Kings, Queens and Norah Vincent

As much as I hate to admit this, I was watching Tyra Banks' talk show (I'm unemployed, I've got a lot of time on my hands). To ambush potential makeover victims, she enlisted a team of draq queens. Three extremely costumed young men were literally strutting down the street during the day with slabs of make-up and twenty-inch heels to find girls in need of layered bangs and form-fitting tops.

When Tyra announced that she was employing the Drag Force, the audience cheered. And, as I've flipped the channels in the past, I've noticed Tyra, Maury and other talk shows often have drag queens on their shows for advice from fashion to relationships (seriously, I swear, I just flip channels a lot).

Now, I'm not saying by any means that Tyra Banks is the barometer by which we should measure society's ever-changing cultural norms. But, based on certain elements in pop culture and the media, it seems as if we are slowly inching towards a day when drag queens aren't just Boy George-like celebrities to entertain us from a safe distance, but also...maybe...the fabulous, stylish boy next door?

It's no surprise that women appear more open-minded than (straight) men when it comes to expanding notions of sexuality. How else to explain the relatively recent phenomenon of women attending drag bars for bridal showers? Can you even imagine straight men attending a bar full of lesbians and drag kings for a bachelor party? "Dude, where's the men's room? Oh, sorry."

On the flip side, it's not too often that you hear about drag kings in mainstream media. Maybe it's because a woman putting on some baggy clothes and faking a five o'clock shadow will blend in easier than a 6'2" man dressed in a shiny, sequined dress, so therefore drag kings attract less attention to themselves. Maybe it's because women have been adapting male style for decades, modifying the business suit to help actualize their own recently-accquired access to male economic power (whereas we're still nowhere near men employing women's clothes in any serious manner). And Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (or Katherine Hepburn in just about anything) could dress in slacks, dress shirts and ties and be considered intelligent and a sexually attractive romantic lead (again: man in a dress? Not so much).

Enter Norah Vincent: columnist, journalist, lesbian. She took eighteen months off from her jobs at the L.A. Times, The Advocate, and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to dress up as a dude and see what happened. Since her book, Self-Made Man, just came out, I haven't read it yet (the bloggers of Bookslut, however, offer this two-sentence review). But she was profiled on 20/20 by JuJu Chang ("JuJu"? Like the candy? Best. Anchor. Name. Ever.).

First, I would feel more comfortable with this whole discussion if Vincent specified that she was studying straight male culture. As much as she says "men, men, men," what she really is referring to is "straight men." I would think that, of all people, a lesbian journalist would understand the importantance of making such a distinction.

Secondly, I wasn't all that impressed with some of her findings, such as:

Men are emotionally reserved, even around each other. Um, really? No shit. Is this news?

And:

Strip joints are about "pure sex drive - completely empty of any meaningful interaction." Were women under the impression that men had deep, profound conversations with strippers, forming a strong emotional connection so they could choose which surgically-altered Barbie was worthy of slapping his face with her pasties?

Maybe I'm taking some of this information for granted because I am a man. However, some of this is just common sense.

That being said, sometimes stating the obvious is necessary. I still get the feeling that, just as men are clueless about women, so too are women, even with (generalization alert) their supposedly heightened gifts for compassion and empathy, clueless about men. The fact that women (such as Chang and Vincent) even find this to be news worthy says something in itself.

So when Vincent explains that male sexuality is "a bodily function. It's a necessity. It's such a powerful drive and I think because we [women] don't have testosterone in our systems, we don't understand how hard it is," I at first thought...well, duh. But then I realized that maybe some women are still in the dark about male sexuality and still don't understand men's separate relationships with sex and love (the elusive quality of male sexuality is something I've discussed before).

Her strongest point is about the emotional consequences men pay for repressing emotions, as illuminated by her joining a male support group. She was shocked, yet sympathetic, when she found these men using anger to express their darkest frustrations - usually about women. Note to ladies: there's a price to being expected to always be strong and stoic. But maybe women don't care to hear this (which is exactly why they should). The Booklist review for Self-Made Man sums it up best: "[Vincent in drag] also found women to be distrustful, ever ready to criticize men for being emotionally distant yet clearly preferring men who met stereotypical images of strength and virility."

I think it's important to hear, especially from a woman: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy. They need our love, and maybe they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

By letting women in on a man's world from the point of view of both genders, maybe Vincent is on to something. Sometimes it's not the message, but the messenger, that makes a difference. In Sex, Art and American Culture, the anti-feminist feminist Camille Paglia rightly praised drag queens for "their daring, flamboyant insight into sex roles." Paglia might also want to expand that notion to include drag kings since she, a notoriously tough critic, also compliments Vincent's work.

