Girlhood, Chickdom and Womanliness

September 1, 2002
By PENELOPE GREEN




 

WELCOME, gender explorer. Today is the perfect time for you
to become the kind of woman you want to be."

Those are the first words of "Miss Vera's Cross-Dress for
Success: A Resource Guide for Boys Who Want to Be Girls"
(Villard, $12.95). It is the second book by Veronica Vera,
headmistress of the world's first cross-dressing academy,
Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls,
which opened in Manhattan in 1992.

With this title, she invites readers to cherchez la femme
within by wearing proper footwear and supportive
undergarments and by learning good grooming habits. Stories
of happy academy graduates, like George, a fish-and-game
warden who transformed himself into Michelle, a housewife,
help Miss Vera, who indeed is a woman, evoke what she calls
a "tranny planet." Miss Vera reminds us that "tranny" is
short for transgender, a word used to define anyone, she
says, from a feminist to a post-op transsexual who wants
"to transcend the confines of gender."

"For every woman who burned her bra," Miss Vera writes,
"there is a man ready to wear one." For Miss Vera,
femininity is totally do it yourself. "Change your
outerwear and you reveal the inner you," she writes.

But what kind of girl is inside? This question informs more
than Miss Vera's manual. The muse of total girlhood (and
how to shop for it) hovers over much of this fall's style
reading list.

In "Girl Anatomy" (William Morrow, $24.95) she appears as
Lilly, a label-conscious sprite in high heels and low-rise
jeans.

"Girl Anatomy," a roman à clef, is the first novel of
Rebecca Bloom, a 26-year-old Brown graduate, a jewelry
designer and Hollywood sprig. Ms. Bloom's father is Jake
Bloom, an entertainment industry lawyer, and her press
materials describe a childhood surrounded by "powerhouse
V.I.P.'s and celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Nicolas Cage and James Caan." (Manly mentors for a girly
girl?)

Anyway, Lilly is an assistant to an editor at Chick
magazine, "a new magazine for the too-cool-for-school
girl," testing products and laboring under "deadlines with
psychos breathing down my scrawny neck." She pines for new
clothes, and struggles with a dark mood brought on by a
friend's engagement as well as with a powerful inner
duality: "One of me lives in a world of cheap bars, thrift
store furniture and vintage clothes. The other resides in a
pink palace dotted with contemporary art, Prada pillows and
movie stars." There are lots and lots of narrative details,
which mostly read like the captions in Lucky magazine.
Actually, you might want to have a copy of Lucky around as
a reader's aid to give you a mental picture of Earl jeans
or John Fluevog shoes.

"At this stage in my life," Ms. Bloom writes, "black pants
are my staple. Not just any pair of black pants, but my
Katayone Adeli pinstripe lightweight wool trousers." Lilly
likes to wear them with "an overpriced Rolling Stones
baseball T-shirt with a smattering of rhinestones,
high-heeled black boots and a long, black coat." Luckily,
Lilly is blessed with a fabulously dressed, supportive
family that nurses her through the dark times (and many
outfits), after which she finds happiness with her former
love, Jonah, and the "time to savor and loll about in my
total and complete chickdom." Are women born to shop, asks
Thomas Hine, author of "I Want That! How We All Became
Shoppers" (HarperCollins, $24.95). With a soupçon of
neuroscience and a dash of evolutionary psychology, Mr.
Hines explains that while men have demonstrated the upper
hand in exercises like mentally rotating an imagined object
in space, they are unable to locate said object in a
contemporary department store.

Mr. Hines debunks the hunter-gatherer explanation for
women's shopping prowess, which argues that the habit of
shopping is a holdover from all the rooting around girls
did while the boys were out killing mammoths. According to
archaeological evidence, both sexes hunted and gathered,
Mr. Hines points out. As he sees it, the reason for a
woman's overwhelming assumption of (and delight in)
shopping duties can be chalked up to her "willingness to
take primary responsibility for the well-being" of her
family. (Spit-shine your halos, ladies!) Weaving
contemporary cultural studies, anthropology, science and
his own powers of observation, Mr. Hines proposes that
shopping "is a modern way of assuming a primal
responsibility."

