The Man From Paris

Sometimes bizarre things happen. Fortunately, you understand the reasons behind most of these weird occurrences. But there are some where you simply have to just scratch your head and murmur to yourself, “What in the world…?”

In a hot, sweaty summer Beijing day in 1964, a man arrived from France to China was assigned a post at a French Embassy. That very summer, he met a girl who was six years his senior. At twenty years old, he was young, vibrant, and attractive. There was something about this pretty Asian girl that struck his chord. Needless to say, they fell in love and started their courtship that would last for the next two whole decades. In the process, the girl was pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy. The girl followed the Frenchman wherever he went as he shifted from post to post throughout China. They eventually were united together in 1983 in Paris, living as a happy family.

The man from Paris was Bernard Boursicot. His girlfriend was Shi Pei Pu, who turned out to be a naturally born, full biological male. This is the story that inspired the play “M. Butterfly.”

With immense curiosity, one has to wonder what exactly was going on. Questions were popping up all over the places, ranging from the ethical to unethical. How could a man not discover that the girl he was with for almost twenty years was actually a man? How was it possible then, once the truth was known that Shi was indeed a man, for him to give birth at all to a boy? Did anyone not notice the peculiar situation that was happening around them at that time?

Many things were unanswered. That is to say, unanswered directly from the demands of the public media. If the questions were asked “indirectly” and at the right person, we might have had different answers and cleared up most of the confusions, misunderstandings, and the sheer shock that this whole fiasco had created. That is where we need to dissect and delve right inside the psyche of Bernard Boursicot.

The mind of Boursicot is an interesting prospect. If analyzed correctly, he could be the archetypical example of the most forbidden, misinterpreted, and extraordinary topic that our society as a whole has ever discussed: The power and allure of a straight man’s fantasy for a MTF, aka male to female, aka transgendered woman.

Let me first state the clarification of what makes a male to female. The definition, taken from WordIQ.com, easily explained by the makeup of its name, describes a group of “people who were assigned male sex at birth and feel that this is not an accurate or complete description of themselves. They therefore identify as female or strive to fit a female gender role.” In another words, less the physical incongruence to their minds, they were born women. Further more, for the most part, the major difference between a transgendered woman to a biologically born female is the transgendered woman’s ability to maximize her feminine qualities to great heights and greater still.

What do I mean by “great heights?” There’s a very interesting saying that’s going around the society today: If a woman seems too perfect, too beautiful, or too stunning, she isn’t really a woman. We’ve all been in a situation where a tall, voluptuous, and gorgeous individual walks into a room who commands everyone’s attention and think, “Wow!” Granted, we might have experienced it in a drag show most of the time, but one gets the logic. The point is that this person walks as if trained by a world class model, body curvy and full as Kate Winslet’s, and face as smooth as a porcelain doll. Every gesture she creates is flowing. Every glance she gives is heart-stopping. Every smile she makes is mesmerizing. At times you could almost see a radiant glow emitting out of her, like a star. She is such a woman. A woman who is a superstar in her own right.

That was who Bouriscot saw in the summer of 1964. In his mind, Bouriscot saw in Shi a perfect woman. When they met, Shi was a trained performer for Peking Opera who often portrayed female roles. Bouriscot was so inundate by Shi’s trained feminine movements and calculated conversations that he failed to see the man behind a façade of blush, wigs, and dresses. The person more at fault here, however, was none other than Boursicot himself as he was blinded by the fantasy of what he wanted Shi to become as opposed to what Shi had become for him. He was inexplicably delusional. But can you blame him? He was straight after all. Yet, what’s getting the best of me is not the fact that he was straight, but the structure in the construction of the world of his fantasy.

To pick apart a straight man’s fantasy in this particular instance is no easy task. To try and comprehend why straight men fantasize the way they do about transgendered women will take highly hypothetical inquiries and intensely aggressive conclusions to fulfill my hunger for the truth, albeit a truth skewed and vastly biased. But I will attempt it regardless. And after much debate and arguing against myself, I’ve garnered four viable explanations for this phenomenon, which I call the “Barb Wire Effects.”

