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The Shemale As A Figure in Art

By: Cal Y. Pygia



The writer of shemale erotic fiction is doubly blessed--and doubly cursed--because he or she has to describe the best of both worlds: both female faces, breasts, legs, buttocks, and anus and penis, testicles, and scrotum. Although, overall, his or her protagonist must be not only feminine but, usually, beautiful, but she must also be, as far as her male genitals are concerned, virile. More than most elements in shemale erotica, it is the incongruous juxtaposition of the female and the male sexual characteristics that attracts (and, perhaps, simultaneously, for some readers, at least, repels), mystifies, and excites, for, in her own being, the shemale, more than the hermaphrodite of ancient art, both unifies and separates the opposing polarities of male and female, masculine and feminine, man and woman. It is the challenge of the writer of shemale erotic fiction to describe this unblended mix of sex and gender.

Since it is unlikely that most writers of shemale erotic fiction have seen many shemales in person, he or she should make full use of the hundreds, even thousands, of images of transsexuals on the Internet, studying both their close approximations to genetic women and the slight differences that, to the practiced eye, may enable an observer to discern that the transsexual was not born as the woman she so closely resembles. Some of the masculine characteristics that some individuals specify as suggesting that conservative Republican pundit Ann Coulter my be a transsexual are her height, brow ridges, pronounced Adam's apple, and large hands and feet. An online "Shemale or Female" quiz can help the aspiring shemale fiction writer discern these subtle differences. In describing shemales realistically, a writer must be able to focus on both the obvious similarities between transsexuals and genetic women and the not-so-obvious differences. Studying photographs or high-quality printouts of graphic images of shemales and females that have been placed side by side will help the writer to distinguish both these similarities and differences, as will understanding the changes that shemales undergo as transitioning transwomen. The writer of shemale fiction should remember, too, that the transitioning transsexual can stop or skip any phase of the process.

The male-to-female transsexual must transform her appearance and behavior from the male and the masculine to the female and the feminine. As this chart indicates, such a transformation involves many changes, some of which are relatively simple and easy to accomplish and others of which are more complicated and difficult to achieve. Moreover, the transsexual may elect to skip any change that she does not desire to undergo. For example, many transitioning male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals opt to forego sex reassignment surgery, retaining their male genitals. Any combination of male and female attributes is possible, and the transitioning MTF transsexual is free to stop the process at any time after her psychological counseling. (Note: The procedures on this chart do not follow the progression that most transitioning MTF transsexuals would be likely to follow; instead, it simply takes a top down approach, as it were, considering the changes that many such transsexuals undergo from head to toe.)

To reinforce her self-identification with feminine gender, the transitioning male-to-female (MTF) transsexual must undergo mandatory psychological counseling and presentation of self as a female on a continuous basis. To acquire a feminine appearance, she must wear a wig or grow long hair, styling it in a feminine manner; undergo facial plastic surgery; have collagen injected into her lips to make them fuller; undergo electrolysis; take voice lessons; have breast augmentation surgery (breast implants); acquire a feminine wardrobe, including lingerie; obtain altered legal documents that correspond with her new sex and gender; and learn and practice feminine behavior. The shemale fiction writer should be able to describe in detail any of these various processes and procedures.

The key to describing shemale characters well is juxtaposition, for a shemale character is a juxtaposition in herself; she places masculine and feminine characteristics side by side, as it were, exciting the viewer (or reader) by the surprising, if not shocking, incongruity of these contradictory features being united in a body that is both male nor female--and yet, strangely enough, neither. She is both immersed in sex and gender and, paradoxically, at the same time, transcendent to them. She is, as it were, a third sex. As such, the shemale is a unique, wonderful, fascinating creature whose existence gives the lie to the notion that sex and gender are essential aspects of the human condition, demonstrating that these dimensions of human existence are, rather, accidents of nature and nurture, of genetics and education and that, if nature and nurture sometimes make mistakes, these mistakes can be corrected through human intervention.

