Dina’s Diner 5/29/23

HOW ABOUT A NICE STORY?

I came across an article headlined Linda and Crossdressing Fiancé Phil Are Mistaken for Two Women on Nights Out. It appeared on a news site named WalesOnline.co.uk back in November of 2022.

Theirs is a story straight out of the 2020s. Phil and Linda became acquainted through the video posting site TikTok in late 2021. The article noted, “The pair started supporting each other’s videos, before talking in private messages. By February this year they realised they had romantic feelings for each other and decided to meet up in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, in March. After hitting it off, the couple started dating and Phil proposed in June.”

Linda and Phil

Phil’s story sounds like many crossdressers’ own. “For the last 10 years I would come home from work and put a skirt on. I’ve always found feminine clothes more comfortable. I joined TikTok about a year ago and decided to go for a makeover and had a wig put on and my make-up done. It was amazing and a massive weight off my shoulders.”

Linda told the reporter that she “came across Phil after he popped up on her ‘for you’ page on TikTok and the pair started engaging on each other’s videos. “I saw his social media account, which was under his former cross-dressing personality name,” she said. “I also have a background of elaborate dressing and used to be a cyber goth so I’d wear six-inch platforms and corsets. We started chatting privately and realised it was more than a friendship.”

After their initial meeting and a roller skating first date, things got more serious with stayovers together and joint Tik Tok videos. The article reports, “In June Phil asked Linda to marry him and the pair officially moved in together in October 2022, after Phil found a new job in Coventry. “We walked past a jewelers and Phil just asked me which ring I’d choose and then asked me to marry him,” Linda said. “It was very sweet.””

As the headline mentioned, they often go out together with Phil in femme mode. Their experiences seem to be happy and without problems from naysayers. Linda told the reporter that Phil sometimes gets attention from males because she is so attractive and believable.
Linda said: “I’ve never known Phil any other way as when I first saw him it was on his TikTok in crossdress. I don’t see it as anything I need to support him on because it’s just him. People can assume he is homosexual or trans because he likes to cross-dress. He gets asked out a lot by men because he looks amazing as a woman. He’s just a man who cross-dresses. Any negativity doesn’t bother us.”

If you are a crossdresser hoping for love, find someone who looks at you the way Linda looked at Phil’s crossdressing Tik Toks.

WHAT ARE THEY SEARCHING FOR?

I saw a posting on Reddit.com that referred to a fascinating article on a site named Lawsuit.org. The Reddit post was made in May 2023 but the original article (undated) was based on 2022 data that was dissected by the good folks at Lawsuit.org. Oh, the headline of the original article was Republicans Are Obsessed With Searching for Transgender Porn.

The body of the article describes how the researchers used Google search data statistics to cross-reference them with voting data in states and cities across the U.S. The raw data was from a company named Ahrefs.com who helps companies and others to access Google search data to target specific audiences. Detailed state and local level voting data is readily available and a further dataset for urban areas’ attitudes towards LGBTQ initiatives was also utilized to bolster the correlations.

If you take a quick look at the colored map accompanying, the red areas had the highest incidents of Google searches for terms like Femboy, Tranny, Ladyboy and Shemale. Yes, those may be considered derogatory terms, so if someone is searching for those, they are most probably not searching for legitimate information about transgenderism. More likely porn of one form or another. If you know geography, you can see the darker red area stretches from the deep south and creeps up Appalachia. That is a large swath of the so-called Bible Belt.

This same type of analysis has also been made in relation to hetero porn searches and utilization of sites like PornHub.com. The more politically conservative areas seem to generate more porn searches and logins than elsewhere.

The article also lists the top twenty areas by state and metro area based on those statistical breakdowns. Illinois and Minneapolis are the only two solidly ‘blue’ places that break the top 10 in the search data. The article also gets into the arcana of statistical analyses with a discussion of ‘linear regression’ and ‘R-squared values’ if you remember that stuff from your college Stat classes. It’s a good article and worth taking a look to see how they put the data together.

Without copying and pasting vast stretches of their findings, here are some selected comments from the article: “[T]here is a statistically significant correlation between being more republican, and trans porn search volume, grouped by DMA (metro area). The more red you get, the more you love trans porn. The more you hate them, the more you love them. The data tells a tragic tale of self-loathing closet cases, Republicans who privately get off sexually to trans folks, while publicly trying to remove trans peoples’ rights and stoking hate against them.”

Well said.

SEX, PROGRESS, AND PUSHBACK

The Huffington Post online magazine had a brief article about the actress Lizzy Caplan. The HuffPost was simply re-reporting some comments Caplan gave in a Rolling Stone interview. It appeared on April 29, 2023 under the headline Lizzy Caplan Critiques Instagram-Style Sexiness.

