The Cost of Cross Dressing

Money isn’t everything, but there is very little that it clashes with. As such, I try to pay attention to the money parts of my life, including the money parts of Cross Dressing.

Cross Dressing costs. Money spent nurturing the other self is money not saved for the future, or money otherwise redirected from the very real and pressing needs of the present. This can be a source of conflict, internal and within the household too.

The internal conflicts can be considerable. For many, acquiring a dress or a pair of shoes can represent the difference between balance and depression. For others, and I put myself in this group, the hope of finding the right thing, the thing that makes you look as close to beautiful as you can hope, is a compelling lure. Shopping is more of temptation to me in this part of my life than in any other, by long measures.

A part of this is, I will confess, a little seditious. When shopping in guy mode, I do enjoy the reaction at the cash desk or from a sales assistant when it becomes plain that I am more expert at this gig than most men, and that I am shopping for myself. The reaction is typically very generous. I feel as though I am extended an invitation to a sorority. When shopping en femme, it is easy to feel as though you have failed if you don’t have a bag slung over your shoulder at some point in the day after all the effort has been made.

The temptation comes too, in part, from a feeling that I am making up for lost time. There were many years that I simply did not nurture this aspect of my whole self. After coming to personal terms with Cross Dressing, the dam has burst a little. Clothing is more often at the front of my thoughts than in years past. And I follow my thoughts into the shops.

Some of it is practical. I have a spotty wardrobe, and a degree of vanity that I possess about my femme self. I like to look different, if possible, each time I am out. A new outfit is a real confidence booster. It is more likely to get a compliment, and compliments about my appearance are music to my ears. I admit it.

Lastly, I think that many of us are motivated by the very real challenge of just getting it right. We are not schooled by a lifetime of practice. There are a thousand mistakes you could make in putting an ensemble together. Wrestling the dizzying range of choice down and emerging with a smart, flattering, useful garment is not easy. When you do, it can be the most meaningful win of your day.

With all of that said though, and with all the merit inherent in any job well done, if the money is being spent heedlessly, it is being spent poorly. In the attempt to not spend heedlessly, I have hung on to my receipts, and tracked my use of things. I recently did a little inventory, and rebuilt from memory, with a good degree of accuracy, the amount of wear that I have been getting from my purchases.

With all of the vital statistics poured into a spreadsheet, I have created a value called Cost per Wear (CPW). Truthfully though all I did was divide the price I acquired an item for by the number of times it has been worn (ed. by worn, I mean worn out, into the big wide world, not privately). I give credit for the CPW concept to Stacey and Clinton of American “What Not To Wear” fame, who used this approach recently to help a dreadfully conflicted woman overcome her feelings of guilt about shopping for and nurturing herself.

The entire spreadsheet is here. Click to enlarge, if you care, if you dare.

Here are some high level executive summary notes:

Girl likes a sale, yes indeed. The 41 garments I have purchased in the last 18 months have an aggregate discount from full retail price of 67%. I am entirely proud of the thrift displayed in my sprees. A cautionary note here though is that finding flattering and useful clothing at deep, deep discounts takes time. There is a little opportunity cost in repeatedly browsing and leaving shops empty handed. The dividends can be extraordinary though. The silk blouse and nice twill skirt pictured above would have set me back $120.00 at the start of the fall/winter season, but were snapped up for a mere $26.00.

Be prepared to be a reverse snob. JC Penney is a discount retailer. The only purchases I ever made there in the past were crate loads of cheap wine glasses suitable for party scenes Chez Bellejambes. I have picked up 14 really smart, reasonably well made, contemporary garments over the months at good old Penneys, and some stunning under $10.00 wins in the last couple of weeks. A beautifully polished sales assistant in a very upmarket shop told me she loved a skirt I had on one day. I told her it where I picked it up and how little it cost. Her jaw dropped and I felt possessed of magic.

Be prepared to shop up. Absolutely, positively visit shops that you are out of your price range. At the very least you will be better in touch with what is current, and get some terrific accessorizing ideas, but more than that, you can strike gold. Get your elbows up and get to the back of the store, to the clearance racks. There is a lot of meat still on the bone, and of interest to the Cross Dresser, much of it is in larger sizes.

