In her brazen track, “Tranny Chaser,” RuPaul assures her admirers,

“Just because you want me…that don’t make you gay

Every time you watch me…that don’t make you gay

Do you wanna be me?…that don’t make you gay

Or do you wanna **** me?…that don’t make you gay!”

On their surface, these lyrics read as silly filler for a dance beat…but we should all know that in the world of drag, the “surface” only tells half the story. Therefore, I will take a closer look to see if Mama Ru might have tucked a deeper meaning in there and consult with Mama Nature in case she has a say on the matter as well.

Ru contends, “Just because you want me…that don’t make you gay.” What Ru may be implying here is that the tranny chaser in question is drawn, not to the underlying masculinity of RuPaul (or any other drag queen), but rather to the hyperfeminine  characteristics she displays. Thus, she concludes, “do you want to **** me?…that don’t make you gay,” because to do so, by this logic, would connote a decidedly heterosexual act.

****Disclaimer: I understand that using the term “tranny” to refer to drag queens is, at best, inaccurate and, at worst, highly offensive. I acknowledge this misnomer and utilize it here only as shorthand consistent with the pop-vernacular.*****

No, most drag queens don’t look like “natural” women. But in the case of professionals, what distinguishes these ladyboys from biological females is not just hints of an Adam’s apple or a strong jawline, but also the exaggerated cosmetics enhancing their complexion. In other words, if a friend tells me “you look like a drag queen tonight,” it does not mean that I look mannish, but rather that I am donning an excess of makeup…makeup that hyperbolizes the feminine aspects of my lovely face. 

And I’m not the only biogirl who sometimes lays on the eyeliner a touch thick.  Lady celebrities are frequently mocked for looking like gender illusionists, either due to an abundance of makeup or plastic surgery that distorts their features in a similar manner. And while Perez will deem such missteps laughable, both drag face and celebrity “donts” are merely extreme versions of the makeup all stereotypical females wear…which itself represents an artificial means of highlighting their naturally feminine features. So, when enhancing what Mama Nature gave us, where is the line between “HOT” and “HOT MESS?”

To resolve this inquiry we must first address a simpler one: why wear makeup at all? This may seem like a silly question (obvi, you look hotter with bronzer, hunty), but let’s really take a moment to think about this from an evolutionary (and admittedly heterocentric) perspective: If a male searches for a human female with whom to mate, why would it be desirable for said female to wear makeup that alters her natural appearance? That is, shouldn’t the primal male be looking for the female that looks most naturally human, so as not to erroneously copulate with a foreign species? If an unnatural look is preferred by males, why are some aesthetic deviations sexy, while others are fugly? And to what degree can beauty be manipulated before the enhancements become unattractive?

To address these questions, we will look at the phenomenon of supernormal stimuli or “superstimuli.” In her book on the subject, Deirdre Barrett explains,

Animal biology developed a concept that is crucial to understanding the problems instincts create when disconnected from their natural environement—that of the supernormal stimulus. Nobel laureate Niko Tinbrgen coined this term after his animal research revealed that experimenters could create phony targets that appealed to instincts more than the original objects for which they’d evolved. He studied birds that lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with gray and found they preferred to sit on [man-made] giant, bright blue ones with black polka dots. The essence of the supernormal stimulus is that the exaggerated imitation can exert a stronger pull than the real thing…

…Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them. We humans can produce our own: candy sweeter than any fruit, stuffed animals with eyes wider than any baby, pornography, propaganda about menacing enemies. Instincts arose to call attention to rare necessities; now we let them dictate the manufacture of useless attention-grabbers.”

As you might imagine, many warn of the dangers of supernormal stimuli (“these artificial indulgences have made us all addicted to sour patch kids and free porn!”).  However, I am not here to argue for a puritanical simplification of the world’s stimuli. I just want to understand my drag sisters a little better.

If we use the lens of supernormal stimuli to look at Ru and her cohorts, we can understand why heterosexual men may, indeed, be quite attracted to these gurls.  Just like the birds who were drawn to the brighter (though synthetic) eggs, so are some men attracted to the fiercely painted faces of drag queens (or comparably fabulous biogirls). Studies have shown that faces with greater feature contrast (eg, lip color significantly darker than skin color) are viewed to be more feminine; thus, the magenta lipstick of a queen serves as a superstimulus for naturally feminine lips. Features viewed as attractive presumably gain such value because they are, in some way, linked to reproductive health and/or strong genes. In other words, they signal, “it’s worth your time to come bone me!” Therefore, by enhancing these fitness indicators, we thereby enhance bone-ability.

And yet, despite the aggregation of superstimuli that is the modern drag queen, most of these individuals are not viewed as the pinnacle of feminine beauty. So, why is drag-face not the ultimate supersexual stimuli? The stereotypical queen has a look comprised of super-eyes, super-lips, and super-duper-hair…and somehow, all of these elements come together to create an image that, in all its superness, becomes almost alien (see below, Nina Flowers and Madame LaQueer). The queen no longer sufficiently resembles a genuine female, and, in many cases, fails to even look human (sorry, gurl). If the goal of our selective search is to find to find an intercourse partner of our own species, sexual energy is wasted on the eleganza of our drag specimens. This, of course, is compounded by the fact that most individuals viewing a drag queen enter that experience with a priori knowledge of the queen’s biological sex.