The first theory is fantasy displacement. As we grow up, influenced by given environments, our brains are trained to think and react in certain ways. What represents a believed ideology to a person is most likely one hundred percent different than what another person has in his mind. Bouriscot’s youth was filled with teachings of family and catholic values. He was imprisoned within four invisibles walls of yearning and lust as a young adult, and in desperation, he created a fantasy world of which that did not exist in real life, a place he roamed about freely and carelessly. Blinded by his failed retaliation to reality, Shi somehow fit in right in this fantasy world. Shi became Bouriscot’s imaginary maiden who would accompany him to wherever he wished. In an interview later to KPBS On Air Magazine, as Bouriscot succumbed to reality, he shared that, “When I believed it, it was a beautiful story.”

The second theory is idol devotion. This one is as easy to explain as it sounds. We’ve all secretly wanted to be Paris Hilton’s best friend. We all wanted to marry Taylor Swift or Angelina Jolie even if we are fully pledged gays so that we can make pretty babies. It’s human nature to want to be close to a superstar and become part of her posse so that it makes us stand out. Although being next to a fully transformed transgendered woman is not quite the same as being next to Madonna, the immaculate sequined dress on her body, the diminutive mannerisms she possesses, and the ever so gently way she carries herself will have a straight man believe that he is right in the company of a star. A star that’s making him look good at the same time.

The third theory is pure fetish. Some straight men, like us gay boys, have a fondness toward the male private parts, or penises. That’s certainly something they can’t get from their wives or girlfriends. Whether it’s out of curiosity or defiance against the norm, we can’t fathom it. One shouldn’t mistake straight men’s affection for the “winkie” to that of us gay boys’ fascination for the female breasts. With our likeness for boobies, we want to have them as opposed to make love with them. There’s a big difference. The straight men in question want to caress, fondle, and make love to… I shall just stop there before I forget that I am writing a philosophical column instead of erotic porn.

The final theory, which is sort of an extenuation of the third theory, is the straight men’s need to submit. We can juxtapose the analogy of penis and boobs from the previous paragraph to that of both a straight man and a gay man’s fantasy to surrender in bed. Even a hardcore dominating top would sometimes love to take a submissive role, and this is no different for straight men. In this day and age, they are not allowed to speak of being in a submissive role to anyone. Imagine a group of football athletes having a round of beers and out of nowhere one of them declares, “I like to be did in the behind.” And a husband can’t possibly ask his wife to strap it on and begs her by saying, “give it to me, girl!”  Can you picture the horror on her face? That is not to say that most transgendered women are tops, but chances are they are so that they are able to fulfill this part of a straight man’s fantasy.

In the end, a reader must realize that this is not at all a scientifically proven, expertly researched finding but merely a rationalization put together by an opinionated writer. For all we know, maybe it’s true that there’s a little gay in everyone. After another interview with American journalist Joyce Wadler, the fact reveals that Bouriscot, now in his seventies, is residing in France as a publicly out gay man who is sharing the final years of his life with a male partner (Not Shi).

There’s so much to learn about the human nature. Just when we think that we’ve put the final nail in place for the knowledge that we’ve obtained, this knowledge reinvents itself and before we know it, we are looking at totally different information. Like what a colleague of mine, who happens to be fond of transgendered women and will remain anonymous, recently shared with me about his feelings for a transgendered person, “It’s the care that I have for her. It’s not even the physical aspect of what she looks like. There’s an emotion that comes out of her. That vulnerability. That sense of defenselessness because she is still very clueless about herself, about what she is going through. I want to be there for her and help her. It takes a lot of courage and bravery for her to choose the path that she’s taking. That to me is extremely sexy.”

Comments email: pengperspective@yahoo.com