It's always good to squat over the mirror and take a good, hard look at your own ideology sometimes. 'Cause if you don't do the thinking someone else… - Abigail Thorn

I did kind of construct a masculinity out of the best bits of every man that I could find, like the best bits of my brothers and my dad and the best bits of the Bond movies. I tried to do the man of the 21st century thing and, absolutely on it and woke but also compassionate and fun and charming and sexy and all the rest of it and with the muscles and the beard and, I tried to do all of it and it all made me sort of miserable really.

Gender is one of the way that human subjects come into existence. The technical term here is "subjectification" and that process happens publicly. Gender creates the illusion of a private self, which exists before all of that, but this is just an illusion. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it has no pronouns.

Masculinity is a subject about which I know more than I should, but less than some of you may think. I studied it for a number of years but I never quite had the natural talent.