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/1911/2002 Archived Entry: "More on Eddie"

I've just been reading stuff about Eddie Izzard, mainly from the brilliant fansite Cake Or Death. It is actually better than the official page - more up to date and with more information on it. (For example, whilst Izzard.com talks about the upcoming Circle DVD, CorD has reviews of it and interviews that were printed yesterday!)
Anyway, one of the articles I was reading was fascinating, saying so much about crossdressing and his feelings about it. As I was reading it, I was mentally nodding, going 'yes, that's true', 'yes, I agree with that', 'absolutely'. So, I thought that I'd put up some excerpts from it here. If you want to read the whole thing go here and look down the frame on the left hand side, it's quite a way down, but there are lots of other equally interesting articles, many of which cover similar ground.

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Of make-up, men and fantasies
Interview by Ginny Dougary (from The Times 17/2/00)

...

What would I have made of Eddie, for instance, if I had come across him when he was studying accountancy at Sheffield University?

He says he was a slob in a camel coat who didn't give a flying monkey's about his appearance. "I didn't really bother buying clothes because I felt that everything somehow looked wrong on me."

...

"I mean, the whole thing of coming out as transvestite is a big key to how I work. Because the - arrrgh - amount of guts it takes to come out, and what I or any person who does come out has to go through - it's tough. And it's so visual as a TV and you get so much flak and you look such a mess initially in the frumpy transvestite phase when you're not out enough to say 'I wonder what this would look like?', which is what a normal boy or girl or man or woman would do."

Before we get into the grittiest of the nitty-gritty about what makes a TV tick - or, at any rate this TV - I feel that something must be cleared up. At which point, may I suggest that readers of a delicate disposition STOP READING NOW - after which warning if you do cancel your subscription to The Times we will know that you have been unable to resist temptation.

Right. Now if all of us women fancy Eddie, it is likely that somewhere down the line some of us must have imagined what it would be like to be physically entwined with him. And once one goes down that route, inevitably what enters one's mind is the penis-type thing. And so Eddie, I ask, do you use your penis penetratively? A question, incidentally, that I do not recollect ever having asked a man before, interviewee or otherwise. Perhaps being with someone who has to be brave every day of his life has an emboldening effect. And mercifully, he doesn't bat a (smokey grey and kohl-lined) eyelid.

Yes, he says, he does, "if the other woman is into the penis but if not, fine." I had always understood that transvestites were heterosexual men who simply had a fetish - a word Eddie dislikes, as I am to discover - for women's clothing. Transsexuals, on the other hand, were men who felt they were a woman trapped inside the wrong body, men who loathed their maleness and saw their penis as a constant physical rebuke.

But Eddie says TVs and TSs are on exactly the same path, it is just that the latter are farther down it. Until recently he described himself as a heterosexual, but got fed up with journalists writing that he insists on calling himself hetero, as though it were a mask for his gayness (he has never attempted to go to bed with a man) and drag queens accusing him of being a liar. Male lesbian, he thinks, fits the bill and avoids any suggestion that he is distancing himself from other sexual minorities.

But does he, like transsexuals, hate his penis? "The penis is immaterial," he says, which certainly sets him apart from the way most men view their equipment. "I don't think it's at all an aesthecically pleasing thing. I don't think, 'Heyyy, this penis, Gahhd, I'd like to put it on the mantelpiece. Isn't it hard, I venture, to use the penis in a feminine way? "Er, yes," he says. "So that's probably why we don't want penises. I've got breast envy."

You'd like a bosom? "Oh yeah. Just like teenage girls or some women think 'Oh, I wish I was bigger'. That's exactly what's going on with me." Have you ever tried putting a false bosom in? "I have and I did and I do," he says. So would you rather have a bosom than a penis? "Um. I've never done the either/or choice but, yeah." I don't understand, I say.

...

"Men - and disagree with me whenever you want - are stimulated visually. If women do the black dress, the high heels and the lippy, men go, 'Hey! Wow!' And it could be the same woman they haven't paid any attention to. The woman could be a complete bimbo and have no conversation and the man could be very articulate but still - Bam! - would wish to shag. Women? Not so much. They're stimultated more by . . ." Touch? "Touch and also personality. By a bloke who might be a curious-looking bloke. So the key points are the triggers. OK?" OK thus far.

