The Male Reaction
By Marcia Armstrong
Artificial
If this is what you're looking for, I can recommend the combined effect of strongly contrasting colours (especially red and black), lots of serious hair (blonde but not peroxide) and red high heels. All of this amounts to what is known to anthropologists as a Supernormal Stimulus.
"A supernormal stimulus is one that exceeds its natural counterpart," writes Desmond Morris in Manwatching. He explains how man 'can improve on his own physical features in many ways' and can similarly 'supernormalise' the world around him by artificial means.
"If he wishes to improve his height, he can wear high-heeled shoes: if he wishes to improve the smoothness of his skin, he can wear cosmetics..... There is no end to the many ways in which he has amplified his body-signals as a means of improving his sexual displays...."
True, when Morris writes of 'man' he means humankind and not males, but the relevance to transvestism is striking.
All this might explain why Mike, Henri and Dave were fooled for a moment or two by the sight of a fancy hairdo or an off-the-shoulder dress. But I have known other men for example who have invited me to dance, and then left me standing on the dancefloor a moment or two later once they discovered their mistake, with a shake of the head and a muttered "No, I can't take this".
What made our three examples persevere? Were they totally sex-starved? This seems unlikely, since in two of the three cases there were plenty of Real Girls in the immediate vicinity, and even Mike could have chosen a different club to stroll into on a Wednesday night in Manchester.
No, it seems evident to me that on occasions we TVs act as a safety valve for men who are tempted by the idea of homosexuality but without being turned on by the physical appearance of other men.
What drives these what one might call 'crypto-gays'? Not, I think, any kind of intellectual leaning towards homosexuality, as it is sometimes claimed by the critics of open-speaking on gay issues. These critics argue that the media hype about homosexuality will persuade otherwise straight men (or children, as this phobia is often directed against gay teachers) off the straight and narrow.
I gained no impression that any of the three men I described had made up their minds that they ought to try gender-bending and had hunted me down as their excuse.
No, their inclination, so far as I could tell, was a genuinely emotional and physical one. Perhaps more than their more conventional colleagues and more than many writers on the subject, they had realised that the strict categorisation of male/female, gay/straight, simply does not match reality.
We all know the kind of psychological author who attempts to divide humanity into clearly defined types (yes, all 6,000 million of us). The truth is that these boundaries are mental constructs - they do not exist in the real world, but have been made up by humans.
Forbidden
The reason may be religious. The ancient Jews had a mania for categorising and then keeping the categories seperate that went far beyond the well-known meat/milk duality. It was for instance forbidden to mix linen and wool in the same garment, a law that appears only a few lines below the well-known verse forbidding a man to put on a woman's dress or vice versa. (Deuteronomy 22).
It's curious, don't you think, that those who argue against transvestism on religious grounds don't get equally het up about polyster-cotton sheets...?
Or else the reasons may stem from a human need for security, to have things cut and dried, to know where one stands. Maturity, it is said, is the ability to live with ambiguity: by that standard there are a good many immature people around.
Whatever the cause, Mike, Henri and Dave seem to have overcome the straitjacket of conventional categories and surprised themselves in the process.
"I don't usually do this sort of thing you know...."
I suppose we trannies must be good for something!
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