Dude Muses or “Duses”: Do They Exist?

Every poet/artist has their muse.  For John Keats, it was Fanny Brawne.  For Woody Allen, it was his thirty years younger, step daughter.  Many a male artist has been inspired by women.  But have any women ever had a man muse?

I ask this question as someone who rarely sometimes, frequently  finds herself infatuated with some unattainable male.  In most cases, they are

1) Non-existent

2) Existent but currently dating someone else

3) Or away for the school year, serving orphans in Calcutta (seriously).

And because I am not a forward or brazen woman who will thrust herself into the presence of these men and initiate a relationship, I merely tuck them away in the recesses of my mind.  And day after day, while my real self crushes, my creative self gazes and gleans inspiration from these male figures whom I admire and adore for their upstanding morals, courageous attitudes, and also their marblesque, chiseled exteriors.

In light of this, I thought to myself, surely I cannot be the only female artist who does this.  Please, let there be someone as weird/crazy/inspired as me.  I did some research on this, to satisfy my curiosity, and found a fellow blogger, Clare Pollard, who wrote on this here.

Thankfully, as she attested, I am not alone!  Although, looking around me and throughout history, my Females-Inspired-by-Men Support Group is no Alcoholics Anonymous.  Also, apparently the act of gazing is considered masculine and in gazing at and admiring male beauty/courage/ideals, I am initiating a gender role reversal.

Yes, about that….

Here is the most potent passage that I found on her blog:

“There are, of course, many male muses – from the young man of Shakespeare’s sonnets to Neal Cassady (who inspired the Beats, particularly Kerouac and Ginsberg) – but what has surprised me most in looking at the phenomenon is that they are almost exclusively gay, or at least the object of a male gaze. Look through artistic history and it would seem, simply, that women do not have male muses. There are a few groundbreaking women who wrote of male beauty – Aphra Behn and Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example – but their love objects are often transient and interchangeable.” –Clare Pollard, Magma Poetry

Pollard goes on to quote Robert Graves in The White Goddess, who writes that “Woman is not a poet; she is either muse or she is nothing.”

Ouch.

Graves goes on to say that women should be their own muse.   And Francine Prose in Lives of the Muses argues that the artist-muse relationship requires a certain passivity on the part of the muse that is not a part of heterosexual relationships.

Regardless of any criticism or gender norms, I was pleased to read that many modern female poets are being inspired by the men in their lives and are not relegating themselves or their muses to a passive role.  In books such as Portrait of My Young Lover as Horse and poems such as My America modern female poets are poetically adoring the men in their lives.

So ladies, instead of wining and pining after men in your life, use that emotion for good!  Write, sing, paint, but never wallow.  Whatever and whomever catches your fancy can be transformed into great art.