RANSVESTIA

and requires conformity to this polarization. The penalties of non- conformity are name-calling, ridicule, isolation, ostracism, punish- ment and even attacks. We are each therefore deprived of the other half of ourselves.

Parents act for society- they are programmed themselves in child- hood and through their lifetime, and they lay the same trip on their children. Peers enforce it in preschool years by projecting their par- ents' concepts onto their playmates. Teachers, authorities, the system. and still peers maintain it through elementary and high school. It is self enforced thereafter for fear of social penalties and consequences. RESULT: All boys learn to be boys but they also learn NOT to be girls. That is, they learn what acts, behaviors, activities, interests, etc., are socially designated as feminine and therefore not for them. This has the effect of emphasizing the deprivation and denial of a part of the self and makes one aware of that original segregation.

Back to what happens: We live in a highly visually oriented culture. What we see is what we get, to quote Flip Wilson. Or, to quote Virginia Prince, What we see is what it IS. “Girlness” to a boy is, what he sees girls wearing, doing, acting, how they use their bodies, the different attitudes parents have toward them, different expectations, different tasks, etc. Therefore, people who wear slips, panties, dresses, girdles, high heels, etc., are people who are permitted to act differently, speak differently, feel differently and express different feelings in different ways than he can. In short, they are persons of different requirements and expectations. So... a boy in a slip or a dress... keys in to his sub- conscious awareness of the separation and deprivation he suffered as a boy, only now-in the dress-he is not deprived, he is one of them. When in Rome you CAN do as the Romans do. Result – discovery of the previously lost part of self.

5. WHY does he continue to dress in feminine things in spite of fear and shame? Because the feeling is good-satisfying. Superego steps in and says it is bad and wrong for a boy to wear a dress. It is a no-no and he should never do it again . . . so guilt is born. But self discovery and ful- fillment is too basically satisfying, and the long battle between self and society, between satisfaction and pleasure and shame and guilt, begins.

There are other motivations, of course, which occur in specific individuals - such as, a desire to be like mother or sister in contrast to father and brother; to escape from an over-demanding, hyper-mas-

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