RANSVESTIA

opportunity, training, or one might even say tolerance, is extended to the little boy to develop his right-brained potentials. Some boys are artistically or musically inclined but to develop those or similar skills is done in spite of pressures from peers and society, certainly not because of them. If any of you fit into that category you must have experienced a lot of kidding and ridiculing from your peers because you either preferred to paint or play the piano or were required to by parental expectation instead of being down on the corner lot playing baseball or football. Young male culture does not have the room in it for right-brained activities. Thus every male knows how to handle screwdrivers, saws, pliers, shovels and rakes, but only a limited few have any interest in or appreciation of classical music, art, sculpture or ballets, and those that do are often regarded as being effetes and sort of effeminate. Except, of course, those who achieve the real top, such as Nureyev, Stowkowsky, Arthur Fiedler, or Picasso, etc.

Thus with little encouragement and many obstacles in the path of right-brained activity presented to the growing male, most of them never learn much about it. They grow up into beer-drinking, tele- vision-watching, paunch-laden sports fans with little tolerance for those who see something more in the world. (There are of course hundreds of thousands of males who don't fit that pattern, but on the basis of the male population as a whole, the description fits, which is why so much beer, so many television sets and so many sports events are sold and arranged. If there were no market there could be no product.) But somehow, somewhere along the line some young male gets into something feminine. Getting in to it means momentarily getting out of the masculine left-brained world. In those early moments, and in all subsequent moments, out of the left brain means getting into, in some degree, the right brain where art, music, color, feeling (as opposed to intellectual processing) goes on. Most of us I dare say are not aware of this change as such but we all say that we feel more relaxed, are more comfortable and happy as our girlself than as our boyself. The reason for that almost universal FP feeling is, I sub- mit, precisely what I've been talking about. We have closed down to some degree-obviously not entirely, since we still have to function in the left-brained environment so we have to contend with it the same as the most housewifely woman does-our involvement with the left brain which gives the right brain functions a little better opportunity to function.

I don't know how it is with the rest of you, but as Charles I found it difficult to cry-too much guilt about being unmanly and all that jazz

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