A Dahl’s House

I’ve been on a LGBT history binge, here’s my reviews of what I’m been reading:

“The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture” by Daniel Harris – A very bitchy (and I use that word intentionally) book that simultaneously acidly critiques aspects of gay culture and sentimentalizes the “outsider” aspects of gay culture. It would’ve been nicer if the author has copped to this ambivalence in the introduction rather than the final page, since the swings initially come off as if the author just hates everything. But it’s got some great insights, and also offers some interesting looks at gay life outside the major metropolitan areas. For example, Harris discusses the “hobbyist” magazines that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s whose ostensible purpose was to connect people who shared common hobbies, but which quickly became thinly-veiled gay personal ads. Ads from the hinterlands by gay men seeking to meet someone, anyone, who lived locally are all too reminiscent of the posts I still see today on mailing list by deeply closeted crossdressers hoping to meet in person someone like themselves. (NY Times review here.)

“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” by Lillian Faderman – Very well written and comprehensive history (up through 1991).

But a couple things left a bad taste my mouth: Faderman repeated insistence that some people seen as butches might in fact be trans men. To be fair, she was obviously reacting against the “invert” theory of the late 1800s that proposed [I]all[/I] lesbians “men trapped in women’s bodies,” and against the way masculinity was used to discredit lesbians and feminists. But she seems to want to ignore away evidence that some women living as men seemed to be doing so because they saw themselves as men. Plus both of her two actual references to “transsexuals” come complete with scare quotes—while Faderman is a little oblique, it seems like she was of the mindset that if trans people just freed themselves from gender stereotypes they wouldn’t need to transition. Finally, she misrepresents the [URL=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Stone”“]Sandy Stone[/URL] incident. Correctly stating that it caused a huge controversy when the women’s recording collective refused to fire Stone in the face of transphobic attacks by lesbian-feminists—Stone was specifically targeted in Janice Raymond’s “Transsexual Empire”—but neglecting to mention that the company later caved in to the demands and fired Stone.

“Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco” to 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd – A bit on the academic side, but worth wading through the formal prose. Interestingly Boyd begins her book with a chapter on trans and gay male culture—and in fact argues that drag show nightclubs—featuring both drag queens and drag kings, and tolerated because of the tourist dollars they helped bring to the city—provided the city’s first publicly visible queer cultures and communities. Unlike New York, San Francisco was a “wide open town” in a variety of ways—from local politicians ignoring or downplaying morality issues, to the lack of entrenched political machines, to the lack of the Mafia; all of which caused San Francisco’s queer to differ greatly from New York’s. (Here’s a review by the San Francisco Chronicle.)

“Gay L.A.” by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons. L.A. finally gets its due as the overlooked birthplace of many mainstays of today’s gay and lesbian institutions. This time around the scare quotes are gone and trans people do crop up now and then. But disappointingly, only three or four pages out of the 464 pages specifically looked at trans history. It came out in 2006, so Virgina Prince’s biography (as one was Vern and Bonnie Burroughs’ “Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender,” both of which included a fair bit of trans history in L.A.) was available had the author’s cared to read it. (An example of how not only is history written by the victors, but how it’s written by those with the best meeting minutes.) It’s disappointing because early in the book the authors explicitly say they intend to do a comprehensive LGBT history—and that they used “gay” in their title because historically it had been used as an encompassing term that included LGB and T people. Like San Francisco, was also a “wide open town” in its own way compared to New York—with the film industry being a being a haven for all sorts of alternative behavior (as long as done discretely), fewer social hierarchies (since almost everyone was a relative newcomer) and an extremely diverse population.

“Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940” by George Chauncey – Revelatory on how—at least within selected subcultures in New York City, concepts of sexual orientation and gender were far [I]more[/I] flexible than they are today. Aside from oral histories, Chauncey relies heavily on the reports filed by investigators of various “morals committee,” which gives an unusually detailed look at the lives of gay men in public places. (The book doesn’t look at lesbians and lesbian culture at all.)

“The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America” by Charles Kaiser – Good for a general overview of gay and lesbian life in NYC from World War II through the early 1990s, mixing historical analysis with oral histories. But while Kaiser tries to include a spectrum of voices, it feel like it focused heavily on the lives of the gay/lesbian rich and famous.

