HANGING WITH THE HANGETSU

Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929

“Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance — representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance — it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance — it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Look at this beautiful woman. She is standing by the entrance to an entertainment plaza in a South-East Asian capital of some ten million souls. Or ten million people, rather, there being far more souls than bodies in this city. Her name is Mew. 

She’s standing in the entrance, in a sexy dress, swinging a hip. Tall as a model, with jutting breasts and a teasing smile, she is perfect from every angle as long as she keeps still. The simulation is betrayed by her hyper-feminine movements. And her voice, when she speaks.

Is ‘Mew’ a first order simulacrum, of the order of sacraments? Does this impersonation of a woman, like a work of art, defer to the original? Does ‘Mew’, in his life-longing to be one, acknowledge the ineffable nature of woman?

Well, yes — that’s why he has kept his dick.

The majority of ladyboys do, and not because they are still saving up for this last and most expensive staging point on their transformative journey. Value lies in difference, and it is the penis that acknowledges the sovereignty of the original and makes the khatoey a work of art, of the order of sacraments. The simulation is revealed as artificial, groping towards reality… at least, by the end of the night. 

More prosaically: he keeps his dick because the dick is money. 

Let’s not assume, then, that Mew wants to be a perfect illusion: rather, a flickering double-image; half-moon, futanari, khatoey. Without the penis, the ambiguous tease, the post-modern flirtation, would be lost. Reconstruction of the genitals would be a stupid and irredeemable mistake, signaling the end of the performance and consignment to the lowest rung of femininity, and he knows this. Mew’s penis matters as much to him as to any other man – it is livelihood, value, and sacrament. 

But Mew is both more and less than a work of art; simultaneously a first and a second order simulacrum. Mew’s simulation of a beautiful woman does indeed threaten the original – the Bangkok bar-girl – by trying to steal her customers. She is magical for as long as you are deceived by her appearance. Once she exposes the secret penis, her business is to usurp the anima in your mind and your bed – to be better than a girl. If she can do that she graduates to the second order, no longer a work of art but an “evil appearance… of the order of maleficence”. Masculinity and femininity die in a murder-suicide, and resurrect themselves in a new synthesis. The fact that she charges more than a girl suggests that the precession of simulacra is, in this field, already an economic reality. 

You might think she has a different clientele, but there is a big overlap, and Mew, believe me, loves nothing better than to seduce a ‘straight’ man. Of course a straight man, led astray by Mew, can no longer be counted as straight, exactly, though since he is not attracted to men you cannot say he is gay either, or even, strictly speaking, bisexual. 

The physical changes Mew has gone through are mirrored by the remodeling that occurs within the psyche of her customer. I know men who only like chicks; some of those chicks just happen to have dicks. These are men who could never be attracted to another man, but they are seduced by ladyboys and come to enjoy them more than the women they simulate. In some cases they become completely fixated. Now they can’t fancy a woman unless she’s not a woman. 

In such a case, the original object of desire has disappeared, to be replaced by its image, a simulacrum masking the absence of the real. All notion of an original is forgotten and only the fiction remains. Such a man inhabits the dark side of the half-moon, so to speak. The object of desire is not real, but it is not unreal either – it is hyperreal. Strangely, then, futanari – literally ‘to be of two kinds’, or ‘dual forms’ – provide the perfect example of that state, in which the simulation has taken on a life of its own, and is no longer of the order of appearances at all.

∆

Transvestism in South-East Asia has a very different tone to the ugly, politicised transgender movement in the West. Governments in Thailand have been attempting to modernise their laws to deal with discrimination and status, and Thai citizens are now legally able to change their gender on official documents — but there has been none of the hysteria over rights, the obsessing over latrines, or the shocking sexualisation of children in schools, or the surgical transitioning of minors. The Miss Thailand World beauty contest is for women only; khatoeys can compete in their own Miss Tiffany’s Universe pageant. Thailand follows IOC rules in sport but male participation in women’s sports is low, and has not as far as I know thrown up major controversies. All in all, androgyny in Asia is not afflicted with the insanity, exhibitionism and hatred that have wrapped themselves in layers around the issue in the West. Here, there is no deconstructionist hyper-liberal Left seeking to exploit any and every divisive socio-psychological issue or grievance. In Asia the phenomenon has deeper historical roots, and social attitudes have evolved around it: it is what it is, and no one needs claim to be a woman, when khatoeys are socially accepted as a third sex. So we are spared the tortured post-modern convolutions of logic and linguistics, and the pathetic spectacle of squirming politicians pretending they don’t know what a woman is. All of that is left to the declining Western Empire of the Absurd.

