “alpha” male manliness: so much of it was violent, misogynistic, transphobic; so much of it played into the hands of the homophobic conservatives who are goose-stepping all over our asses right now. Just like in the Weimar Republic of the 1930s, the fascists perceived—rightfully—that the gays are obsessed with masculinity, and they took advantage of that. So in 2016 we had figures like Jack Donovan, who decided that just being “gay” wasn’t manly enough. (To this day, I block accounts that say “androphile” in them.) I saw how masculinity (and male homosexuality) could easily be coopted by fascism, and I began to re-evaluate my relationship with it.
I think my journey through graduate school also played a role in my kink-shaming and frustration with my gender: the cisgender straight white rich Protestant Christian man was the great villain of history, and anybody occupying any of those categories of identity was suspect. And so, attempting to account for my privilege as a cisgender white man, I took that lesson to heart, perhaps too much. I took down my muscle growth fiction, deleted a great deal of it, disbanded my MuscleGrowth.net account. I overcompensated, and felt guilty. This particular kind of muscular, hairy masculinity—the kind embodied by body I will never have—it felt like something I had to apologize for, something I had to distance myself from and denounce. And so that led to a place of leftist kink-shaming: out of a desire to fight back against the conservative forces that have been strangling our nation since 2016, I ended up strangling a part of myself that I could never fully get rid of.
None of us can help our gender or our race, yet there I was attempting to be critical of my positionality, and attempting to account for the problematics of being who I was. And, although that was useful mental work to do—indeed, all of us should be critical of our privilege and reflective about it—I ended up adopting a holier-than-thou posture that struck many people as smug and offputting. I recall many online conversations with folks who would complain that I sounded as though I was preaching or lecturing at them. On the one hand, there is my intellectual need to analyze, to recognize how cultural notions of masculinity and power have become weapons against marginalized people. But, on the other, there is that visceral, erotic effect that masculinity and power have on me. And suits occupy the Venn diagram intersection of those two ideas: the financial wherewithal and cultural capital necessary to own a suit and tie intersects with masculinity. The suit is a uniform of the powerful. It is the emblem of respectability that the powerful have used to shut out the marginalized.
All of these things are true. Yet suits and muscles still turn me on. All of those emblems of what folks call “toxic” masculinity get me going. And I still don’t know what to do with that. I feel as though I’m most turned on by something that intends to destroy me. (Hence, werewolves.)
Leather: Queer as in Fuck You.
Then came leather.
My first pair of driving gloves was a pair of Fratelli Orsini calfskin gloves in cognac. I purchased them during the pandemic back in 2021. They were something of a vanity splurge, inspired by the image of these beautiful suited Italian gentleman at Pitti Uomo motoring about on their vespas with fabulous gloves coordinated with their ties. But then, when I started posting pictures of the gloves on Instagram (back when I was still on there), the leathermen came out of the woodwork, and took notice. And so those gloves were my gateway drug into a whole new scene.
I’ve written about how much more welcoming the leather community is than the suit community, and my experience has borne that out to be true. I’ve been reading Larry Townsend’s Leatherman’s Handbook, Jay Wiseman’s SM 101, John Weal’s Leatherman’s Protocol Handbook, and Leatherfolk, all of which point to a broad, rich, ethical, politically engaged queer fetish community that I felt the suitmen sorely lacked. I remain further convinced that the suit fetish guys are a halfhearted attempt to bring Mattachine respectability politics into the kink scene. And, as much as suits and ties turn me on, I find that leather has that sense of deeper fulfillment. The suitmen are mere hobbyists. But the leatherfolk are a community, and there’s a world of difference between the two.
So, in a way, my exploration of leather has brought me into further communion with my suit fetish. Both are the same fascination with clothing associated with masculinity and power. But with leather, there is the additional thrill of the taboo, the thrill of being able to say “queer as in fuck you.”
No Apologies: The “Fuck It” Point.
So suits are a uniform of masculinity and power. And I fucking love that rush that they give me, that sense of invulnerability, control, virility. Yet the moment I write “virility,” I realize how many trans and nonbinary people are also into suits and ties, yet feel shut out of the suit and tie scene (scattered and spread thin as it is). Like so many fetishes that center on notions of masculinity, suits hold the door open to gender essentialism and transmisogyny. So, as I try to think about my own masculinity, I realize, too, that trans and nonbinary people deserve to enjoy this clothing. Our culture codes this clothing as masculine. And individual people get to redefine that coding if they please. And many suit and tie fetishists enjoy the masculinity of suits. And many suit and tie fetishists also don’t necessarily identify with masculinity. And all of these things can be true at once.