This month’s Out magazine is a special on trans issues. As part of that, they included a rather craptacular list of must-read trans books. I realize Out is a fashion magazine, but jeebus it’s a bizarre list. There’s a few good choices, a few books I’d never heard of that look like they may be interesting but I doubt are essential reading, and a few asinine choices (“Myra Breckinridge”).

As Diana said, yet another clear indicator that the real and perceived ‘’trans’’ communities are light years apart.

Fortunately Helen Boyd has posted her own list of essential trans reading with capsule reviews on her site. Modestly, Helen omits her books—“My Husband Betty” and “She’s Not The Man I Married”—which are definitely on my must-read list. (Sadly, both SNTMIM and Julia Serano’s excellent “Whipping Girl” were both overlooked for this year’s Lambda Literary Foundation’s list of finalists in the transgender category. One wonders whether the Lammies had any trans people on the review committee.)

Saw “Brokeback” this weekend. Excellent, if a bit languidly paced.

For those of you who are squeamish, there’s actually more nudity in the hetro sex scenes than the gay sex scenes (although there’s a couple gay make-out scenes). If you’re really squeamish, just remember to go for pop-corn whenever Ennis goes into Jack’s tent.

But seriously, it’s really more of a gay “Romeo and Juliet” than a “gay cowboy” movie. It’s really about lovers separated by society’s prejudices—I could easily imagine the basic plot being translated into an interracial hetro affair in the Jim Crow South, or a German/Jewish hetro affair in Nazi Germany.

And while the subject matter is obviously different, I think it’s a movie that one can use to communicate some of the pain that comes from being in the closet about crossdressing. Jack and Ennis are in the throes of urges they don’t really understand and can barely articulate. But they do feel that it’s something they absolutely can’t let anyone know about. And hiding that part of themselves eats away at all involved.

Norah Vincent’s experience in “Self-Made Man,” her account of posing as a man named Ned off and on for 18 months, is a lesson in what being careful what you wish for. Vincent successfully blends in, but instead of the world of male privilege she’d been expecting, the strains of “being a man” (and of her double-life) lead to a nervous breakdown. For anyone who’s lived life as a man, Vincent’s insights often fall into the “well, yeeaaah” variety, but I suspect (and hope) many women will find the book to be eye-opening.

Like many crossdressers, Vincent seems to have a discomfort with her native gender. “Practically from birth, I was the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene.” That sentence points out one problem with the book and with Vincent’s conclusions: she fails to distinguish between sex identity (whether you feel biologically male or female), gender self-identity (whether you feel you’ve got a “masculine” or “feminine” personality) and gender role expectations (how others think men and women are “supposed” to behave). Vincent claims not to have transgendered feelings and I believe her. But Vincent herself makes clear her discomfort with gender role expectations for women and her belief that she’s got a “masculine” personality.

Ironically, Vincent assumes she’s butch enough that her personality won’t be a problem. Instead she frets about her physical appearance even though she’s got a physique (5′10″ wearing size 11 men’s shoes) that female-to-male transsexuals would gladly kill for. Vincent spends several pages describing her physical transformation in the sort of loving detail one finds in postings on online crossdressing forums. But to Vincent’s shock, it’s her feminine personality that keeps comes bursting through the physical disguise. Vincent may successfully pose as a man, but she’s almost universally seen as a gay man—an example of society’s equivalence of “unmanly” = “effeminate” = “gay” in action.

Part of it that Vincent constantly stumbled over the subtle do’s and don’ts that men have incorporated into their behavior an unconscious level. (For example, one of the monks actually reprimands Vincent when she refers to another monk as “cute.”) As a crossdresser trying to blend in, I also find the hard part is less the physical transformation as much as trying to understand all the unwritten rules of behavior that women have also learned consciously or unconsciously growing up.

Crossdressers are often (and rightly) taken to task by wives and girlfriends for the assertion that feeling that one has a “feminine side” and putting on a dress somehow inherently understand those who are born and raised as women. And I confess I had the same reservations about Vincent’s experiment. The experiences she sought seem drawn from a rogue’s gallery of middle/upper-class feminist bête noires. The men’s hangout for working class stiffs. The strip club. Men-without-women (Vincent joins a monastery mainly because going undercover in the army or prison presented obvious difficulties). The Glengarry Glen Ross sales job. The Robert Bly-ish men’s movement weekend, beating drums in the wilderness. It’s only the chapter on dating where Vincent talks about something remotely like everyday male-female interaction.

