Beauty who beat hundreds of women to final of modelling competition revealed to be a man

[Guest]

Beauty who beat hundreds of women to final of modelling competition revealed to be a man

 

http://www.telegraph...o-be-a-man.html

 

(Yes I started a ladyboy thread)

[Rogie]

As a performer with Ladyboys of Bangkok I could well imagine that gave what must already have been a very ambitious person the confidence and poise to impress a few impressionable judges from a small seaside town on England's south coast. Actually I have a soft spot for Brighton as I spent 3 years there as a student.

[Guest thaiworthy]

As a performer with Ladyboys of Bangkok I could well imagine that gave what must already have been a very ambitious person the confidence and poise to impress a few impressionable judges from a small seaside town on England's south coast.

 

When someone wants something badly enough as some ladyboys do who want to be women, I think your confidence and charisma power-charge the looks, approach and personality much more than their real women counterparts. That might make her seem more a woman than real women are. It can happen If you pursue your femininity with the same fervor as that which you annihilate your masculinity. And it helps if you are a natural.

 

Good for her. I think she deserves to flaunt it. As my conservative father once said when I showed him my pictures from Tiffany's, "That's a guy!?"

 

"No Dad, she's called a transvestite." It was so typical of him to have used the demonstrative pronoun in this case instead of the personal pronoun. Had he done that he might have had a convulsion, I suppose or some horrible nausea. He made a sour face and walked away. Sorry, Dad. You are only demonstrating your own ignorance.

 

Case in point: it is interesting how I can defend ladyboys when it comes to personal expression, but I take it just as badly when aggressively confronted by it without provocation, such as the famous ladyboy thread. This may be our most popular subject yet, that and airline fares.

 

(Yes I started a ladyboy thread)

 

Is this a change of taste, Z? You're not going to change your avatar again, are you!?

[Guest fountainhall]

When someone wants something badly enough . . .

 

Isn't that the real reason Khun Toon made it to the final? The judges really wanted her there to add glamour and a touch of the exotic to their competition and were blinded to what might have been reality.

 

The tale reminds me of David Henry Hwang's wonderful stage play M Butterfly - sadly made into a poor movie with the weak and ineffectual John Lone (B. D. Wong on Broadway was vastly more convincing) and Jeremy Irons. That was based on the true story of French diplomat Renee Gallimard. When serving in Beijing, he fell in love with Chinese Opera singer, Song Liling. They had a child and eventually returned to France, living together for 20 years.

 

Song turns out to be not only a spy, but also a man. Never once, the play tells us, did Gallimard consider Song was anything other than a woman. After serving a term in prison, Gallimard commits suicide as Song looks on dispassionately smoking a cigarette. The parallels to Puccini's opera are obvious.

 

Can you actually live with a fully formed man and not know 'she' is 'he'? Clearly it's possible. Mind over matter!

 

Last year I met a gorgeous Thai transexual who has had the operation and has lived with her rich boyfriend in Monte Carlo for more than 3 years. She told me her boyfriend still does not realise that at one time his lover was a man. Her surgeon sure earned his money

[Guest fountainhall]

In the thread From today’s ‘The Nation’, I have quoted from Alex Ker’s excellent book: Bangkok Found. This thread calls for another quote, one that illustrates how the concept of the ‘lady-boy’ comes from Thailand’s deep-rooted traditional culture, and how it may have come to be accepted within society here.

 

Kerr talks about the pervasive influence of dance in everyday life in Thailand, and in particular of the traditional Khon dance. It’s difficult to get through a day in Bangkok, he writes, without running across some reference to dance, either an advertisement with a model wearing a golden Khon-style crown, or a tourist poster of dancers posing in front of ancient ruins.

 

Khon’s pivotal role traces back to ancient India. Thailand, after all, belongs to “Indianized Southeast Asia,” in contrast to Vietnam, Japan and Korea, where China exerted the primary influence. For dance, this makes a drastic difference because India, unlike China, loved the human body.

 

In India, naked male and female dancers cavort in temple friezes; Lord Shiva whirls ecstatically with one leg raised as Lord of the Dance. Dance and the body are divine. This was not true in China or Japan, where the human body disappears in layers of robes and kimono, and dancers rarely feature in high art. In the old days, the Chinese and Japanese authorities viewed dance performances as vulgar. They ranked Peking Opera performers and Kabuki actors as lower than beggars.

 

He continues

 

It's no accident that yin and yang come together in dance, because dance and music are so closely linked to sex, as the ancient Indians well understood . . . By the simple fact of being the human body in motion, dance everywhere in the world carries erotic overtones . . .

 

As for Thai classical drama, Lakhon nai started out as drama performed by women inside the palace, with women performing male roles. Khon, on the other hand, which had been all-male at its origin, came over time to include women and the techniques of Lakhon nai. With all the mixing and blending going on, lines between yin and yang blurred. Female roles took on masculine strength and male roles took on feminine delicacy . . .

 

One is tempted to extrapolate beyond Khon to the androgynous nature of Thai society in general . . . the model of Thai manhood isn’t sweaty, musclebound Rambo, but refined, soft-spoken Rama . . . there’s a disregard for male robustness, and a bent for effeminacy on the construction of the hero figure in classical literature. Make-up in likay folk opera must emphasize the prettiness of the phra ek (leading man), which the largely female fans demand. Similarly, youths are happy to primp like Japanese boy bands to please their girlfriend.

 

So do many young ‘metrosexuals’ in London and New York, But go a few steps further and you arrive at the katoey (male-to-female transsexuals) . . . Surely no other country in the world gives such a prominent and even honored role to its “lady-boys”.

 

Kerr also points out that in Thailand as late as the 19^th century, men and women dressed almost identically. How can you dress like the opposite sex if both sexes dress the same? They both wore their hair short, a sarong for the lower body, and often the upper part unclothed.

 

He quotes an American visitor to Bangkok in the 1830s, Edmund Roberts, as saying about an official dinner: “As I cannot tell a Siamese man from a woman, when numbers are seated together, so it is out of my power to say whether any females were present (amongst the audience) . . . the hair of Siamese women is cut like that of the men; their countenances are, in fact, more masculine than those of the males.”

 

So, Kerr speculates, perhaps because of the long-standing traditional permissible boundaries between genders, not only katoey, but also gay life, seem more prominent to visitors in Bangkok than in other countries.

 

Excerpts from Bangkok Found: Reflections on the City by Alex Kerr published by River Books