Femininity (23 page)

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In the twentieth century, pale skin remains a proud symbol of lofty aims and spiritual
masculinity in Orthodox Jewish communities, which still value the pallid, pasty-faced
Talmudic scholar above other men.

A
THENE, GODDESS OF WISDOM
and goddess of war, protector of cities and patron-inventor of the technological
arts, also invented a remarkable flute. Pleased with her accomplishment and its beautiful
music, she played one day at an Olympian banquet, expecting a generous round of applause.
Instead, she noticed Hera and Aphrodite laughing behind their hands. Repairing in
confusion to a stream in the woods, Athene picked up the flute and watched her reflection
in the water. Suddenly she understood. In the strain of transforming her breath into
music, her cheeks puffed out comically; her features were distorted. Athene threw
away her fine invention with a curse. (According to scholars of classical Greek, this
story comes late in the cycle of myths.)

My mother gave me curtsy lessons before I was five. At the drop of the cue, “And this
is our daughter, Susan,” I’d gather the ends of my short, pleated skirt—elbows
in,
wrists
down,
fingers
up
—and fall to the ground on one tender-skinned knee. Grownups were enchanted. So was
I, for Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin and all the storybook princesses stood at my
side. I had mastered my first serious training in feminine movement, and found it
was something at which I excelled.

I always excelled in feminine movement. I’m lissome, I’m fluid, even in trousers.
Want to see me raise my eyebrow? I used to practice for hours in front of a mirror.
Notice how I roll my eyes when I say something clever and crinkle my nose when I laugh?
Teen queen flirtation, consciously applied. The slight tilt to my chin? Copied from
Paula E——, the most popular girl in
grade school. The arch of my neck, the curved alignment of my raised arm and hand?
Poses I learned from ballet. My fluttery wave goodbye? An adaptation of Queen Elizabeth
in a motorcade. I never jab a finger—Mother always said “Don’t point,” and I still
relax on the sofa in a kittenish curl.

Inspired by classical sculpture, Chinese ivories and Florentine art, I’m an adept
practitioner of the oblique gesture, the softened motion, the twisting torso, the
widening eyes. I rarely stand straight, preferring to lean sideways from the waist
with one knee slightly flexed, one hip extended. I lower my shoulder when I lift my
arm, adjusting the balance of elbow, wrist and fingers, breaking the line at each
critical joint. Without conscious effort I smoke a cigarette, eat a sandwich, regard
my hand, climb into a taxi with full assurance of the feminine effect. I’ve been doing
it for a lifetime; I never forget.

Or do I? What about when I hurry through a crowded street, when I lose myself in a
heated discussion, when I make a wisecrack that is aggressively cutting? Hunched shoulders,
clenched jaw, narrowing eye and head thrust forward like a lowering bull. Torso rigid,
neck strained, thumb jerking strongly. Nothing is feminine about these postures—where
did they come from? I shrink from the knowledge that my reliably trained body can
slip so easily over the line, and I remind myself to watch it. Even the best of actresses
can let her performance slide, and I perform now without props and from memory.

What a stroke of good fortune that my basic equipment is right for the part. What
anatomical dumb luck, what a happy accident of genetics, that my physical characteristics
fall within the idealized norm. Suppose my shoulders were broader or my fingers were
stubby? Suppose my joints weren’t supple and I didn’t possess a limber, flexible spine?
What if I weren’t small-framed and light-boned? What if my reflexes were sluggish,
my coordination a bit slow? Suppose I was big-framed, hefty and stiff through the
middle? The answer must be acknowledged. I doubt that I would have gotten away with
being me. My disinterest in children, my dislike of makeup and jewelry, my inability
to cook a good meal or embroider a pillow—what a terrible record of unfeminine traits
to pile on top of strong ambition. If I
hadn’t felt secure in the way that I move, something else would have had to give.

For in truth I could not have pushed forward in life without some signal part of the
feminine standard to claim as my own. I’m too competitive and eager to please. Biological
femaleness never left me in doubt as to which sex I belonged to, and I’ve always been
pleased with the luck of the draw, but gender alone does not suffice to convince the
judgmental. One must demonstrate that one glories in being a woman or suffer suspicion.
In the illusory, demanding art of the feminine, I’ve let my physical gestures prove
my credentials.

