Last Week I Made Friends With My Anima | Finding The Woman Within The Man

This is the first post in what will be a series from our friend and moderator Gr8legs. It’s his personal tale of becoming acquainted and comfortable with his feminine side, panty wearing and cross-dressing. It’s a lovely deep read and my sincere thanks go to Gr8legs for sharing this with us all.

If you’d like to make a guest post on He Wears Panties, feel free to email me: hope-alexander@hotmail.com

Last week, I made friends with my Anima. She’s been with me all of my life and right throughout my life she’s tried to let me know she’s there, but in a some ways I’ve felt more than a little ashamed and embarrassed about her. You see, the society in which we live is very much defined by stereotypes that are invented and promoted by the media, stereotypes that reinforce the way we see and perceive both other people and, more importantly, ourselves. From an early age, around the time we start school, we are told that little boys are made of “rats and snails and puppy dogs’ tails”, whereas little girls are made of “sugar and spice and all things nice”. Furthermore, big boys don’t cry.

Over the years I have had straight and gay friends of both genders. Indeed, most of my closest and enduring friendships have been with females and, unlike many of my male friends, I have always felt perfectly comfortable in otherwise exclusively female company. As a young boy I would play sports, race my bicycle with my friends, climb trees and engage in typically masculine “adventurous” activities. However, although I had no desire to play at “tea parties” or with dolls (other than Action Man soldier dolls), I would be quite happy to be in the company of and engage in other, non gender-specific games and activities, such as board games with girls.

In The Beginning

My first crossdressing memories were of wearing one of my Mum’s slips at around the age of 5. My Dad had died when I was very young and, although my Mum remarried, for a couple of years there were just the three of us (Mum, sister & I) in the house. At first Mum didn’t seem to mind, but then I suppose she got worried because it was becoming a regular thing. One day, she took the slip off me and threw it into the open fire, saying that it was dangerous for me to walk around the house dressed like that as a spark could set fire to the slip & I’d be burned.

I didn’t really understand at the time, but with hindsight, I think she had noticed that what was initially something cute & novel was becoming a regular occurrence and was trying to stop it from developing into something more – probably worried I’d grow up to be gay! After that incident I did stop wearing feminine articles of clothing until puberty hit and the hormones kicked in.

Then, around the age of 12, I started sneaking into my parents’ room and borrowing first my Mum’s slips and then also pantyhose and masturbating whilst wearing them. I was discovered once by my sister, who told my parents and I was made to endure a horrendously embarrassing “chat”. Nothing more was ever mentioned about it after that, although my Mum did once mention to my soon-to-be ex-wife that she was worried at one stage that I might grow up to be gay (which explains the behaviour in the first paragraph).

I continued with the secret wearing of lingerie as a purely sexual fetish activity, but was deeply ashamed and embarrassed about it and never told anyone. At around the age of 21, I had a girlfriend who used to leave some of her more “raunchy” lingerie at my apartment and I’d sometimes wear it when she wasn’t around. If I was visiting her place and showered there, I would inevitably “accidentally” not have any clean underwear with me and she’d loan me a pair of her panties. I never told her of my love of wearing those silky panties but, once again in hindsight, I think she probably suspected, but didn’t mind.

When I moved away from home and married at 23, my first wife and I went to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the cinema. On the way home she kept talking about how hot Tim Curry looked in his corset and stockings and when we got home she dressed me up in some of her lingerie and we enjoyed a session of passionate love-making. Following that night, my wearing her nighties/pantyhose etc became a regular part of our sexual repertoire, but because of my lingering sense of shame about it, I was never able to tell her about my previous experiences with lingerie, nor openly admit to just how much I loved it. When we split up she gave me one of her nighties to keep.

After that time I never wore lingerie for any other girlfriends, nor bought any for myself, although I was quite relaxed about openly buying lingerie for various girlfriends and gaining some form of vicarious pleasure from that. As far as using lingerie for sexual purposes went, I was reliant upon lingerie left behind by girlfriends.

Then, one night I went with a girlfriend to see the Rocky Horror Show theatre presentation. She borrowed a corset for me from her sister and on the night of the show, she dressed me and made me at my apartment before leaving for the theatre. When we returned home after the show, she grabbed me as soon as the door was closed, frantic with lust and insisted on making love in front of a mirror so she could watch me making love to her whilst wearing a corset and stockings. There was never any repetition of that as I was still too afraid to admit to my love of lingerie, although I would buy it for her to wear. When we split up, she left my favourite black, silky teddy behind, with the words “You might as well keep it, you’ll have more use for it than me”. She’d obviously sussed my liking of female underwear, but had been sensitive enough to realise my embarrassment and hadn’t pressed the point. How I wish now that she had been able to tell me that she was cool about it.

The first person I ever openly told about my fetish was my soon-to-be ex-wife. I told her I liked wearing pantyhose and silky lingerie one Saturday afternoon and she immediately insisted that we should go shopping to buy me some. Over the nearly 15 years of our marriage, I would regularly wear lingerie when we were making love and she would buy me slips and nighties as gifts from time-to-time. When we split up, she used this against me, telling friends about my “cross-dressing”, much to my horror and embarrassment. She even cited it as one of the reasons behind the breakdown of our marriage and has tried to use it against me in court to try and stop me from seeing my kids. My lawyer told me before our first appearance in the Family Court, “I’ve known cases where one party was a heroin addict and user and was still granted free access to their kids, wearing ladies underwear is not going to be seen by the courts as constituting a danger to your kids”.

The second person I told was my best friend. My ex- had told his wife and I didn’t feel that it was right that she should be carrying a secret that he wasn’t a party to. I told him about my wearing lingerie and showed him a statement I had typed for myself some weeks before – a kind of mantra to help me to become more comfortable about it. His response was “Mate, it makes no difference to me. We’ve been friends for all these years and this doesn’t change a thing”.

During the time following my separation from my second wife, I discovered Hope Alexander’s articles on Hub Pages.

The third person I told was my current girlfriend. By this time I had read many of Hope Alexander’s articles and was feeling a lot more comfortable in myself about my penchant for ladies’ lingerie. The third time we had made love, I had worn a pair of black, silky, boy leg panties and a silky black ladies’ singlet. She made no attempt to remove either when we were making love and so, on our next date I told her the truth. I sat her down and told her that I had something important to tell her and then I quite simply said to her that I liked wearing lingerie. Her response was “Is that all? God! I thought you were going to tell me you were seeing other women!” She absolutely loves that I wear lingerie. She finds it to be a huge turn-on and we almost always both wear sexy, silky, feminine underwear during our love-making sessions.

As a result of a combination of the reading and research I have done and my experiences with my girlfriend, I began to feel a lot more comfortable in expressing my feminine self.

By this stage I had a fairly expansive lingerie collection and, although I was not yet ready to be completely open about it, each reaction I have from others that is either positive or non-judgmental, had the combined effect of allaying my long-held fears regarding the attitudes and reactions of others, as well as increasing my own sense of self-worth. There was a growing sense that this form of expressing the feminine part of my psyche – my anima – that I have, is not a horrid and shameful thing.