For those who care about such things and notice what the porn community is
doing and responding to, people like myself - the pre-op M2F - are the
current Flavor of the Month. The so-called "Shemale" is the focus of
thousands of relatively new porn sites. Nearly from its inception, there has
always been a thriving porn business in America that specialized in
presenting the exotic and forbidden. There were always magazines and books
devoted to showing black people and there were always magazines for showing
the very young, and there were always outlets devoted to showing us Asians
and bestiality and... well, you get the idea.
Why are there suddenly so many sex sites devoted to showing M2F
transsexualism? I suspect the answer is not so much that we are exotic and
mysterious as it is that we are seen as safe and relatively normal. Until
recently Western society, and North American society in particular, still
threw up tremendous roadblocks in the way of any bio-male wishing to express
simple, honest affection toward another male. Growing up in a little
red-necked town full of John Wayne clones, the general perception was that
those Europeans were all a bunch of fags because the guys sometimes hug each
other. The degree of homophobia was incredible. Any male who expressed an
interest in anything feminine or sissified was immediately tagged as a
potential homo.
And yet every male has the potential to be warm and loving toward another
male, we all have the desire to show what's in our hearts and if we only had
the courage to break through the social taboos we would do so. But the
stigma of queerness is too much for many males and so they live a lifetime
of artificial maleness, suppressing their natural desires in order to meet
society's expectations. For some males, the early prohibitions against
anything that might be seen as homosexual behavior and the horror of being
tainted with the disgusting stench of femaleness are just too strong.
We have all marveled that heterosexual biological femmes fall into lesbian
encounters with absolutely no shame or guilt and are utterly capable of
being warm and loving to another female in a way that heterosexual males
cannot be with another male. Why should it be so different? It is different
simply because of the way we bring up young males to revile any hint of
homosexuality. And of course, this sort of training doesn't work because it
is so horribly unnatural. Males grow up with their sexual curiosity about
other males left unsatisfied. And that curiosity is there and there can't be
any doubt about that. Every man has had sexual fantasies about other males.
Every male has had the desire to play the sub role and go down on another
male.
WE ARE THE BRIDGE between femaleness and maleness for such males. With us,
they can indulge their natural impulse to be loving toward another male
without being judged queer. When your date looks like a woman and smells
like a woman and walks like a woman and talks like a woman and wears a dress
like a woman and wears lipstick like a woman.... then it's okay to perform
fellatio on her. There's no horrible feeling of wrongness because you can
see her as a woman and that makes everything alright.
I used to go to a lot of chat rooms for transsexuals and there would always
be males there who would strenuously deny that they were gay or abnormal in
anyway except for this fascination with transsexuals. Since I used a highly
provocative screen name, I was a target. They homed in on that name. I
sometimes handled 10 or 12 Instant Message boxes at a time. In one six-month
period, I talked to perhaps 300 such males. Almost invariably one of the
very first questions would be: "Can you pass?" They wanted to spend time
with someone who would not mark them as homosexuals for dating us. And
almost invariably, their greatest desire was not to penetrate but to be
penetrated. Of the 300 or so males I talked to in those chat rooms during
that one six-month period, I would guess that 290 were primarily interested
in performing fellatio.
Sexual exploration is a natural and normal part of growing up and in a
society where we demand that our young people do the impossible --suppress
the strongest sexual urges they will ever experience in this lifetime-- for
several years, the frustration of this urge leads to sexual frustration,
misery and the burgeoning of a porn industry devoted to giving males
glimpses of what they are forbidden to have in reality: the warmth and
affection of their peer group.
Under such insane circumstances, it is hardly surprising that our society is
so screwed up. What's surprising is that it continues to lurch along at all.
But we pay a high price for the way we treat young people and the way we
restrict our natural sexual urges. That price can be seen in the rape
statistics, the insane corporate culture we've created, the strange
inability to experience compassion by so many of our citizens, the weird
perception of freedom as something scary and intolerable.
But mainly we pay the price in simple human misery. The vast majority of our
citizens skulk about the world looking for ways to express their natural
sexual urges and finding no way that society will approve. Nearly all these
people are unhappy and most of them are miserable.
And so they search for an outlet for their drives. And there we are. We are
the acceptable sex objects for their homosexual longings because we wear
dresses and lipstick. So long as society continues to place straight jackets
on our sexual behavior toward others of the same gender, there will always
be a large percentage of the population, mostly male but with a lot of
females also, that finds the need to indulge its desires in acceptable ways.
And we are the sex objects of choice for the moment, not because we are
exotic or strange but because we are seen, in a very strange way, as being
closer to the norm than true homosexuality.
Jessica Caine
