RANSVESTIA

impossible to possess feminine appearances and behaviorisms and yet retain a male standing. (Italics mine-Ed.)

According to society, a feminine male-even a male who dares. walk too lightly or laugh to enthusiastically-immediately gives up the sacred status of being a man: he is automatically in some neutral sexual territory neither a man nor a woman. It is not difficult to understand why this androgynous state might present a terrifying, distorted self-image, especially for the heterosexual man. Men are so very oppressed by sexism that any deviation from the strict masculine code calls for ostracism from the brotherhood. Men can't even touch each other without the guise of "rough-housing" to make it "okay." A feminine man is not recognized as a reality. Even feminists decry men who are incorporating visual "feminine" symbols as trying to be, or demean, women. At the same time feminists deny emphatically that they themselves are trying to be, or demean, men. Men must be liberated from physical and behavioral stereotypes just as women. Conversely, feminists should be working with transvestites to obtain changes in laws and in societal attitudes, promoting acceptance of both the woman who desires traditionally "masculine" attitudes and the man who desires traditionally "feminine" attitudes. A man wearing eye-makeup and jewelry should be as lauded as a woman with a well-scrubbed face wearing combat boots ... he is a brave pioneer in the world of man where even a minute change in the conservative dress style takes many cautiously manipulated years. Moreover, if women could really detach themselves from traditionally feminine attitudes and mannerisms, the transvestite could not possibly be furthering the stereotype of women, as they have been charged, but simply establishing themselves as feminine men. They themselves would be the only ones left to imitate.

In observing the feminine male, I have learned one important thing: "femininity" and "masculinity" are not natural to anyone. The feminine male is living proof that a man is not inherently forceful, unemotional and obsessed with his "superiority over women." A feminine male is the truly liberated man: he is the only man who knows women are no different than he and that he is no "higher" than they. He knows that a woman's supposed nature of being coy, flirtatious, delicate and receptive are only "other" ways of behaving: another way of sitting, smiling, walking, talking. And more effectively than all the volumes of rhetoric trying to prove and rationalize the basic equality of the sexes, the feminine male shows this equality.

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