Flowers

Laqueer 

And yet, there are some exceptional cases…cases in which the queen achieves such a level of realness that a heterosexual male passerby does hit on a ladyboy in the absence of biology-clarifying context clues. Such a queen, said to be “serving fish,”  indeed represents a supermodel superstimulus. Consider, below, the beauties Carmen Carrera and Tatianna.

    Carmen            

Tatianna    

These fishy queens utilize cosmetics to disguise their “maleness” and highlight their “femaleness”, achieving a hyperfeminine aesthetic that would likely attract a heterosexual male ignorant to their XY secret. And these bitches know it.

Skilled queens know exactly which features to mask and which to forge in order to create an overall look that not only reads as female, but as a super sexy female. Of course, Carmen cannot relate the numerical values for feature ratios associated with traditional beauty, but through trial, error, and the sagacity of a seasoned drag mother, she manages to utilize such ratios in applying her face.  A diligent analysis of geometric components comprising the complexions of Tatianna and Carmen would likely reveal ratios similar to those found in biological females, yet slightly exaggerated to produce attractive superstimuli. If, however, we applied a similar analysis to Ms. Flowers and Ms. LaQueer, we would observe their ratios to be exponentially disturbed or entirely independent of any equation for beauty (No T, no shade!).

Though there are currently no studies on the mathematics of drag (trust me, I’ve looked), in attempting to create a superfishy look, the queen is implicitly utilizing geometry and trigonometry for her face.  And, upon examining the silhouette of such queens, you may find that creative costuming has produced a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of ~0.7— this value is an indicator of female reproductive fitness and has been found to activate neural “reward” centers in heterosexual males. Of course, if a WHR of 0.7 represents a sexy female stimulus, wouldn’t further decreasing that value increase said sexiness and, indeed, femininity?….

I think the moral of the story is: yes, within limits. As psychologist Ronald Henss puts it, “Although there is abundant evidence that supranormal stimuli may be more effective than naturally occurring variations of a trait, it is self-evident that this principle cannot be stretched till infinity. For WHR, as for any other morphological trait, there is a certain point, beyond which it appears grotesque, thoroughly unhealthy, and repelling.”

In other words, you get Sharon Needles.

Ok, Tumblr bandwagon, room for one more?

I’ve resisted blogging for many reasons, the primary deterrent being the presumptuousness it implies: “here are my banal daily ruminations, the world. You can thank me later.” But ultimately, whether it’s blogging, tweeting, facehooking, or whoresquaring, an online presence in this era is an assumed extension of self and, indeed, may redefine that self and the perception thereof (I’ll get there).

But could it be dangerous to contribute further to my already-cluttered virtual persona? There’s been a lot of talk lately about the potential damages of our obsession with the internet and related technologies. In April, Sherry Turkle wrote a NYTimes piece titled “The Flight From Conversation,” in which she discussed emotional implications of the instant-access age:

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Essentially, Turkle highlights the modern paradox wherein, by constantly “connecting” to “everyone,” we fail to truly connect to anyone at all, especially ourselves.  I don’t completely disagree with Turkle, so much as I feel that she fails to acknowledge that this phenomenon is only a modern incarnation of a paradox that has persisted throughout all of civilization.

Put simply: in order to translate our thoughts into any medium accessible to others, we must withdraw. Take, for example, the man writing that novel that is going to change the world. In the name of “sharing,” the man will likely become a recluse such that he may complete his masterpiece. Now, certainly, the full impact of this world-altering manifesto will be well worth any damage to the man’s personal life—so what if he has ignored his friends and family for a decade? Think of how many others he is now reaching!!

Perhaps, in this case, one man’s social martyrdom is “worth it.” Surely, he is not significantly damaging all of human interaction by missing a few potlucks to stay home and write. Well, the problem is that this man is one in a million. Most books are not worth the social sacrifice it takes to compose them. And if we all spent our lives at home writing, society would cease to exist and, well, there wouldn’t be much to write about.

What I’m saying is: the presumptuousness of writing a blog is necessarily present in any form of writing/communicating. In the hopes of composing something that will reach masses, we withdraw from those who immediately surround us—talk about “present company excluded.”  We somehow feel more real as our audience increases in size. And with its seeming ability to reach anyone, anywhere in the world, the internet has brought our compulsion to “share” to a new extreme.

Yes, the extremity is new, but the nature of this compulsion is far from novel. One can imagine a similar sort of frenzy with the advent of the printing press. It’s pretty much the same idea: innovative technology allows the thoughts/words of a single person to be disseminated all over the world. While the printing press had the most immediate utility for previously established scientists/philosophers/politicians, it eventually affected a democratization of the printed word that would have implications for society as a whole. Indeed, with the printing press came increased literacy and the circulation of diverse ideologies that dramatically empowered the “common man.”  He now had access to libraries of information previously only available to the elite. And, importantly, all men had an implicit promise that if they put pen to paper, perhaps the world would read.

