FOREWORD (60 page)

Getting back to my “hobby” though, whenever I have a

“fashion show” (only before the mirror now) it takes several hours to change into all of my outfits and I proceed leisurely from daytime things to evening wear and finally my great Nancy Friday

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fascination – sleepwear. The end of the charade finds me wearing three pairs of stockings supported by two garter belts and a long-leg panty corselette, the top of which is filled out by my breast forms. Under that I have on three pairs of nylon-satin briefs, the first and second pair worn with the crotches alternating on either side of my prick and balls, the third pair covering it all. My five-inch-heel maribou-trimmed mules, costume jewelry and long, luxurious nylon chiffon peignoir set complete this stunning ensemble in which I practice posing and walking in front of the mirror. Finally, I no longer postpone the inevitable climax. Lifting the gown, I draw my stiff and straining cock through the corselette’s split crotch, letting the outer panty cover my balls. Carefully tuck-ing a few inches of the gown’s underskirt into the edge of the corselette over my cock, I allow the rest of the peignoir and gown to fall around my well-stockinged legs in soft caressing, clinging folds. The movement of my prone body (by now practically transfigured) up and down the sheets and across and into these soft and yielding garments is next to effortless.

When I’ve fairly fainted with pleasure, the shattering crash takes place, leaving my adorable outfit soaked in sweat and semen, my makeup running and the pillow covered with lipstick.

Is this too heavy for
any
woman? I desperately hope not.

CRANE

I am forty years old, born and raised in a rural area, with a conservative political religious background. I am married, have two children. I am a clergyman with a major pluralistic denomination of the reformed tradition. And I have a great investment in and love for the work of the church. I have a string of degrees in business administration, theology and pastoral counseling and enjoy education.

Much of my early life is still a fog. I think that I developed fantasies very early in life, and used them as hanging hooks Men In Love

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to suspend the conflicts that arose concerning my psychosexual development. It was my fantasies that gave me pleasure for years. It also was my fantasies that were sources of conflict and alienation because I would not share them with anyone.

Stage One (7-10 years of age):
My parents were divorced and my mother, two sisters and I moved to the maternal homestead in a very rural location. My nuclear family lived in the great parlor, with rugs hanging from ropes suspended from the walls to make for privacy. I developed a fantasy about being Wonder Woman with her magic truth rope, getting tied up, under beds, in corners and so forth, and then escaping from the Nazis. I had a cover story about Roy Rogers in case I was caught, but cannot ever remember having to use it. I found relationships with teachers easy to develop – all I had to do was be smart. It always had been tough to relate to peers, however.

Stage Two (10-17 years of age):
My father and paternal grandfather died within days of each other soon after this move, and when my body began to work through puberty, the fantasies erupted again. The power of Wonder Woman was gone, and I was angry toward my sisters. Somewhere around age twelve, I began to dress in my sisters’ jeans and other clothes and have fantasies that I was tying them up and punishing them. Then one day, the delicious thing happened – I came! I was scared at first over the mess. But I loved the feeling. I quickly developed a surreptitious system in order to have more experiences like that. I practiced different kinds of variations four or five days a week, fantasizing first one sister, then the other, or perhaps one of the girls I liked to look at at school. Since my buddies began dating, and I was too shy to ask, I began to think that maybe I wasn’t likable – or that I was bad. I come from a very quiet family, except when we are fighting, so had no permission to ask about my feelings.

Stage Three (19-34 years of age):
Upon graduation from high school, I fled into the world – to freedom from the conNancy Friday

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fines of rural life, and to privacy, I hoped. This was the stage where I spent time in college, in the armed forces and employed in the secular world. It meant money, and though it took a lot of effort I was able to go into public stores and by concocting embarrassing stories, I was able to purchase the things I always had wanted to wear but couldn’t. It pretty much was confined to sports clothing – women’s jodhpurs, halters, ski outfits, jeans. Only a couple of times did I wear anything in public under my regular clothing. It created a lot of anxiety on my part and I can remember just barely making it to some private spot where I vomited. I fantasized myself as a woman, sometimes as a man who had been changed into a woman, or as a man who was wearing special skin that hid my penis until the right time when I would turn the tables.