The Eastern tradition is more storied, more poetic. When the kick-boxer Parinya Charoenphol, or ‘Nong Tum‘, entered the Muay Thai ring as a sixteen-year-old khatoey back in the nineties, it went without saying that s/he fought against other males. S/he was an overnight star — the illusion of watching a demure, graceful young woman fighting and winning against men even sparked renewed interest in the sport, which had been in decline.

It’s said that the tradition of androgyny in Asia is rooted not in biology or genetics but in rumour, theatre, and folk religion. Traditional clothing in Japan made it easy to dissemble gender; for instance, a woman could easily dress as a man to gain access to a prohibited area, or a man could dress as a woman and hide a weapon or contraband in the belt bag. Security guards were therefore posted at key points in the city to perform body checks, and whether or not their genesis lay in actual cases of clitoromegaly or hermaphrodism, the sensational stories told by these guards became popular and widespread.

The conventions of Onnagata theatre led to all kinds of identity-play, culminating in early 17th century Wakashū kabuki, which used casts of adolescent boys to play both male and female roles and dwelt on erotic themes. Surviving oral elements of Japanese folk-religion hint at tales of gender transformation; deities such as dōsojin had ambiguous gender, and were represented by both phallic and yonic symbols. Belief spread that people existed who could change their gender with the phases of the moon, and the term hangetsu or ‘half-moon’ (半月) was coined to describe such beings. From there the half-moon becomes a character in anime and manga, explodes into pornography, and onto the streets of Tokyo, Manila and Bangkok.

So the hangetsu emerges from folklore, like the various chimaera modeled in a thousand forms all over Bangkok, from the golden singh tigers guarding the Royal Palace to the kinnara birds adorning the lamp-posts, to statues and reliefs of the Great King Naga. Once you start looking, creatures of the mythical forest of Himmaphan are everywhere, images without originals, playing at being an appearance: third-phase images of the order of sorcery.

किन्नर? (Sanskrit: Is this a man?)

∆

And look, here comes one now — well, actually it’s Mew’s friend Wan, tottering on her stack heels, swinging her arm and bubbling, as always, with laughter. 

Wan ran away from home at twenty, and ended up in Pat Pong, working in a khatoey bar where most, though not all, of the girls were boys. That was its selling point; the name of the bar was ‘GUESS’. Runaway Wan was taken in by the ladyboys, who liked her and showed her the ropes. So it was natural that some of their mannerisms should rub off on her, and her persona become a salute to them. She adopted those angular gestures, the ironic hands, the gaily swinging arm – and she could be very gay, very funny, always pushing the joke, staccato laughter peppering her speech until it was almost incomprehensible. She had her hair dyed blonde, spiky as a cartoon, one side shaved, which grew back in her native black, giving her a two-tone, punkish look. A stud in the tongue and one in the nose, tattoos visible on her right arm and left shoulder. 

It was part of her job, and of the standing joke, to keep the customers guessing. Sometimes she would shove tissue paper down her shorts to make a little bulge. A girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl — it’s positively Shakespearean. More to the point, essentially Baudrillardian: the simulation of a simulation. As a female, Wan was the original the ladyboys were copying. When she copied their copy and paid homage to their homage, she became, not a fake, but a fake fake. 

“It plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery.” 

That’s you, baby.

A few years ago, I heard that one of the big designer brands of handbags, the commercial victim of many rip-offs, was bringing out a ‘fake fake’ line — i.e., the branded article, pretending to be a fake, made by the original producer but cutting corners to create a cheaper product.

I don’t know if that caught on. But Wan did – she was extremely popular; fake fake with a strap-on, of the third order of simulacra of Nana and Pat Pong. 

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NEXT: 4 —BAUDRILLARD IN BRABANT

“Meanwhile in the years immediately following the publication of Simulacra, the Disneyland of European terrorism only got weirder. In a series of slaughters in the Brabant region of Belgium, assailants in face paint and carnival masks gratuitously executed bystanders and hostages, including children, seemingly immune from police bullets and discernible motivation alike.”