When a man decides to live his childhood dream and to enter the Miss France competition by hiding his male gender ... This is the pitch of the film Miss directed by Ruben Alves, released in theaters on Wednesday and whose Europe 1 is partner. The opportunity for psychoanalyst and sexologist Catherine Blanc to respond, in the program "Without appointment", to certain questions that arise about androgyny.
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What is androgyny?
It is someone whose appearance makes it difficult to know if he is a boy or a girl. It is, therefore, only a story of appearance, that is to say that the traits do not allow us to properly define its genre.
Is this a recent phenomenon or has it always existed?
It is not a cultural story. It is really a story of bodies or traits, cultivated or not. There are times, especially in the 70s, when we played on landslides of its kind, so that men had long hair, women did not put their breasts forward, removed their supports -throat as if to deny their feminine gender. So we can play with that, but if not, it's simply a question of genetic structure.
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It has nothing to do with hermaphroditism?
No because there, it is a question of gender in the sense of reproduction which is not very clear, that is to say that we do not know if there is the female sex or the male sex, or both are potentially present, or one has not fully developed and the other is still somewhat present. Nothing to see. Here we are in appearance. Besides, it comes from the Greek "andro", man, in the sense of appearance, gender and "gyne", woman. It is, therefore, really a story of look.
Does it have an impact on the person's sexuality?
Obviously when we build ourselves, we do it with the idea that we make of ourselves and the idea that we refer to others. So me, if I feel deeply feminine while the external appearances suggest something very masculine, I can be polluted by this look and doubt my feelings.
>> READ ALSO - "Neutral sex", a reality difficult to define
Is an androgynous man necessarily homosexual?
Not at all, no, not necessarily. He can be completely heterosexual. We must understand that our sexual impulse is an impulse that starts from our physiological reality on the one hand, from what society sends us back, from what we are, and from the stakes of what we are and possibilities or not. And then after, relational issues with each other and the interest or the opportunity to prevail momentum or another.
Can you be both virile and androgynous?
Absolutely yes. Except that, obviously, when you are androgynous, you are not perceived as virile. So, as we are not, we tend to divest that side to invest what others seem to see of ourselves and that is why we find ourselves in an absence of virility, by an absence in the body of a denial of this manhood.
Is it easy to find love when you are androgynous?
In fact there, the question arises because we speak of androgyny. But, even in very identified male / female couples, with very clear characteristics, that does not mean that the man completely plays a "male" role and the woman completely a "female" role. In reality, there is always a shoe on his feet, that is to say that there is always, even for the androgyne, someone who will find, in his somewhat ambivalent appearance, the wonderful opportunity to play his own personal ambivalence, even if physically there would be none. So there is no problem. We all have people who match us, who take advantage of who we are and what we put forward to come and echo their own mechanism, their own history, their own challenges and their own impulses.