Most of the pleasure came in the preparation, planning and executing the plan that led to the ejaculation. It was downhill and damned depressing from that point onwards. After marriage it became less frequent, and I began to develop the anxiety that led me to therapy and a different way of handling my fantasy life. I disliked myself, I was becoming self-destructive. Even my relationships with the women in my life could not seem to extinguish this passion I had for masturbation and transvestism. I had a number of minor auto accidents, and suffered from a variety of viral illnesses. I was scheduling myself to die before the age my father had reached.

Stage Four (1972-present; 35-40 years of age):
This is my therapeutic age. I defused my fantasies and convulsions. I wanted to be castrated. I had been preoccupied with crotch watching and feeling guilty about it. After some intensive therapeutic experiences I got rid of the guilt that went with the fantasies.

What was emerging was a new way to use my creative imagination. My fantasies are still with me. I use them to grow, and to get the old pleasure if I want it. Recently, I gave the “woman” in me a name. And I made friends with her – in a therapeutic setting of course. Now she helps me in my fan-Men In Love

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tasies. We take turns being dominant or cooperative in my fantasies. And she wears a dress! That alone, for me, is significant in the way I feel about myself. I don’t have to disguise my creativity to myself. I can take advantage of it. The future is open for me. I can look forward to a better understanding of my masculine and feminine parts – which really are just me. And I can praise any Christian God for the total image which I think I now have of him – a great gentle, strong force that led us all to seek him out in our own private experiences.

LLOYD

I should like to relate a fantasy I have had re: cross-dressing as a woman. It excites me, and I usually masturbate while having it:

I am twelve years old, and going to a small, private, nonsexist school. The headmistress of the school is fat, jolly – a grandmotherly woman. One day while we are in class and discussing sexual stereotypes, such as girls’ games and boys’

games, one of the boys blurts out that he would like to learn how to sew. I sympathize with this wish, and would like to sew even girls’ clothes; but the other boys immediately tease and ridicule the boy, much to the distress of the headmistress, who wants us to give up stereotyped roles. I join in the teasing out of fear.

So the next day, she announces that the boys will be required to attend the girls’ home economics and sewing classes; and more, each boy will have to produce as a project a skirt, circular and full; and the girls will grade them upon craftsmanship, at a final session at which the boys will model them. The boys, needless to say, protest; but she gradually overcomes their objections, saying things like “I’ll bet lots of you have wanted to try on a skirt, to see how it feels, and won’t admit it.” She asks for a show of hands on this ques-Nancy Friday

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tion, and eventually most of the boys reluctantly admit to wanting to try on a skirt at one time or another.

So, soon the class is in full swing; and as the boys enter into the spirit of the thing, they find that they like sewing and want to outdo the girls at it. I like to imagine them working on their skirts, comparing them with each other, and lastly, trying them on in front of a mirror to adjust the length of the hems, blushing and giggling as the girls would.

Finally comes the big day: the modeling of the clothes made in the boys’ and girls’ home economics classes. As a special surprise, the headmistress has provided frilly halfslips to wear under the skirts; and some of the boys elect to wear them. At first the boys feel very self-conscious, appearing in public in their skirts, but soon become very used to it, and behave naturally. Several of the skirts are praised by the girls and get high marks, and then there is a party with lemonade and cakes, and a good time is had by all – especially me: I even dare to appear wearing a stand-out petticoat lent me by a girl, and a pair of high heels, and no one puts me down for it.

I’m sure if my parents knew that I wanted to wear skirts and petticoats, they’d be sure that I was becoming gay –

which I sensed even when small. I used to sneak up to the attic and try on my mom’s old skirts and dresses.