Admittedly, choosing these sorts of extreme archetypes does highlight behavior seen elsewhere, and initially Vincent does caution that her experiences are a really a travelogue of carefully chosen outings, “certainly inapplicable to anything so grand as a pronouncement on gender in American society.” Which—for better of worse—doesn’t stop her from making exactly those sorts of pronouncements later on in the book. Many of those insights are dead on—if not exactly news—for this guy.

This is where Vincent’s lesbianism is advantage. She herself points out having dated men before she came out as a lesbian, she learned that romantic hurt gets inflicted by both genders in equal measure—whereas exclusively heterosexual woman often unfairly assign the blame for such hurt on the gender, rather than the morals of the person inflicting the pain. But more significantly, while a number of feminist writers have written sensitively and insightfully about the masculine psyche, as heterosexual women they’ve assumed that men’s relationships with women are the pivotal foundation of masculine experience. Whereas Michael Kimmel points out in his excellent “Manhood in America,” that American men define their masculinity, not as much in relation to women, but in relation to each other men. Not to say women are incidental to men’s conception of (and efforts to prove their) manhood—men do often take elaborate and extraordinary risks to prove themselves in the eyes of women. But it’s the fear that we won’t measure up in the eyes of other men that’s far more haunting.

In fact the central lesson Vincent learns is how constrained and powerless men often feel. As Kimmel notes, the paradox of male privilege is that while men as a whole have benefited from it, individual men rarely feel the power that feminist critiques tell them they have. As Vincent puts it: “Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching.” In a meat-grinder job of door-to-door sales, the sale manager taunts the sales team with the fear of failure. On dates she’s shocked by the power women have and the icy precision with which they wield it. She hates how emotionally constrained she has to make herself to be a believable man.

One gets the sense that her breakdown may not have simply been the strain of the impersonation and the inevitable lies required, but instead may have been just as much do, as another reviewer put it, that “it was just as difficult—particularly for a lesbian, feminist, former Village Voice writer—to handle the disconcerting realization that being a guy is, as she plainly (and plaintively) puts it, “really hard.’”

Men—particularly those in the men’s liberation movement—have been saying that for years. So one of the main values of Vincent’s book is that hopefully women will be more receptive to hearing about some of the downsides of masculinity—and differences in communications styles—from one of their own. Vincent notes that women have taken the attitude that their style of communication is the “correct” one and men are just incommunicative clods who need to be trained how to do so properly. And it’s true that many men are unable to analyze their feelings, let alone articulate them, not only lacking the years of training that women have in both skills, but also having been actively discouraged (by fathers and mothers) from developing them. But Vincent discovers there’s a masculine style of intimacy that women haven’t bothered to see is there, let alone understand. It’s more physical than verbal, it’s often more about letting someone know you’re there rather than overtly offering sympathy—but it’s no less caring. As Vincent says, she learned “about the respectful space a man often needs around him when he is vulnerable or in tears. It may be possible now to interpret the silences of men around me as something more than voids or standoffs, and to feel more comfortable about being present and available to them without always needs our exchange to be explicit or neatly resolvable in my language.”

But being a man isn’t all bad. In her sales-jobs-from-beyond-hell, nerdy Ned becomes a Big Swinging Dick. “Nobody ever thought this Ned was gay,” she notes. Vincent doesn’t comment on why the change occurred, nor is it really clear to me either. But in part it was the clothes. Ned finally gets to wear the blazers and dress slacks Nora had stocked up on. And in the hardscrabble door-to-door sales industry, Vincent in her sharp suits stood-out (as potential management material) from the other salesmen with little cash and less fashion sense, who looked like exactly what they were: hucksters in cheap suits. The other part is it seems Vincent learned the same lesson men learn: fake it until you make it. The interviewers for these high testosterone sales jobs expected Ned “to brag about himself, to be smugly charming and steadfast, and so I did and I was.” (So much did Ned end up getting into Nora’s head that she ended up being mistaken for a man even out of disguise.)

