Is what’s inside the true measure of a man?
Brick, a chauvinistic alpha male, asks this question just before revealing his new, pin-up girl body, with huge, gravity defying breasts, to his girlfriend, Connie. And it is a first rate pin-up girl body, drawn by one of the masters of the form, Art Adams. And those breasts are in 3-D, thrusting right off the page and right at the reader.
The girl he’d become– one of the most erotic images I had ever seen– a true fantasy girl in every way– blew my mind. If you have seen Art Adam’s work, you know he loves the female form, and he draws erotic, idealized visions of femininity that surpass anything you will ever see in the real world. The man who now found himself with those full, firm breasts and those slender, round arms was a tough, domineering, strong man who was all about the macho lifestyle, and now here he was in a physical form that embodied everything he had felt superior to before his change.
I think this was the first time I had seen a TG comic with nudity, a man as a bare-breasted woman, and that was part of the allure as well. There he stood before the woman who loved him, now prettier and more generously endowed than she was. I imagined the shame, the humiliation, the despair he must have felt to have his women see him as a female for the first time.
So, back to the question: Is what’s inside the true measure of a man?
The comic answers in a single panel as we see Brick, the former alpha male, wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes and cleaning laundry in a pond. Connie, returning from a successful hunting trip, a rifle in one hand, calls out, “Better Hurry Up, Hun.”
“Yes, dear,” Brick answers. “Whatever you say, dear.”
The alpha male, now the prettier, curvier of the two, has become the fem in the relationship, and his formerly girly-girly girlfriend has become the dominant partner. She has the rifle, she does the hunting. He is in the traditional role of the wife. The man with the bigger breasts has become the woman. What’s inside has changed to match his new shape.
It may have been my juvenile state at the time, or maybe it is my still juvenile state as of today, but those breasts haunted me, the idea that those amazing breasts belonged to a man, and what it seemed like they had done to him. I just felt like having those big, perfect breasts had stripped away his manhood, though I now would have to think there were other parts of his body that he lost that would have had an equal or bigger impact. In any case, it seemed to me that it was the body that changed him.
In my own writings that have featured characters like Brick I have played with a different idea, though, than merely the idea that a perfect, sexy little pin-up girl body would turn a chauvinist into a pin-up girl personality. My feeling has been that a chauvinist could become the victim of his own biases, and that he would turn himself into a submissive female, giggling and pleasing and all those things because he would believe that was all he could be given his new sex and shape. Perhaps it would not be a case of biology is destiny, but bias is destiny.