Vincent has a pretty exhaustive media assault to promote her book in the next coming weeks, but if she really wants to make a difference, maybe she should go on Tyra's show. Miss Banks can teach Vincent how to be fierce and Vincent can teach Tyra how to cover her skyscraper forehead with a backwards baseball cap.

And So the Roundtable Begins

For the first meeting of the minds, RW, who originated the idea of a blogger's roundtable, kicks things off with a discussion of Anthony Hopkins' speech at the Golden Globes Awards. Having just won the Cecil B. DeMille Award (the Globes version of a lifetime achievement award), RW found the speech to be lacking and the recipient himself to be substandard.

I don't think I've actually heard anyone say anything bad about Anthony Hopkins...like...ever. And RW actually refers to him as "mediocre." Damn! I think Anthony Hopkins just got served. So it's interesting to see RW's take on what Sir Tony's speech should have been...

Coming Soon - The Roundtable

I was recently contacted by RW, a fellow blogger who came up with the idea of recreating the Algonquin Roundtable with Vanity Fair's Dorothy Parker, where writers used to get together to drink and share ideas and puke and pass out, only classy-like. I immediately liked the idea, even if we're only sharing a virtual round of tequila shots (I'll have literal ones by myself, thank you very much).

Each week, one blogger will post something, anything, they like. The rest of us will direct our readers' attention to their profundity while adding our two cents. RW will kick things off with the inaugaural Roundtable this week. Joining us will be Lauren (an old personal friend who I've mentioned before), Stephen, Trish* and Sereena X.

If you're a fellow blogger who'd like to join, please contact one of us. If you're not a blogger but would still like to participate...well, I guess you could bring a bottle of vodka over to my place while I type up my entry. Deal?

*Blogger update: The lovely Trish is pulling up a chair to the roundtable as well (an addition since the original five were chosen). Welcome, Trish!

The Horror...The Horror...

As I previously mentioned, this past Friday the 13th a group of us decided to test our emotional limits by subjecting our eyes, ears and sanity to the horror that is Showgirls. Why, oh why, would we do this to ourselves, you might ask? Because we live our lives on the edge. Because we're extreme masochists. But, most importantly, because it's there.

I had already seen the edited version on VH1 (competing with sister station MTV for least relevant music channel on TV), where not only do they cut out all the best parts, they actually superimpose bras on all the girls. The squiggly, pastel lingerie look like a drunk intern smeared a fat marker all over the screen.

Of course, I didn't realize how much they were trying to cover up. When I suggested we all take a shot every time we see female nudity, my brother informed me we'd be trashed within thirty seconds. And he was right. I think their costume budget cost less than the cup of coffee I'm drinking right now. It became more shocking to see them actually wearing shirts, and even when they did they were barely covering anything.

But, more importantly, VH1 cut out all the best scenes and lines. Imagine my delight when viewing the extended sex scene in the pool, when Elizabeth Berkeley mounts Kyle MacLachlan and then proceeds to writhe like a flopping flounder (sexy!). Or how my ears tickled with such melodic dialogue as: "Man, everybody got AIDS and shit." Or picture the visual feast that is Gina Gershon in a leather S&M corset (!) reenacting a gang-rape (!!) through the art of a Vegas dance routine (!!!).

Luckily, the whole film is anchored by television-actress-turned-gymnastic-prostitute Elizabeth Berkeley, who resembles a seven-foot-tall transsexual amazon warrior. Not only does she have absolutely no chemistry with actor-turned-k.d. lang impersonator MacLachlan, she grunts after every gesture, every line of dialogue, and every dance step, showing us just how hard she's working to be the best worst actress ever. And when she turns down a suitor's advances by stuffing his hand down her pants to prove she's on her period, I'm sure women everywhere cheered their new feminist icon's methods of rejection and independence (her mother must have been so very, very proud).

Ironically, I capped off this weekend by watching Hostel, a horror movie whose horror is actually intentional. Even with sliced Achilles tendons, flopping eyeballs, severed fingers, beheadings and enough boobs to rival the first ten minutes of Showgirls, it's still the latter movie that had me considering gauging out my own eyes with a wooden spoon.

But I survived. I made it. And I'm a better, stronger person because of it.

(For more information, and I know you want more, check out my previous encounter with Miss Berkeley or IMDB's Showgirls trivia page.)