A great price is not a great value. I have been dazzled by mark downs, sad puppies on hangers simply looking for exactly the sort of home I can provide. If you get the puppy home and cannot show it some love though, you are just being irresponsible. I have 16 items that I have not worn yet. If I am to be honest, perhaps six or seven of them will never see light of day. These things are going to find a better home, in a donation box or with a woman’s shelter. There, at least, I will be providing value, if not taking direct benefit myself. Stay true to your style and to the limits of what parts of your body you can show. No more half sleeves for me, and no more purchases justified on the basis of “but it was so cheap”.

And the money shot, so to speak, is this: My average CPW is $11.24. I don’t know if this is a good number, but I feel like it is, given that my wardrobe does not get used daily, or cycled through frequently. I am going to track this key metric, and use the ~ $ 10.00 benchmark as my gold standard. I think the Board of Directors here at Voyages en Rose Inc. (hi honey!) will continue to be supportive of this business units performance.

How about you? Do you track your spend? Is your spend out in the open? Is it all a source of delight or despair? Input welcomed on this matter from anyone with a purse.

Questions on any other topic, and I do mean any topic, are equally welcomed. Please ask a question in my snazzy new Formspring “Ask me anything” widget. Thanks in advance for your insatiable curiosity.

Happy dressing, shopping and etc.

To be admired

I was moved to write on an unexpected theme this morning by recent events in Vancouver at the Winter Olympics. I hope that you had the privilege to watch, or witness rather, figure skater Joannie Rochette of Canada on the ice on Tuesday of this week. I did. My wife and I watched it again last night, shocked at just how real life can be.

The background is this: Two days before Ms. Rochette was to perform in front of an adoring, hopeful and demanding home country audience, her mother died. Not with a gradual surrender to a known ailment with a known end, but suddenly, of a heart attack, upon arrival in Vancouver to watch her only child compete.

How this accomplished 24 year old was able to do anything more in the immediate aftermath than hug her father and give him something to lean on, someone to hold is simply beyond me. The loss of a parent is a jarring thing. Many of you, like me, know that already. The unexpected loss of a parent must be a far harder road to walk, and a road you could be forgiven for stumbling on. In either event though, most of us are allowed to muddle through our intimate tragedies, quietly, privately, without too much demanded of us, or too many strangers watching.

This was not the case for Ms. Rochette. And somehow, with strength tapped from where, I don’t know, she skated. In front of a billion people. The performance of her life.

Let me here now attempt to tie this event to this blog.

I may never know exactly what pinch of this or dash of that went into my own odd recipe. My unique calibrations of sugar and spice, snakes and snails and puppy dog tails will likely elude me and science both, and I don’t mind. But I do know this: I was drawn to explore, in my way, what women are made of, how women perceive the world around them, and how that world perceives them in part out of admiration. There are generous lumps of other things in there, but flat out admiration is a key ingredient for me.

Men are not optimized for endurance, grace and selflessness. These quieter, subtler characteristics are more rightly the province of the fairer sex. The ability to maintain a dignified carriage when life intrudes in unfair ways seems to me something that women are better fitted for than the other half. Finally, the willingness to be present and available to dangerous, hot currents of emotion, and to simply, honestly, openly cry. This place, men do not visit often.

The television commentators were beautifully silent throughout the performance. All of us watching were left free from Axels and Salchows, arabesques and spins. Free to imagine for a moment the weight of loss, and the immense capacity that some have for shouldering it. Free to quietly grieve for a loss we can imagine, and breathless at the bravery and beauty of a woman suffering through it, in circumstances that we cannot.

I don’t know that I have felt admiration for a person so acutely in my life, and I wanted to share that with you here today.

Ms. Rochette performs this evening (Thursday 25 Feb). To see her earlier performance, don’t even think of attempting to search for it on NBC’s web site. Just follow this link.

Seven Deadly Cross Dressing Sins – The Concluding Two

I have had a couple of struggles summoning the energy to finish this series, and for that I am a more than a little tweaked off at myself. Serendipitously though, the only remaining Deadly Sins are Sloth and Wrath. Sometimes things just work out.