That air of confidence—even if it’s sometimes actually whistling in graveyard bluster—is one of the few aspects of Ned that Vincent carried through her post-Ned “detox” and she’s appreciative that it allows her to expand her repertoire of behavior. In a similar vein, crossdressing at its best can allow men to flex the parts of their personalities that they feel they can’t express as men. Admittedly, as Helen Boyd, author of the excellent “My Husband Betty,” points out, crossdressers are expressing a man’s idea of what it’s like to be a woman, but again it can—especially for crossdressers who get out in public and interact with people—be an opportunity to step out of the “normal” constraints of masculinity.

Speaking of constraints, I enjoyed Vincent’s chapter where she joins a men’s lib group of the Iron John-Robert Bly mythopoetic variety where the men eventually get together for a weekend retreat out in the woods beating drums and getting in touch with their long-buried Wild Men. While Vincent sympathizes with the mostly broken men there—she says of one man: “you could see that his sense of self was in pieces all over the floor”—she’s a bit bemused by the “toothless mantra and aphorisms, or airy poetry that’s supposed to sound deep but usually isn’t.” As someone who flirted with the men’s movement years ago, but who was turned off for similar reasons, it was interesting to see Vincent also wishing the group would “offer a genuine obstacle, a real trial that would test the limits of a person’s character and sense of self” rather than their faux-Native American/pagan rituals.

The book does have some definite downsides. The chapter on sex is by far the weakest. For starters using a strip club to investigate men’s attitudes toward sex is both spurious and offensive. (I can only imagine the reaction I would get if I posed as a woman and hung out with strippers to gauge women’s attitude toward sex.) Moreover, the two clubs Vincent hangs out at sound like something out of the lower levels of Dante’s Inferno, but Vincent seems naively shocked to see the amount of sleaziness. Vincent’s attitude toward the male libido itself seems oddly Victorian—men are just horny beasts who can’t really help themselves. Now I’ve seen enough male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals to have a healthy respect for the impact testosterone has on the libido, but the story isn’t quite that simple. There’s definitely truth in Vincent’s assertion that men on the whole think more from the groin and a better at separating lust from love, but on the other hand she wasn’t likely to meet the guys who take a more “womanly” approach to intimacy (i.e. attraction on more of an emotional basis) at a strip club.

The chapter on dating omits Ned’s dates with gay men, which Vincent has mentioned in interviews, which would’ve have provided an interesting contrast. Vincent did mention that they had far more sexual overtones than her dates with women and that the gay men immediately lost interest in her once they found out who she really was. But Vincent didn’t mention whether she also told them she was a lesbian—which obviously might have been a factor. A fair number of female-to-male transsexuals end up as gay men and manage to find partners even without genital reassignment surgery, so I’m not sure the picture is as clear-cut as Vincent might think it is.

In her chapter on her stay at a monastery, I think Vincent actually captures some of the problems of intimacy men have among each other and the sort of hazing that occurs as a new man seeks to proved himself to other men. But Vincent fails to look at how much of the hazing and emotional constriction is due to the environment rather than the gender. From what I recall of a ex-nun’s account of her time in the convent, a similar process of weeding out potential candidates went on, as well a tamping down on intimacy (also to prevent potential homosexual encounters as well as ensure each nun’s attachment remained on God), etc.

But it’s the conclusion of the book that for me is especially problematic. On the one hand, I’m glad she sums up the downsides to her experience. Vincent herself says that she became the “tired and prototypical angry young man” who she used to hate for droning on about his problems. “But after living as a guy for even just a small slice of a lifetime, I can really related to that screed and give you one of my own.” But Vincent is unable to move past the pain. Perhaps it’s too new to her. As men we’ve grown up with these constraints and as “Brokeback Mountain’s” Ennis Del Mar says, “If you can’t change it, then you gotta stand it…” So we may chafe it our constraints but they’re not as raw as they are for Vincent. I imagine it’s a bit like women and the beauty myth—it’s something that’s always there in the background, like a stone you can’t quite ever get out of your shoe, but it’s not something that constantly preoccupies your thoughts. And Vincent’s atypical forays into the world of men might have something to do the pain she feels about being a man—ironically the final bits written after temporarily checking herself into a locked psychiatric ward are written in a clipped tone that reveals almost nothing about what’s going on in her head (maybe Vincent hasn’t shed Ned as thoroughly as she thought).

