XXI century cross-dressing. Boys or girls. Part 1
Men have been dressing up in women's clothing for centuries. Nevertheless, the public's interest in stage / screen cross-dressing continues unabated, and for the sake of the attention of the audience, male artists go on risky experiments with dressing up.
How is it, and here to remove, and here to remove ?!
Love affair at work
The task, which the heroine of Alisa Freundlich in the film "Office Romance" was struggling to cope with - to suck in both her stomach and buttocks at the same time - is being effortlessly performed by an increasing number of men. However, before they start to "clean up", they first have to … apply. Starting with one of the main attributes of femininity - breasts and ending with eyelashes and wigs. Still, in order to look like a woman, you have to try hard.
Men have been dressing up in women's clothing for centuries. Suffice it to recall the Japanese kabuki theater, in which all roles are performed by men. The history of this tradition is interesting, because everything started exactly the opposite - initially, all the roles in kabuki performances were performed by women. Many performances were obscene, and most actresses openly earned money as prostitution, as a result of which kabuki received the nickname "theater of singing and dancing courtesans."
The "female version" of kabuki lasted only a quarter of a century. When the atmosphere of debauchery around theatrical performances reached its intensity, the authorities forbade women to go on stage, replacing them with young men and focusing not on Bacchic dances, but on drama. However, it didn't help.
ON-SHE ON THE THEATER STEP
Let's go quickly dress up the knight with the Brandford witch
W. Shakespeare. Windsor pranksters
The young actors turned out to be even more tasty morsel for the public; many of them, like their predecessors, were engaged in prostitution. Plastic and artistic, basically skin-visual boys willingly gave themselves to … men. This was their main highlight - they served both women and men, providing the latter with anal and oral sex. The Kagema, as they were called, earned an order of magnitude more than female prostitutes, and their business went uphill. The word "kagema" is still used in the informal speech of Japanese homosexuals as an analogue of the Russian "passive".
This disgrace continued for another quarter of a century, after which the shogunate allowed only mature men to perform on stage, which eventually turned the scandalous theater into a sophisticated and beautiful performance.
Nowadays, women sometimes play in this theater, but kabuki is nevertheless considered a traditionally male art. There are entire dynasties of male actors who specialize in female roles.
In England, under Queen Elizabeth, only men played in the theater, and only they consisted of the troupe of the famous Globe Theater, in which Shakespeare himself owned a small share. It was in this theater that the premiere performances of the overwhelming majority of his plays took place. So the first scenic Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona and other Shakespearean ladies were … men.
Another well-known historical example of theatrical disguise is provided by European operatic art of the 17th – 18th centuries, when castratic singers were in great favor. Even the Duke of Buckingham, known to us from The Three Musketeers, invited these sweet-voiced and effeminate singers to his London house for, as they would say now, private parties.
Most of the legendary castrates were Italians. Farinelli, Senesino, Marchesi, Bernacchi, Caffarelli - all of them and many others whose names have not come down to us, from time to time portrayed ladies and performed female roles in operas.
For example, Marchesi became famous for his debut as a female role in Pergolesi's opera "The Handmaidens-Madame" and subsequently sang female parts more than once. Interestingly, neither the fact that he was a castrato, nor his appearance on stage in a woman's dress could not divert female attention from him. The fans pursued him in droves; a case is known when a married lady, having lost her head from his singing, left her husband and children and for several years followed him throughout Europe. Many castrated singers had female fans …
And although castrates were not just skin-visual, but often with sound, orality, anality … Agree, this increased attention of the female audience is somewhat reminiscent of the madness of our days, when effeminate androgynous models and puny and hysterical skin-visual pop-party-goers become sex symbols and an object of desire for hundreds and thousands of female fans (Sergey Zverev, Gauguin Solntsev, Andrey Pezhich, etc.)
But back to our castrates. Many of them found their talents for reincarnation and other use, frankly laughing if someone suddenly decided to sympathize with the "unfortunate eunuchs". Skin-visual nature helped them find patrons in the face of influential men who were not indifferent to sweet-voiced feminine-masculine charms …
At present, the parts written for the castrati are performed mainly by women, and some of the operas are still gathering dust in storage facilities, for there is no one to sing most of the parts.
Later, in the European tradition, all these stories with dressing up turned into the theatrical role of drag queen. Today's drag queens are most often women, playing the roles of boys and adolescents almost to old age. However, male drag queens also have enough work, mostly in the movies.
TRAVEL MEN: NOT "TRANS …" ONCE STILL?
… After all, women paint, why not men?..
