Sunday, 20th May, 2007

A Sort Of Prepending Calm

work random

Sunday evenings are usually, for me at least, a relaxing affair — a time to kick off my heels (like I ever wear heels...), put my feet up, and relax with a bottle (or two) of wine and a carton of Marlboros, safe in the knowledge that I have a whole day to follow where I can Get Stuff Done™.

Tonight though, I'm reeling slightly from a day's worth of code-pushing, design frustrations, and reading too many Things That Explain Art™, fretting ever-so-slightly that I've got tonnes to do before a 6am set-off for work tomorrow.

But hey. That's not really important — not in this context anyway. I just wanted to slip in a bit of an "I'm not going to get the chance to write much for the next week or so" kinda thing, and instead direct your eyes to the complete weirdness-type direction that the comments about profile photos and picture theft from a couple of days ago are taking.

(Does anyone ever go back and read old pages to see if there are new comments? Maybe I should get around to that comment RSS feed I've been promising myself for three years )

You should be glad that someone likes you and thinks of you enough to steal your pictures.

That would be my cue to get quite drunk and have a rant...

words fail me

Allow me then

On Honesty, Self-Projection, And Photo-Thievery (of sorts)

tranny photography self deception honesty

I find it very difficult to write about things in a structred way these days. I think that perhaps, in the past, I used to have deep angerisms running through me that needed to be vented, and, along with an in-house Curran-vetting process (my Ex) I could come out with a stream of vaguely constructive prose about a particular issue that irked me.

These days, my brain tends to flit around subjects like a cat with ADD, confronted by too many mice and bits of string.

I wanted to avoid — you see — taking the comments that Michelle left a couple of days ago, and picking them apart, because that comes across as very reactionary — and I'm not a reactionary kind of girl these days. I've somehow defaulted to a state of beige where I try to keep everyone happy, intent solely on getting to the end of whichever disease it is that snuffs me out, without having caused any upset, or made any enemies.

I mean, initially I was just a bit narked — it's not that rare a thing for someone to take photographs of me and pass them off as their own, and usually I just chalk it up to the intertubes being that diverse and odd, and casually laugh it off. But there was a strange tone to the first comment — a tone that knocked my usual devil-may-care attitude to one side for a second, and the second one just really freaked me out.

So, sitting alone — as I am — with no external moderator to preparse any thoughts I might have on this, and with the full realisation that I might just be opening a whole can of trollfeed, I'm going to do exactly what I didn't want to do, and pick things apart...

I don't mean to cause trouble and I certainly don't mean to steal pics.

Great. Ta. You know that bit where you stole my pics and used them as your own? That was kinda stealing my pics, a little.

Maybe I think that "Siobhan Curran" , if he or she is even real...

I'm a "he", I'm very real, and my name doesn't need quotation marks around it.

...is gorgeous.

Yes. Well.

What if my Myspace page is going to be a trubite to TGirls and Crossdressers

Then I really think you should get out more.

and is a way for me to meet others, like him or her.

Siobhan's advice for meeting others like him or her: Don't piss them off by stealing their photos and pretending to be them.

And I am trying to model myself like her/him.

You're doing a great job. You've made youself look eactly like me. Even going the whole hog and visiting the place I get my photos done, getting the same makeup, standing in the same doorway, posing the same way...

I guess call me a fan.

I can think of other words to use.

Also I was curious to see how many actually thought Siobhan was Hot, Classy and Femme.

Now, joking aside, this is the part that pissed me off. I am very particular about any spaces in which I put photographs of me. I'm very aware of each and every audience that I try to court, and I make very specific contextual decisions about how and why I put myself in certain places.

What you've done, effectively, is treat me as some kind of 'experiment' — stripping the textual/visual supporting contexts away from the photographs, leaving them raw, and slapping them in an entirely seperate space, attributing them to a completely different person — in an attempt to find out how 'hot' I am.

You're effectively reducing my entire personality down to what I look like. And forgive me for being self-inflating, but I don't consider myself to be that superficial.

And as expected, she recieved an unbelieveable amount of replys on several websites.

Whatever.

I did take your pic off as my profile pic, but will add it with your real name soon as a tribute.

No please. Don't.

OH and by the way, If I looked as good as you as a female, I would'nt eveen consider being a guy.