For transgendered people (in the broadest sense of the word, including not only transsexuals, but crossdressers, drag queens, etc.), it’s heartening to hear that Vincent—who wrote some notoriously transphobic things a few years ago—has developed a deep sympathy for us. (This isn’t explicitly mentioned in the book, but Vincent has mentioned on the talk show circuit.) However, Vincent does talk about the ever-increasing difficulty she had trying to sustain simultaneously maintain male and female personas—“this cognitive dissonance essentially shut down my brain.” Ironically, for someone who’s an advocate of androgyny, Vincent decides she needs to banish Ned entirely to maintain her sanity. “I could not live in both worlds at once, so I chose the side to which habit and upbringing have accustomed me….” Unfortunately, Vincent generalizes from her personal experience that “I can’t help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human being and female human beings, as separate as sects.” I’m remind of Mark Twain’s adage that a cat having sat on a hot stove will never again—nor a cold stove either. Vincent has burned herself (perhaps deeper than she realizes) with her gender bending, and in talk shows she’s shown an unfortunate tendency to warn others against “messing with gender.”

Which is probably one reason Vincent doesn’t seem like she’s a found integrated sense of manhood. On the one hand, she sees men as the sorrier sex. On the other, she still seems to harbor “gender fantasy” ideas about masculinity—such as her rhapsody to the “authenticity” of the male handshake. Girlfriend, lemme tell ya, men’s handshakes may not involve the fake smiles that women-to-women greetings can have, but there’s also a lot of subtext going on there too. Believe me, I’ve endured more bone-crushing let’s-see-who’s-top-dog handshakes than I care to remember. That said, if Vincent has contradictory attitudes toward masculinity, it’s undoubtedly in part because society also does.

Had Vincent participated in more “regular Joe” male pursuits, she might have discovered that there many times when being a man isn’t “a series of unrealistic, limiting, infuriating and depressing expectations constantly coming over the wire”—in fact it can be a joy (and not just from the privilege of being the cock of the walk). Or why, although I enjoy putting on a dress and taking a gender vacation from time to time, I’m happy to remain a man.

I’d been interested in learning more about drag queens, since it’s clear that despite the convention (contention?) that it’s “just for the stage” some drag queens clearly continue their feminine presentation offstage and I’d seen references to a few studies that suggested at some drag queens crossdress for similar reasons that hetrosexual crossdressing do. So I was hoping to find a book that would provide insights to the psychology of drag queens. Unfortunately “Girlfriend: Men, Women and Drag” (text by Holly Brubach and photographs by Michael James O’Brien) isn’t that book.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. O’Briens photos are excellent and often intriguing, and Brubach does make a number interesting insights about crossdressing in general and the drag variety in particular—plus more interesting thoughts on gender. So it’s worth reading. But it’s a “reportial” book in the bad sense of the word. It might be better subtitled: Brubach parachutes into eight drag/transgender cultures around the globe and talks about the people she meets. Unfortunately, the travel guide approach ends up being about surfaces—Brubach never delves deeply into the motivations of those she meets, although she does discuss the varying attitudes different cultures have toward crossdressing and gender impersonation.

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What does 13th century plate armor have to do with modern fashion? Plenty as it turns out in Anne Hollander’s fascinating “Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress,” which traces the evolution of modern men’s and women’s dress – and which convincingly argues the counterintuitive idea that it’s men’s fashion that’ actually have been far more innovative over the centuries since the late Middle Ages and that women’s fashion has been imitating and borrowing from it for centuries. It’s also Hollander’s paean to the men’s suit. Both ideas are particularly ironic to a crossdresser for whom men’s fashion seems drab by comparison. While I have always appreciated a good suit, it’s never felt particularly sexy to me.

Hollander acknowledges her views run contrary to popular opinion: “Actual women take “Fashion” seriously or not, depending on their lives, means and views; but they may all believe that it is something legitimately possible for them, something any woman may ignore if she likes but always has an absolute right to take part in.… Most men, in accordance with modern rules, are still quite comfortable ignoring “Men’s Fashion” in its show-businesslike aspects, and feeling that it is not actually available to them nor really even aimed at them.” But Hollander, an art historian, is focused on the formal qualities of clothing, particularly their structure.

