Men Who Wear Makeup Serve the Patriarchy More Than Anyone Else

In our totalitarian societies, there are many problematic issues that encounter individuals, groups, and socially stereotyped classifications. Sometimes attitudes towards them are interpreted in an irrational manner and aren’t subject to any logic. Perhaps one of these problems is the concept of sexual identity.

One day a friend called me — while each of us was living in a different country — to tell me that he had separated from his wife for good. Following a relatively long discussion, he stated that a while after he had gotten married, he began to feel something strange within him. He later discovered his sexual identity — a homosexual — belonging to a completely different world of thoughts and feelings.

At the time, he told me this at such a fast pace that it came as an unexpected surprise to me, perhaps because I knew the details of an old life where we would hang out and discuss sexual matters with girls. But I automatically treated the topic as a personal choice, regardless of whether that choice was the result of certain feelings, special desires, or thoughts to experiment. Of course, personal choices always have a humanitarian priority, regardless of whether or not they suit us ideologically.

Our friendship continued normally until the day we had a video call. We were talking about a lot of things, until my friend got up, brought makeup, and started applying it to his face in a side mirror. It was then that a long discussion on the issue of make-up began, with the end result being — according to his opinion — that I am a person more inclined towards patriarchal thinking. Of course, this was one of the dilemmas of the uptight misconceptions that are made regarding homosexuals, as well as a misperception on any topic that approaches their privacy or their own choices.

Of course, my sexual identity is different, and I tend to prefer women. My objection to the idea of ​​my friend’s makeup was not because he was gay, but because the makeup culture that we carry out as daily behavior is, in essence, the product of gender, economic, and historical divisions. It was imposed, at some point, by a political force with a patriarchal view on women in order to be more aesthetically and sexually acceptable within the patriarchal sense.

In simpler terms, we as human beings belong to the concept of nature as a philosophical and cultural existence. The process of our contemporary urbanization is nothing but patterns of intellectual, political, and religious structures that define forms of our awareness and culture that depend on modern consumer systems, in which the concept and philosophy of makeup constitute a large part of this existential dependence. The idea of makeup is just a process based on satisfying the patriarchy — when a woman, for example, dolls herself up and changes her look and actions in order to please a foolish male, or in another justifiable way, dolls up for herself and not for anyone else. But sorry, dear, isn’t the idea of your personal sense of beauty in essence the result of your desire to be more sexually exciting to others! To be accepted by the fertile male temperament?

Of course, I am not condemning here the act of adorning oneself for sexual purposes. Such behaviors exist within the world of any creature on earth, whether it was man or animal. Sexual goals and objectives are part of the concept of existence within nature, which is based on the issue of reproduction, which, in turn, is the basis and essence of life before the rise of any philosophical concepts of sex. But I am only explaining the idea of makeup as a supposedly contemporary, consumerist, and economic object from a power that controls collective consciousness.

Therefore, when a gay man comes out to exercise his sexual identity as an analogy to a woman who herself is shaped by the patriarchy, then the entire concept of social rebellion is worthless. This is simply because he did not oppose the authority of the institution that assumes the divisive identity of gender, but rather is a transition from one gender party to another. “In the words of the popular saying: ‘Somewhere... They hanged him’.”

When a gay man comes out to exercise his sexual identity as an analogy to a woman who herself is shaped by the patriarchy, then the entire concept of social rebellion is worthless.

What’s the problem of being homosexual without presenting yourself as a more aesthetically, behaviorally or linguistically rich creature? And without presenting yourself as a coveted fantasy for others? Isn’t the concept of spoiling or adorning oneself a concept of estrangement of the self towards the existing patriarchal authority? That patriarchy that awaits every stimulating act of a spoiled creature to pave the way for a sacred erection?

The dilemma is not in sexual identity, or our acceptance or non-acceptance of it, but rather the acceptance of the other without turning into a being of inferior value, as his task is only supposed to entertain a party that believes that he himself is descended from ‘eternal heaven’, and that he is the mighty actor that will charge through the walls of Constantinople.