Say It Ain't So

Just in case Friday the 13th isn't scary enough, tonight a bunch of us are getting together to scare the bejeezus out of ourselves by watching...wait for it...Showgirls! The classicly awful, campy stripper movie starring Elizabeth Berkeley will now be the subject of many nightmares to come. Hooray!

I'll give you a full report later (if I'm not babbling in a straightjacket after watching Jesse Spano lick a stripper pole).

In the meantime, on a sadder note, one of my favorite bloggers is quitting. Of course, he didn't consult me before reaching this decision so I'm obviously pissed. People, you must consult me before taking away the blog love! Anyway, B over at That's Mr. Byron to Yous has months of fun stories, retail rants, Chicago adventures, interesting insights, and apartment floods to dig through. Also, if you explore, you can find his store of cool merchandise he designed himself.

So don't walk under any ladders, avoid black cats, take a shot every time Miss Berkeley says "Ver-sais" instead of "Ver-sah-chee" and read B here.

A Whore Among Flowers

I already quickly referenced it earlier, but I just finished The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (could his name be any more perfect?). A best-seller from 2001, the book explores how plants have manipulated humans to gain evolutionary advantage as much as humans have manipulated plants. As the subtitle says, it's "a plant's-eye view of the world." He explains how the apple exploits our desire for sweetnes, the tulip for beauty, marijuana for intoxication, and the potato for control. The book is chock-full (what does that expression even mean?) of interesting facts, you just have to get to them through his twisting, turning, history-lesson narrative that jumps and dances around the main stories.

The chapter on the apple is practically a biography of the highly eccentric John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed. A cliff's notes version:
- a nature/animal lover, he would buy lame horses to save them and rescue wolves from traps and let bear cubs sleep in hollowed-out logs he planned to use as a bed (he'd sleep in the snow instead)
- a shoe hater, he'd go barefoot year round, punish his feet if he stepped on a worm, and entertain local boys by pressing needles or hot coals into his gnarly, coarse soles
- ambiguously sexual, he allegedly arranged to help a farmer raise his ten-year-old daughter so that he could marry her later (ewwww)

Johnny Appleseed? More like Johnny Weirdoseed. Or something.

Not only does the chapter on pot explain how plants have contributed to the origins of religion, philosophy and art, it comes up with two of the best descriptions of the experience of getting high that I've read (not that I know what it's like to get high...):
- Quoting David Lenson's On Drugs, "Every object stands more clearly for all of its own class. A cup 'looks like' the Platonic Idea of a cup, a landscape looks like a landscape painting, a hamburger stands for all the trillions of hamburgers ever served." Then Pollan sums up: "A psychoactive plant can open a door onto a world of archetypal forms."
- Since our brains actually have cannabanoid receptors already built in that act very similarly to the THC found in pot (though, obviously, on a much milder level), Pollan theorizes that pot increases those receptor's ability to drain our pool of sensory information so that we can live much more in the moment. "It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment."

So let's see: Your environment becoming more profound than it actually is. Check. Short-term memory temporarily annihilated. Check. Time slowing down. Check (Ah-hah, that's why "Like A Prayer" went on for like four hours on our way to Baker's Square that night). Michael Pollan, you're genius!

The chapter on potatoes covers bioengineering. Some corporation came up with the idea of creating potatoes that have a pesticide (Bt) in its DNA so that it kills its predators (like beetles) automatically while still remaining (supposedly) safe for humans. The only problem? It's all assumptions. The potato is safe, the Bt they're injecting into the potato is safe, but that's all they know. Since this Bt has never actually been part of the human diet before, they don't really know how humans will react. Um, great. Does that mean I have to give up McDonald's french fries? (No. McDonald's stopped using genetically manipulated potatoes. See? They have some health standards.)

The best part is how they inject the potatoes. They have two methods. One of the ways is to soak a potato leaf in a solution that has the new DNA in it. Pretty straightfoward, right? In the second method, they get medieval on the poato plant's ass. They use a gun - yes, an actual gun - to fire DNA-soaked bullets at the potato plant. When the bullet pierces the leaf or steam, maybe some of the new DNA will break into some of the cells' nuclei and into the old DNA, maybe not. Even if it does, the new DNA would still have to land in the exact right place, and they don't even know where that is. Comforting, right?