For centuries in Western culture (and commonly in non-Western culture to this day), both sexes wore roughly the equivalent clothing: bag-like garments that were variously wrapped, belted and fastened. The length might differ—men often wore shorter ones for activities, such as physical labor and war, that required greater movement—and Northern European men added loose-fitting leg covers to cope with the climate, but the similarities far greater than the differences. However, the first revolutionary advance in men’s clothing occurred in the late 1200s when plate armor required a close-fitting undergarment to protect the wearer from the metal casing—and men’s fashion quickly imitated the shapes created by the linen-armorers, who were effectively the first tailors of Europe. Subsequently, men’s fashion varied wildly over the centuries—compare the portraits of Henry VII, Rembrandt and George Washington—before settling down with the invention of the “modern” men’s suit around 1800.

In contrast, Hollander argues: “The female costume stayed essentially the same since the Middle Ages….[F]ashion might thicken or thin out the female formula, sometimes imitating the simplicity of the poor, sometimes adding more display with extreme extensions or extra details, sometimes imitating men’s accessories; but the scheme was not radically challenged until this century….” In other words, as Hollander sees it, women’s clothing was inventive but not innovative. She argues the only two major formal innovations in women’s fashion were the skirt (as opposed to a the dress) and décolletage (not only of the neckline and back, but also exposure of the wrists, arms or shoulders—and finally the legs in the 20th century). Interestingly, this sort of exposure seems to be fascinating to many crossdressers, in part no doubt because décolletage (and skirts) has always been a “women’s-only” style of dress.

But aside from the obvious feminine connotations of décolletage and skirts, their appeal to crossdressers may stem from two other more common desires in fashion. First, is simply the unbearable desire for something new and different—something that Hollander argues sets “modern fashion” apart from traditional modes of dress. “Fashion abhors fixity, or form or meaning, of knowledge or telling, or the past itself. Fashionable dress thus has a built-in contingent character quite lacking to all ethnic and folk dress, and to most clothes of the ancient world.” In contrast, traditional dress illustrates “the confirmation of established custom, and to embody the desire for stable meaning even if custom changes…. [E]ven with considerable change in the look of traditional clothing over time, the formal relation of new to old is direct, a straightforward adaptation….”

While women’s clothing underwent this “modern” shift in meaning, Hollander argues that it was strictly within the realm of “surface” aspects. In part, this may have been due to another historical event. In 1675, Louis XIV granted a group of French seamstresses royal permission for the first guild of female tailors to make women’s clothes—the first professional dressmakers. However, men remained the corset-makers (a skill set which traced it roots to the linen-armorers). Consequently, the seamstresses didn’t control the fundamental shaping of the body in the same way that tailors could sculpt men’s clothing. However, women were acknowledged experts in fine needlework and when they became dressmakers they focused on the “exquisite finish of surface details.” Consequently, while the elegance of men’s clothing depended on the subtleties of cut, women’s clothes focused on surface decoration and “the making and arranging of ephemeral trim and small accessories that gave feminine fashion an increasingly bad reputation for frivolity and extravagant costliness.”

The “modern” men’s suit, invented around 1800, coincided with both a sharpening of gender differences as well as the Industrial Revolution in which men were expected to take a more “serious” role in order to literally take care of business. While Hollander does touch on surrounding social trends, her focus tends to be on the clothing itself (probably due to her background as an art historian). Which is unfortunate because the rise of the suit has fascinating correlations with the rise of “The Self-Made Man” as the dominant image of manhood in the United States (as detailed by Michael Kimmel’s “Manhood in America”). But Hollander does note that: “Paintings of the later nineteenth century often contrast a somber-suited man with the riotous light, motion and color of the natural world…. His suit was not supposed to be beautiful, but reasonable by contrast….”

And so men’s fashion—at least on the surface—retreated into a pseudo-uniform to allow them to devote their energies to the “serious” business of becoming success objects. But while it’s taken 200 years, men seem to be finally tiring of the suit and men are starting to borrow from women’s fashion for the first time in centuries, although within carefully “acceptable” limits.

But ironically, Hollander argues: “To make clothing express a more radical form of equality for men and women, something more has lately been needed than simply dressing women in men’s suits—that finally smacks too much of giving in to male dominance, unless it is done for fun in the old coquettish form….The real solution has instead been found to in dressing everyone like children. A crowd of adults at a museum or a park now looks just like a school trip…. Everyone is in the same colorful zipper jackets, sweaters, pants and shirts worn by kids—which are the same as traditional work-clothes, only made in jolly colors.”

