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Shemales: An Appreciation

By: Cal Y. Pygia



Androgyne, futari, girly man, he-she, intersexed, hermaphrodite, kathoey, ladyboy, newhalf, shemale, tranny, transgender, transsexual--there are lots of names for chicks with dicks--maybe too many. As whenever such a case presents itself, it is helpful--no, mandatory--that one define one's terms. As used in this essay, "shemale" is reserved for pre-operative transsexuals who have decided that breasts have made them womanly enough and that they will forego sex-reassignment surgery, opting to retain their male genitals. These divine beings, neither fully male nor fully female, it may be argued, are the sexiest creatures in the universe. For those who believe so, a word of explanation seems to be warranted, since a sexual attraction to shemales which is more immediate, intense, and enduring than sexual attraction to either of the traditional two sexes is unusual, if increasing.

What is so attractive about chicks with dicks?

Obviously, the incongruity of a feminine appearance, facially, physically, emotionally, and otherwise, coupled with male genitals, is marvelous, even astonishing. Therefore, it is noticeable in a world in which fewer and fewer persons, places, and things have presence. In a world in which people, like objects, are more and more ignored and are becoming, therefore, increasingly invisible, shemales definitely get one's attention.

However, the astonishment that one feels could change to disgust as quickly as it can transform into appreciation. In fact, it seems that more men than not are appalled by shemales than are admiring of them. If shemales are reckoned to represent a third sex, it is apparent that not all men (or women) want a third sex. Many people, after all, prefer the status quo.

Shemales suggest that men, in mimicking women, can be all that beautiful women are characterized as being: empathetic, gentle, lovely, sensitive, sympathetic tender, and so on. In other words, they suggest that, in every man, there's a beautiful woman waiting to get out (or to "out" herself). From a psychological point of view, shemales imply that a bisexual theory of human personality is correct: there is a female component to masculinity, just as there is a masculine dimension to femininity. Sex and gender are not the neat polar opposites that unsophisticated analysts of human nature and observers of human behavior perceive and believe. There is more complexity to human existence than a set of genitals or secondary sexual characteristics alone suggest, and, as a rule, people tend to prefer the simple to the complex, the black or white to the gray. Men want men to be men and women to be women, and women want women to be women and men to be men. That way, things are straightforward, and there is no room for confusion concerning actions, attitudes, beliefs, feelings, personal identity, social expectations, roles, and a thousand other areas related to individual and collective existence and behavior. Life is hard enough when the rules are clear. Shemales threaten the definitions, understandings, and riles that not only regulate behavior but also allow meaning.

Why, then, the question persists, do some people (mostly men, it seems) find shemales irresistibly attractive and preferable, even, to females?

There's more to them than meets the eye--initially, at least. They are a "surprise," some say. They represent the "best of both worlds," others declare. They are not women. They are apparent women. They are the sort of "women" whom men prefer who do not want real women, who want only men who look like women. However, these men do not want to admit that they prefer men to women. They do not want to admit, even to themselves, that they are homosexual, because, to them, such an admission, means that they are less than men themselves and presents them with the emotional and psychological quandary of both loving and rejecting their own masculinity, of feeling ambivalent about who and what they are. When the object of one's desire has long hair; a beautiful face; wears makeup and feminine attire; has round, womanly buttocks; has shaved legs, and is equipped with breasts, it is easier to accept the male genitals. One can rationalize his attraction to the shemale by telling himself that this beautiful, feminine creature is not a man. The shemale may also not be a woman, either, exactly, but, just as clearly, "she" is not a man--at least, not fully. She is a he-she, a shemale, a third sex that is both male and female and, yet, paradoxically, at the same time, neither, male nor female.

Despite this paradox, which would have it both ways, men want to think of shemales as women, not as men. Therefore, such creatures are regarded as chicks with dicks rather than as dudes with boobs.

Ultimately, shemales are denials of femininity. They cannot conceive. They cannot bear children. They cannot become mothers or, legally, wives. They are, at most, companions--playmates rather than helpmates--built for fun, not family; for sex, not responsibility. Their fists, their mouths, or their rectums are surrogate vaginas, and, if they play the manly role, their semen cannot inseminate. Furthermore, in dating a shemale, a man need not explore the feminine within a woman or within himself, for he is not dating a true woman, but a substitute, a "shemale" rather than a female. His woman is a man-made woman. As such, she is a guarantor of sterility, and a promise against the moral and legal responsibilities that claim a father. For an actual woman, despite proper use of the Pill, there is always the chance, however slight, that she could become pregnant; with a shemale, there is no chance, ever, of pregnancy; therefore, there is no chance, ever, of fatherhood and its attendant responsibilities. There's just the fun and adventure of sex with a look-alike woman. The best of both worlds is not only the inclusion of both breasts and male genitals in the same medically and technologically revised anatomy, but it is also the denial of the biological purpose of womanhood altogether, which is verified and confirmed again and again every time that the penis enters the fist, mouth, or rectum instead of a vagina and the penetrated person's own penis, whether flaccid or erect, dangles or stands idle and superfluous.

