Why? You Ask

Before I get to the relevant post, today is Get Things Ready day. I'll post a follow-up later or tomorrow morning. I don't know when. Remember, I'll have company and I'll be out most of the evening. Please bear with me!

Latest weather: freeze alert for tomorrow morning! Come out and watch me freeze.

On to the Whys.

Why the logistics posts, the things that can go wrong posts, the step-by-step posts, the random thoughts posts?

I don't have hard figures. (Personally, I have hardly any figure at all.) From what I've read and from my own experience, I'm comfortable making a scale which will cover all males. For lack of a better name, I'm going to call it the Femme Scale.

At one end is men who've never worn women's clothing, who'd never want to try. Civilians.

At the other end is the 24/7 gurls. My scale covers men, so there is a cutoff point. I'm not sure where it is. Maybe it's hormones, or surgery, or implants, or when a born male decides "I am now a female." OK, now you're a woman. You're not part of the scale.

The scale is for men.

For the gurls who still identify as male, let's call them Full-Timers. They're still on the scale, at the "always" mark.

If you drew a graph it would look like this:

The straight line is a fudge. There's no linear scale for the bottom. It's not "fully dressed 1 hour per year", "fully dressed 2 hours per year" up to "fully dressed 8760 hours per year". There's no straight line from "never" to "always" at all. And there are no numbers for "lots of men" and "few men".

Where does the guy who dresses once a month in the house fit in? The one who dresses once a week in the house? Is the one who goes out once a month "further" to the right than the one who stays in but dresses daily? How about the underdressers?

Most people don't climb mountains. But you could wake up one day and say "climbing Everest is on my bucket list. I'm going to join a party today!" You're now at the small end of the "mountain climbing" scale, but you didn't get there by climbing progressively higher mountains, or doing solo climbs. There are any number of paths to the "few men" end of that scale.

Someone might wake up and say "seeing what it's like to be a woman is on my bucket list. Today's the day!" And maybe today's the only day. Or maybe it's the start of the rest of your life.

We're all different.

But I'm making a scale anyway. The endpoints are there. The line assumes that there is a progression from never to always.

Most men will mill around in the "never" pool. Some (a few ~ call them "us") will venture towards the "always" side.

If we left everybody in, the males who read this blog would all cluster in a small group near the "always" side and the straight line would become a ski jump.

If I remove the "nevers" the number of men drops a lot. Let's keep the ones who are curious, and just drop the "over my dead body" guys. What about the guys who put on panties once because their wife thought it would be sexy, or they ran out of underwear, or just wanted to see how it looked? You can leave them in or take them out. Without a linear scale, it doesn't matter.

You didn't think you'd need math for this blog, did you? :)

Anyway, some studies say 10% of men would be left. And the readers would be more evenly spread out.

You know where I stand. I won't summarise. On a linear scale, I'm much closer to the "always" end than the "never" end. We're all part of a small group. I'm part of a smaller group.

Here's where the progression kind of makes sense. If I made a list of What We Do and had everyone check off what they do, the list could be arranged in such a way that people would check off items until the stopped because they never went further. Or haven't yet gone further.

Confused? Here's an easier-to-understand list:

__ finished elementary school
__ finished middle school
__ finished high school
__ at least attended some college
__ completed a 4-year degree
__ at least did some graduate work
__ received a graduate degree

People would keep checking lines until they had to stop. It's unlikely anyone would skip "finished middle school" but check "finished high school".

So if I made a list like:

_ at least occasionally thought about wearing women's clothing
_ at least occasionally wore panties/hose/stockings
_ at least occasionally wore a bra
_ at least occasionally dressed completely as a woman
_ at least occasionally went out wearing women's underclothes
_ at least occasionally went out dressed completely as a woman
_ always went out dressed completely as a woman

with lots and lots of other items in between, people would generally check every box until they stopped checking boxes. And from those results I could re-order the list so that there would be fewer gaps in people's lists. Maybe I'd have to swap items 4 and 5 to reduce a gap.

So, back to my original question. (I'll wait here while you go look. You've probably forgotten it by now.)

I believe there is a progression. I believe we're all career or at least hobbyist mountain climbers and our goal may not be Everest, but it might be Ranier. Or maybe just the Appalachians. Or maybe Lombard Street in San Francisco. It doesn't matter what your personal destination is.

If you're a male reading this, you're on the scale and probably on your own journey. If you say you're not on a journey, I would bet you are and don't realise it.

As I said, I'm near the skinny end. If you're further on the scale than I am, you're probably not reading. If you're nearer the beginning of the scale, you probably are.

I'm not a teacher. I'm not a mentor. I'm trying to share ~ to show that, hey, it may not be easy but it's doable, and it's worth doing. Here's a roadmap. It's not the only way, but it's kinda sorta working and it could work for you. You can go out, be the only drag for Halloween at work, get on a plane, join a group of women being women, find your comfort level and push it and watch it stretch.

Join me. Tell me where you are. (e-mail me at youCanCallMeMeg@gmail.com) Maybe after Halloween I'll write that scale and see if enough people are interested in sharing their answers.

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