Photographers, sculptors, and artists have depicted genetic women and hermaphrodites for centuries and shemales for decades. Therefore, the writer of shemale fiction can also learn from these, their fellow artists in other media, and use the literary equivalents that they employ to enhance their descriptions--and the eroticism of their descriptions--of the shemale characters whom they create in their fiction. A classic Internet text on the techniques that such artists use is Stefan Beyst's The Erotic Eye and the Erotic Senses, to which this article makes extensive reference.

Beyst starts his consideration of the erotic with theoretical accounts of the origin of the erotic. Later, he provides practical tips as to how to depict the naked human form in as highly erotic, sensual, and aesthetic a manner as possible. These practical tips, although directed at men and, especially, women (and, occasionally hermaphrodites), can be adapted to the description of shemales.

According to Beyst, erotic art results from the desire of parents to be always near one another in order to be able to assist each other in the care and nurture of their children. Since they can never actually always be together, their senses conspire, as it were, to keep the other in mind during his or her absence. Likewise, the senses help the lover and the beloved to be emotionally as well as physically close, helping to establish and to maintain physical and sexual as well as an emotional intimacy. He uses the analogy of a relay race to explain how the senses, working together, accomplish these purposes: "The erotic senses behave as runners in a relay-race, handing over the torch to each other, until, at last, the orgasmic fire can be lit . . . . The ear becomes deaf when the eyes begin to look. The eyes are closed when the hand begins to touch." He says that perversion results from the occasional reluctance, as it were, for one sense to pass the torch to the next: "The irrevocable advent of the orgasm brings an end to the feelings of pleasure--whence the endeavor to postpone it . . . . The eye gains only when it refuses to hand over the torch . . . . The 'erotic senses' aspiration to autonomy is traditionally–and rightly–called 'perversion': 'pervertere' means to deviate from an original goal." Although we normally think of perversion as entirely negative, Beyst contends that perversion also has positive effects: "From a positive point of view, the perverse move can be described as an endeavor to aestheticization in the sense of 'becoming a goal in its own right.'" Perversion, the hesitancy of one sense to pass on perception of its appreciation of and participation in nudity and sexual behavior, results in the creation of erotica" The perverse postponement and eventual cancellation of orgasm comes down to a visualization of love."

In the animal world, Beyst argues, males are more attractive than females because many males must compete against one another for the privilege of reproducing offspring with a limited number of females. In the human world, the fertility of males and females is approximately equal and women, unlike female animals, are capable of having sex any time. Moreover, men invest much more time and effort in the rearing of their children than male animals typically do in the care and nurture of their offspring. However, men do not find pregnant and lactating women all that sexy, he argues, and women's beauty is both more "transient" than male beauty and "decreases with the number of pregnancies." These factors combine to make "female beauty" rather than its male counterpart "the focus of attention" among humans and has led to the use by women of their beauty as a means of controlling men, which men have resisted "by increasing their economic and political power." In general, men have enjoyed superior status because, as they age, their economic and political prowess increases, whereas, as women age, their beauty fades. Two related consequence of this dynamic are voyeurism and exhibitionism, Beyst declares: "Under such regime, man only admires female beauty, while woman has only eyes for his economic power, not for his beauty." Another effect of this dynamic is that, because some women are more beautiful than others and only the wealthiest men can afford the most beautiful women, men of lesser wealth must be content to fantasize about such women.

This need for fantasy fuels the erotic impulse that is predicated upon the reduction of women to their bodies; the voyeurism and exhibitionism that results from the rebellion of the senses, as it were, in exchanging visual for tactile or other perceptions of the female body; the exchange of beauty by women for the benefits that are associated with the male's wealth and power; and lesser men's need to fantasize about the most beautiful, albeit unattainable, women.