If one rejects the biological purpose of the female, a shemale--a man transformed into an imitation of a woman--can be fun and sexy, because then it's only the sex that counts. Shemales are a part of America's love affair with what has been called the "culture of death" or the "death culture." As such, they are as sexy as the forbidden fruit that tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden. They second-guess God or nature, as it were, suggesting that chicks with dicks may be an equally good, if not better, partner with whom men can establish and maintain personal, social, and sexual relationships--one that does not and cannot involve reproduction. As such, the pursuit of the shemale, rather than of the female, defies the divine injunction that demands that men "be fruitful and multiply" and the very reproductive basis itself for male-female (rather than male-shemale) relationships.

Despite appearances to the contrary, a shemale is not a female. She is a contradiction, an embodiment of ambivalence and ambiguity. Ostensibly an alternative third sex that, in merging sex and gender, transcends both, she is, as a so-called chick with a dick (and without a cunt), ultimately a denial and a rejection of womanhood. Therein lies her mystique, her charisma, and her attraction for those who admire her and rejoice in her charms.

Shemales: An Appreciation Pt. 02



Similarities may be overlooked, but differences demand explanation. In a patriarchal society, wherein men rule, it is men who must explain women, not women who must explain men, and, since men regard themselves as normative, women are considered to be aberrational. In the Western world, until about 100 years ago, women were explained as inferior, weaker versions of men—as pale imitations, as it were, of their betters, or, as Sigmund Freud would have it, as castrated males possessed of "penis envy."

It has been said that it is the winners, not the losers, of military campaigns who write their nation's history. Likewise, it is the ruler, not the ruled, who defines (or assigns) the meanings and values of persons, places, and things in their societies. It hardly needs to be mentioned that, in defining such meanings and values, those who do so do so according to their own purposes. Men have defined women as providers of pleasure, as domestic servants, and as bodies upon whom they may beget children—usually, in this order. To hear men tell it, women have breasts primarily for men's benefit, as means by which to provide them with pleasure, and only secondarily to suckle infants. Likewise, women's vaginas are not for the purpose—at least, not primarily—of incubating babies, but for the same purpose as the anus, the hands, and the mouth, which is to say, again, to pleasure men. In the final analysis, to be female (or, at least, feminine)—and one may be feminine without being a woman—is to be fucked, as I suggest in my short story "Transformation," is to be fucked.

Shemales (by which term, as I use it, I mean "chicks with dicks," that is, male-to-female transsexuals who, having otherwise completely feminized themselves, opt to retain their male genitals rather than to undergo sex-reassignment surgery) offer an opportunity to even more drastically separate women—or man-made women (the impulse to create the perfect woman, which is to say a man-made woman, remains as strong, or stronger, today as it was when it inspired Pygmalion to carve Galatea)—from her biological, or reproductive, function. By dispensing with the very possibilities of impregnation, conception, pregnancy, and childbirth, men, in fashioning for themselves shemales as sexual playmates, reduce such man-made women purely to the vehicles of their own pleasure (and, perhaps, domestic service). As I argue in part one of this series, divorcing females—or, rather, shemales—from procreation has proven very popular among men, because the impossibility of impregnating them relieves men of the burdens of fatherhood while, at the same time, allowing them the pleasures of sex.

Shemales, unable to bear children, offer other pleasures beyond those which they provide by the use of their anuses, rectums, mouths, penises, and hands. They are also, even more than women (who, after all, can be impregnated), vehicles by which, and upon which, men can express the superiority that they have claimed to have until a century or so ago (and often continue to claim to have, even if only to themselves). By relegating shemales to the role of being but providers of sexual pleasure (and, perhaps, domestic service), men, both symbolically (or socially) and literally (or sexually) elevate themselves to the superior status exhibited by their own power and authority in society and the relative powerlessness and submissiveness of the vanquished "other," the shemale herself.