Sloth is to me an interesting word. Habitual disinclination to exertion; indolence; laziness. It comes to us from Middle English roots, predating Chaucer by a century or two or three. These years were hard years, an era of filthy hand to toothless mouth subsistence. You might imagine that a display of Sloth on a given day then, would likely result in an empty belly at the end of that day. Sloth was, in short, an early indicator of failure and a Deadly Sin indeed.

Here in our current world, so slickly optimized for people the likes of we (people with lots of electronic gadgetry and such), Sloth might be better understood as a reward, a payoff. Dinner is in the freezer, not out in the woods. Don’t need to gather wood to burn under the microwave. And a machine does the dishes. Doesn’t take much of an effort to pounce on a couch either.

Clearly, the less generally slothful you are, the greater the likelihood that your freezer will be bigger, the microwave will be sleeker, the dishwasher will run quieter and the couch won’t wind up on the rickety front porch. But Sloth is, in most of our days, our spa moment. Doing nothing? Luxury. So Sloth has (hath?) lost (lotht??) some of its sting.

If Sloth was still a truly Deadly Sin though, I reckon the Cross Dresser would be last on the Grim Reaper’s guest list. You simply cannot be a slothful Cross Dresser. The logistics of where and when are too exacting. The mechanics of makeup and wardrobe are too complex. The general exhilaration and full attention to the moment one has when inhabiting the wardrobe or gender identity of choice is simply too vivid. We are many things friends, but slothful I think not.

There are evenings perhaps where the eye makeup doesn’t get fully removed or the clothes are left rumpled, but that is more likely from fatigue or passion than a failure of character. There are weeks or seasons too where perhaps one simply does not feel up for the effort or terribly drawn to the dress. To me these tides are part of my Cross Dressing parcel. The lady comes and goes as she pleases, yes? Not much to do with Sloth.

Wrath is different filly altogether though. I will speak for my own experience, and suspect that you may find echoes in your own.

Wrath is another early English entry, and carries with it today its original meaning from the 9th Western century, and plenty of contemporary applicability: strong, stern, or fierce anger; deeply resentful indignation. Wrath gets your attention and the attention of people around you. At it's best, it may be a motivator of change and progress, but moments of wrathfulness are not moments of forward progress.

I have had over the years countless instances of Wrath, at a few moments before and many moments after brief encounters with my feminine parts. The Wrath is, or more accurately was, summoned from a place of self-recrimination. I was wrathful at my inability to say no to the urge. I was wrathful that something I could not understand and did not enlist for was a seeming part of my bargain with the cosmos, and beyond my powers of restraint. The highs were high, yes, but the immediate afterwards of my femme flights were touched with resentment, furtive and far too inwardly focused.

Cross Dressing, and fantasizing about it was a small, private and hermetically sealed part of my whole life throughout my teens, twenties and thirties, and so the moments of Wrath were few and far between. They did not impair the forward progress of my life. Nor did they did not cause costly wardrobe purges and promises of abstinence that I could not keep, but they did exact a little toll on my happiness along the way.

I think that anything kept in a small enclosure and periodically subjected to strong forces has the potential for combustion, for explosion. The longer my years went, the greater the forces became. With that, the potential for damage, to myself, and to the people most dear to me grew, slowly and surely. I was fortunate to come to terms with the reality that I had a characteristic integral to my whole self that needed to be socialized, to be introduced to the rest of me. Doing so, about a year and a half ago has done me a world of good. Broadening the inner circle to include my wife has further diminished the possibilities of combustion. The moments of Wrath, and useless regret that did surface around Cross Dressing are, at least for now, gone.

Along with that bargain, and unexpectedly, I have found permission from within to demure and tone down some of the "guy" behaviors that I never felt fully at ease with. I don’t bother now with over-compensating for my private proclivities. If I am not thought to be a fully accredited chest-thumping, musk-soaked primate in good standing with the rest of the hairy tribe, so be it.