But my favorite chapter is on the tulip. First, it explains how flowers attract bugs to spread their pollen. One plant, the Ophryus orchid (pictured on the left), has evolved to actually look like a female bee or fly, depending on the species. Actually, it looks like a female bee or fly from behind so as to attract male bees or flies. The male then tries having sex with it, gets covered in pollen in the process, then flies off in sexual frustration to mount countless other blossoms. What would I call this flower? "The Cocktease Orchid." What do botanists actually call this flower? "The Prostitute Orchid." Close enough. I wonder if the other flowers nearby are like, "Geez, Ophryus is such a slut." When they go to the bathroom, they probably write on the walls, "For a good time, call Ophryus." Orchids can be so catty.

Not only did botanists come up with that nickname, but one botanist even calls bees "flying penises." Who knew botanists were so kinky?

But, as for tulips themselves, there was actually an era of Turkish history known as the Tulip Era. Sultan Ahmed III actually had tulip parties. Check this out:

"The imperial gardens were filled with [thousands of] prize tulips. The scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a canon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan's mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne [27 years]."

I think it's obvious: the Sultan was gay.

Doesn't this sound like a party P. Diddy would throw if he liked tulips? The tortoises, the mistresses, the guests having to match the theme? I'm sure Diddy could round up some eunuchs if he wanted. Hell, he could pay a couple guys enough money to volunteer to be eunuchs.

Anyway, the information Pollan digs up is fascinating, his grasp of history, myth, philosophy and poetry is impressive, and his own stories are hilarious (like trying to hide the pot in his garden from the cops). Plants can drive people to do some pretty crazy stuff. Thankfully, Pollan lets us in on their weird little worlds.

Honored Just To Be Nominated My Ass

There's only two more days to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2006 Bloggie Awards.

I'm not pointing this out just so you'll go and vote for me, but it was just my birthday (see yesterday's post) so...if you're feeling generous...

No, seriously, this kind of recognition can really help a blogger. Established in 2001, the Bloggies have highlighted the work of many, big and small, overhyped and overlooked alike. Nominees will find themselves in the company of past winners like Wonkette, Gawker, and Dooce. So take a few minutes of your time and submit those that have made you skip your office meetings for the past year.

Start by clicking here.

Happy Birthday To Me

Yes, dear readers, today is my birthday. Hooray! To celebrate, I have two gifts.

First, I was recently contacted by Northeast Public Radio to discuss what it's like behind the scenes at a book signing with "She Who Shall Not Be Named." I listened to some of their programs and found them to be fun, smart, and even slightly edgy. I was interviewed by Mary Darcy for their Weekly Rundown program. It was a lot of fun, so even though I hate hate hate the sound of my own voice, you can listen to the mp3 here (it's about 2/3 of the way through the broadcast).

Second, I went to Hawaii in October for a friend's wedding. I'm trying to make my Shutterfly account available publicly, but until then I'm posting a few of my favorite pics here.

I'm off to my festivities, so enjoy!

That Pretty Much Sums It Up

Anyone living in Chicago should seriously consider buying this shirt from NewAthens.org. It pretty much sums up how the whole city feels about the Macy's vs. Marshall Field's situation.

Unfortunately, I'm thinking that, even with the ill will towards Macy's, as soon as it takes over MF's in fall 2006, people will still shop there. In an ideal world, everyone would boycott (although, as I'm finding out, people have found other reasons to boycott Macy's anyway), even if they were having some insane sales where everything was like $1. Then, Macy's would be all, "We made a mistake! We underestimated you Chicagoans! We thought you were all stupid midwesterners who would flock to our store like your cows flocks to a trough!"

Even though cows don't eat out of troughs, but whatever.

The irony is, I don't even like shopping at department stores anyway (too overwhelming and claustrophobic), but I do have a sense of history and tradition, and I am a fan of Chicago, so I know this is wrong. Maybe I'll go buy a shirt right now.

Resolutions Courtesy of the National Spelling Bee

For this, the seventh year of the new millenium, I have made certain resolutions that I feel will guide me toward a successful and happy year.

1) I will not be a pococurante, but I will also not be a kamikaze, nor will I be guilty of logorrhea. I would like to study at a lyceum, or any milieu that would help me elucubrate.

2) I hope I don't get staphylococci (which might give me xanthosis), but if I do I could maybe try using an antipyretic. Hell, I don't even want odontalgia, you know what I mean?

3) And most of all, I definitely will not be a victim of vivisepulture (this might sound antediluvian, but I'm more of a sarcophagus guy myself, and no succedaneum will suffice). But if by some chance I am, any elegiacal demarche will be truly appreciated.

I don't think I've ever watched ESPN in my life, but Eric and I turned it on today and a rerun of the 77th Annual National Spelling Bee had me hypnotized (as any viewer of the documentary Spellbound will understand), which led me to this.

Who says TV can't educate?