RANSVESTIA

maturity — of learning to make your own decisions and standing up to the results of them. Stories of humiliation, domination and punishment always feature some other person who forces the poor FP to dress as a girl in spite of his protests. This other person, strangely enough, is al- ways a very strong and dominant female, often a relative an older sis- ter, an aunt, a step mother, or some individual who stands to benefit financially from the downgrading or destruction of the young man who is the hero-heroine of the story. Isn't it strange that the dominant party is hardly ever another male though sometimes a butler, footman, or crony of some kind who is a male gets into the act but it's always in a secondary capacity. Does it occur to any of you that the reason that it is not a dom- inant male is that this has too strong homosexual themes in it to be pal- atable to the writer of the story who is after all an FP himself? Being dominated or pushed around by another male is not “where it's at” in the fantasy. After all every male that works has a boss who is another male, athletes compete against other males. Male-male competition and interaction is the way life is, there is no fun and no eroticism in that for a heterosexual person. In passing I'll bet that the fantasy stories of the gay world are replete with dominant males who push the passive-recep- tive males around and tell them what to do.

Sometimes there is a variable inserted in that no actual persons are responsible for the necessity for the young man to dress as a girl or wo- man. Some situation is created in which there are reasons which appear to make it worthwhile to effect the change, such as in one story where a twin sister dies and the brother assumed her place in order to inherit an Uncle's estate; or another wherein the role change was necessary to protect a parent from some sort of skullduggery. The point is that such stories, no matter how they are constructed, serve to divest the hero- heroine of the blame for the role switching. After all, he can't help it; his aunt, stepmother, cousin, the situation — you name it — MADE him do it (cf. Geraldine Wilson's famous line "The devil made me buy this dress."). This is just great because now he can have the pleasure of doing what he wants to do dressing - without having to face up to the fact that he does it because he wants to and because he enjoys it. Somebody else MAKES him do it so it isn't his responsibility. The inconsistancy in these stories and what provides the giveaway is that no matter how our hero yells and protests at the beginning, the slow, subtle, devious effects of high heels and corsets (and long kid gloves, I almost forgot) always manage to convert him so that in the end he renounces his masculinity, adopts femininity as a way of life, and is a good "girl" ever after. Of course, somebody else gets the fortune, the estate, or whatever stakes

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