The Boy, as I may have mentioned, enjoys presenting as female sometimes. He likes to feel sexy and pretty, and regular boy-clothes don't really allow for that the same way fishnets and pleather do.
As for me, I've experimented with dressing as a boy once or twice - mostly out of curiosity and an urge to mess with people ("if I go out in public like this, will I pass?"), and partly to ramp up the contrast when The Boy is being The Girl.
The problem, though, is the photographs.
My hard drive has approximately fifty gazillion photographs of The Boy vamping it up in girl clothes. He strikes all the archetypal "sexy woman"-type poses: crawling sexily across the floor, looking coquettishly over his shoulder, lying on his back with his legs in the air, and many, many more.
Also on my hard drive: approximately five photographs of me as a dude. In them, I am striking all the archetypal "dude" poses: grabbing my crotch, giving the finger to the camera, and standing there with my arms hanging like salamis...and that's basically it. I'd get The Boy to take more photos of dude-me, but they would all look just like those first five except with a different shirt.
Maybe the shortage of viable boy-poses is why drag kings seem so much rarer than drag queens: it's hard to be campy as a boy. If you try to do a satire of manliness, you just end up leering and grabbing your wadded-up pants-sock every single time. Meh.
It's not just the lack of stereotypical boy-poses. It's probably also the lack of stereotypical boy CLOTHES. Nowadays, a woman can wear just about anything a man could wear and it wouldn't be considered "cross-dressing". Women routinely wear T-shirts, jeans, etc., whereas in many places and contexts it's still out-of-the-ordinary for a man to wear a dress. (I'm not saying the latter ought to be that way, mind you -- just that, at the moment, it isn't an everyday occurrence everywhere).
ReplyDeletePerhaps in more pics your hands should be holding something out front...
ReplyDeleteDamini: That still only adds one more possible pose. :P
ReplyDeleteVikram: technically both sexes wear t-shirts and jeans, but the fit tends to be very different - at least if you look within the "preppy/normal" sort of subculture.
Go to Bluenotes sometime and observe that all of the women's t-shirts are fitted and the jeans are all ass-hugging, while the men's t-shirts and jeans are baggy and conceal the body. If I wore my baggy "guy jeans" while not actually in drag, it would read strangely; it would look "wrong" to people.
Although you do still have a point: a drag king may not find as much contrast between her normal clothes and her drag clothes as a male transvestite would. It may be clear that a drag king is crossdressed, but arguably it won't be as much fun for her - as much of a total paradigm shift - as it is for a guy to go from jeans to a dress.
Personally, I found it tremendously freeing to walk around in huge, baggy, figure-concealing clothes.