So the “fuck it” point is about embracing contradictions and paradoxes like that. Yes, this is problematic. Yes, this turns me on. Yes, yes, and yes. Pick your poison.
The contradictions run in some different directions, too. For non-queer (cis, straight) folks, the “fuck it” point of their 40s means doing what we want and not giving a damn about the opinions of others. Yet for us queer folks, there’s a wrinkle. So much of our livelihood and ability to exist in public space depends on—unfortunately—the opinions of others. We’re living in a time where the United States gives privilege to a small group of heteropatriarchal, Christian fundamentalist “opinions” over others. We’re living in a time in which the existence of trans and nonbinary people is debated as though it’s an “opinion” when it is, in fact, a fact. As queer people, our lives are very much subject to the opinions of others. We have to look over our shoulders, or scrutinize the people around us, to see whether we’re about to offend the wrong person. It’s a survival strategy in a queerphobic world.
So what does the “fuck it” point mean for queer folks in their 40s? How can we embrace what we love, and learn the subtle art of not giving a fuck, when there are far too many queerphobic straights who are itching for an opportunity to fuck up our lives? How can we disregard the opinions of others, when their opinions could motivate them to insult us, or restrict our rights, or get us fired, or enact violence against us? How can we embrace what we love, while still learning that what we love embodies the problematic notions within our culture?
No more apologizing?
Part of the reason that fascism (under the mask of conservatism) is on the rise is that being a fascism means never having to apologize. And people—privileged people—are very much attracted to that notion. They don’t want to be made to apologize for being white or being male, since they perceive these traits as things that they didn’t consent to. So it falls to us on the left to manage that defensiveness, to bypass it, to figure out ways to be who we are without apology, and to show that a truly unapologetic way of living means standing up for those who need standing up for, and speaking truth to power.
I wrote last year about how to reimagine masculinity in more positive ways, and how to take the thing that hurt us and transform it into something that empowers us. I believe kink offers us a way to do that, but only if we understand and accept the invitation to do so. We can be kinky and threatening and dangerous and sexy, and we can also be kind and nurturing and protective and fatherly, and we can be masculine in either or any of these ways. We can say “Fuck around and find out” and we can also say “Be kind and take no shit” and we can also say “No fucks given.”
So all of this is to say: although I still find myself guided intellectually by a leftist politic that seeks to make the world a more just place for marginalized people, I still feel myself turned on by imagery of strength and power, by masculinity itself. Fetish and kink, when practiced uncritically, tend to reinforce these notions of toxic masculinity. However, fetish and kink, when practiced with compassion and communication, with trust and intimacy, and with a good sense of fun—that has the potential to heal, to transform, to turn power into play.
Thank you for reaching the endpoint of these entries of mine. I’ve been sitting on them for many months, revisiting and revising them, running them through proofreaders. (Thank you, kinky proofreaders. Y’all know who you are.)
These last tidbits are still ones that I think are worth mentioning, but I couldn’t figure out where they belong. Returning to the milestone of 40, I have figured out the following things:
1. I no longer feel guilty about having a muscle growth kink. I’ve been going to the gym regularly for over two years now. I have a muscle growth kink, and I have living a version of that in my own life. And it turns me on and it makes me feel affirmed and masculine and powerful. I no longer feel a need to apologize for my body. My body looks as it looks, and now I know how to do a deadlift and a squat. Also, I wear my “Drag Is Not a Crime” shirt to the gym, because that’s manly too.
2. We throw ourselves out of our comfort zones before we are ready. That’s what leather taught me. I drove an hour and a half across my state to find the nearest leather shop and get fitted for a harness. And now it has become a part of my kink expression. I invested in a military surplus biker jacket, and am on the lookout for boots. Leather, for me, means not having to apologize. Leather means “queer as in fuck you.” And I think we all can use a bit of that attitude. (And I think many kinds of gear can convey that attitude, too—not just leather.)
3. If I do harm, I apologize, and I try to do better. If I am called out for making a mistake, I apologize, and I try to do better. Those are the places where apology belongs. It really is that simple.
4. It is never too late to grow. The folks who peaked in high school are now very dull and dissatisfied people. Kink offers a way past the picket fence.
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