In this era of Boy George and Grace Jones, when jeans and tracksuits are normal wear for both men and women, it might seem that we are moving towards a unisex style culture. And drag, the deliberate dressing-up as the opposite sex, might appear as part of that same liberation from sex roles which feminists have demanded for years, and sometimes pursued through dress, in trousers and dungarees, short hair-cuts and bomber jackets. Not that this is exactly a form of drag, but rather the recognition of genderized dress and body image as being in some way a symbol of the workings of power in a society in which power is invested in the male sex. But it is precisely this imbalance of power in both sexual relations and society at large, which makes the equation of men dressing up as women, and women dressing up as men, less even than it might seem: drag is not a simply reversible phenomenon.
To understand the real social/sexual meanings of drag, and of body images in general, I would argue that you must look not so much at the men who dress as women, or the women who dress as men, but at the ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ characteristics they adopt, and the values placed on these, no matter who ‘wears’ them. This means separating actual gender (male/female) from the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics that either sex can adopt or play down, worship or parody. The feminine is usually characterized by breasts, hips and curves, and the masculine by a taller, leaner shape, flat stomach, hard thighs. But these are not just caricatures: men and women are for the most part built differently. Women inevitably have ‘tummies’ which are different from men’s since they house an entire organ men don’t have – the womb. Women biologically have more subcutaneous fat than men, and differently distributed: they have wider hips and, obviously enough, breasts. Of course there is one further, fundamental difference in body shape between the sexes: men have the appendage of the penis. But this crucial difference is revealingly absent from the style language of drag and sex role games.
Instead, it is big tits, fat tummies, wobbly hips and elaborate hair-dos that feature most widely in popular images of drag. And they are usually a joke. ‘Feminine’ characteristics are parodied by Hinge and Bracket, Dame Edna Everage, and other well-known female impersonators. The man in each case isn’t being undermined: female characteristics, and by implication women, are. There is nothing inherently radical about men dressing as women. After all, under all those skirts and stuffed bras there’s still a perfectly safe penis. Men can have their cake and eat it, in this respect, since they don’t actually have to undermine their own sexual characteristics in order to adopt and undermine women’s. And we have yet to see a female comic stuff a sock in her trousers and waggle it at crowded studio audiences to roars of laughter.
Why is it that female body characteristics are supposedly funny, while male ones patently aren’t? On the social level, as long as women are less powerful than men and treated as inferior, the characteristics of maleness will probably be valued more highly, and taken more seriously than those of femaleness. But another aspect of the relentless, almost hysterical joking about women’s bodies, tits, bums etc., is perhaps the unease aroused by femininity, by the fact that women do indeed lack that most serious of assets, the penis. As the song says, It’s Different for Girls: and girls are different. They are the Other, the departure from the norm. The threat posed to a value system based on possession of the penis, by the very possibility of its absence, is enormous. Women’s bodies frequently provoke fear in men; and joking can diffuse fear, while men dressing as women can appear to bridge the frightening gap of sexual difference. After all, if men can do it (be women) there’s nothing to it!
If men taking a female appearance helps to disperse that uneasy sense of the ‘Other’, the un-male, what can women do to help further dismantle the threat posed by their sex? Not look like women, of course. Here I am not referring to those women mentioned above who dress outside traditional ‘feminine’ stereotypes to avoid being looked on as sexually available, weak or inferior. Certainly this is part of the same language of body image and power; but an important part of the women’s liberation project has always been to affirm the female body, and allow its natural shape – different for each woman – to appear unfettered by corsetry and not pushed by high heels etc into the exaggerated postures which turn the female form into almost a parody of itself (as happens with Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot). In our society fake breasts on male comedians are funny, but real breasts on women who don’t wear bras, or breastfeed in public, are less acceptable. The point for many feminists is not to resist looking like women – it is to resist looking like a fashion-plate model, or rather, to come to terms with not looking like one.
And the fashion images that we inevitably compare ourselves with (to be found lacking!) are of figures that resemble not so much women, as boys. For many decades the desirable shape held out through fashion photos and adverts has been that of a lean, tall, flat-tummied boy – leggy, tight-bummed, curve-less. Endless boyish models with tousled hair, long thin legs and no hips pout at us from every magazine, their armpits and so-called bikini areas immaculately hairless, a total denial of adult women’s sexual qualities. Most of these models are women who look boyish, but an extreme example of this phenomenon is the model Tula (who appears in the Smirnoff Loch Ness advert). Tula is actually a man, Barry Cossey, who has undergone a sex change. This of course involved a change-around of basic organs; yet the totally hard, flat stomach and lean torso, the spare bone structure and long limbs, look more male than female. Tula as a model is a blueprint for women. The fact that her body started off male seems an ironic comment not on sex-changes or Tula herself, but on the whole body image industry, modelling, photography, fashion, which can sell us the male form as the ideal for females.