In connection with this thought, it is interesting that, despite the shemale's retention of her male genitals, she is defined as a woman (or a man-made woman) in accordance with her possession of artificially acquired secondary sexual characteristics—essentially, besides her feminine appearance and behavior, her artificial breasts. This definition of her as female (or, at least, feminine) by her secondary sexual characteristics is not as odd, actually, as it may first seem, for, throughout history, whenever a crossing of boundaries has occurred between the powerful and the powerless, rulers have defined those whom they regard as hybrids of superiors and inferiors in terms of the inferior group's attributes. For example, products of sexual liaisons between whites and blacks are regarded as "mulattos," "high yellows," or "blacks," but never as whites, just as the offspring of white and Native American, or Indian, couplings were considered to be "half breeds" or "Indians," but never whites. The same tendency is discernable in characterizing shemales as female despite their lack of vaginas and their possession of penises and testicles. This characterization clearly marks shemales (like females) as being inferior to males. Again, in a patriarchal society, men rule, and they determine, consequently, what meaning and value both they and others shall have. Male is the normative model; females, genetic and man-made, are aberrations—inferior, weaker pale imitations of men.

With procreation denied them, shemales are useful to men in another way. They are vehicles by which men exhibit their strength, power, virility, dominance, and masculinity, because only one partner may enter the other, and, of course, in sex, penetration has long signified superiority because, between male and female partners, it is the male who penetrates and the inferior, weaker, aberrational female (or shemale) who is penetrated. To penetrate a person with a penis, even one who has breasts and is considered to be feminine, if not exactly female, is to deny him (or "her") the natural use of his own penis as a penetrating, impregnating organ—in other words, it is not only to feminize him, but also to neuter, or unman, him. Taking the remnant of a man's masculinity is a conquest of him by means of a symbolic castration—even when, as a shemale, he (or "she") is already regarded as feminine. For men who seek empowerment (or the seal of empowerment), anal sex with a man-made woman is sexy, indeed.

Women are supposed to be fucked. The very essence of being a woman is to be fucked, and not only fucked but transformed by being fucked, that is, to be made pregnant, so that her belly swells with child, and she becomes a mother (and not any longer merely a lover). The essence of men, therefore, is to fuck, and, thereby, to deliver the seed by which a woman is impregnated. This essential difference between men and women remains even when procreation is seen as alternative and secondary to pleasure as the purpose of heterosexual sex. 

However, this distinction, fundamental as it is, does not apply between males and shemales, because shemales, lacking vaginas, are not really women at all; at best, they are wannabe women, or artificial, man-made women, flesh-and-blood Galateas. Therefore, although heterosexual sex can end in pregnancy, homosexual sex between a male and a shemale cannot. Denied the essential attribute of womanhood, a shemale's own womanhood is repudiated, and she is shown to be "male," and not "she," after all, appearances to the contrary, which is why, of course, shemales are grouped among gays. Their sexuality, like their identity, is based upon pretense, their own and society's, that they are truly women, despite the technological (chemical and surgical) and the cultural (learned) means of their supposed transformation into "women." To be a woman, one must be a woman born, not made. When it comes to the ultimate test of womanhood, which is the ability to be not merely penetrated, but impregnated, shemales fail at being female. The pretense breaks down. They can be feminine, but they cannot be female. Gender, not sex, is allowed to them.

If, in the final analysis, shemales are not really "chicks with dicks" but are, rather, "dudes with boobs," their erotic appeal lies, perhaps, in their willingness to be regarded as women, rather than as men; in their casting off, so to speak, the mantle of masculinity in favor of the mantle of femininity; of their voluntary subjugation of themselves to the power and authority of men who, in a patriarchal society, rule, for, in doing so, they willingly, of their own accord, accept the meaning and valuation that are otherwise reserved by men for women. They make of themselves the very image of womanhood that men define as meaningful and valuable (to men themselves, at least, if not to women per se). When sex is more a matter of empowering oneself at the expense of another (as, for the most part, it is, when procreation is set aside as unimportant or irrelevant), such a devaluation of oneself is prized by those who seek to exhibit their power, and such a willingness to become weak and inferior is, in short, another reason that many men find shemales so damned sexy. (And, of course, there's neither pregnancy nor menstruation to interrupt one's pleasure.)

Still, shemale are damned hot for yet another, perhaps more profound, reason, which I shall take up in the next installment of this series. 



Shemales: An Appreciation Pt. 03



Cynthia A. Freeland's discussion of the androgynous nature of Victor von Frankenstein's monster (in The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror), sheds light on my topic, shemales.

Building upon the opposition of supposedly "masculine" and feminine traits listed below, Freeland argues, quite convincingly, that Frankenstein's "Creature," despite being described as a male and desiring that his creator build him a woman of his own is, according to the very traits themselves, at least as much feminine as masculine:

MALE—FEMALE 

Culture—nature

Reason—nature

Mind—body

Master—slave

Reason—matter (physicality)

Rationality—animality (nature)

Human—nature (non-human)

Civilized—primitive (nature)

Production—reproduction (nature)

Self—other

According to Freeland, "the Creature symbolizes animality, primitiveness, and physicality," whereas the "excessively male" Frankenstein himself "represents the forces of civilization, rationality, production, and culture." The Creature is also "other," ostracized as he is from human camaraderie, whereas the scientist "is part of a happy family and has prospects of marriage."