A long time ago, when I first started blogging, one of my main sources of irateness was the insistence from certain quarters that I was somehow "wasting" myself being a guy. "Are you FT? If not, you should be" was something I used to see all the time in chatrooms.

It annoyed me, for several reasons — not least because that attitude in some ways serves to compound the pressure to pass that defeats a hell of a lot of transgendered people all over the world. The onus becomes on the way that you look, not the way that you are — and again, it reduces a complex system of personalities down to the very superficial.

I'll admit that from certain angles, and through certain post-processing of photographs, I do look like a woman. Sometimes. But the reality of my everyday life is that the only way I can effectively 'pass', is if everyone else in the world gets struck down by the same self-delusional abilities that I have.

Insisting that 'I' look good as "a female" (shades of Ferengi there) shifts away from a very finely balanced sense of 'self' that I have, and...

As a guy, you are just normal. As a female, you could truly be a MODEL.

...fuck off. I look cute as a guy too.

What's worse???

A picture theif who hides behind the pictures they steal. Or the guy who dresses like a woman, making others think he is a woman, then says in his profile that he is a guy and doesn't want to be a woman. Then complains that someone took his woman pictures.

You want a simple answer? The thief.

You want a more drawn-out one?

There are levels of complexity in what I do. The whole point of the photographs of me trying to look like a woman, is the shared suspension of disbelief that I and the audience experience. From the very first moment of looking at a photograph of me, everyone is very aware that they're looking at a photograph of a guy, yet there's something deliciously attractive about the head-fuck that comes from knowing something, yet not seeing something.

Aside from any self-image, and self-presentation issues that I might have — ignoring just what level of transgenderism I subscribe to — there is nothing remotely deceptive about my photographic work. I don't make others think I'm a woman, I blatantly admit, upfront that I'm not. In fact, if I was trying to deceive, then I don't think my photography would be in any way interesting whatsoever. It's the fact that I'm not what I'm presenting, that makes them worthwhile.

Then complains that someone took his woman pictures.

There is a hideous undertone of 'commodification' in that line. A suggestion that the photographs of me dressed as a woman are somehow 'objects' — and the extension of that being that I am an 'object'. And I think that that attitude — the objectification of imagery — is both insulting, and scarey.

They are not my "woman pictures". They are photographs of me. Calling them "his woman pictures" suggests to me that you don't see a person in them — just some commodity for you to consume and use how you want. Like you've somehow tagged me as Public Domain, ignoring any self that exists behind the photographs, and felt free to use me in whatever way you like.

I am not afraid to say that I would like to be a woman.

From my personal experiences of women, I have never found them to be people who objectify images for their own gratification. I have always found that to be a very male trait.

You should be glad that someone likes you and thinks of you enough to steal your pictures.

You know what? I'll admit that to some extents you have a point. I have — for a long time — seen people writing about how their photos got nicked, and wondered just what it was that was wrong with me that someone hadn't nicked mine too.

And I think that frisson of smugness would have stayed, if you hadn't tried to somehow justify trying to pass yourself off as me — trying to ride on the back of my work — as being somehow better than me.

If you'd left it at the first comment, you would have just had an email off me asking you not to make some kind of 'tribute'. It was the second comment made me angry.

...

That aside, the entire notion of 'honesty' within online self-publication is one that fascinates me — not only in the sense of gender-perceptions, but in a whole sense of self-perceptions as well.

Blogging is an incredibly self-centric thing — the self-publication tools that exist only ever present one side of a story. In every medium that I write and I post — whether drunk or not, there's always a level of self-editing going on ... even if that self-editing is unadvisable sometimes.

There is no line between honesty and deception — no sharp line anyway. Our fantasy versions of ourselves — whether they're created through makeup, Photoshop, or sliders in Appearnace settings in a virtual space — they're all just as valid as the self you're likely to bump into at in the wine section at Sainsburys.

But while the Self is something that has a 20-pixel Gaussian blur slapped on it, I do think there's at least one Unsharp Masked line that you shouldn't cross. Whenever the expression that you chooose to make of yourself relies on the detriment of someone else's — whether that's through demeaning a model and reducing him/her down to a 'body' when you stick your face over theirs, or through wholeheartedly taking someone's photographs and self-portraits, and passing them off as your own — then you've crossed that line.

And I have no time for people who cross that line. Except when I'm the one that they're demeaning — and then, the only time I have for them, is the time it takes to point and laugh, and then move on.