Now, it does not matter who actually ends up consuming a given composition. What matters is the silent audience that is assumed as one composes it. The same is true for  internet dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be). The inventions of both Gutenberg and Zuckerberg allowed the everyman to contribute to world’s conversation and, simultaneously, removed him from the world he so desperately hoped to change.

Though the analogy here is obvious, what is contentious is the degree to which these inventions help us or hurt us. While a piece like Turkle’s likely received many a “hear! hear!” from parents trying to pry teens from their iPhones, I doubt such supporters would denounce printing presses and any books they render. And if you no longer embrace the analogy…well then, I might as well take it a step further while I’m at it.

Verbal sharing at its most basic level—that is, talking—breeds isolation. I sense resistance here: “How can talking be on the list of antisocial technologies? It is inherently social!” Yes, but it facilitates a retreat into one’s mind that is ultimately solitary. Presumably, the meme* of language evolved such that we would be better able to communicate with our cohorts, yet, eventually, this tool would function to organize our thoughts for internal use as well. Though language as a behavior should serve to coordinate the activity of a group, over the years, this meme has taken on an entirely different role. The majority of sentences that pass through our head stay in our heads and facilitate colorful conversation without the need for another human being. Similarly,  the internet was intended to allow us to connect to others, yet the only person reading the majority of words typed is the same person who types them!

(*as in, evolutionary meme, not internet meme!)

So while we post and poke to connect to others, we are truly creating a feedback loop for our own thoughts. As Turkle puts it, “‘I share, therefore I am.’ We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them” Turkle, of course, refers to internet sharing; however, we create an analogous feedback when we form verbal thoughts for our “stream of consciousness.” 

The way we speak and write does not just communicate “our thoughts,” but rather facilitates the creation of said thoughts by organizing otherwise unwieldy neural processes. Turkle laments “Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete.” But we do the same thing every time we speak a sentence or form a thought: we edit the world into discrete and manageable verbal components that behoove us.

So we see that internal monologue and, indeed, consciousness is simply “talking” to an imagined audience. As we change the form and complexity of “sharing,” so does that consciousness. For example, as we are introduced to long-form narrative (even orally), we may imagine ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories, or at the very least think of our lives as character arcs. More complex compositions allow us to ponder more complex concepts. And importantly, the ability to reach wider audiences creates a drive to do so in order to establish a sense of self: just as we cannot appreciate our internal state without verbalizing it, so now do fail to fully feel ourselves in the world without engaging in virtual “communication.”

Interestingly, the evolution of “sharing” technology has led us, not to wildly complicated linguistic compositions, but rather to curt and clumsy tweets (or facebook posts, etc). So if we consider the notion that our method of sharing reshapes our consciousness…well, this could be interesting. The impulsive, succinct nature of internet lingo is actually more ephemeral than anything humankind has seen in quite some time, and is almost animalistic in nature. 140-word ejaculations simply don’t relate to human emotion as we conceive of it, which is perhaps why Turkle argues that it threatens psychological health. Again, I don’t necessarily disagree, but there’s another can of worms to be opened here.

If language in its various forms created social and internal consciousness once, could it now be recreating it? That is to say, could tweets be the building blocks of a new form of phenomenal existence? Of course, in the short term, the answer is no—the language system we have in place and accompanying psychology would not allow it. But if internet communication in its various manifestations comes to replace language as the meme supreme, we may someday reach a type of consciousness categorically distinct from that which we experience currently.

Just as it would be moot to try to explain our “feelings” to an organism without language, so is it impossible to imagine what this consciousness might be like on a subjective level. And to wonder whether this hypothetical consciousness would be “better” or “worse,” well…that’s like asking a bat if he thinks he has it “better” than us.  It seems that the real emotional conundrum we face (and that Turkle bemoans) is the following: our language reflects an archaic consciousness that does not necessarily align with the emoticonsciousness of the facebook era. So while we continue to adapt our internet lingo (#ZOMG!), we revert back to traditional language for the rare occasions on which we chat with someone face-to-face.  So though our computers hold the framework for the evolution of a new language/consciousness, it is at odds with the consciousness we grew up with (both as individuals and as a society). It is unlikely that our brain can support two psychologically distinct manners of functioning so, at present, it is a touch confused—thus, the mental distress.

…As this rant becomes excessively long, I’m realizing that (1) my consciousness is oh-so far from any imagined twitter phenomenology, and (2) I clearly don’t know how to blog.

There’s so much more to say on this topic! But…to whom? In presenting the above post, am I claiming that I have something so meaningful to offer that it is worth time spent withdrawing from social life (/missing optimal sun-tanning opportunities)? Well, no, but it’s given me a moment to think m’thoughts the only way a Gen-Y gal knows how.  I wouldn’t be able to keep track of such abstract concepts without written word, and I wouldn’t feel like I existed without the illusion of an audience. So in blogging for “you,” I have taught some things to “me.” You’re welcome, little homunculus!