"Now let me stay on the point because I think this is a bit of a breakthrough in explaining things. So TVs have an urge to be a woman. They're at home and they get the clothes and the make-up right and maybe they'll turn the lights down low so that the look is good, and they'll say 'Hey right, I look like a woman.' But then this two-step effect happens. Because they get visually stimulated - like clockwork - just like all men do. They have created this sexy image that they are then attracted to."

So it's masturbatory? "Yes, absolutely." So it's "I love . . . me"? "No. It's 'I love that image'. What they'd prefer to do is to make love to another woman and have lesbian sex. They'd like to be a woman and make love to another woman." Right, still with him, just about.

What I still find quite hard to understand is the clothing. In the past you have said that your desire sometimes to wear a provocative skirt rather than boring old trousers is no different from the way a woman dresses to please herself. But isn't the relationship of the transvestite with the actual gear eroticised? And if so, this is not the way most women relate to their wardrobe. He says he has watched women, something he does a lot, and has noticed the way that they will stroke a new pair of boots and though they are obviously not getting wildly turned on, they will say 'I love the feel of this. It makes me feel sexy.'

But it's not the same thing, is it Eddie? He says there are no sexy men's clothes apart from, say, a leather thong. Men's satin dressing gowns? "You find those wildly erotic?" he says, with disbelief. "There's nothing sensual or sexy for men. Male lingerie does not exist. Stockings do not exist. Socks are not going to get you going, 'Hey maaan, great socks, let's go!'

"Women have this vast variety of lingerie, stockings and tights and different patterns, and shoes, with different-sized heels, in red and black, and skirts - short, long, with slits - push-the-boob things . . . there's so much around in women's things that is erotic.

While men have: shirt shirt shirt jumper shirt jumper jacket jumper shirt jacket trousers trousers short trousers trousers flat shoes."

He says that while women wearing men's clothes confers on them a certain sort of power - and cites Marlene Dietrich as an example - men attack other men for wearing women's clothes because it is seen as a weakness: "And it's seen as being weak because they equate the clothing with being female, and female equals weak - which is wrong, because women have strong and weak characters, and so do men."

I say that part of the problem with transvestism is that there is an image of shame and humiliation and solitariness, and husbands ejaculating over their wives' clothing, and it's not a very attractive image. "Mmm. Absolutely." And then you come along and mix it and match it and have this very male way of being and it's no longer seen as something pathetic. "It's because it's out and knitted into society," he says thoughtfully.

...

It is only towards the end of our conversation, and almost by chance, that I finally find an image for transvestism that works for me. I ask Eddie whether the erotic nature of transvestism isn't essentially narcissistic, and he reminds me that when Narcissus fell in love with his image in the water he didn't know that the face staring back at him was his own. And there's the key, I think. The transvestite at his most private, most sexually engaged, is actually disengaged from himself. He looks at his femaleness from the outside, rather than feeling it from within. And if that splitting of oneself is fundamental to your make-up, it might explain why there are other areas of detachment as well.

...

At the end of the interview, Eddie says that what you need to do is to look at everybody's fantasies and line them all up and only then can you see what is normal and what is not. "Who doesn't have fantasies?" he asks. I don't think I do. "Actually, I've heard other women say that." Don't have time to...

"So you don't really have fantasies?" he asks softly. Not really. "You should get some," he breathes. Because they're fun? "Yeaaaahhh."

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I was trying to think of something to say at the end here, but I think it stands up for itself and doesn't really need me to add anything. I feel a little like I'm baring my soul, especially with some of the stuff at the end there, when it starts getting rather more sexual. But anyway, I've been wanting to add more stuff to the site about my dressing for a long time (this is the first 'Ellen' authored journal entry!!!) and this seems like a reasonably interesting thing to do. I'd be interested to hear what people (all the thousands who are reading my journal daily...) think of this, from both tv's and non-tv's.

Posted by Nieto @ 04/30/2003 09:39 AM GMT