Sam Smith

[TimeLady]

Oh, Sam. It's OK to be a feminine man. Just be patient and wait for the right partner.

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7458871/Sam-Smith-asks-loved-ones-refer-instead-he.html

This looks like the first steps towards transition to me, and I have a strong sense of foreboding. Sam sounds deeply unhappy.

Brilliant post, rabbitwoman.

Here's a poem for you, Sam Smith, about what it is to feel like a woman. Hope you fucking enjoy it:

Recognition

Things get away from one.
I’ve let myself go, I know.
Children? I’ve had three
and don’t even know them.

I strain to remember a time
when my body felt lighter.
Years. My face is swollen
with regrets. I put powder on,

but it flakes off. I love him,
through habit., but the proof
has evaporated. He gets upset.
I tried to do all the essentials

on one trip. Foolish, yes,
but I was weepy all morning.
Quiche. A blond boy swung me up
in his arms and promised the earth.

You see this came back to me
as I stood on the scales.
I wept. Shallots. In the window
creamy ladies held a pose

which left me clogged and old.
The waste. I forgotten my purse,
fumbled; the shopgirl gaped at me
compassionless. Claret. I blushed.

Cheese. Kleenex. It did happen.
I lay in my slip on wet grass,
laughing. Years. I had to rush out,
blind in a hot flush and bumped

into an anxious, dowdy matron
who touched the cold mirror
and stared at me. Stared
and said I’m sorry sorry sorry.

Carol Ann Duffy (1955 –
from her Selected Poems book

I've only vaguely heard of him (he's older than me apparently, but I have no interest in most contemporary music) but he sounds like a total wanker.
Just BE a gay man ffs, it's a perfectly fine thing to be!

For me, what is sad is that Sam Smith's personal story is actually quite common: overweight non masculine boy gets bullied and has unhappy childhood. They actually had liposuction at 12 after being mocked for having 'breasts'.

They were praised effusively in the media for losing weight. Those photos in the article show that they are trying to present in a typically celeb way but they don't have the look of the stereotyped gay male celeb with broad shoulders, a sculpted chest and six pack.

I see Sam Smith as quite a vulnerable figure so am trying to be careful with pronouns. I do think there is something in the posters commenting about how it was ok to be a feminine presenting man (at least in the music world) in the 1970s and 80s. Where did that go?

I think trying to become happy inside would help Sam more than public statements about pronouns. I see the pronoun thing less as a publicity strategy than a wider societal problem with corrosive gender sterotypes. I don't mind using his preferred pronouns but I am sick of the media virtue signalling about pronouns while actively encouraging such narrow representations of male and female beauty.

I think I need a coffee after that rant!

I note that the DM article uses "he" pronouns for Sam. I'm pleased that they (the DM, not him) do.

"Some days I've got my manly side and some days I've got my womanly side, but it's when I'm in the middle of that switch that I get really, really depressed and sad. Because I don't know who I am or where I am or what I'm doing, and I feel very misunderstood by myself. I realised that's because I don't fit into either."

I don't understand how people can see themselves through such a gendered lens. Everyone analyses themselves sometimes I'm sure, but I've genuinely never had a "today I'm feeling very womanly/manly/in the middle" kind of feeling. Do they (the gender obsessed, including but not exclusively, Sam Smith) really think about things in this way? Actually the only time I really had a "I am a woman" kind of feeling was when I was breast-fed my DD and I had a realisation that I was doing something I could only do because I was a woman.

^
I don't understand how people can see themselves through such a gendered lens. Everyone analyses themselves sometimes I'm sure, but I've genuinely never had a "today I'm feeling very womanly/manly/in the middle" kind of feeling. Do they (the gender obsessed, including but not exclusively, Sam Smith) really think about things in this way?^

I agree with this so much BooLoo, I honestly cannot get my head around that way of think - it's completely and utterly alien to me.

Dull bloke with a sliding career desperately trying to cling on to fame.

Next.

Can’t sing for toffee.

I saw this on the bbc news website and couldn’t understand how on Earth this qualifies as ‘news’.

I am looking for a website where I can read reasonably unbiased actual news because the bbc news website seems to have turned itself into a tabloid propaganda machine.

BarbaraStrozzi

I thought Sam came out as non-binary ages ago. I'm sure I remember reading a self indulgent pile of toss an interview about a year ago.

I had an actual laugh-out-loud at that 😂

I don’t care what people want to refer to themselves as but the whole they / their thing is so grammatically incorrect it makes me cringe every time I see it.

I thought he said he was in touch with his feminine side or some other brain fart. Desperate for attention much, eh?

It's been news on the radio this morning. Non-binary isn't a thing. He's a bloke, that's all.