And now for the hard part. The four-year-old who practiced her curtsy, wore an opal
ring on her finger and walked with her small fists tucked firmly in a little fur muff
wanted to be the best little girl in the world. Being best, she discovered, was relative
and complex. The spirited twelve-year-old was elected captain of the girls’ punchball
team, but her pleasure at socking the ball out of the schoolyard was tempered by her
worry that she might develop muscles. The teenage romantic, stuck on boys, gave up
sports and bought a baton to practice twirling. She hoped to become a drum majorette,
performing at half-time. She devoured the etiquette columns in
Seventeen
magazine. She waited for her dates to open the door for her and walk on the curbside
when they went to the movies. Her dates, alas, were not up on the etiquette columns.
There were bumps and confusions, not the stately minuet of manners of which she had
dreamed. She found that stepping to one side while her date bought the movie tickets
was humiliating. She toyed with her hair and studied the movie posters, but that didn’t
help.

Complications soon multiplied in fast order. She who could execute an arabesque with
grace was incapable of taking her partner’s lead in a foxtrot or lindy. Mother’s curtsy
lessons and the ring and the muff had not thoroughly prepared her for following a
boy. She had learned only half the required course and she resented the other half,
although she didn’t know why. She liked being touched but she didn’t like being handled.
Thus began her difficult time of testy resistance, when the boys at the dance would
say, “Relax,” which was guaranteed to make her
nervous. She gloried in her feminine movements in solo performance, but in a one-two-three
dip she had two left feet and felt diminished.

“And mind you,” the shantywoman told Huckleberry Finn, on the lam and dressed in a
calico frock, “when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees
apart; she don’t clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of
lead.” The shantywoman had seen through Huck’s disguise and was trying to give him
some helpful pointers. He didn’t know the first thing about threading a needle; he
tossed a lump of lead sidearm like a boy when he should have thrown it overhead on
tiptoe; and he had beaned the rat squarely instead of missing his target by six or
seven feet. But Huck’s worst mistake had come when she dropped the lead in his lap.
To convincingly imitate a girl, Huck should have spread out his skirt to receive it.

This is a famous scene in Mark Twain’s great novel, remembered by those who read it
when they were young as a vivid explication of the difference between girls and boys.
The scene has nagged at my mind for thirty-five years. Mark Twain got it wrong. Girls
surely learn to thread a proper needle at home or at school (I had), as boys are taught
to throw sidearm—I’ve heard more than one anxious father yell at his son not to “throw
like a girl”—but no girl, no matter what she was wearing, could deny such a basic
reflex action as clamping her legs together when a lump of lead was dropped in her
lap. Throw the knees apart? Not likely, not for any human being. Physiology can be
compromised only so far.

When the imaginative choreographer Tommy Tune taught a cast of actresses how to walk
and sit like men, he told them to imagine they had something dangling between their
legs. This adjustment, along with a suit and some direct, forceful gestures, was all
the actresses needed. No mysterious bundle of tricks is required to impersonate a
man, for masculine movement flows naturally from physiology with little modification.
Female impersonation, however, relies on a suitcase full of special effects: a wig,
a dress, a brassiere and a set of falsies, jewelry for the arms, neck and ears, a
makeup kit with lipstick, rouge, eye shadow and false lashes, a girdle, nylons and
a pair of high heels.
Not only must the impersonator deck himself out in full regalia to create his illusion,
he must familiarize himself with the workings of each and every item, for women are
all female impersonators to some degree.

See him on stage. He fluffs up his wig with a hand that is ringed and manicured with
false nails. Body pitched forward on wobbly heels, his rear end juts upward as, he
minces to and fro. Deciding to sit, he perches one hip on a stool in a dainty maneuver.
Smoothing the folds of his gown, he crosses his shaved, stockinged legs and twirls
one ankle. Resting elbow in palm, he shakes a wrist to jangle his bracelets. Absently
he fondles the pearls at his neck, then touches an eyelash with one polished nail
to free a bit of mascara stuck to his lids. Feather boas, fur wraps and diaphanous
shawls work nicely for him. The elbow rotation required to drape them protectively
across the chest induces a winsome motion. A professional calls this “working with
pieces,” and the art demands that he practice with each separate piece.