Freeland asks, rather pointedly, whether the monster can truly be regarded as male, adding that it "begins with a good and innocent nature," which contradicts the idea that it is wild or "primitive," and is "identified with the feminine in his desire for family and social bonds" and "may even be a personification of Nature's female power." Frankenstein himself, on the other hand, is obviously associated with many of the qualities of masculinity, such as culture, rationality, mind, mastery, humanity, civilization, production, and selfhood.

Indeed, Freeland declares, "We could even propose that the Creature's very monstrousness is a result of his gender and moral indeterminacy. He exhibits a combination of the goods and evils associated with each gender: a desire for domesticity coupled with an extreme thirst for knowledge, the raw power of feminine Nature as against the uncaring violence of men. The slipperiness of the monster's status regarding good and evil and the uneasy gender affiliations in the novel reflect his monstrously undecidable, unnatural state between life and death."

Much of what Freeland argues concerning Frankenstein's monster, of course, can be likewise proclaimed regarding shemales, or "chicks with dicks" (or, more accurately still, "dudes with boobs"). Shemales are gender benders and, as such, they contradict the neat categories of gender and sex that scientists have erected, suggesting, thereby, that the division of humanity into just two opposing genders and sexes is akin to the either-or fallacy. The division presents society and the individuals of which society is composed with the false dilemma of a false dichotomy.

Men have female hormones, and women have male hormones. None of us is entirely one sex (or gender) or the other; we are both. When we try to renounce part of ourselves, we behave irrationally and may suffer a fate similar to that of Frankenstein, for, as Freeland warns her readers, the "excessive rationality" of mad scientists like Frankenstein "becomes effectively irrationality."

The etymology of the word "monster" suggests that dual-sex creatures such as hermaphrodites, who were considered to be monsters, were regarded as harbingers of doom. As the Online Etymology Dictionary declares, "monster" originally referred to "signs or omens of impending evil." Although not exactly hermaphrodites, shemales are a close modern equivalent to such "monsters."

In an increasingly secular world, such creatures may no longer seem to represent warnings of divine wrath, as hermaphrodites once did, but they do represent a living, breathing rebuke, as it were, to the tendency of the rational (male) mind to categorize everything according to a system of binary opposites that explains away more than it explains. As I observe in "Thank Heaven For Little Girly Boys," shemales, by sporting both feminine breasts and masculine genitals, confuse everything in the most delightful ways! This confusion is a needed corrective to the belief that everyone is either male or female/masculine or feminine, for, like the euglena, which is neither wholly plant nor wholly animal, the shemale is neither wholly man nor wholly woman, neither entirely male nor entirely female.

If males and females ground us (to some extent) in maleness, masculinity, femaleness, and femininity, shemales, bless their hearts, free us, to some extent, from these same moorings, letting us understand that our view of sex and gender is as much invented (or socially constructed) as it is "natural" and that, therefore, it is not unnatural to consider oneself a mix of the two genders and sexes. If it is not unnatural to be both male and female and both masculine and feminine, it is also not unnatural to be attracted only to men whether one is himself a man or only to women whether one is herself a woman or to a member of the "opposite" sex or to both men and women (and, indeed, shemales).

In two previous installments, I considered reasons as to why shemales are so damned hot. One reason for their erotic appeal, I ventured, is their freeing of men from the responsibilities of fatherhood. Since shemales, by nature, cannot be impregnated, men can use them as they please, without fear that, because of a brief dalliance, they will be called upon to surrender their freedom for the rest of their lives. There are hundreds of thousands of shemales in the world, many of whom are as beautiful as any genetic woman and many more of whom are at least as attractive as the average woman. They may not have vaginas, but their anuses are perfectly suitable substitutes. Indeed, they may be superior, because they are tighter, do not menstruate, and cannot be impregnated. All they lack is lubricant, which can be supplied, easily enough, through applied science, or technology, in the form of a tube of anal lube.

Another reason for the popularity of shemales, I suggested, is that they are similar enough to men (while, at the same time, being different enough from men) to facilitate free and easy communication between minds that understand the male (and the masculine) mindset.

Finally, as I argue in this last installment, shemales also free men and women to be men and women who are both men and women and who can prefer as sex partners of the same sex, the "opposite" sex, the third sex (if shemales can be supposed to represent a third sex), or any combination thereof.

If shemales are not better than females, they're certainly desirable and suitable substitutes or alternatives to women. Is there any wonder men and women should not appreciate them? Speaking for myself, I can't find even one reason.