Beyst next considers the respective beauty of the male sexual organs and the female bodies. He finds that the interiority of the female genitals makes them more attractive than the obvious external male organs, and the fact that male beauty, being the opposite of female beauty, tends also to enhance female beauty: "The beauty of the female body is further enhanced in that male beauty is in many respects the opposite of female beauty. The beard and the bald skull of the old man are the sheer negation of the beautiful mane and the naked chin and cheeks of the young girl," he writes, adding that "Where the female body shows its utmost treasures--the eyes, cheeks, and lips in the face; the breast, womb and the buttock on the body--the male body only shows a beard and hair, muscle and bone. Especially with white men, the haired male body strongly contrasts with the alluring beauty of a completely hairless--nude--female body." To prove the truth of this latter assertion, he invites the reader to "measure the effect of the hairless smoothness of the nude by imagining a woman with hair on her breasts, womb and buttocks." In addition, the softness of the female form, with its curves, invites touch, whereas the relative hardness and angularity of the male form does not.

In depicting male beauty, Beyst points out, artists often exaggerate the feminine aspects of the masculine form; however, since the penis remains, this attempt to feminize the masculine causes "the opposition between male and female" to coalesce "around two oppositions: the female genitals as negation of the penis, and the male body as negation of the female nude." It is not the male body as a whole that opposes the female body; rather, it is the penis per se that opposes the female body as a whole.

The more dedicated lovers are to one another, the more attracted to each other they will be, Beyst argues: "Ideally, sexual and economical coitus reinforce each other. Sexual attraction is an expression of the overall reciprocal dedication of the partners to each other." However, the emphasis on the beauty of the female body results, in erotica, in the depiction of the faceless female, of her as "a body without a face." This reduction has the corollary of reducing the male to being a disembodied eye.

In erotica, according to Beyst, body parts take on multivalent significance as one part reminds the voyeur of another, a situation that can be compared to "a text in which the words have more than one meaning. Thus, the lips often remind of the vagina, or a muscled and veined arm of the penis," and "the erotic charge of one element is often displaced to another." This tendency toward the "displacement" of one body part by another is sometimes immortalized, as it were, in language, as when "labia," which literally means "lips" refers to the folds of flesh at the sides of the vagina. The overriding purpose of displacement, Beyst contends, is to beautify the genitals and "to soothe the anxiety provoked by the idea of the lurid wound"; the movement toward displacement, he says, results from the attempt of the eye to replace "touch and genital feeling" and, in turn, "culminates in the emergence of the phallic woman and the vaginal man." As examples of such displacement, Beyst cites "arms and legs" that "are not only hard and veined, just like fingers and toes, but muscled as well, which can only endorse the evocation of the force of the erect penis" or the nose, which serves as a phallic symbol because, like the penis, "it secretes slime, its back reminds of the shaft and the nostrils of the scrotum, while a moustache is an obvious substitute for the pubic hair." The same sort of displacement occurs with regard to the female genitals and various other body parts, Beyst declares, offering such examples as "Not only the penis, also the vagina is substituted with more aesthetic parts of the body in the periphery. The most obvious substitutes are the lips. These have colour, shape and structure in common with the labia, without being slimy. Often the focus is more on the opening: With the eye, the eyelids remind of the labia, the eyelashes or the eyebrows remind of the pubic hair, the tear gland of the clitoris and the pupil of the vaginal opening: The auricle is a hollow surrounded by folds reminding of the labia. The armpits are a fold surrounded by hair, and they have the odour in common with the vagina. Also the parting of the hair on the head is often read as a vagina." Sometimes, these associations can become quite complex, as when "The spinal column is an extension of the anal cleft," on either side of which "bundles of muscles . . . function as substitutes for the labia, while the whole is covered with undamaged skin: hollow, but not cut," which "heals" the "wound" to which the vagina, in the imagination, is often compared.

A consequence of displacement and its multivalent associations is the masculinization of the female form and the feminization of the male dorm, or, as Beyst phrases this dual transformation, "the emergence of the phallic woman and the vaginal man" because "under displaced form, the genitals are no longer bound to a sexually determined body, since "a woman has fingers, toes, arms, legs and a nose, and . . . a man has a mouth, folds and hollows, and a back."