The connection between products and feminine behavior is
entertainingly documented in "Pink Think: Becoming a Woman
in Many Uneasy Lessons," by Lynn Peril (W. W. Norton &
Company, $15.95). Using her own deliciously quaint
collection of pop-culture curiosities (Ms. Peril calls it
"femorabilia") that include magazine ads, child-rearing and
teenage manuals, home-economics textbooks and teenage
novels, products and games, the author unveils a social
history of femininity from 1940 to 1970. Through board
games with names like Miss Popularity and Park and Shop -
both intended to teach the womanly art of shopping -and
advertisements for products like a Lysol douche, Ms. Peril
reveals an entire world organized around raising and/or
becoming a tidy wife and mother who keeps her mouth shut,
her legs crossed and her skirts wrinkle-free.

Another sendup of women's tortured relationship with
self-improvement is "I Love My Hair," (Stewart, Tabori &
Chang, $12.95) by Maria Peevey and Megan Weinerman. A
deadpan takeoff on the self-help movement, this bright pink
workbook is full of exercises and affirmations: learn to
love your hair by drawing a picture of it; perk yourself up
by writing your favorite affirmations on flashcards ("I've
got it and you can't have it."); feel rich by making dollar
bills out of green construction paper and pasting your own
photo in the center. You'll also learn how to redecorate
your room with glow-in-the-dark planets and stars. "If you
don't like the world you're in," the authors write, "make
one up by building your own universe in your bedroom."

There is profound interior inspiration in "Super Suite: The
Ultimate Bedroom Makeover for Girls," by Mark Montano
(Universe, $17.95), a New York City fashion designer and
the author of CosmoGirl's Cool Room column. "Super Suite"
documents Mr. Montano's makeovers of 15 rooms belonging to
real live teenage girls. In it, you'll learn how to make
your own throne, about a headboard made from cookie sheets,
a pop-art masterpiece made from 250 blue plastic cups, and
a Warholian poster of . . . yourself.

Mr. Montano showcases the girls and their rooms
beautifully, and you'll find yourself longing for a pink
polyester-satin bedspread ($13 at a five-and-dime store), a
sheaf of $1 posters of Hindu deities and a few quarts of
high-gloss hot-pink enamel, No. 2077-30 from Benjamin
Moore, a color the company calls Hot Lips.

"Super Suite" presents the fall's most engaging
transformations (though the story of Gayle, the Southern
entrepreneur and grandfather who became a bride at Miss
Vera's academy, is pretty sweet, too).

The most eye-popping, however, are delivered by the cast
and sets portrayed in "Be My Guest: Theme Party Savoir
Faire," by Rena Sindi (Assouline, $34.95). Ms. Sindi is a
New York social figure and party lover who has staged all
manner of elaborate shindigs for her friends in Manhattan's
shiny set. Fourteen of them, from an "Arabian Nights" 30th
birthday for her husband to a Venetian-style bal masque,
are reproduced here.

Photographed by Jessica Craig-Martin, this navel-close view
of the haute bourgeoisie with the women writhing in
jewel-encrusted bustiers and the men slightly ridiculous in
their turbans and togas, both attracts and repels. You
can't help comparing it with the wretched excess dos of the
last boom, but, jeez, those tycoons were so square - those
Steinbergs and Kravises - with their hoedowns and their
living tableaus. This crowd is younger and hipper, and its
borders are more permeable (you'll see a model or two in
the mix). The result is more sophisticated, and possibly
more decadent: a photograph of the doll-like Paris Hilton,
her skin as smooth as nail enamel, reveals an expression of
ecstatic nothingness that is more frightening than anything
I've seen in a while.

Why a theme party, you wonder? What does it all mean? Ms.
Sindi explains: "I'll never forget that first excited shock
that hit me when I walked into Pia and Christopher Getty's
`Tarzan and Jane' party a few summers ago," she writes.
"Everywhere I looked, the buttoned-up women I knew from the
city floated by in tiny, cut-suede dresses, loosely knotted
sarongs, coconut bras and leopard spots. Their husbands had
traded in their suits for loincloths, cheetah-print
G-strings and, in my own husband's case, Zulu warrior garb
in the form of a shield and not much else. He dragged me
into the tent on a rope, which stunned more than a few
guests but earned us Pia's prize for best costume: a
sterling silver banana"

That banana, writes Ms. Sindi, "is precisely what this book
is all about."

Miss Vera would be proud.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/fashion/01BOOK.html?ex=1031891280&ei=1&en=aaec3062b57f132c