Sanguine
a vocab word to describe a coming of age.
At least, that’s what I think.
This essay isn’t exactly an argument or persuasive essay, in that I don’t know that I’m arguing my thesis as much as I’m more mulling it over. Musing, if you will. I do think this could (and should) become something more meaty, too, with a little research and etc. But allow me to noodle on this idea a bit first, yeah? It’s a concept I’ve been internally mulling over for a while, particularly since expressing my bemusement at being a woman who loves The Fight, and who came of age in an unusual way. What’s my thesis?
Every human child needs to be blooded in order to properly come of age.
Depending on the child’s biology, it’ll happen in different ways.
Girls start menstruating, which is the blood happening to them, to mark the beginning of the body’s changes and the shift from childhood to adulthood. Boys, though, don’t have an automatic blood thing happen to their bodies when they come of age, so they have to make the blood (and pain) happen from an external source instead of an internal.
This is why so many cultures have a male body-modification ritual involving a physical mutilation of some kind, or a ‘blooding’ rite where the boy will undergo a rite involving violence, to mark him as a man. Girls tend to not have rituals like this, because they’ve got the pain and the blood going on already from their own insides. When they bleed, they’re no longer a child. This must be simulated for a boy.
I don’t know what the parallel would be for a child that’s not either of the binary genders. Would it be a matter of: if they bleed themselves, that takes care of that, like with girls? what about if their anatomy doesn’t provide that; would they then need to be blooded like a boy? I’m already in a bit over my head with this thesis to begin with, as I’m not a sociologist or an anthropologist (as much as my humanities and folkloric expertise opens those fields to me in tiny oblique driblets), so I think I’ll begin my mullings and Musings on this idea by discussing the binary genders here first. Anyone who reads this who has more of an in-depth knowledge of 3rd genders or of any of these social sciences, please chime in. And throw me a bone. A bloody bone.) (A raw head and bloody bones? Remember that scary folktale?)
Sanguine
The definition of this word actually has to do not with passion (as you might think, it being a word associated with blood), but optimism. Which. I dunno if I like that or not–I have a fraught relationship with optimism, having suffered from an oppressively toxic strain of it through most of my adult life till now. But it’s about that from its origins in medieval concepts of the humors being in charge of personality. The balance of two different biles, phlegm, and blood all contribute to health, and an imbalance of any of them shows up in certain characteristics. We still call people ‘phlegmatic’ and ‘bilious,’ and even ‘melancholy.’ So, sanguine it is. Ruddy, rosy-cheeked. Falstaffian.
So why did I choose this word to represent the concept of the blooding of kids into adults? I was focused on the blood connection, to be honest. But now that I think closer about its relationship to optimism, I can see how that could fit nicely into a coming of age. It’s a hope for the future, after all. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear (rose colored) shades.
Blood Sport
In ‘Violence is Normal,’ I describe the widespread trope that dictates that a man, a ‘real’ man, only dominates. And his only way of domination is violent domination. It’s the last of my Problematic Toxic Masculinity Tropes, through which I discuss the (damaging) concepts of hegemonic masculinity and hypermasculinity, and what that means for our regular culture and media diet in this country.
The Violence is Normal trope focuses on men being the, well, men of action, not women. Female action stars are very rare (thankfully getting less so but they’re still the unusual minority), and of course in Hollywood, non-binary genders don’t exist. Hegemonic-masculine men protect their women and children with violence; men leave the home to provide, but also to stand guard outside the homestead in order to eradicate interlopers who would steal his valuables (valuables that include his women and his children).
So. Violence. Particularly masculine violence. Is it natural? Yes and no. (Look at my brief summary of Sapolsky’s summary of human behavior, in the article above.) BUt I have a strange and, to me at least, interesting take on the whole ‘blooding’ thing, as pertains to my own personal coming of age. I talk about this process in chapter 5 of my memoir, ‘One of the Guys,’ and more in an earlier vocab word piece, Vapulate:
Getting that job as a fighter at the Renaissance Festival … not only meant that I was in hard training and excellent practice, but I was going through another process: I was enduring a coming of age ritual. But I was going through a masculine ritual, not separated out from my comrades as they learned what it was to be a man and a fighter. In a weird way, that first summer with its savage hazing and its tough guy physicality and its dirt and sweat and aggressive sexual posturing (and aggressive sexual pursuits), I came of age as a man.
