Victoria's Real Secret

I am a deviant.

Or rather, I’ve been acting like one. Or feeling like one.

Maybe all three.

I’ve gotten myself a pair of men’s boxer brief underwear from Mervyns. To be in Mervyns, with its summer line full of polyester floral dresses in appalling pinks, oranges, and lime greens – the color made even more hideous by the fluorescent lights and the fact that it’s 2002 and not 1978 – to be there and go to the men’s underwear department and examine all the boxer briefs, makes me feel deviant and nervous. Like if I got caught they’d throw me out of the store. Or worse.

A Struggle Against High Femme
No doubt it is hard for anyone who grows up feeling like he or she doesn’t fit – quite literally – into the clothes society subscribes for us. We want our boys to be boys and our girls to be girls. Perhaps when we are young, it is worse for boys than girls, as there is a certain, head-shaking tolerance for tomboys.

Except maybe in my family. I come from a long line of high femmes, women steeped in the mystery of the makeup counter and the dressing table, garters and gloves. Imagine, then, my mother’s and grandmother’s chagrin to have a four-year-old girl who wanted to wear nothing but jeans and her white undershirt, off of which she’d ripped the satin bow. And imagine the battles ten year later when the same girl discovered white t-shirts and Levi Button Fly Jeans. At four, I was allowed to dress myself, provided I wore a dress three times a week. At 14, the control waning, I could wear what I wanted, with the caveat of no Levi’s at school or social functions.

A rush just short of sexual ran through my body the first time I pulled on a pair of button-fly jeans. That rough denim weave – shrunk down to size – stretching, loosening just enough to allow the jeans to take on the shape of my body while still maintaining its legendary strength. I sighed – whether in climax or relief, I’m still not sure. These jeans felt like a homecoming. For the first time, I felt powerful and comfortable in my clothes rather than ridiculous and awkward.

I can only imagine what my mother saw. What these jeans confirmed for me, I am sure they also confirmed for her. So she laid down the law: no Levis at school. I realize that my mother’s discomfort saved me significant trauma, although if you saw me in a dress, you might beg to differ.

Take the outfit I wore to 9th grade graduation: a sleeveless aqua colored dress that draped nicely and made me look girlier than I felt. On my feet, Candies. You know Candies – the open-backed three inch heels that were all the rage until 1983, when the first music videos came out and singers vamped while wearing Candies and we could see how awful they really were.

While most of my classmates viewed Candies as a rite of passage to senior high school, for me they were just another pair of shoes my sister would inherit. Even as I was afflicted with the drag king genome, she was cursed with the Jordache genome which caused her to crave tight jeans, high heels sans nylons, and lots and lots of eyeliner.

But me. There I was in a dress, nylons, and Candies, trying to walk "like a lady" and not fall out of my shoes. I felt like a god-damned drag queen, I tell you what.

But the pain of feeling like a drag queen is probably less than the pain of looking like a drag king – especially in suburban America with all the requisite gawking that comes with gender-bending dressing. Because for all my mother’s fears of a daughter in Levi’s and boots, it could be written off as teenage slouchiness and rebellion. A senior portrait taken in a tuxedo was another matter entirely.

Girls In White Tails With Long Satin Sashes
Because that’s what I did. Pulled on a shirt, bow tie, and jacket and had the senior portrait photographer snap several shots of me in a tux. Of course, the photo of me in a black velvet drape is the one that went to the yearbook and the one that hangs on my parents’ wall. I don’t think it looks bad – except when you compare it to my sisters’ photos, girls resplendent in pearl earrings and necklaces, eyes highlighted by mascara and shadow. Still, it’s a sweet picture and I think originally it must have made my mother long for a traditional daughter.

It wasn’t until I was 23 that I saw an honest-to-god drag king or even heard the word used. And when this woman, in a beautiful suit complete with morning coat and double-knotted silk tie appeared, I was afraid, fascinated, and aroused all at once. There is something phenomenally breath-taking about a woman who incarnates her butchness. Let me be clear about several things here.

