true that fetishism, masochism and narcissism are present in transves- tism, it is also true that they are present in some degree in all "nor- mal" people too. But because psychiatry was a growing science, all patterns of behavior slightly out of the ordinary were considered pro- per things to study as "deviations" and that is where we are today. Personally, I do not regard myself or any other heterosexual Femme- Personator as emotionally or psychologically ill. Moreover, those persons who may have other neurotic conditions on top of TVism may be ill in spite of the TV but not because of it.
In
What then is this condition that all of us so enjoy? In my opin- ion it is a rediscovery of something that has become "lost" in the multiplicity of human cultural regimentation. Briefly it is this: the great majority of non-human species the behaviour of the sexes in all matters not related to procreation are pretty much alike. "Male" and "female" describe anatomical and reproductive differen- ces. The words masculine" and "feminine" have no meaning in most cases. Gender, whose key words are masculine and feminine, is al- most entirely a human concept and manifestation. Unfortunately, in human cultural development we have tended to take the total of all possible traits, interests, behavior patterns, and activities that are NOT related to anatomical sex and reproductive processes and arbit- rarily divided them and assigned these to males and then called them masculine and those to females and ca lled them feminine. That this is a cultural fallacy, is arbitrary and generally psychologically des- tructive, since it goes against the inherent natures of people, is att- ested to by the facts that in other cultures and other times in history almost everything assigned in our culture as masculine or feminine has at one time or another been the opposite.
Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, has shown that a num- ber of the traits so widely taken to be inherent in the male and call- ed masculine are, in fact, not male-related but are due to our pat- riarchal society. Thus aggressiveness, decisiveness, competitiveness (in non-sexual matters) are qualities of the dominance of a sex in the social organization, not in the sex itself. In a matriarchal cul- ture, the female would have to decide, dominate, compete and be aggressive in the process of "running" the society, its culture and in- stitutions just as the male generally does today. Further indication of the falsity of this arbitrary division is evident in all the tests and devices which psychologists come up with to measure masculinity and femininity "indexes" in each sex. They therefore give lip service to the presence of masculinity in the female and femininity in the male but when it comes to practical and actual expression of this (at least on the part of the male) they raise their eyebrows, get out their old-
72.