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

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A simulacrum is a likeness, image or effigy; bearing a superficial similarity to its original, it is a placeholder or sign for the real thing, a representation rather than a replication. The instrumental suffix -crum signifies something which might be used in a simulation, like a baby doll in a nativity play, a CPR dummy, or a scale model of the moon for rehearsing the Apollo mission: something, that is, having the mere appearance of another thing: a specious imitation. Jean Baudrillard, however, galvanizes the word with post-modern magic, stratifying its meaning into three or four gradations. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), the simulacrum becomes something more than a mere likeness; it is the image that ‘murders’ reality. The violence of the hyperbole is startling.

“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.”

Let’s try an analysis. I’ll take a subject close to home. Just up the street, in fact.

Regard this beautiful woman. She is standing by the entrance to an entertainment plaza in a certain 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?

Arguably yes — and for that reason he has kept his dick.

The majority of ladyboys do, and not just 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 kathoey 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 she knows this. Mew’s penis matters as much to her as to any other man – it is her livelihood, her value, and her 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, 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 costs 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 her, can no longer be counted as straight, exactly, though since he is not attracted to men you cannot say he is gay either, or for that matter 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 who are seduced by ladyboys and eventually grow to enjoy them more than the women they simulate. In some cases they become, in time, fixated on the simulacrum. 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 now masking the absence of the real, which persists only in rotting shreds clinging to certain points on the map. 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, a world of references without referents, copies without originals, signs to nowhere and portraits of no one. It is not real, but it is not unreal either – it is hyperreal.

Thus futanari – literally ‘to be of two kinds’, or ‘dual forms’ – exhibit the precession of simulacra. The burgeoning of androgynes 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, as in Shakespeare, 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.

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, the creatures of the mythical forest of Himmaphan are everywhere, and such representations are copies without originals, merely playing at being an appearance: the kinnara, then, is a third-phase image, of the order of sorcery.

किन्नर? (Sanskrit: Is this a man?)

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Baudrillard’s paradoxes do not strike us as counter-intuitive in the least. On the contrary, hyperreality seems both imminent and immanent; as ‘reality’ approaches its crisis, it seems to breathe from every surface, artistic, sexual, political, technological, theoretical. Biologically-inspired robotics have quickly manifested Philip K Dick’s vision in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – a title which neatly encapsulates the short-circuiting of reality that Baudrillard describes. Robotic cockroaches and mules and cheetahs and snakes and fish and dragonflies already exist; once the bees are gone, to leave Google’s robotic pollinators servicing Monsanto’s genetically engineered plants, how long before humanoid robots will climb from the cinema screens to hunt humans in packs? At that point, the precession of simulacra will be nearing completion, and we will feel, too late, the murderous capacity of the image. 

But long before that day comes, here comes 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 Shakespearean. More to the point, essentially Baudrillardian. The simulation of a simulation. 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.” 

A few years ago, I heard talk of some designer brand of handbags which was the commercial victim of many rip-offs 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.”