In another approximate and intimate example, I don’t really like the idea of a woman who appears as a totally soft entity in erogenous zones, such as absolutely clean private parts or a body that doesn’t have any hair. Not because I prefer or do not prefer these issues, but because the idea of treating a human as a physiologically natural reality has a much higher philosophical and spiritual value than a clean angel-like being whose sole mission is to be a lusted object for male consumption.

This angelic image of a clean body is nothing but an attempt at voluntary female submission at an imaginary level. They are just meat vessels ready to be completely absorbed, devoured, and penetrated as well as subject to the imaginary power of male control in the worst form of rape, regardless of whether there are physiological natures of each entity. Here, however, we are talking about a socially inherited culture for the task imparted upon every human being. In the same sense, homosexuality, in the process of putting makeup for example, practices the same formulas that a female exercises in presenting herself as a consumable object for the male. It is a voluntary alienation of one’s self in order to satisfy the patriarchal authority.

What is the problem with being a woman with natural body hair without feeling the position of weakness or social male ridicule if the erogenous zones aren't shaved for the sake of a male boasting of freedom? Of course, some will come out as usual to speak in a semi-scientific or semi-religious phrasing, that the subject is a matter of cleanliness and not as I presented it in the context of the conversation.

And of course I will tell you briefly.. “I swear on your sister’s life, you do not need to swear by the holy Qur'an, I believe you man, no need to go on these long spiels and justifications for your masculinity. I swore by your sister because I know that she is precious — according to your thinking — and your sister, not your mother, because according to your culture, your mother’s femininity has been consumed by the parent eros, but your sister still retains unspilled virgin blood. Isn’t this it?..No problem, sirree.”

As a result, justifying the idea of body cleanliness — especially religious cleanliness — in order to establish the imaginative power of the ready-made social patriarchy, as well as justification even for the most powerful liberals, is the most lowly thing that can be said in order to preserve the imaginative perceptions — that rise to material levels later on — from the concepts of sex, regardless of whether they are homosexual or not. In the same sense, some homosexuals in our societies exercise the same cultural dimensions and dilemmas of the concepts of sexual transformation without adequate awareness, that the issue of the choice of sexual identity is a cultural meaning before it is exercised as behavior, and that one of the reasons for not achieving its freedom at the social level is that those looking for their identities do not fight or oppose the institution that imposes its political and cultural power on the collective consciousness. What's the point of discovering your sexual preference, and then move from one oppressed gender party to another oppressed gender party. This is not freedom, because the institution that enslaves the two still exists and controls all the details of collective consciousness.

The choice of sexual, religious, political, cultural liberation, etc. is indivisible. The idealism of the woman who implicitly wants to be a pure angel to be devoured by a superior male figure — according to religious concepts — and the homosexual who practices contemporary feminine awareness because he has a vision that transformation and the choice of sexual identity is primarily a submission to the dominant eros — both models are dispossessed of an institutional authority that dominates consciousness.

If institutions — all institutions — are not placed under the guillotine, then all these claims of sexual liberation and the movement of identity is mere hollow nonsense.

In practice, the misperception of rational debate in our totalitarian societies exists in a large and unfortunately bad rate. My dear homosexual, the problem is not that the authority recognizes your rights, because those in power will refuse to recognize those rights until the moment they are placed before death. Rather, the real problem is that you exercise your sexual identity without feeling that you have to be a spoiled creature that has had the idea that these gender-divided behaviors from its historical culture are our absolute human reality planted in its comprehensive awareness.

In my view, the dilemma is a dilemma of self-awareness about our choices, sexual identity, and their behavioral application. It is not an issue of passing a law for the recognition of identity, because sooner or later everyone - states, individuals and laws - will recognize others, their choices, and their sexual identities. The dilemma is that we do not practice behaviors that assume a gender division towards ourselves.

Sex is a philosophy of pleasure, so we do not need to put that philosophy and its physical applications into boxes that express the stereotypical limits molded in our ready-made consciousness.

*The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Raseef22