One, there is definitely a separation between being butch and being masculine. It has everything to do with not being male and yet, still holding in consciousness that which we call masculine. As one woman put it, "being a male means carrying your identity and ideas about masculinity in your dick. Being a butch embraces honor, pride respect, and power – and manifests as true masculinity."

Two, wearing a suit does not automatically make a woman butch. Take Miranda on Sex In The City. She frequently wears blue suits and red power ties and is disconnected completely from her own masculine qualities. The clothes a butch wears are just an outward sign of the power a woman not only feels but incarnates. But it’s not just the clothing, there is also a confidence of movement and a self-assurance that women do not usually emit. It takes a good deal of confidence in one’s self to flock convention like that – to not only embrace the clothes, but the attitude, as well. My friend Anita says, "when I'm feeling butch I walk differently, I interact a little differently, and I like it. I feel a kicked up confidence about who I am in this world and my place in it."

Three, being attracted to a butch woman has nothing to do with latent heterosexuality and not having yet met the "right man." My friend Kris says, "I like the butches who know they're a woman and have that twinkle in their eye to say so.  To me it's very femininely attractive when a woman acts with masculine mannerisms, it’s erotic." Similarly, dressing butch does not indicate that one wishes one was male. To wit, re-read point one.

My straight, Jungian therapist says that we all embody butch and femme and meet that energy in ourselves and others, transcending sexuality. My own non-scientific research seems to confirm this as well. By and large, the attraction to and fascination with butches has nothing to do with clothes or sexuality and everything to do with personal power. The power that is considered socially acceptable for a woman to embrace is usually wily, seductive, and subtle. Says one of my straight friends, "I’m occasionally attracted to butch women because of an aura of confidence and competence, a can-do attitude with no chip-on-the-shoulder overtones, a sense of seeming to be less affected by societal "shoulds" than many folks, gay or straight."

The power that a butch exudes is much more overt and it is probably this, more than the clothes, that makes people so nervous. So why was I worried then that the Mervyn’s clothes police would throw me out of the store for looking at the men’s underwear? Because for all of butchness being about power and not the clothes, there is a certain butch look – it is that androgynous look of a woman who still identifies as a woman, yet has some masculine characteristics. A butch woman who is looking at boxer shorts probably doesn’t have long hair or wear lipstick with her cargo shorts and Jack Purcell hightops. My sister refers to butch girls likes this as "Sporty Spices." You know the girls, you see them in the Eddie Bauer catalog, except that they have long hair and makeup on and are commonly referred to as "soft" butches. Real butch women look a bit more serious, and girls who look this way and who are shopping for boxer shorts expect to be hassled. So maybe it is our own nervousness that sends out a signal.

Are These For Your Boyfriend?
So I paid the clerk for my boxer briefs – one white pair, one black. I tried to act casual. If the checker asked, these were a present for my dad. Which as I think of it, seems stupid as at the coffee shop where I hang out half the slacker girls have boxers hanging out of their low rider jeans. Still, it’s good to have a plan. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve shopped in the men’s departments and the clerks have asked if I was shopping for my boyfriend. Without a plan, I get all flustered and leave the store empty-handed.

I drove home thinking about how these underwear would feel under my cargo shorts. They’d feel like a secret. A secret other butch girls would know about and straight girls wouldn’t even guess at. And as I wore these underwear under a business suit, I’d feel devious, impish, like I’d snuck something past the culture guards. Smiling through a meeting, acquiescing to requests, but each time I felt the underwear down on my thigh, knowing I could unleash and kick some serious ass if I wanted. Yet still maintaining some sort of pink-cheeked, I’m-just-a-girl culpability.

That’s what I thought. The reality was these underwear are made for a man’s body – all straight (if you’ll pardon the term) and angular. A body with any bit of curve to it doesn’t work. The underwear rode up my thigh, refused to stay put. I tugged at the legs constantly, mitigating any coolness my secret clothes might confer upon me. Under a suit, cut in the current androgynous style but made for a woman nonetheless, you could see the line mid-thigh made by the underwear. There’d be no wearing these underwear anywhere except maybe to sleep.