Lizzy Caplan

Lizzy told the Rolling Stone reporter, “There’s a distance between the sexiness of Instagram and actual sexiness. I do think it’s a strange time in our society where, on one hand, things feel hyper-sexualized in terms of your appearance, on social media, and flaunting your body in that way.” But she also noted that we are “almost shifting back into a prude-er way of being” in today’s political climate. She said that the type of sexiness on display in media and online “feels removed from actual sexuality and eroticism and all the things that made these erotic thrillers work back in the day.”

I’m not sure I completely agree with her assessment but I understand where she’s coming from in making it. The type of purposeful sexiness of Instagram posts or more and more daring red carpet dressing has a calculated edge to it that reduces the sexy quotient. But you could say the same about older media like Playboy or vintage Hollywood cheesecake pictorials. The one major difference is the prevalence of it in today’s media culture. You want to look at sexy women? Pick your phone up and start browsing. You don’t need to wait for the next Playboy delivery or flip through pages of ads and short stories to find the good stuff.

As someone who grew up in the age of permissiveness in the ’60s and ’70s, it always puzzles me how so many folks younger than I am became so conservative – even repressive – in their social beliefs.

And as the sex pendulum seems to swing further away from center, the backlash begins from those quarters. Not just about sex or sexuality either. Attacks on books that are viewed as “woke” are not specifically targeted towards sex or sexiness but rather gender roles (and other issues). The concern over the video site Tik Tok may be more political now but if the activists can ban one site, will they take on other sites disapprove of on social or moral grounds? I just saw a headline that an anti-pornography proposal was attached to the current debt limit negotiation. And of particular concern for us as crossdressers, if drag shows can be harassed or intimidated, if trans identities can be denigrated and marginalized, will any form of public crossdressing be targeted with sanctions as in decades gone by?

UNIFORMS AND BEAUTY RETHOUGHT

I was listening to an audiobook in my car titled Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin. There was a single passage that struck me as so interesting I (safely) jotted it down while still in the car.

Uniformed beauty.

In the story, the elderly protagonist says that (and I’m paraphrasing rather than quoting), “uniforms bring out the beauty in a woman’s face.” He was speaking broadly of uniforms including such outfits as women’s business suits, or restaurant servers’ white blouses and black pants, or medical scrubs. The book character’s thought was not expanded on — it was just a passing comment in the story. But it resonated with me.

I agree with that sentiment. When a woman wears a uniform — even a tailored business suit, or an iconic airline attendant uniform, one’s eyes are drawn to the face because the mind subconsciously discounts the clothing as, well, just a uniform of some sort. So in a way, the uniform — which is supposed to eliminate individuality to some degree — actually focuses one’s attention on the face of the person, the individual, before us.

As crossdressers, we generally like uniforms as a fun or fetishy focus of feminine iconography: the French Maid, the Naughty Nurse, the Sexy Policewoman, the Cheerleader, etc, etc. It may be worth considering that if you’re getting into one of your “uniforms” you should think about your face and facial presentation foremost. A perfectly executed French Maid or Sexy Secretary outfit may be undermined if you are not emoting that somehow through your face.

Crossdressing may be about the materials involved in our physical transformations but the best presentations invite the viewer to imagine the person within. That would include both dressing in a uniform or not. Dressing to project our internal femininity or even a fantasy image needs some spark of humanity to make the whole thing work.

EYE APPEAL

Lindsey Puls

I was immediately filled with joy when I saw the photo here of Lindsey Puls. Lindsey is a fashion and travel blogger on her site Have Clothes, Will Travel. I first saw the photo in a Pinterest.com feed, then followed the linkages to Lindsey’s blog. The actual blog post in which her outfit appeared goes back to 2016 but it is timeless.

It was the over-the-knee socks that did it. Several years ago I wrote an item about over-the-knee socks worn by some professional women golfers. But the overall funkiness of the combination of the frilly dress (Lindsey’s description) with the socks and lace up heels is really eye-catching and appealing to me. Lindsey’s blog also reminds me of another fashion and travel blogger I wrote about a few years ago: Celina of Trends and Tolstoy. She’s all about funky outfits in interesting settings.

Whether you think of it as funky or quirky or offbeat or eccentric, I think many of us enjoy playful fashion when we see it. Recently, I saw some photos of high school girls who wore high top canvas sneakers with their prom dresses. The look I am thinking of resides somewhere between ‘normal’ fashion pairings and costumery. The long socks, or the sneakers, or a hat or hair bow can elevate a ‘nice’ outfit to something memorable.

Given that our favorite hobby involves dressing up, have you ever purposely tried to create a funky outfit? In honesty, as much as I like them on others, I can’t think of anything I ever wore that would fall into that quirky category. I should get to work on that. Care to join and share any funky ideas you have?

Tags: crossdressing, fashion, featured, opinion

Category: Opinion, Transgender Fun & Entertainment