Paradoxically, the eye's attempt to prolong its visual enjoyment of the female body's beauty not only delays but misses orgasm and its release, Beyst argues: "When lovers are kissing each other, they close their eyes, but the eyes wants to continue enjoying visual beauty: the lovers want see the exalted face instead of feeling it with the lips. And when the hand begins to touch, the eye only grants it its pleasure because new signs of exaltation on the body are elicited. The greedy eye then scans the body, until it finally comes to rest at the sight of the erect penis or the aroused vagina, the ultimate signs of exaltation. Stubbornly clinging to its desire for visual pleasure, the eye would like to witness even the merger of the genitals, but when these are allowed to do as they please, the penis inevitably will disappear in the vagina. When the eye is not prepared to give up its pleasure, it will have to prevent such merger and the impending advent of orgasm" so that "Such seizure of power trough the eye comes down to a veritable 'castration': seeing forbids genital feeling."

According to Beyst, the eye's refusal to grant orgasm results in the transformation of the lovers into a hermaphrodite, or "a being that possesses both sexual organs." (In place of "hermaphrodite," we can substitute "shemale.") One result of this confusion of sex and gender is that "the phallic body" succumbs "to the temptation of penetrating itself," and the voyeuristic viewer witnesses "all the forms of masturbation."

In the hermaphrodite, or shemale, the fusion of the masculine and the feminine enables the feminized male to attain independence from women, as he no longer needs, as it were, to barter his wealth and power for her beauty but, instead, has feminine beauty within his own body: "A good example is Donatelo's David," Beyst says. "The beautiful young boy enjoys the beauty of his own body that makes him independent from the unattainable woman. The entwining of the bodies is replaced with the closed circle of the eye admiring the beauty of its own body," resulting in " the complete visualization of genitality." The shemale has a counterpart in the so-called phallic woman: "The counterpart of such 'feminine' self-sufficient retirement in itself is the aggressive triumph of the 'phallic woman': desirability and desire in one and the same body. Here, the emphasis is on the desiring penis," and in the case both of the shemale and the "phallic woman," "the eye enjoys its own body, or, to be more precise, the part of its body that belongs to the other sex." In art, the creation of the shemale or the phallic woman results in the same sort of "merger of desiring penis and desired body" that is effected in the sex-reassignment surgery that transsexuals undergo: "The visualization is completed when the identification of desiring body and desired body eventually leads to the replacement of the desiring organ itself. That is the case when the male wants to be transformed in the desired female, and the desired female in the desired male. An illustration is the self-portrait of Schiele: a gory seam runs over the scrotum, no member is to be seen, the abdomen is transformed into a womb, the upper part of the body is adorned with female breast, the arms hold their own head and the legs are cut off, not otherwise than the penis. Only the angularity of the skinny body are the last testimonies to the dissolved masculinity."

Voyeurism (the reluctance or refusal of the eye to allow the other senses to appreciate the female's nudity) is the basis of fetishism, Beyst believes" "So strong is the 'perverse' desire to witness the tactile and genital exaltation, that the erotic eye all too easily overlooks that it is merely enjoying signs: to maintain its position, the eye should above all not remember that those signs only refer to what is doomed to remain invisible forever. Therein, the eye resembles the devotees of the golden calf: they take the representation for the invisible original. They are worshipping an idol--a fetish. Through forbidding precisely what it wants to see, the erotic eye creates the very void that is doomed to remain empty forever. What is supposed to disappear in it, resurfaces from within. Out of this move is born the primeval fetish." The emphasis on attempts to make the genitals appear to be more aesthetic and to heal the wound that the vagina appears to represent result in focusing the attention on the signs of orgasm rather than upon the orgasm itself so that "the primeval fetish becomes unrecognizable" as "it goes hidden behind ever new fetishes of the second generation: fetishes of the fetish. Again, as with the golden calf, these fetishes of the second generation used to be worshipped with a devotion that is meant for the original, which goes hidden behind an aesthetic veil."