The Avant Garde Male

Let's follow this line of thought a little further. In its original conception the avant was the experimental, the inflammatory, and a kind of stubborn craftless craft.

What I mean by the avant garde male, is a man who is not enslaved to the expectations of his social role, or the pressures of a post-feminist sexuality. He doesn't care if size matters, he does not want to "perform" for his woman. His sexuality is a perpetually fluid improvisation, and yeilds nothing to the programming of Patriarchal culture.

The avant male is rustic, he feels his way through the territory of the moment. He is not thoughtless, but his idea of himself is not a concept, it need not be fixed, or polarised or attached to the inheritance of his biology.

Perhaps a central feature of Patriarchy is the male ego. This is not something that inhibits the avant garde man. That is not to say he is not a victim of this haunting cultural system within him, but that his attitude allows him to know and rise above it. The male ego is borne from the fixed idea of a man, one that requires him to exhibit little or no vulnerability, to be an emotioanl rock, a rooted trunk of temperance.

A masculinity that is improvisational, creative and alive, doesn't give a shit about any of that. This kind of man is not trying to impress anyone, or pick up the slack, or fight anyone else's battles. He lives to express himself, to make each moment a statement of authenticity.

This includes when he is fucking. Many men, men who are by nature avant garde, are poisoned by their own self-consciousness in bed. Underneath this turgid timidity, is a free spirit, one that needs the boundaries of expectation and elusive perfectionism to be let down before they can let loose the dogs of war.

This is not just me rambling here. I think it is a critical point and substantiates my critique of the post-feminist ideal. It is proof to me that post-feminism is just another version of archaic Patriarchy, in that this culture still entrenches the fears and insecurities that form the pathological ego of men.

For a man to unravel the full potential of nuanced sexuality, he has a big bloody battle on his hands. He has to fly in the face of rigid ideas of masculinity, the idea that his manhood is founded on what role he plays for another, and the requirement that he must exhibit perfectionism and excellent from the get go.

The avant garde man does not hit the ground running. Such an idea is an anathema to his masculinity. He plays. He wets his lips. He dirties his knees in the mud. He paints with his fingertips. He understands that in order for him to access his prowess and his genius he must be allowed to screw everything up, to toss all his feeling to the wall and wait to see what sticks.