The desirable shape for a woman, then, is that of a boy. This is easier for some women to achieve than others; thousands of anorexic women believe their already emaciated thighs are too fat, their breasts too big, their tummies too round – their self-image wildly distorted in a grotesque parody of the boy-fashion phenomenon. Yet there is nothing funny about this parody; it is the comic figures who have the wobbly bustlines that are amusing. So it seems that the ‘silliest’, least valued shape for either men or women, is ‘womanly’: and the most fashionable, most valued shape for both sexes, ‘boyish’.
Comedy aside, ‘unisex invariably means boyish. In style – Grace Jones’ sharp, lean look is a trendsetter for both women and men. Yes, she’s a woman, but it is the masculinity of this style that makes it smart. In clothes – it means trousers, jeans, suits, sweatshirts, male sportsgear (shorts, not tennis-skirts!). In shape – many of the clothes currently fashionable, including sportsgear, have a flattening effect; loose, flat tops conceal breasts, the bosomy look is definitely out. Meanwhile, jeans advertising has concentrated heavily on bottoms; with pictures of male and female bodies alike poured into skin-tight jeans that mould sexually indistinguishable small, tight bums. True, a new Levi’s campaign now sells jeans specially fitted for girls; but the point is, they are specially fitted for girls to have that skin-tight, boyish-bum look. The shift in public imagery and style from breasts to bottoms is surely a move away from the ‘ideal woman’ male fantasy towards the (equally male) fantasy of the ‘ideal boy’. And while this mainly involves a shift in imagery, there is a similar trend in actual sports and ‘training’, with famous examples like Lisa Lyon whose body-building producing a taut, muscular physique, earns her inclusion among Robert Mapplethorpe’s mainly homosexual, muscle-bound, hard-bodied male subjects. This is not to criticize the project in itself; but to draw attention to the high fashion value placed on eliminating female body characteristics.
So how about recent examples of men dressing as women, not in the Hinge and Bracket vein, but in more serious or stylish form? There is Boy George, slightly pudgy of face, slightly prissy of gesture – feminine, rather than masculine in image. But however girlish he acts, George’s title is a crucial and revealing part of his charm. Thousands of teenage girls both worship, and try to look like Boy George; suggesting a wish to be the object of desire, as much as to ‘have’ him, in other words, to be the recipient rather than the initiator of passions. For what is perhaps most interesting about Boy George is his much proclaimed celibacy. In both fan-mags and the popular press, George’s lack of interest in a sex-life has been widely publicized. This allows his sexuality to remain completely ambiguous, since no-one seems to know whether his partner would be male or female, if he had one. His pudginess is, in fact, rather reminiscent of the way people sometimes get when they don’t have sex. So in a curious way, Boy George seems less bi-sexual, than a-sexual; he has that smooth, hairless, rounded quality almost like a baby, which can be very appealing to those who like the object of their desire passive and unthreatening. There is a dimension to the sexual ambiguity fashion which is actually a way of avoiding sexuality. After all, a cute girlish boy, or a lean, tomboyish girl, aren’t actually meant to have active sexual feelings. (The fact that children do, of course, is another matter). If you present yourself as pre-sexual, you may arouse desire in others, but you can also absolve yourself of the responsibility for it. The currently fashionable boy/girl figure is bland and impassive, seeming not to have a sexuality of its own but to offer itself as a peg for the fantasies of others. Unenergetic, limp, even, Boy George is not shocking or exciting in his androgeny (as, for example, Mick Jagger or David Bowie always have been); he is, ultimately, supremely safe.
A very different contemporary example of man-as-woman, hailed as radical by many people, was Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. After all, the film was ‘about’ sexism; as ‘Dorothy’, the Dustin Hoffman character Michael Dorsey finds that he is treated as inferior and subjected to sexual harassment and names like ‘tootsie’. But it is Michael/Dorothy who leads the silly, flighty, timorous women of the film in the fight against sexism: showing that men not only make the best women, they make the best feminists (!). And of course the joke, and the whole point, is that ‘Dorothy’ isn’t a woman, he is a man: Michael is simply an out-of-work actor trying for the part that his girlfriend has been too useless to get. Anyone, it seems, can be a woman, but not everyone can be as motivated and courageous as a man. For there is not one real woman in the film who is shown to be nearly as fine as ‘Dorothy’, there is only the ‘silly, gawky’ girlfriend (whom, as a man, Michael treats appallingly) and the ‘cute, feather-brained’ second girlfriend whom Michael is paired with at the end.
The values of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in style are ultimately bound up with the values placed on actual male and female roles in social and sexual life. Taking on the clothes or shape of the opposite sex may be individually liberating for anyone who wants to play with stereotypes and ‘escape’ their conventional gender image: yet as long as the value of male/female is imbalanced, even those ‘transgressions’ remain within a convention of a different kind. To play with the language of gender is not to escape it, merely to detach it from the sex of the ‘wearer’. As I said: the day I see a female comic on a family TV show with a padded penis (what a joke! One of those! Isn’t it wobbly, ha ha! Just like my father-in-law’s! Get a load of that! etc) I will believe in the radical equality of unisex and drag.
(City Limits, 1984)