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RainydayNE -> RE: feminization (10/26/2008 9:47:25 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: stella41b
I'm going to try and come back in here without hashing this up... I'll try...
I think people are making a distinction between what's already there and what they would like to be there.
I'm a transgendered female, the rarer 'mosaic' type. I have two different DNA patterns, both defective, which are intertwined with each other. Consider that to become either one of the two binary genders - male or female - I would need hormone therapy. I am however female and as I age I age in exactly the same way as a female. This is as far as it goes, and I'/m not bothered with how many x's or y's I have in my chromosiomes, I am more concerned with living and being me.
My being transgendered doesn't make me submissive, it just makes me transgendered. I am female, but have been raised and socialized as a male. It took me years to develop some sort of image with which I am comfortable and with which I feel myself. I am not the same as a natural born woman and never will be, not even after my transition period has been completed and I'm through everything. I never had the socialization, the upbringing, the childhood or even the 'rights of passage' that women have to go through.
I'm sitting here typing this a little miffed because two of my nails have broken. Yes, I've been transitioning for ten years and I still don't have good nails. It took me eight years to work out what to do with my eyebrows. I have had to learn these things mainly on my own over a long period of time, and mainly through trial and error. i worked out make up quickly because I took a professional make up course.
I went through a stage of wanting to be feminized, but when I found a domme who was prepared to feminize me I quickly lost interest and decided that it would be best if I did my own feminization. I didn't want this domme to make me more feminine, I am naturally very feminine and very much so in a feline sort of way, but I was looking for better ways to express my own femininity. It just didn't work out, she couldn't do it, and this is where I learned that feminization is something which is very difficult to attempt let alone pull off.
The point I'm trying to make here is that for feminization to have any chance of success there has to be some degree of femininity there in the first place. Otherwise it becomes about as pointless as trying to turn someone with Nordic beauty into a Pakistani.
I'm not trying to do down any male submissives for being interested in feminization, I'm not, and I guess to some degree I can see where you're coming from. But you're dealing with something here, which just like masculinity doesn't have a stereotype - it's individual and it's also individual in everyone.
On another BDSM website I started some threads last year under the title 'What is male? What is female? Who are you?' in an attempt to see if people could come up with a generally agreed consensus of what defines femininity and what defines masculinity. This provoked lots of postings but no general consensus was reached and you could have gone on to try and define humanity.
I mean when you look at it, it's the same arguments for masculinity, which is just as fragile if not more so than femininity. You have the rights of passage growing up as a male, the first pint of beer, the first porn magazine, the first girlfriend, and so on. It's dealing with zits on your face, working out whether three fingers is better than five, seeing how far you can piss up against a wall and how far you can shoot your load. Hands up now, how many of you have managed to give yourself a pearl necklace?
I spent some years living in Eastern Europe, in Poland, and the first time I travelled to Poland was in 1992 and I travelled by road, hitchhiking across Europe. One of the strangest experiences I ever had was crossing from West Germany to East Germany. There was no border, but as you were driving along you picked up an awful sense of something being different, and it took me some time to work out what it was. Then I put my finger on it - everything looked the same, but I picked up on a sense of suddenly being taken back in time to say the 1950's.
Travelling through Poland I felt the same thing.. you got the narrow roads, the forests, the buildings, villages, and you could be forgiven for thinking you were driving through small town America in the 1950's. This is how everything looked. Now the reason why I mentioned this was that the former communist system across Eastern Europe was isolationist, and influences from the West were frowned upon. Even though it has changed over recent years Polish society of the early 1990's was pretty much what we had in the West during the 1950's. Men were the breadwinners and the women stayed at home or worked in office jobs or factories. However conversely it was the woman who was in charge at home, she did all the domestic work, raised the children, she made sure that there was always vodka in the fridge and she took the man's wages and gave him enough back to get to work, and for cigarettes and beer.
Gender roles were always very clearly defined but this changed with the restructuring of Polish society throughout the late 1990's and into the first few years of this century. Government's under Lech Walesa did all they could to attract investment from the West and from about 1994 or so Poland was swamped with consumer goods from the West. The Poles went mad and would do what they could to buy anything and everything Western. All of a sudden the Trabants, Wartburgs, and Polski Fiats were tootling about in were changed for Renaults, Fords, Volkswagens, and kitchens were kitted out in Moulinex, Whirlpool and Ariston appliances. Everyone started smoking Marlboro cigarettes, drinking Coke or Pepsi, queuing to get into MacDonalds, and even their own vodka - and trust me Poland produces a lot of the stuff - was rejected in favour of Smirnoff, Absolut, and Stolichnaya.
The inevitable started happening in the mid-1990's - unemployment. This is what started a new wave of migrant workers from Poland travelling to the West 'do roboty' (for work) and left others to collect scrap metal, empty beer cans, beer bottles, and anything which could be recycled which they could sell to raise a bit of money to keep their families. Others just spent the day drinking with their friends outside the local shop.
The mid-1990's was when BDSM started to become more known with the expansion of the Internet into people's homes. However due to the rigidity of gender roles in Polish society feminization and even sissy maids is a recent trend and still remains very much a taboo subject in Polish society.
That whole 'he to she' feminization culture you see in the Internet is nothing really more than a myth, which I think most male submissives have managed to work out, but what I feel they fail to see is the misogyny in their thinking. The paradox for me from what I can see is that in cheapening and fetishizing stereotypes of femininity it also actually cheapens and weakens masculinity. It is nothing more than pure escapism, a fantasy.
The myth of course is that anyone can be magically transformed into someone of the opposite gender with a few bits of clothing and cosmetics. It's amazing just how many people fall for this myth.
It's like this way of thinking that women are somehow inferior or secondary to men. How so? Just because of some mythical story of Eve taking an apple out of a tree which somehow made Adam equal to God? Really? So how do you compromise this way of thinking with the reality that the one person who (generally) exerts the strongest influence on you and your life is a woman - i.e. your mother?
I just find it somewhat amusing that most of the prejudice and discrimination I face comes from men, and somehow also coincidentally most of it comes from some of the men who seek out feminization or who dress up in women's clothing in secret, but are those ones who are stood outside the pub with their boozy mates ridiculing me and shouting out such things as 'That's a bloke!' or 'faggot!' - it comes from the same source, insecurity over one's own gender and self-identity.
This is why I face such problems, in that I have dared to give up my masculinity and betray men to 'bat for the other side' and this is how some people see those like me. I only wish that was the case and that I had such a choice but I am who I am and the simple truth is that despite how it looked when I was born I was never male. That is the illusion. Therefore this leads to another paradox, in that every such attack on me doesn't cheapen or ridicule me but actually strengthens me and weakens and cheapens the person making the attack.
It still all boils down to the same thing in my opinion. Femininity (like masculinity) cannot be imposed, it can only be elicited and I feel that if you go back over the whole of this thread you may find that this is somewhat close to reaching any sort of consensus on the subject.
But this is just my feeling, and I may be wrong.
that is one of the most interesting, thoughful posts i've ever read. :) so neat :) the world is full of so many completely unique life stories
good luck with your journey, wherever it takes you :)
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