Videos. Mine last. The usual.

First we have a rather good PSA. It’s made by a group dedicated to fighting sexual assault, but its message about gender stereotyping is far more universal than that.

Certainly, as a gay man who has never felt like male gender roles fit him at all, and who has a lot of aspects to his personality which would be considered stereotypically female, I respond very well to any message about men not being bound by gender stereotypes either.

I feel deeply uncomfortable about my gender expression. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that, as in so many things, I will have to make up my own gender role and go on from there.

For years, I have just glibly deflected the issue with a joke like saying “I’m a me!”, but just saying “I’m a whatever I happen to be” does not resolve the issue. Especially not when you are in a period of heavy identity construction like I am right now.

Glib evasions aside, you have to know who you are in order to be happy. You have to know it and you have to accept it. That doesn’t mean you have to like all of it, but you have to accept that it is you, as you are right now, and denial about that fact only makes your problems worse.

I was a boy who cried easily. That is a major problem if you are male. We are taught not to cry, that it’s a sign of weakness, it means you are a wimp.

And “wimp” is pretty much the male equivalent of “bitch”. It’s the worst thing you can be. So much madness and hate packed into a one syllable word.

The only reason “fag” is used as an insult by men to men is that “fag” is assumed to be the absolute worst form of “wimp”. You are such a wimp that you are basically a girl, except not, because then you would have a valid gender identity of your own.

Instead, you are at Gender Conformity Zero, which is far far worse.

And what the hell, while we are delving deep into the bitter darkness, let’s tackle race.

Tim Wise delivers a brilliant talk about the myth of whiteness. Everything he says corresponds to something I have thought about for years but never quite put into words, and of course, that is exactly what a public articulator does.

And he’s right. Whiteness is entirely bogus. It was an invention of North American pioneers who wanted to really emphasize how different they were (and felt) from the darker hued people they were busy enslaving and robbing of their land.

As usual when it comes to us humans, the only thing that really gets us to band together and overcome our differences for the common good is an outside threat. All these paler skinned people set aside the differences that back in Europe would have set them at each other’s throats and made a solemn vow that it didn’t matter if you were French, or British, or Dutch, or whatever.

All that mattered is that you were more like each other than you were these dark faced inhuman heathen savages who should be glad we are here to rescue them from their pagan misery.

So in a sense, it was progress. The arc of history has always bent towards human beings organizing themselves into larger and larger groups. It is beyond tragic and getting into the realm of the downright absurd that it took the need to band together against the people they were repressing in order to do it, but the fact remains that this myth of the “white race” (a scientifically hilarious concept) actually helped to unify many disparate peoples who were still killing each other back in Europe.

And this time, said peoples went beyond the conquering empires which brought them together in the first place, and made their own empire for oppression and slaughter of a new kind of people.

That’s innovation, that is.

And finally, of course, there’s my little contribution.

Thought it would be fun to put a bunch of nerdy type jokes up on YouTube. Those were all that I could remember when I was making the vid. Sure, I could have looked up more on the Internet, but where is the fun in that? As is, I put myself through needless pain and suffering by cudgeling my grey matter for the ones I did remember.

I am just no good at that kind of memory. I am great at remembering things when prompted, which is why I always tested so well. Things remind me of things all the time. It gets a little tricky sometimes, to be quite honest about it.

But I am not good at just remembering everything I know about a certain subject. This is especially true when what I am trying to remember has no narrative structure to give it a sequence or meaning.

I was just lucky that when I was a kid, rote memorization had been almost entirely removed from education as a Bad Thing We Don’t Do Any More. I am pretty sure I would have been able to do it, but I would have utterly hated it.

What a disgusting way to learn! Just cramming the fact into your brain undigested like that. It gives me mental indigestion just thinking about it. I am definitely the sort of person who heavily processes everything before it is added to my mental structure. Everything has to find its way to the right place, congruent with the rest of the structure, or it gets rejected.

In other words, I check everything for consistency with what I already know before accepting it. However, the existing knowledge does not always win. I am open-minded enough to let new information change the existing structure, especially when the new information resolves other conflicts.

That all sounds so clinical. I’m a really warm and sweet guy, honest!

I just have a brain like a diesel computer.