I think that a certain amount of mellowing comes to us all with enough years. There is also, for me, the mellowing that comes from nurturing the parts of me that “Petra” enlivens. Nice outcomes. I still have a capacity for Wrath, but am happy to report (and grateful as hell) that it does not come from an internal conflict about my own nature. It is more likely to be engaged by the idiot in the left lane who cannot locate his turn indicator.

This post then concludes my compulsion to somehow map an ancient moral touchstone, The Seven Deadly Sins, to the life of the contemporary Cross Dresser. Again, a salute out to the cold outer reaches of the blogosphere to Marta Dahlig, the artist responsible for the beautiful images that in part inspired and accompanied this series. Earlier posts on Vanity, Envy, and the whole “Greed” Group complete the set. They attend patiently, always, upon your click.

Your thoughts welcomed as always, in the form of comments here, or perhaps for a little change, in the form of a question posed in the Ask Me Anything box on your right.

Happy dressing and everything else….

So a Cross Dresser walks into a blog …

There is an age, dear friends, for radical experimentation with ones outward appearance. I will happily confess to having passed my “best before” date for such experiments. I am fairly well settled on what looks work well with me, in drab and en femme, and I do not color too wildly outside the lines. With that said, I have always felt that it is healthy for all of us, CD, TG, GG and the whole happy rainbow of human experience, to tinker with the recipe now and then.

I enjoy stabbing a pitch fork into my personal compost pile, turning it over and airing things out a bit. And do you know, you really cannot lose when you do. Either you prove your instincts correct, or you get a happy new finding. Perhaps it is sound practice to apply the same thinking to ones blog. At the very least, not having made any substantial changes to the layout of or editorial approach to Voyages en Rose in well over a year, it feels like it might be time to start stirring it up a bit.

I will be tinkering with layout, tools, gadgets and interactive media gew-gaws in general in the spare moments presented over the next couple of weeks, and hope to wind up not entirely breaking things. At the same time, I am going to plunder my brain, or any other willing source for themes and content for a blog post or two. I think that is the stuff that you actually come here for.

A new tool that is live on the blog as of today (ta-da!) may serve both happy purposes. Over to your right you will notice a little “Ask Me Anything” widget. This smart little code stub from Formspring allows blog visitors to, well ... ask me anything. My hopes are that you will. You can anonymously stick your own pitchfork into my compost heap, and turn it over to your hearts content. Alternatively, you can easily create your own Formspring account, and operate in the open. If your question fits under the rubric of anything, I want to hear it.

I hope that your questions will help me dredge up a memory or an observation worthy of a post or two here. If the come in sufficient volume, then I might be able to quilt up a weekly Letters to the Editor format post. At the very least, I am interested in hearing what you want to hear. It will save me all the bother of borrowing ideas from other blogs. So there we are. Ask me anything. Subject matter is wide open, and in your capable, well moisturized hands.

Responses to these questions will also post pronto-like to my tiny Twitter-sphere (@petrab_cd). Twitter. Hmmm. I am not yet convinced of the merits of Twitter. 140 characters is either too few to express a thought well, or too many for a good theatrical drama, unless 130 of them are members of a massive Greek chorus. That said, perhaps this sort of rapid fire Q&A is exactly the sort of thing that Twitter does well. Lets give it the old college try shall we?

One other slightly more than cosmetic change to announce today. Treacle, noted wordsmith, blogger extraordinaire and by my reckoning, the reigning Queen of the Underwearworld, saw fit today to bequeath a Certified Lingerie Addict award on Voyages en Rose today. I have become friendly with Treacle in a nice HTTP way over the last couple of months, and have a lot of respect for the hard work and general savvy she applies to her always lovely blog. Additionally, I take it as a big win for Cross Dressers and other members of the Transgendered collective when any one of us gets a little easy acceptance from a member of more mainstream community. Treacle’s more mainstream community is the 51% privileged at birth to be members of the fairer (and far more interesting) sex.

If you do not know her blog, Confessions of a Lingerie Addict, and have a fondness for the pretty things beneath the surface, you have lost time to make up for. Now would be a great time to start. Thanks Treacle! A cotton gloved salute and a big air kiss your way.