But if Hollander’s argument about the insatiable need of Fashion for novelty is correct, we’ll seen the pendulum swing back toward formality one of these days. In fact, I just ran across an article that men are starting to dress more formally for work—nominally to decrease the chance they’ll get outsourced, although Hollander notes the expressed reasons for changes in fashion rarely seem to match the actual, unconsciousness ones that are clearly visible in hindsight.

As far as the downsides to the book, Hollander does have a weakness for Proustian-length sentences, although they do remain fairly readable. And transgender readers may find it irritating that Hollander uses “sex” and “gender” interchangeably (instead of realizing the former is what’s between your legs and the latter is between your ears). Finally, the initial chapters, which take a philosophical look at “what is fashion” can be a little hard going at first. If so, I’d suggest skipping them and then circling back afterwards, since they’re easier to understand after seeing Hollander’s examples in action.

But on the whole, it’s fascinating read with many intriguing—if unintended—insights relevant to crossdressing.

Channel surfing I ran across a rather interesting show on the BBC America channel.

Is the real you hiding beneath dreary clothes? In A Week of Dressing Dangerously, U.K. fashion journalist, Angela Buttolph, commandeers women’s closets for one week, challenging them to play dress-up in order to develop an aspect they feel is lacking in their personalities.

A housewife may be asked to dress like a punk rocker on one day and a glam movie star the next. Or, Angela might assign a 40-year-old divorcee to dress like an Amazonian cave woman for the day in order to learn how to stop caring so much about what people think.

In the end, the women are surprised to find how they behave when their regular clothes are off and people start taking notice. They also learn to have lots of fun with their new personas, and the confidence they inspire. A Week of Dressing Dangerously is a makeover show from the outside-in.

And they do mean dress-up. In the episode I saw an introverted singleton was told to wear a Spanish flamenco dress one day (to become more “passionate”) and another day to wear a fake fur coat over nothing but lingerie (to be more “sexy”).

What was interesting were the parallels to some of the more fantasy-style dressing/personas that some crossdressers—including myself—sometimes do. For myself, there is a sense how “playing dress-up” can help explore parts of my personality. I was also interesting watching the show’s participant interacting with people in the park in her flamenco dress, which almost felt like I was watching her doing drag as she loosened up and got into it.

More details (click on “programs”) about each episode, with photos and each participants’ thoughts about how they felt wearing the outfits).

I just saw Transamerica last night and Huffman did a brilliant performance, definitely outshining the movie, which is the cliched sort of indie “road movie” that’s been done to death (apparently in a world where no one’s ever heard of interstate highways). But as the director has said in interviews, it’s really not a movie about transsexualism. It’s about an individual finding herself and learning to connect to others.

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Ran across a great book, “Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me,” which essentially a Consumer Reports-guide to skin-care and cosmetic products. Definitely can save you money—there’s a lot of hype and over-priced products.
The bad news—I discovered the Aveda rosemary mint products that smell really nice also contain lots of stuff that irritate the skin, which may be why I’ve been having some break-out problems.

The good news—the author, Paula Begoun, generally likes MAC products, although she thinks many of the Full Coverage shades don’t match well (I’ve noticed mine seems a little peachy) and are a bit heavy. She really like the Illuminare foundation that some others have mentioned. No word on ColorTration unfortunately.

The even better news—many of the product reviews are available for free on her website, which also offers a line of skin and cosmetics that Begoun create herself out of frustration with existing products. (Yes, there is a bit of conflict of interest to her reviews, which Begoun is upfront about and in her book she doesn’t rate her own products for that reason.) Haven’t tried any of the Paula’s Choice stuff yet, but some of her skin care product look interesting.

Ran across an interesting site put together by a French artist which shows 59 women in both clothed and unclothed states. Not particularly sexy, unless you’ve got a fetish for super serious women. As the person who passed it along said:

You voyeurs will enjoy all the naked women. For me, and perhaps some others who may question the femininity of our bodies, it’s a great opportunity to see a wide variety of real bodies I could compare to and contrast with my own. I also thought it was interesting the image I get in my mind when I see the woman clothed corresponds so poorly to what she really looks like.