“Sleeping Hermaphroditus,” a second century Roman copy of a Hellenistic work, marble. Musée du Louvre. The mythical figure, child of the Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite, was said to be both male and female.

Caster Semenya and the complexity of gender

May 8, 2019

The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, has ruled that elite South African runner and Olympic champion Caster Semenya cannot compete with other women in endurance races, because her body naturally produces too much testosterone, giving her an “unfair” advantage.

Caitlyn Jenner, feminism and the beauty trap

June 10, 2015

Provocative piece in The New York Time’s Sunday Review by journalist, filmmaker and former women’s studies professor Elinor Burkett, who, while sympathetic to transgendered women like Caitlyn Jenner, doesn’t want them to co-opt her experience of womanhood.

“…As much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman,” Burkett writes in “What Makes A Woman?”

For her, the answer to that question takes a lot more than the nail polish Jenner referred to in her interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “20/20.”

The essay earned Burkett the sobriquet “crotchety” and brought me back to the days of my youth when feminists were often considered humorless battle-axes who despised Marilyn Monroe. ...

Goodbye, Bruce. Hello, Caitlyn

June 1, 2015

And Godspeed. Reaction to Bruce Jenner’s metamorphosis into Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair has been predictably all over the place and, just as predictably, says more about the commenters than it does about Caitlyn.

There’s no point in dwelling on those who think she’s sick or out for publicity. They just don’t get it.

More interesting are those comments that criticize the pinup aspect of the Annie Leibovitz cover. Let’s face it, if you’re going to transform yourself physically into the sex you believe you always were, well, then you and we want to see that transformation. As for the poster on The New York Times’ site who said that the way to be a smokin’-hot woman at 60 is to live the previous 59 years as a man, well, he – I’m sure it was a he – has a point. I’ve often said on this blog and elsewhere that men are the more beautiful, sexier and thrilling of the two traditional sexes. It’s part of the reason I write about beautiful, sexy, thrilling men in my novel series “The Games Men Play.” ...

The transgendered nature of art

April 30, 2015

Bruce Jenner’s transition to womanhood and the profile of transgendered model Andreja Pejić in May Vogue have got me thinking about the transgendered nature of art.

Consider Thomas Hardy – whose “Far From the Madding Crowd” has been made into a new film starring Carey Mulligan, the sensual Matthias Schoenaerts and the estimable Michael Sheen. For him to create some of fiction’s greatest romantic heroines, and heroes, he had to understand a woman’s mind and heart as well as that of a man. For George Balanchine to create some of ballet’s finest works, he had to know a woman’s body as intimately as a man’s.

Art has also long been preoccupied with hermaphroditism – the condition of having the physical attributes of both sexes. In ancient Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus – son of Hermes, the messenger god, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty – was a beautiful youth beloved by the water nymph Salmacis, who embraced him against his will in her pool and prayed that the two would become one. ...

Bruce Jenner and the divided self

April 27, 2015

Much of what has been written and said about Bruce Jenner coming out as a transgendered woman has been derisive and ignorant, the two qualities usually going hand-in-hand. Watching his interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “20/20,” I could only feel sadness. It must be terrible to spend your whole life thinking it’s wrong to be yourself.

The self is much under siege nowadays, no doubt as a backlash to our cult of narcissism. The self must be sacrificed to the good of others – critics say. Never mind that others can become a kind of tyranny that crushes the individual spirit.

I’m no libertarian, but you cannot sacrifice what you do not possess. Self-sacrifice implies a self to sacrifice. I thought the single most illuminating moment in the interview was the one in which Jenner said that stepdaughter Kim Kardashian reached out to him in support after her husband, Kanye West, told her that unless you’re happy in yourself it doesn’t matter how wonderful your wife and child are. ...