Take a look at this man. He's in the grip of some kind of sexual
episode. The arching of his back, the thrusting and grasping of his breasts and
the half-lidded look of arousal on his face, all tell you he is experiencing
intense sexual feelings. Most of the men reading this will have seen themselves
in the same or a similar state of arousal, dressed in women's clothes, fondling
their own body and enjoying the sight of their own sexual excitement. I'm no exception.
I do it as much as the next man.
It is one of the things I find very curious about being a heterosexual transvestite. While I (and, no doubt, millions like me) will ogle myself and fondle myself, aroused and excited by the sight and feel of my own body, it is something that I only do while cross-dressed. I don't find myself at all titillating in my normal clothes, or naked. Now, why is that?
The simplistic answer (which doesn't explain anything) is that the female clothes are "fetish objects". That is, it is the clothing causing the arousal and the clothing that we are responding to. But not only is the whole fetish explanation of transvestitism empty (it merely replaces one mystery with another), it is also clearly wrong. Take a look again at the photograph and think again about how you interact with feminine clothes. It is my contention that the man in the picture is not aroused by the clothing, he is not being turned on by a dress or a wig. He is aroused by the transformation of his appearance, for which the clothes are merely instrumental. What's more, he is not simply feeling hot because he looks like a woman, he is projecting his transformed sexual identity so as to enjoy the feeling of being sexually desirable as a woman.
To see this more clearly, look at the picture again. This time imagine it is a real woman. (I deliberately chose a man with a slim and feminine body shape to make this easier.) If this was a real woman, what does it look like she's doing? I'd say she was posing provocatively in order to attract men to her. She looks as if she's feeling aroused and she'd like someone to have sex with her. The arching of her back and the presentation of her breasts would be a clear sign to an ethologist or zoologist that she is ready to be mated. In fact, the scientific term for such behaviour in other species than ours is "presenting".
So, going back to the picture, here we have what looks very much like a woman who is apparently aroused and signalling to us that she'd like sex. Now we need to ask ourselves; why is a man doing this? Indeed, why do we all--most of us heterosexuals--do this? Why are we acting as if we're trying to tempt a man to come and mate with us? And don't kid yourself that the attraction we try to generate is aimed at anything but men. Setting aside your awareness that this picture is of a man for the moment and being brutally honest with yourself, you have to admit that, on some level, this picture arouses sexual feelings in you. It's a normal masculine response to the purely visual illusion of an aroused and sexually receptive female. You also have to admit that this appearance and pose is likely to do nothing for a heterosexual woman.
So why do we do this? I think the possibilities are these:
1. We do really want a man to have sex with us. Although we don't know it or admit it, we are all closet homosexuals or, perhaps more accurately, closet transsexuals.
2. We are doing it as part of some kind of fantasy play-acting. We pose for ourselves the way we would like a woman to pose for us and imagine our mirror image or self-image to be a genuine woman.
3. We feel a wholly auto-erotic desire to have sex only with our transformed selves.
4.We feel an 'abstract' sense of wanting to appear feminine and desirable which is not directed at any external person or group but which is complete in itself.
5. We do it purely to imitate women we have seen, to add to the illusion of being female, and not for any reason to do with sex.
I think it is quite probable that, for different individuals among us, any one of these motives might be the main one. I also think that most of us will have more than one of these motives working at the same time. However, I am not looking at individuals here. I want to understand what motivates the great majority of us. So, if you happen not to fit the answers I come up with, that's fine, as long as you are special. If you are not special, and you still don't fit, then let me know because it means I got it wrong somewhere.
Going through the possibilities above, I think I can dismiss 3 and 5 fairly quickly. I see no evidence that men who strike provocative poses while dressed as women are doing it because they find themselves and only themselves attractive. It's quite believable that they do find their own appearance attractive but I don't see this as a prerequisite for the behaviour. Similarly I don't find it credible that men pose as sexually available females so as to perfect their illusion. I believe that if a man acts that way it is because something sexual is going on, not something neutral.
Which leaves us with three possibilities: we are secretly transsexual, we are being our own fantasy object, and we are driven by gender-inappropriate and un-integrated urges to appear attractive.
Of these, being one's own fantasy object is quite possibly true and many TVs cite this as a possible explanation of their cross-dressing. Even if both of the others were true, we would still need to explain why we become so sexually aroused while cross-dressed and many think the answer is simple. If we really are heterosexual males, the sight and touch of a woman will turn us on. It's true that most of us are not exactly beautiful in drag but that is probably offset by how willing the image in the mirror is to titillate us and how that interacts with our already-heightened sense of arousal. That is, if we are feeling attractive and desirable already, wanting to attract a mate, then the sight of a willing female, clearly interested in arousing us is an unusually powerful stimulus.
However, the choice of which of the other two reasons to believe influences our interpretation of our arousal. In the first case -- we are closet transsexuals -- the arousal can be seen as a normal female state and the sexual posturing is then just a natural expression of it. In this case, the arousal precedes the posing and, indeed, the dressing, and is not driven by it. Furthermore, the arousal should be more-or-less independent of the cross-dressing. That is, we should feel like posing in ways that would attract men, even when in drab. I do not believe that this fits with the evidence I have of how transvestites feel or behave.
Curiously, the assumption that women don't need to be dressed up as women to feel sexually attractive as women, is one I feel is open to challenge. What is more, questioning this assumption opens up the possibility that our remaining hypothetical reason for transvestites 'presenting' could be true. After all, why do women in Western cultures dress up in ways that emphasise their secondary sexual characteristics and thus their differences from men? Also, why do they dress in ways that, in whatever culture they belong to, identify them as female and distinguish them from males? My suggestion is that it is part of the neural wiring of our species that women feel a compulsion to look like women and that part of this hard-wired programming is to absorb the social norms for feminine appearance of the culture we find ourselves in and to reflect it as strongly as we are able. What I'm saying is that women feel compelled to dress up in much the same way that transvestites do. Their brains, like ours, are pre-programmed to feel the need to present themselves as attractive females.
The beauty of this conclusion is that it seems to fit all the evidence, doesn't contradict anything I know about either transvestites or women, and provides a simple, plausible, causal explanation of transvestitism. On this view, the sexual posturing we go in for when dressed is partly our innate urge to present ourselves as sexually attractive females but exaggerated by our natural, heterosexual arousal response to our own behaviour and appearance.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not saying that I, or any of us, cross-dresses because we want to attract males to mate with us. What I'm saying is that there is a part of the female brain that drives a woman to look feminine (whatever that might mean for a particular culture). The evolutionary advantage of such a brain function is obvious -- the woman with it will attract mates. But to the woman, all she feels is an urge to dress up because it makes her feel good. Attracting mates is just a side effect that Nature finds useful. For some reason, perhaps to do with a quirk of our early development, transvestite males have also developed this brain function. For us, it has no benefit whatsoever but has the side effect of making men, including ourselves, find us sexually arousing.
The background on this page features Jasmine Lee. You can't see Jasmine Lee's website anymore but I hope she puts it up again one day.
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