M. Vrubel
Nowadays, male artists who dress up in women's dress, thank God, do not have to engage in prostitution or - God forbid! - be castrated. But, of course, there are costs involved in transgender reincarnation. Ill-wishers sometimes spread gossip in the style of "He's a fagot!", Or even accuse of transvestism. Well, or at least they are discussing all the visible flaws in the appearance that the female image highlights, like a spotlight. And especially impressionable representatives of sexual minorities are bombarded with romantic confessions (they say that letters from gay fans come in sacks to Yuri Stoyanov).
Nevertheless, the public's interest in stage / screen cross-dressing continues unabated, and for the sake of the attention of the audience, male artists go on risky experiments with dressing up.
The female images are firmly and seriously exploited by Andrei Danilko (shocking Verka Serduchka), Igor Kasilov and Sergei Chvanov (perky "new Russian grandmothers"); a huge number of female images are used in their creative activities by the parodist Alexander Peskov, TV stars Sergey Svetlakov and Mikhail Galustyan, actor Yuri Stoyanov. By the way, the latter, known for his comic range in the creation of female images, admitted in a recent interview that at some point he “got sick of playing female roles,” and he even demanded that his colleague Ilya Oleinikov shave off his mustache so that he would also “play ". However, fortunately for Gorodok, seeing Oleinikov without a mustache, Stoyanov changed his mind and agreed to play women for the rest of his life.
Some transvestites, trying to find a logical explanation for their passion for dressing up in women's clothing and underwear, often cite famous artists who have turned into ladies as examples. Like, we are just non-standard and artistic personalities who like to try on different images. But reincarnation is a delicate matter. One thing is acting, the purpose of which is to create an artistic image on a stage or screen. Another thing is dressing up, caused by the inner irresistible need of the transvestite. Although the root of these phenomena is the same - the skin-visual ligament of a man, these two and those who look at them have completely different emotions and sensations from the female image transmitted into the world.
In the female roles, many legendary and living actors were noted. In foreign films at different times they shone: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon - beauties Daphne and Josephine ("There are only girls in jazz"), Dustin Hoffman - confident Dorothy Michaels ("Tootsie"), Robin Williams - a cozy pensioner - a nanny of her own children ("Mrs. Dayfire"). Even such generally recognized symbols of masculinity and "world men" as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gerard Depardieu, managed to shine in a woman's outfit: Arnold - hiding the belly of a miraculously pregnant man ("Junior"), and Gerard - portraying a disguised adventurer) ("Evening dress").
Our, domestic artists have coped with female roles no less talentedly. Suffice it to recall Alexander Kalyagin in the role of auntie Donna Rosa ("Hello, I am your aunt!") And Oleg Tabakov as the housewife of Miss Harpy and Miss Furia ("Mary Poppins, goodbye"). And how colorful Mikhail Efremov is in women's clothes in the film "Super-testa for a loser"!
However, these characters are rather comical and caricatured. Most male actors in women's clothing look so ridiculous that they only cause a comic effect, which is what their dressing is, in fact, designed for. Against their background, the screen images created by skin-visual artists look very feminine … Do you remember how the midshipman Alyosha Korsak disguised himself as a pious shy Annushka? With minimal make-up, just dressed in "ladies'", he looked like a girl … As Dmitry Kharatyan admitted in an interview with "MK" about dressing up his movie hero, he "did not want to endow him with the most delicate feminine features." Well, he did it.
Yuri Chursin, incredibly organically flashed in the female role in the performance of the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov's "Prima Donna", said that thanks to this role he learned many women's secrets and even tried something from the "woman's life": he bought tights, for example, or chose cosmetics for his heroine. When journalists asked if he liked all this, the artist enthusiastically replied: “How! It is unlikely that my impressions are somehow different from a woman's buzz when choosing a lipstick."
At one time, Sergei Rost and Dmitry Nagiyev did quite exotic ladies in the program "Be careful, modern!" With bright make-up, in flirty skirts or dressing gowns, these two reincarnated, albeit comic, but quite feminine ladies.
Of course, not all artists who have tried on a female image run the risk of repeating this experience. “After I starred as a woman, I'm not afraid of anything. The most difficult thing was the very idea of playing a woman! - this is how Valery Meladze talks about his experience of cross-dressing, who in one of his videos played the episodic role of a pop beauty. According to the singer, all his masculine nature wildly resisted reincarnation, especially when artificial breasts were applied to him … Still, despite the visual-cutaneous ligament, the reference vector of this polymorph is still anal, and it is completely alien to him to dress up as a woman.
Well, this is a completely natural male reaction, which is not common for everyone. Many men, outwardly transforming into a woman, experience emotional uplift, joy, relief. And there is an explanation for this, because for many of them dressing up in a woman's dress gives a feeling of security.
To be continued…