This is a revelation that I’ve processed through the decades after the late ‘90s and then early aughts came and went, wherein I engaged with love and aplomb in several fighting arts, and continued to be made fun of by friends for being terrible at girly stuff. And making men friends way easier than women, and. It hit me that it’s because I came of age, as a late bloomer, after a developing childhood of vicious bullying by girls and women, through a masculine ritual (not really technically ‘as a man,’ since it was the ‘90s and we didn’t really have a safe way to talk about gender switching or fluidity, or really anything but cis identites. More on that in a minute). And of course that’s why I trusted men way more than women, as an adult, too. So my norms and behavior once I reached adulthood were for the most part masculine. As I have always loved dressing in mixed gender styles, once society evolved enough for me to look into and understand other genders besides the binary, I adopted gender-fluidity as a thing I can see I always have been. Is that because I underwent a male ritual to become an adult? Am I, because I’m a woman, twice-blooded, in that case? What could that mean? Twice-blooded, twice grown up? Twice gendered?
I discuss some of the nuances of (masculine) hazing in previous pieces like Discipline and Omphaloskepsis as well, though I don’t really Muse as much about my own hazing process (and its sociological importance) in those. It’s an echo, though, isn’t it. An essential part of the life process, a requirement to becoming an intimate part of a tight knit group. What sorts of hazing did you go through, in your coming of age? What gender were you and are you today? I’d be curious to hear, and to collect stories (albeit in a completely non-scientific way).
Liquid Assets (and genders)
I feel like I should go a little more into my personal experience with blooding back in the mid-’90s when I was in my early 20s, as it relates to my confused gender fluidity (not to mention closeted fluid sexuality): which came first? The gender or the rite? I’ve been batting this question around a bit, and I figure it’s impossible to say, because the ‘90s. Non-binary genders wouldn’t have been a choice of identity then, no matter what gender fluidity was in our fashions. Non-hetero sexualities were just beginning to peep into the mainstream, but the AIDS epidemic put a huge painfully deadly damper on that process of acceptance, and we’re feeling the repercussions of that fear-based homophobia even today, where alternatives to heterosexuality are far more mainstream than they were then. We’ve come a long way, baby (but we still have a long, long way to go). So suffice to say that when I was undergoing my masculine rite of passage, any nonbinary gender choices weren’t open to me. I was still a woman, hanging with my swordmates. One of the Guys. Except not really.
For more about how my fashion has, since 8th grade, been a wild mix of gender expression, read ‘Textures.’ in it, I describe some of the ways I used to (and still do) mix gender expressions in my fashions. This was a big thing, from the mid-’80s through the ‘90s: combining the masculine and feminine into fluid, dynamic looks. But back then, gender itself was still relegated to cis. Annie Lennox was still always ‘she.’ Prince was ‘he’ in leather and lace (til he was an unpronounceable symbol, but even then he was still ‘he’). Boy George was…well look at his name. Grace Jones, even, was never referred to as ‘they’—we didn’t have that. She was ‘she’, as much as she looked and dressed the way she did.
I wonder how many of these artists would have taken on nonbinary pronouns and identities if it had been a thing back then? Maybe we should ask them–I’d love to hear what Grace Jones thinks of non-binary gender identity. I know Boy George is an LGBTQ+ activist, and I don’t know what his views on non-cis identities is. Okay, there’s one direction I can go in as far as more research beyond my own life experiences. Cool. I’ll take a note.
Side note: is all this true for me because I grew up in Colorado? If I’d grown up in New York or some other more coastal, cosmopolitan area, would I have observed more choices pop up earlier than I did? Chime in with your own thoughts or experiences.
And now, I’m 51 and undergoing perimenopause. A de-blooding, as it were. A coming of a different age. The blooding is being taken from me, now. And I am way too creaky to engage in the martial arts the way I used to (though I hope to continue to choreograph for many years to come). And I feel like not enough is said about the de-blooding phase, of all genders.
But that’s it for my initial sanguine Musings. What do you think I should do about this next? Other research? I’d love any suggestions from my readers—where should I turn, to make this into a meatier (bloodier?) project?