Seriously what does that mean? I’d love for him to expand on that because if being a woman is all about nice flowery thoughts and girly outfits etc then I don’t think I’m w women at all!

Maybe he wants love more than sex.........or wants to feel desired and seen as sexy and attractive........has an aesthetic sense and likes to shop for home furnishings....probably more like that sort of thing.

Thing is, these are not strictly gendered desires or preferences. We really have gone backwards, haven't we...it is as if various liberation movements had not happened, and as if people had not been rejecting strict gender stereotypes and roles for many decades.

It's as if women didn't yet have the vote, and men were forbidden from having long hair or wearing moisturiser......

Well, he seems to self-identify as a singer, so why not a woman? 🤷🏼‍♀️

He needs a hobby. People who don’t have enough to do can become awfully self focussed.

Does anyone else hear Shania Twain singing ‘man, I feel like a woman’ in their head.

Sam you are dull, accept that. It’s like when he tried to make a thing about being the first out gay man to win an Oscar (he wasn’t). Snooze, no one cares mate.

And I use ‘mate’ in a gender neutral way...

I see Sam Smith as quite a vulnerable figure so am trying to be careful with pronouns. I do think there is something in the posters commenting about how it was ok to be a feminine presenting man (at least in the music world) in the 1970s and 80s. Where did that go?

Yes, what happened?

Could it be that a younger generation no longer reads, or has much interest in historical liberation movements; has little awareness of goths, new romantics, Mark Bolan, David Bowie, Annie Lennox - or of any radical and liberating youth movements of times gone by.

What of gay liberation? Equal civil rights are almost a given, and surely it is one of the best times in which to be a gay man?

I feel very stupid about this, because I don't understand what non-binary means :( I don't think of myself as anything. What does it mean? What does it feel like? If it's a negative thing - NON-binary - how is it different than how most people feel? Does anyone know anyone who knows what it feels like to be a woman?

Sorry to be so inarticulate, I just can't grasp the significance of it.

It means you are speschul

Everyone analyses themselves sometimes I'm sure, but I've genuinely never had a "today I'm feeling very womanly/manly/in the middle" kind of feeling.

I think that's more to do with what is considered to be acceptable for women Vs men. As a woman no one bats an eyelid if I wear a dress and make up one day and jeans, check shirt and Timberland s the next day. No one thinks I'm presenting as a woman and then presenting as a man but that isn't the same for men. There's quite a strict societal definition of what it is to be a man but it seems now that more men are questioning this and are struggling with how to express it.

Why can't people just "be" without labels being applied or comments or judgements being made on them?

I’m an old giffer and remember the 70s and 80s when there was much more “gender” flexibility. Whether male or female there was less pressure to “fit” a traditional stereotype, which is weird when you think it was 40 years ago. Since then it has polarised massively and “gender” ie some set of cultural stuff that society ascribed to your sex, has become more important - to the point where it’s normal now for lots of people to really think that “gender” is a thing they have and that it matters. It’s not, it’s just a range of sexist cultural choices that plenty of people have always resisted, while remaining their own sex.

“non-binary” means “I don’t feel I fit in with a load stereotypical societally prescribed piffle about what male or female people should be like”. In other words the same thing many thinking, questioning people have realised since the year 0. It’s just that in the past we rightly didn’t take gender so seriously so it didn’t matter - in the 80a only the most boring, unimaginative people would have thought that you should adhere to gender norms.

The interesting thing was also that breaking gender norms didn’t affect your sex, which remained a valid part of you. A man could wear a ton of make up and have long dyed hair and be wildly attractive to straight women and very masculine in his own way, like nick Rhodes . Or do the same and be a gay man, like boy George. Going back even further that was also true, eg reformation styles for men.

To be “non-binary” you have to perceive a strict binary to fall in between. It’s not really there and never has been.

I remember seeing an article that was linked either on here on or Twitter ages ago where someone NB was saying something along the lines of: On the days where I am feeling more feminine I'm so blonde and ditsy and emotional and on the days I'm feeling masculine I'm more together 🙄 They were male, just in case you can't guess.

That's where stupid gender stereotyping gets us. How can this be progress?

Even a fairly woke FB group I'm on found this stupid.

One person even queried if Sam will be re-recording all of Sam's songs which contain an "I"

And as pp, he seems more than happy to accept awards for MALE performers.

Yes men saying they feel/think/see the world like a woman. And you know this how? You mean you have some thoughts and feelings that YOU associate with a cheesy, crappy concept of femininity. How can people not see the obviousness of that?

@DecomposingComposers The generally accepted idea in society about what a man should be like has been out of date for a very very long time. I posted a video of my ex on page two, sadly what he says is very true.