I am entranced when I watch a female impersonator at work, particularly one who wears
street clothes and is attempting to pass. Sometimes the effect is uncanny. The head
turns with piquance, the fingers are never splayed, the wrist is never held rigid.
The penis, I know, has been strapped back with care (or surgically removed), the breasts
are augmented by hormones and silicone or padding, and all telltale signs of male
hair have been thoroughly denuded. It wouldn’t do for a drag queen to feel for his
five o’clock shadow.

But no matter how good the act, and sometimes it’s very, very good, it is easy to
notice a foot that is improbably large, a calf muscle that is oddly sinewy and hard,
a set of shoulders that are impossibly broad, buttocks that are too high and flat,
and biceps that are too thickly developed. Whenever a female impersonator does something
awkward, incontrovertible biology usually gives him away. Men who imitate women are
generally too big and muscular for the part, and they began to practice too late in
life. Their gestures have an exaggerated, overly energetic, overly calculated look.
But then, many observers are willing to accept a few tokens, a flash of some familiar
signals. Author
James Morris, who took the hormonal, surgical voyage to a more peaceful state of mind
called Jan, has written, “I soon discovered that only the smallest display of overt
femininity, a touch of makeup, a couple of bracelets, was enough to tip me over the
social line and establish me as female … The more I was treated as a woman, the more
woman I became … If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening
bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming.”

Women do move in ways that are different from men. The anatomical difference lends
to routine activities such as walking a marked ambience that we identify as gender-specific,
for size and shape have a profound effect on objects in motion. A hundred-pound woman
who is five feet two, with large breasts, short legs, a wide pelvis and a low center
of gravity will hurry across the street with a natural gait that is quite unlike the
stride of a two-hundred-pound man who is six feet tall with long legs, large biceps,
wide shoulders and a high center of gravity. But this, of course, is an exaggerated
example; physical difference between the sexes is usually less extreme.

When it comes to bones, a female skeleton is lighter and thinner than a male skeleton
of the same age and height. Fleshing out the bony frame, an average woman is 25 percent
fat and 23 percent muscle; an average man is 15 percent fat and 40 percent muscle.
This is a hormonal difference. Centimeter for square centimeter of muscle, a woman
might be as strong as a man, but this seems to be a moot point. Taller and heavier—in
absolute weight, in muscle weight and in bone weight—and carrying less fat, which
is dead weight in terms of strength and motion, adult men usually have one-third more
physical power than adult women. Most of this extra power resides in the upper body.
With a rigorous training program, a female athlete’s leg strength can equal the strength
of a male athlete’s leg, with adjustments for size and weight, but her arms, chest
and back muscles will remain comparatively weak.

Legs perform the same function in men and women, but a woman has functional breasts
with the capacity to nurse, and musculature in her upper body takes second place to
the capacity for lactation. There may be cultures still extant in which a
woman serves as beast of burden while her man sits under a tree and takes his repose,
but in terms of biological efficiency, it is the male of the species who is usually
best suited for lifting and carrying the heavy load.

With one big exception. To successfully hold a growing fetus in place and to force
it down and out at birth, the uterus possesses a powerful set of muscles. This grand,
intricate muscle mass that expands in pregnancy and contracts with giant heaves during
labor is of no use in athletic competitions or in measuring the comparative strength
of women and men. But labor is what the uterus does, the bone-wearying work of pushing
and bearing down until exhaustion, even though it may be called upon infrequently
or not at all.

A related aspect of femaleness is a large, bony pelvis that must accommodate safe
passage of a baby from uterus to birth. A female pelvis is shaped like a bucket. With
similar structural functions (supporting the upper body, housing the abdomen and securing
the hipbones) but without room for a birthing channel, the narrower pelvis of the
male resembles a funnel. In consequence, a female’s hipbones are set at a relatively
greater distance and the angle of the sockets allows for a wider range of motion.
A woman can execute a split with greater physical ease, but when walking or running
she must shift a bit farther to keep her center of gravity over the weight-bearing
foot. (This contributes to the slight roll and sway that sometimes distinguishes the
female walk.)