Dina’s Diner 1/8/24

THE SPOKEN WORD

I saw a cute news story on a site called Metroweekly.com. The headline said, Ohio TV Anchor Comes Out as Lesbian on Air. It appeared on December 13, 2023. The story also appeared on other news sites all over because it’s heartwarming.

Taylor Bruck

Here’s how MetroWeekly reported it. “Spectrum News 1 Ohio anchor Taylor Bruck was chatting with co-anchor Alexa Maslowski last month about upcoming plans for the holidays during a November 26 broadcast. “The extent of my traveling is probably going to Cleveland to visit my girlfriend,” Bruck said.”

The low key comment went unnoticed by many but Taylor posted about it on her Instagram page where she said, “A seemingly simple yet scary word. I said ‘girlfriend’ on air for the first time today, which some people may say ‘OK, who cares?’ … but to me it’s a step toward accepting and loving myself fully and being authentic on and off the air.”

The video clip of her ‘outing’ got over 100 thousand views on TikTok and 200 thousand ‘likes’ on her Instagram page. She received notes from people all over the country and the world supporting her and thanking her for just saying it casually on air. People Magazine also did a piece on her. People reported, “I told myself, ‘Just say it,’” she said. “When I finally said it out loud, I smiled inside because it was a big moment for me.”

It probably shouldn’t be a big story but I think it’s the simplicity of her revelation that makes it a bigger moment for her and us as viewers (even after the fact).

It made me think about how hard it would be for me (and probably many of you) to casually let people know about my/your crossdressing. I sometimes mention something that happened while I was crossdressed but never mention that I was crossdressed at the time. And it’s frustrating not to tell some of the experiences I (we) have had as our femme selves because we fear the reaction. It would be a huge leap to let our friends or family members know that we crossdress. We’ll never get into People Magazine holding in all our secrets, ladies.

QUANT-IFYING THE SIXTIES

The New York Times ran one of those year-end lists of famous people who died in 2023. One of the names listed was designer Mary Quant who passed in April last year at the age of 93. I missed it at the time so I went back and read the obituary and another retrospective of her work that appeared on the same day.

Mary Quant

For those unfamiliar with Mary Quant (and I was only marginally familiar myself), she burst onto the London fashion scene with a boutique in 1955. She was only 25 at the time. The boutique featured her own designs for young women looking to move beyond their mothers’ conservative fashions. She was famously credited with starting the miniskirt craze. She also became a celebrity herself, dressed in her own youthful fashions, boots, caps, berets, and tights plus her trademark short bob with bangs hairstyle.

I was just a kid during her heyday in the ’60s but that ‘mod’ look was everywhere on television and magazine covers in those years. Think of the Austin Powers movies to get an idea of the sensibility of that fashion movement. Mary’s designs were about freedom from the oppression of corsets, girdles, lacquered hairstyles, and boring women’s fashion. It hit at just the right time as Britain emerged from the war years and the ‘jet age’ and ‘space age’ promised a faster pace and more forward-looking lifestyles.

I like some of the conservative styles against which Mary Quant rebelled: fitted dresses, bouffant hairdos, girdles, stockings, and pointy-toed pumps. Perhaps the ‘mod’ look would have happened without Mary leading the charge. But putting women in more colorful, short-hemmed frocks, patterned tights, funky hats, etc. coincided with young women of the baby boom who were coming of age as the counterculture and women’s lib movements were getting underway. The Times quotes her: “We were at the beginning of a tremendous renaissance in fashion. It was not happening because of us. It was simply that, as things turned out, we were a part of it. Good designers know that to have any influence they must keep in step with public needs and that intangible ‘something in the air.’ I just happened to start when ‘that something in the air’ was coming to a boil.”

That liberalization of attitudes about dress (and androgyny in fashion and hairstyles) contributed to the greater freedom we enjoy today as crossdressers.

ARE YOU SEEING RED?

The New York Times Style section has a feature called Ask Vanessa where readers can pose questions on fashion. On December 4, 2023, a reader asked “Is there any time red lipstick is not appropriate?”

I guess I never really thought about it before but red lipstick is perhaps too much for some social circumstances like work or a job interview, or a daytime outing. Vanessa Friedman of the Times began her answer with some history: “There are few cosmetics as charged with meaning as red lipstick, which over the centuries has been associated with female allure, sex, sin, glamour, power and politics. One of the first reported fans of red lipstick was Cleopatra, who was said to have painted her lips with red dye made from crushed carmine beetles. Scarlet women wore scarlet lipstick, but it was also a symbol of the suffragists, who wore it with their white dresses as they marched for the right to vote in the early 1900s.”

The answer to the question seemed to be “it depends.” Vanessa posed the question to Rachel Felder who wrote a whole book about red lipstick: “Red communicates strength and a specifically feminine type of strength,” said Ms. Felder, who said she has been wearing red lipstick since she was a teenager. It says: I am here. I am a woman. Deal with it. That can be both intimidating and unsettling to the viewer–and alluring. Either way, it is impossible to ignore. Which means that how you wear it, and in what context, matters.”