I don’t see why people can’t just wear what makes them happy, without labeling them as “homosexual” or whatever.

Whatever bisexuality I may have only seems to be accentu-ated by the societal pressure that identifies cross-dressers as

“queer.” If my desires as to dress had simply been accepted, and something I could do without fear or ridicule or arrest, I think I’d be much more “normal” sexually, although that may seem a nutty statement.

If gays can have rights, then I think cross-dressing males, whether they want to be gay or straight in their life-styles, should have that right too.

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The drag queen or female impersonator wants to show off what he is doing, but to the average transvestite, the thought that he might be discovered is unbearable. Dayle’s joy (above) at fooling the world with his womanly disguise is in proportion to how sure he feels he will get away with it.

Cross-dressers often argue that their desires are harmless.

This is not quite true. Their pleasures are often bought at the price of living with fearsome guilt and shame. Crane (above) allows himself only the most masculine of women’s sports clothes, but his anxiety is so great that on at least one occasion he vomited.

Such a burden can be too great to carry alone. If only someone else knew, someone who didn’t mind, didn’t call the man names – even joined in the fun – the relief would be marvelous. Whom can he trust if not his wife? Mrs. Dayle is so far from condemning her husband that she even sews for him. In this, she takes on the role of one of the enduring heroines of fantasy: the permission-giving woman.

If a man can limit his transvestite desires to the privacy of his own home, he can go for years (even his entire life) without being found out. The fact is that this kind of man is often a hard-working, model husband. Living up to the high performance standards that he sets himself as the mark of a man makes him a good provider for his family; it also wears him out to the point where, as Dr. Schaefer says, he feels he has earned the few hours vacation he gets from the masculine rat race by putting on women’s clothes.

The wife’s position can become very anxious and complicated. As if to emphasize how difficult it was to be a man, Howard (above) seems to have entered into competition with his wife about how easy it is to be woman, wanting to prove he could be more feminine than Mrs. Howard, more beautiful and glamorous. In Lloyd’s fantasy (above) the boys “find they like sewing, and want to outdo the girls at it.” Not only must the woman endure the violence done to her own ideas of gender identity in finding herself married to someone who wears lipstick and panty hose, but she must accept his com-Nancy Friday

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petitive putdowns of her femininity, too. Howard’s wife became enraged and left him.

“In my personal counseling,” says Dr. Schaefer, “what I try to do is help the man rid himself of his guilt. As he gets easier about cross-dressing and stops thinking his wife is judging him harshly, he in turn usually stops putting her down. The therapeutic idea is to make cross-dressing not a guilty secret, but a part of life. Do it as much as possible. But I always remind him that while it may be a big thrill to go out in public dressed Ike a woman, it is also a big thrill to drive a hundred miles an hour. Both are dangerous. If he confines his cross-dressing to the home, he will be safe. Once it becomes a part of their life together, the wife may become less anxious about it; and he can stop resentfully telling her he would make a better woman than she. What they end up with is a special sort of spice that is part of their own private lovemaking, and nobody else’s business.”

I have always admired Dr. Schaefer’s generosity of spirit in all things sexual. Her advice is sound, but I know in my heart how difficult it would be for me if my husband loved to cross-dress. Heeding Dr. Schaefer’s admonitions may help you to keep a marriage you want. But if you cannot, it does not mean you are a failure as a woman ... or a man.

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Breast and Vagina Envy

The debate over the significance of penis envy – a notion born early in psychoanalytic history – still goes on. Orthodox Freudians believe women unconsciously fear that they have been deprived: They long to get back the penis they feel was taken away in some mysterious past. Various traits are usually cited in evidence: women’s belittling of their own sex, competition with men, negative self-image, resentment of the feminine role leading to frigidity.

More recently, the idea has come to be taken less literally: the male organ is seen as a symbol of the power and control men are given by our society. Women do not resent having a vagina; they resent having it posited as a sign of their inferiority.