The construct of the “manly Englishman” of Colonial times was an idea painstakingly created in the vicinity of Oxbridge and exported worldwide in the rhetoric of imperialism and as justification for colonialism. As I type, I look around the New Bodleian Reading Room at Oxford, where I am. Several men around me are working away at their computers and files of paper – bespectacled, intellectual looking, studying anything from particular physics down to Hindi and Arabic literature – these inheritors of the muscular, manly tradition. I wonder how many of them I will see in the evening, in dresses, make-up and tights at St. Antony’s College’s famous Hallowqueen party Yes that’s right. Oxford’s manly men do let down their hair and put the spangly heels on.
And the heels are higher than I’ve ever worn. Stuffed conical busts bulge incongruously from male chests, hairpieces cling onto crew cuts and deltoids push delicate straps out of shape – I try not to gawk as I see a man in a nude-suit: he’s decided to be a topless woman. Another, who’s made it through the snaking long line of transvestism and is now in the hall where the bop is beginning, decides to show off to the world that he’s actually wearing a thong. Ouch, is my first reaction, but then as I look around, men seem to be walking about, almost comfortably in corsets, skin-tight miniskirts and not falling off stilettos. One adjusts his make-up, and another is trying to keep his strapless gown up. A third is fiddling not so discreetly with his bra. I recognize several – men I’ve met in libraries and the College Bar – men I usually see in suits and pressed sweaters and trousers. Someone drops a earring on my foot, and I see a huge diaphanous bulge of balloons under a sequined dress, as the owner stoops to pick it up, and says to me, in deep, British baritone, “sorry”.
Sam Roots, a graduate student in the sciences, says, in one word “rebellion”, when I ask him why men here tend to switch from ultra-formal button-down shirts and sweater sets, even suits, by day and week, to cross-dressing and bizarre costumes for the “bops” that are so integral to weekend and night culture at Oxford Colleges. Roots himself, though usually seen in suits and sweater sets, was dressed in a bright pink miniskirt for Hallowqueen and has previously dressed as a bible and a giant playing card. “It’s the work hard, play hard culture” he says. Bops rarely come without a theme, and it’s considered good manners to go dressed up – whether as a member of the opposite sex, an inanimate object or a zombie. For Andrew Duncan, a Cambridge graduate, currently at Oxford, it’s a question of being noticed – and functionality. “The cheapest thing to do was borrow a dress from one of my friends” he says.
Masculinity is of course at the centre in other spaces as well, and my favourite of these is Rugby. On the one hand a testosterone-driven contact sport, rugby turns into the context for a lot of hyper masculine expression at Oxford – the weekly drinks session at Lincoln College Bar where the team lets in hair – and other things – down is a fascinating example. On the other hand, Chris Taylor, the first male radical feminist I met at Oxford actually plays rugby. Being a contact sport though, there’s a lot of banter, about “blokes” and homosexuality in the sport. Interestingly, Oxford rugby teams have been known to attend Queer Bop, a party for the LGBT community en masse. Taylor, whom I asked about this says it’s mostly because the men want to show their girlfriends they are “man enough to dress in women’s clothes.” I’m intrigued by the many implications of that.
Oxford has, in the past been the headquarters of the aesthete movement, from which men like Oscar Wilde emerged – redefining masculinity, asking what it was that made a man, well, a man? Loving a woman? Wearing clothes of a certain kind? (Wilde himself famously fashioned flamboyant “aesthete” clothes for a tour of America) Playing certain sports? (Rugy is hypermasculine, coxing isn’t particularly masculine while cricket is a “hard sport”, I’m told). Oscar Wilde himself, once “lionized in the press, and mobbed in the streets”, was turned into a symbol of stigma – EM Forster’s eponymous Maurice tells his doctor, in euphemism, that he is “of the Oscar Wilde kind” – a modern-day Bogey Man, as Hugh Davis puts it, once discovered to be homosexual. Is this lionized man, and his awe-inspiring presence in the witness-box not masculine then?
None of this self-exploratory partying, as I now like to think of it, is ever done outside of the Oxford Colleges. In a strange way, the historical separation at Oxford, between the town itself and the university seems to endure. “No one” Sam Roots tells me, “would ever do any of this in a club in town.” The idea of a fortress Oxonia and Cantabrigia is hard to miss. Forster’s Maurice chooses to cease his sexual exploration in the year that he spends as living outside College (King’s College, Cambridge). When he moves into college, the following year, the transformation begins and Maurice’s true awakening begins. Again, there is the sense of a world within a world when Maurice is sent down, following the dean’s discovery of his homosexual tendencies. The protagonist’s lover, Clive is distraught. “…he and Maurice would never meet in Cambridge again. Their love belonged to it, and particularly to their rooms, so that he could not conceive of their meeting anywhere else.”
I end this piece with the question that has caused me to think and discover while, in Forster’s terminology, being digested by the College and the Bodleian Library: What makes a man?
An edited version of this was published in the New Indian Express on December 5th, 2009.
Pic Source: Wikipedia
The Author Sneha Krishnan is an economics-obsessed, pasta-loving history student bound for Oxford this fall. She is usually found curled up in sofas with her ever-present macbook perched on some surface in the vicinity. Sneha first started thinking about doing Sa when she and Shweta realized that they were ranting about the day's news/ happenings practically everyday and everything they said had something to do with their feminist convictions. So they wondered how it would be to write about these things and more... and KaBoom... seven months and laborious code-learning (trial and error, the only method for us) sessions later, Sa came to be. Sneha’s favourite pastimes, besides feminism and Sa, are reading the New York Times, playing Scrabble and watching every movie that looks remotely interesting.
Certainly not making a parody of women, or what they consider women are, or ought to be like. I don’t really get it. Every time I see a pair of fake boobs being dangled about like a joke I wonder if they’ll ever stop being an object of pleasure/amusement for everyone (but the owner). I’m not saying T and A are not marvelous creations on their own, but it pisses me off that people think there all there is to us, and in an exaggerated form cross-dressing is a mere spectacle and not a test for tolerance, or however this new man-enough-to-wear-pink thing goes.
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