Pimpin' pride and prejudice

Got wood? So do we!

Singapore has for some time now played host to the Eastern version of the American dream. Immigrants flock here from Vietnam, China, India, the UAE, Europe and even America; some in search of financial freedom, some for sunshine and expat tax-rates, some on the run from the law and personal demons, some to pay for new breasts.

Yup, breasts. And penises, too. While living in Glasgow, I had heard many a tall tale of the quintessential ladyboy scene in Bangkok, or drag-queens in Amsterdam. There were a couple of post-ops at work but I had never properly been introduced to the gender-bending, smutty underbelly of the hermaphrodite sex-trade.

Last Saturday then, I found myself drinking at Orchard Towers, famously home to prostitutes and pimps and lonely men willing to pay for a good old time. I'm ashamed that I feel the need to justify being there but these things cannot be helped. I was at a bar downstairs, attending a gig by a fairly popular cover-band whose name mysteriously escapes me. They do a mean Bowie.

After the gig, I headed upstairs because when you're a depressed single man, closing time is never late enough. I knew fully well that there was no chance of meeting the kind of woman I could take home to my mother, but the drinks were not unreasonably priced and besides, the mother-ship (if you'll excuse the pun) had sailed a good many years ago.

I wasn't immediately swarmed by the many 'professional' women there as I expected, but was given time to settle down, get used to the surroundings and make my move. I didn't move. I had no intention of paying for sex; I was happy enough to watch, observe. This is easier said than done. After a while, especially in the throes of a drunken stupor, you start wondering if they just don't approach you because you're not attractive enough.

Still later, you convince yourself you can pick up a 'professional', riding on your charm and looks alone, that they will somehow give up income and working hours to nurse your inner Casanova. I offered to buy a girl a drink. Beautiful, from Laos, on a tourist visa, owns a penis. Different girl, same story. As with all her colleagues. They're fairly upfront with this information. And friendly; very friendly. I'm playing my usual card of being a 21-year old traveler (I can probably pull this off for another five years, given the nuclear lack of growth on my still-cherubic 27-year old face), awed and nervous in equal measure, and they're lapping it up.

I establish that I have no interest in doing a dude. This is taken stoically, without judgement. I buy another round of drinks. We sit and talk about life, about why we're in Singapore, who or what we've left behind, what we're looking for. As it turns out, we have plenty in common. We have all tucked our penises between our legs, checked in our self-respect at Immigration and strolled through looking for breasts.

I would like them against me, they would like theirs on them. Implants, enhancement, magic, the whole spectrum. They tell me a tourist visa lets them stay for three months, enough time to make money to pay for their new bodies. There are 'agencies' that specialize in this arrangement back home - they take care of everything from travel to accommodation for a cut, and put them in touch with a surgeon.

I wonder if they hope their new bodies will fail to recollect the atrocities that paid for them. They tell me their customers almost exclusively straight men. They tell me tales of being excreted on, of brutality and head-over-heels love, all in the space of one night and several indistinguishable faces. I can detect no sense of regret or shame. I decide there is no reason for any, if this is a choice they have made for themselves.

Some of them intend to pursue their studies, careers in accountancy and marketing and law after they're all-woman. I tell them I hope things work out. They laugh. They stroke my chin, tussle my hair. I'm not repulsed in the least. They tell me I have the haunted smile of one who has no hope at all, for himself.        

*Image courtesy of Warrens Singapore 

     Life on Mars - David Bowie

     

When a dude looks like a lady

This here is Andrej Pejic. If I were a builder, I'd be whistling. If I were a lesbian, I'd be carpet-munching. Unfortunately, I'm a University-educated, haplessly middle class 27 year old man-child and I'm therefore painfully short on crude metaphors that indicate sexual attraction and riddled with bullet hole-like Catholic guilt at that indomitable stirring in my groins. Because this here, ladies and gents, Andrej here, is one of the world's most successful androgynous supermodels. In the words of my confounded flatmate, "chick's got a dick?!"

Well not exactly, because Andrej -as I understand it- is a man. His gender identity is androgynous, meaning he catwalks down international runways modeling fashion clothing for both men and women. I don't mean to restrict his androgyny to one of commercial interest alone; I'll get to the lifestyle element in a bit. But I'd like to first take stock of what we have here: a beautiful specimen of the human race, his male genitalia, and my own corresponding set, responding to his virtual pheromones, picking them up, drawing them out like a satellite dish does ESPN.

My question is not one of faux-Catholic rectitude; it is one of consumer rights/ protection: do I, as a member of the perpetually sexually-inclined straight male community, have the right to be informed straight away that the image I'm ogling over is of a man in a dress? The answer, I'm afraid, is blowin' in the wind, much like Andrej's own testicles would do in the position above if they weren't impeccably tucked in to prevent the worst kind of wardrobe malfunction that could befall a female supermodel. (In a meta-tastic brainwave generally  not associated with the fashion industry, he has recently been signed up to be the face of a company selling push-up bras.)

Now I don't know what Andrej's preference is, when it comes to sexual partners. I do know however that he is something of a survivor - born in 1991 in Bosnia, his mother fled with him to Serbia to escape the war. They immigrated to Australia when he was eight, and he is now a citizen. (The same welcoming land would later nick-name him 'gender-bender'.) He now spends his time shuttling between photoshoots in Europe and America. As a serial-immigrant and writer, I'm tempted to draw parallels between the problems faced by the diaspora in finding a cultural identity, and his own decision to not choose between genders and bravely embrace them both. This would of course be sinfully pseudo-intellectual and ignorant. I choose instead to point to the great scripture of our times: pop culture.

I'm currently reading Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides, the story of a man with a recessive gene in his fifth chromosome that led him to be born with a perfectly normal-looking vagina and was raised as a girl till the age of fourteen. A couple of days ago, fellow-blogger Robim Moran brought to my attention the story of Sasha who is being raised by his parents to be gender-neutral and is referred to simply as 'the infant'. In 2008, the world witnessed the phenomenon of Lady Gaga, a throwback (in terms of fashion, if not music) to the glory days of  David Bowie and Annie Lennox. We were as smitten as the Bard himself with the cross-dressing Viole de Lesseps of Shakespeare in Love, and raised nary an eyebrow as  Borat flaunted his mankini in all its fluorescent gender-transcendence. In little Britain, audiences invited cross-dressing comedians David Walliams and Eddie Izzard warmly into the mainstream, and the generally homophobic football terraces in Manchester took no issue to David Beckham's sarong as long as he kept bending those long balls in.  Even conservative Singapore has an impressive array of gender-bending entertainers on tv and the live comedy/theatre circuit. And suddenly, its hep to be hairless, rudderless, gender-less.

In a way, this is natural modern day progression. Pampered by central heating and microwave ovens and 24/7 connectivity, we're all less and less capable of dealing with adulthood, with reality. That little window in the timelines of our lives -that innocent time before the onslaught of pubic hair and menstrual cramps, when it was enough to just be human- is beginning to appeal more and more. I don't wish to imply that androgyny is infantile, or intellectually inferior, or -God forbid- immoral. Social scientists in fact claim that it may be the logical approach to daily life - some parts of it are better dealt with from a woman's perspective, and some from a man's. I only insist that if I've just bought you a drink, I did so under the sincere impression that you are the somewhat salacious owner of definitive lady-parts. And I humbly request that if in my drunken stupor I have made a mistake on that count, I'd like to be informed about it before I put on my poker face.    

            Dude (Looks like a lady) - Aerosmith