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How Masculine Am I?

Closeup photo of the three formal shirts in white, blue and light pink hanged neatly
By Asim Mudgal Masculinities and Sexuality 2 Voices May 19, 2025

How masculine am I? I have dealt with having a non-masculine body since the time I was a teenager. I have questioned my sexuality and how it interacted with my non-masculine body. I have struggled with questions about how much muscle my body has or how much muscle it needs. To man up, I have tried gymming despite onlookers making me feel self-conscious, embarrassed and ashamed. Is my sexuality a product of a non-masculine body, or is a non-masculine body a product of my sexuality? I believed that my non-masculine body was the reason for my failure as a date-able person. Perhaps, my body needed something more – broad shoulders, pumped-up chest, pointy Adam’s apple, veiny muscles on hands, biceps, triceps, and legs? However, that was absurd given my reality.

Later, I thought my cultural identity was the reason for my rejection, as I was blocked on many dating sites when they heard that I was from Bihar. So, this section of identity becomes part of my sexuality and non-masculine body. Along this trajectory lies my Brahminhood, which not only gets polluted by my sexual orientation but also by my ethnicity and non-masculine body. This pollution makes my masculinity fragile and leads me to live a life of delusions, self-pity and social self-consciousness.

Is masculinity colour-coded? In a short story collection, Mohanaswamy, the third-person narrator, says, about Mohanaswamy, a South Indian Brahmin:

Many times he tried to escape from this inner turmoil, but to no avail. I should behave like men, he would tell himself, but his feminine mannerisms would invariably reflect in his behaviour. So he was very particular about what he wore. Colours like pink, red and yellow were a strict no. (Vasudhendra, 2016)

Like Mohanaswamy, I also went through a dilemma about what to wear and what not to wear. Colour is just a feature of clothing, not of one’s sexuality, but Mohanaswamy’s choices and preferences for a particular colour were shaped by his sexuality and his notions of masculinity. Furthermore, Mohanaswamy went through all sorts of inner turmoil from childhood to adulthood to change his feminine mannerisms. The narrator says:

His mother did not know what to say. After a while she replied, “You must also behave like boys. Then nobody will dare call you so.” “But how to behave like boys, Amma?” “The way you speak, the way your voice sounds, the movement of your eyes, your body language, the games you play … everything should be like that of boys.”

In the scene above, Mohanaswamy and his mother discuss how a boy should behave. How does coming out as ‘gay’ define one’s masculinity? How does a mother react to her son’s never-ending questions about what it is to be a boy? In what manner should he behave to fit himself into the other boys’ shoes at his school? Thus, to become ‘other’ boys and to protect the peace at home, which was disrupted by his feminine traits, the teenager Mohana:

[..] made up his mind to be rough and tough, but he behaved like a robot instead, controlling the movement of his hands, legs and eyes. He also had to do something about his shrill voice. Since he couldn’t change it, he thought the best solution was to talk less. He stopped asking questions in class. He stopped chitchatting with his classmates. He tried to speak in a low, harsh voice. “Speak up, Mohana,” people would tell him. But he would speak with the same hoarseness. He had earned the nickname ‘GanSu’1 because he played with his sister and her friends, so he stopped playing with them. If he went to play with the boys, they bullied him. So he decided to be all by himself. He read books. Sometimes he felt too tempted to join his sister and her friends, but he restrained himself.

Mohanaswamy’s desperation to change his mannerisms turns him into a robot, making masculinity mechanical. Moreover, in this short story collection, Mohanaswamy’s masculinity and sexuality also lie at the intersection of his caste, i.e., being a South Indian Brahmin. His changing behaviours, attributes, and expectations ply between three dimensions: sexuality, caste and masculinity. Through the short story collection, Mohanaswamy is socially anxious and tries to repair his ‘self’ to fit into that of the ‘others’. Similarly, my sexuality not only pollutes my brahminhood but also my non-masculine body, burdening it with anxiety to perform in public. As Yudi, a brahmin character in R. Raj Rao’s 2003 novel The Boyfriend rightly says, “Homos are no different from Bhangis. Both are Untouchables. […] homosexuals have no caste or religion. They have only their homosexuality.”

How masculine am I? Perhaps my self-consciousness has grown with my awareness of emergent forms of masculinities and sexualities making it hard for me to navigate my own masculinity; yet, I am trying.

Reference:

1 A shorter form of ‘Gandu Sule’, which means a male prostitute in Kannada ↩︎

Cover image by Nimble Made on Unsplash

Asim Mudgal / About Author
Asim Mudgal is a queer poet and storyteller born in Drabhanga, Bihar. He has a bachelor's degree in History from the University. He is pursuing a Master's in Comparative Literature from Dr B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. His collection of poetry books includes Peeping Away, Home: Virah Drabhanga Sa Dilli Tak and Cafe'17 Darbhanga.
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