"My Husband Wears My Clothes" Peggy Rudd-Partial read

Starting this blog has instilled in me a sense of responsibility, that I have to read books, I have to blog about them and I can’t blog unless I complete the book. I’m in the middle of a book that I simply can’t justify finishing when I could be spending that time reading more interesting books. So, I have made a command decision that since I am the only one who reads my blog anyway (my followers consist of me and my sister, and she doesn’t read it), if I have something to say about a partial read, then I say it, put the book on the shelf and get on with my life.

I learn a lot from TV shows that discus sexual issues for women and men even when my situation is far removed from theirs. For instance, I like watching “Secret Lives of Women” on WE TV. It is the only show I watch on WE, but there is a lot going on in women’s lives that they don’t generally share over coffee at the office, and this show does a great job of discussing those silent issues. The specific show on plural marriages helped me think about the jealousy me or my partners have experienced in past relationships. I had one relationship where I was jealous of all the time my boyfriend spent with other people. I was jealous of the time he spent with anyone else, especially women, and especially his mother and grandmothers. He and I are still friends, and I am still jealous when I see him chatting with other women on Facebook. On the other hand, when I was married my husband was jealous of the time I spend with my colleagues, who were mostly men as it happens in the mathematical world. In my current relationship, I don’t see the signs of jealously on his part or my part---except when he spends time with the children from his previous partner. How do I wrap my head around the various dynamics of these relationships? While I have never considered a plural marriage, the “Secret Lives of Women” episode on plural marriages gave me a lot of food for thought about how women can share the attentions, both sexual and otherwise, of a single man. Of course, I don’t have the answers yet. My job in this post is not to give all the answers-just to pose the questions.

That said, I must say that I was not reading “My Husband Wears My Clothes,” because my partner is a cross dresser, but instead I was reading it because of the issues of gender identity and equity among the genders. I and most women I know are cross dressers. There is not a feminine article of clothing in the suitcases that I brought to Alaska. In general, the only feminine clothes I wear are scarves, which I have become addicted to in the past few years and I should put a ban on buying those as well as books, fabric, tea, etc. Back to the subject at hand-no one cares the least whether my clothes are women’s clothes in the style of men’s or even if they are actual men’s clothes. In fact, since I have broad shoulders and slim hips, men’s styles fit me better, so I often wear men’s slacks and men’s shirts. But again, no one bats an eye at that. If a male student of mine showed up in class in dress or a lacy scarf, I am sure the other students would have a lot to say about that. This inequity bothers me, and I was hoping this book would give me some insight.

I could have liked Peggy Rudd’s book if it was only a memoir, and thus told from her point of view, and I might have liked it if it were strictly a guidance book on the issues of cross dressing told from a variety of viewpoints. However, it was a mixture of both and the counseling was not broad based enough to be considered academic. Since she set out to help women married to cross dressers, I wanted her to be more inclusive of the lifestyles of the women involved and the personalities of the men involved, but everything seemed to be based on her own marriage and her own experiences.

As with many books of nonfiction, I found the writing redundant. Sometimes redundancy serves a purpose, as when I repeat things for my class because with each repetition the students assimilate more information and make more connections, but sometimes redundancy seems like it is there just to make a work long enough to be marketable. Granted, I work in a field where writing is purposefully concise, but with 60 pages left in Rudd’s 129 page book, I’m not sure if there is anything left for me to learn. I generally agreed with or learned from her discussions on femininity v. masculinity and that in each person this is not a binary state but a continuum. However, I bristled at her attempt to counsel a woman to stay in a marriage, because she would struggle getting a job in a man’s world, and besides who would help fix things around the house. Give me a break. If I had thought there was more to learn, I could have gotten past this, but I don’t think there will be anything new in the rest of the book. That was my limit, and I stopped reading.

I think this would be a good book for a woman who discovers that her husband is a cross dresser. Again, cross dressing husbands are not something that is discussed over coffee at the office, but I suspect it is something that is not all that unusual. Look at how many cross dressing women you know and extrapolate. Rudd does have something to say to those women that they are not going to hear in casual conversation, and if the woman is a traditionalist, then she will find much of what is written by Rudd helpful. If the woman is a relationship with nontraditional roles, then I suggest that she look elsewhere for help understanding her relationship with a cross-dressing man.