What guy hasn’t wanted to wear pink spandex and a mammoth pair of prosthetic boobs? I only ask because that’s what the husband of Kristi Noem, former US secretary of homeland security, was wearing in pictures that appeared in the Daily Mail on 31 March. Had the paper delayed publication for another day, the story might have been dismissed as an April Fool’s.
Bryon Noem – a successful crop-insurance salesman – racked up, it is alleged, bills of $25,000 from paying women to talk to him online, while he was wearing huge rubber breasts and pouting with all the feminine allure he could muster (despite forgetting to shave).
It sometimes seems as if nothing can shock us about adults’ consenting sexual behaviour, but the universal bafflement that greeted the images of Mr Noem was understandable. It has echoed the stunned reaction to the revelation in HBO’s The White Lotus, that Sam Rockwell’s character likes dressing up as a woman and getting ‘railed’ by four or five men at a time. In their different ways, Noem and Rockwell have helped lift the veil on a subject the trans lobby and their insanely uncritical allies have long refused to acknowledge. Whisper it gently: the vast majority of cross-dressing men get a sexual thrill from doing so.
Trans activists have relentlessly suppressed this fact. And who can blame them? The public would never for a moment have entertained allowing men in dresses access to women’s single-sex spaces if they knew the truth – namely, that many of these men are sexually aroused by forcing other people to treat them as if they’re women.
This is not to say that autogynephilia, the technical name for men getting off on imagining themselves as female, comes in only one style, the fetish equivalent of the little black dress. There’s a whole walk-in wardrobe of different cross-dressing fashions. Each more spicy than the next.
Hellbound and Down 