Travis Alabanza’s new book shows how male self-pity is weaponised against women’s rights.
Remember when oppression meant the government brutally denying you the rights and freedoms enjoyed by everyone else? Now it means blokes agonising over whether or not to paint their nails.
Seriously. In his new book None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, nonbinary writer Travis Alabanza cites this dilemma as proof of the ‘oppression [of] the gender binary’. He introduces us to Steve, a man who had ‘wanted to paint his nails for years’. But he didn’t because, like the rest of us cis squares, he’d been conditioned into ‘upholding the gender binary’ which says men don’t do that. One day, though, after seeing one of Alabanza’s theatre shows, Steve plucks up the courage to paint his nails neon yellow. Alabanza is moved by this brave strike against the forces of oppression. ‘My urge was to hug him’, he writes. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, free at last!