Petra’s Pantyhose Parade – High Waisted Wrap Up

The Pantyhose Parade has been a regular feature of these Voyages en Rose from the very beginnings of this blog, upon my realization that my hosiery crush was a lasting thing, not just two hips that dress up in tights. I have done a fair old whack of shopping in my attempts to accurately map these sheer seas and have, for my labors, full drawers groaning under the weight of several lifetimes of pretty leg wear. Now, not only am I running out of storage space, I think that I have practically tapped out my well of metaphor. Therefore here today, I conclude this series with wrap up notes on my recent chaotic and quixotic romp through the world of high-waisted, super-slimming pantyhose.

I have no doubt, dear friends, that I will offer up unsolicited opinions about tights here from time to time. You may have need of more regular and passionate discourses on this topic though, so I direct your attention to the passionate and shockingly knowledgeable Treacle, proprietress of the Stocking and Lingerie Addict Blog for your daily fixes. She really knows her stuff, and looks far, far better than I.

And so, on with the show, such as it is. I will start with the tournament results, present the relative rankings, and then finish up with some off-color commentary.

Our Winner, with 225.6 Petra's Pantyhose Points, is the L’eggs Profiles Waist Smoother Toner. Remarkable comfort, appearance and durability for a smallish investment of $8.00. I did not place as high a scoring value on price within this ranking exercise, but the pennies do add up my dears, do they not? The pennies in fact seemed to have decided things for us here, and both of the value priced L’eggs entries ascended to the Medal podium, sharing honors with a stellar contestant from Donna Karan. The scoring table is presented below (ed.click images for a better view, I hate to think of you squinting)

With money taken out of the equation, the DK’s would handily tromp the rest of the field. A truly gorgeous garment, luxurious to the touch and to the eye. As dressy as you would ever need for a big night on the town. The Spanx efforts, well made as they are, simply lack a little magic in the leg. I would love to be able to say nicer things about the Ann Taylors', fond as I am of the shop, but I simply cannot. Premium price for a run of the mill product is never a recipe for success. Ann m’dear, if your hosiery mill pulls ups their game a bit, I will pull your hose up my gams once again.

Now after all of this effort, if you are feeling an urge to shop, stow it for a moment. Aunty Petra wants a few words with you here. Shapewear is a godsend. Beautiful, fashionable sheers are too. But one simply cannot ask one garment to effectively do the job of two. For starters, the economics are not there. A terrific waist whittling shaping brief can be had for $20-30, and with care will last 30-50 wearings. There is absolutely no way to get 30 days of wear out of a pair of sheers. If you ladder a pair of everyday sheers, and you are out of pocket for a little. Ladder a pair of high waist pantyhose, and you have in effect thrown away a perfectly good girdle. You will be better off hedging your bets and buying things separately.

There is a pretty big functional problem associated with these tights too. Functions of nature specifically. Unless you have the constitution of a camel, there is a likely requirement for relief at some point in your day. Pulling a dress up, pulling these down, and reverse repeating the process requires Houdini like flexibility, and the athletic grace of a Nureyev. If you have that, jolly good for you, but you will have probably worked up a little facial glow by the conclusions of your struggles that may require a reapplication of setting powder.

The all-in-ones are simply not there from a other functional perspectives either. All of our contenders to one degree or another, pooled at the waistband, thereby mooting the promised smoothing benefits of the garment. Right tool for the job is a good rule to live by, and rare is the case that a multi-function tool is the right tool. This is not one of those rare cases.

If you are looking to slim the silhouette, smooth various bits out, and help make a hot dress look red hot, the options are endless. Have a look around you and you may notice that overweight and out of shape is the norm (at least here in America and to a large extent, the UK). The size of the problem, so to speak, assures a rich variety of solutions on the shelves. So go shopping, with a friend who knows her way around if you can. Failing that, trust the nice lady in the lingerie department at a Macy’s or Sears nearby. Believe me, you will not be their first client with special needs.

With all of that said then, beyond catering to my own borderline obsession with legwear in general, I cannot find a single reason for enduring a day in a pair of high waisted sheers. But I started this damned-fools errand, and so am relieved now that it is finished. Your suggestions on shapewear and sheers, as always, welcomed here. Comment freely friends.

Happy dressing, and everything else…