So yes, red lipstick can be appropriate at any time of day and in almost any circumstances dependent on how it fits into the overall look. Even with a conservative outfit, the splash of red could provide a little pizzazz. With a casual outfit it could provide a contrasting bit of glamour. The article mentions that “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Vogue that she wears red lipstick every day because it gives her confidence and “oomph” and because, when she was first campaigning, it gave her an immediate visual signifier and a way of looking put together.”

For myself – and perhaps you too – red lipstick (of almost any shade) is a fixture. A natural beauty can afford to be minimalist in their cosmetic and lipstick choices. I would feel washed out without a splash of dark lip color. Vanessa Friedman closes her column out this way: “When it comes to red lipstick, as when it comes to anything that is an interface between yourself and the world, it shouldn’t make you feel self-conscious. It should make you feel more gloriously, totally, who you are.” Pucker up, put it on, and be red-dye for anything.

GRAPPLING WITH STYLE

Sukeban girl gang members.

The New York Times Style section had an article about a new form of women’s professional wrestling headlined Can Sukeban Make Female Wrestling Fashionable With Americans? It was on the paper’s site December 12, 2023.

The article was sub-headed “A unique form of Japanese wrestling that mixes fashion and theatrics has come to America.” I have long admired Japanese takes on many forms of pop and traditional culture and written about some here previously. I’m not a fan of professional wrestling (I was a fan between the ages of 10 and 12 long before the WWF came about) but I like the idea of young Japanese women wrestling in theatrical fashions. The name “Sukeban” comes from the term for “girl gang” which arose in Japan as a female response to young men’s gangs of the 1960s and ’70s. According to the article, gangs of young women would roam the streets in stylized gang costumes striking fear and actually committing crimes just like the boys.

Sukeban Wrestling

The Times reported that “[Sukeban] is one of many leagues dedicated to Japanese women’s wrestling, where athletes often perform theatrical, hard-hitting punches and clever defenses while telling a story with their moves and costumes. Sukeban places a particular emphasis on fashion and well-known [Japanese] designers helped to produce the costumes and props with the hope of appealing to an audience unfamiliar with the sport.

It sounded to me like Japanese anime or cosplay combined with theatrical wrestling violence. The league held its first American match in Miami where the Times caught up with them. “Eighteen wrestlers who compete professionally in Japan participated in the match. They were grouped into four gangs, the Vandals, Cherry Bomb Girls, Dangerous Liaisons and the Harajuku Stars. The athletes, each of whom has a specific persona, battled one another using their costumes, gestures and facial expressions to tell a story about good versus evil.”

I watched a brief clip on YouTube and (to be honest) didn’t see much different about Sukeban than other wrestling spectacles. One of the wrestlers told the Times that she saw “an opportunity for a collaboration between Japanese and American culture, and a chance to expose U.S. audiences to professional female wrestling.” Just what the U.S. needs: more professional wrestling.

BABY’S GOT FULLBACK

I came across an article headlined These Experts Once Said Women Couldn’t Play Football. Boy Were They Wrong. I saw it on the website GetPocket.com but the article originally appeared in Popular Science (of all places) in November 2021.

Early women footballers.

I knew there is or was a Lingerie Football League for women and every so often some high school or college will have a woman player on the team. I didn’t know that women’s football – or at least attempts at creating women’s football – went back to the 1930s. The article reports: “In October 1939, history was made as the first full-contact women’s football game to be played in Los Angeles took place at Gilmore Stadium. The Chet Relph Hollywood Stars faced off against the Marshall Clampett Amazons of Los Angeles in front of two thousand five hundred spectators. The Los Angeles Times was on hand to cover the game in full detail, and Life magazine would feature a two-page photo spread of the players in the November 22 issue.”

The article also reports that the newspaper and Life were complimentary about the level of competition on the field and reported that it “was no powder puff battle.” But as you could have guessed, many football enthusiasts in the sports writing ranks were not fans. Some medical men also expressed concerns for the players because “a woman’s body is not heavily muscled, cannot withstand knocks. A blow, either on the breast or in the abdominal region, may result in cancer or internal injury. A woman’s nervous system is also too delicate for such rough play.”

Also in 1939, an educator in Nebraska fashioned a women’s game with six players on a side, a smaller field, and more passing to make it safer for the girls. It was known as “powder puff football” and became popular around the country for a while. During the war years, another attempt was made to create a professional women’s league (a la the women’s baseball league). In 1945, a college in South Dakota who had only three men enrolled due to the war fielded a women’s team so that the traditional homecoming game could be played. But that was a one-off and remains an oddity.

Another blogpost I saw online noted several isolated attempts to create women’s football leagues through the decades including in the ‘modern’ era with plastic helmets, faceguards, shoulder pads, etc.

I like women’s sports. I actually prefer women’s college basketball to men’s. I watch a lot of the college women’s softball playoffs each spring. And I watch women’s professional golf on TV. But I can’t get into the idea of women’s football. Even the sight of all those athletic female fannies in tight football britches can’t entice me. Crossdressed football maybe? Nah. There’s gotta be a line somewhere.

Tags: featured, opinion

Category: Opinion