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Perhaps the most shocking Halloween costume Miss Poubelle ever witnessed was worn by a woman dressed as a naked man. She was slender, small-breasted women wearing a flesh-colored body suit to which she had added pubic hair and a fabric phallus. This was surprisingly effective-- from a few feet away, she gave a convincing impression of a guy in the buff.

Of course, women with strap-on dildos are scarcely unusual-- they figure prominently in straight (?!) pornography. Nor are chicks with dicks remarkable, at least since the days when pre-op transexuals have had access to female hormones. The combination of breasts and penis gives an erotic charge to a reliable portion of the population. But the Halloween guest was Miss Poubelle's first encounter with a woman who convincingly gave the appearance of a man, both above and below.

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Until recently, that's been quite a hard act for a man to follow. Men can impersonate clothed women quite successfully, we know. And with the right hormones and surgery, anything is possible. But surgical changes have a way of being rather permanent. What about the chap who feels like having a cunt for the evening, but doesn't want a long-term commitment?

Enter the mangina, an invention of Patrick Bucklew. Miss Poubelle first learned about the mangina from Jonathan Ames's amusing book What's not to love? The adventures of a mildly perverted young writer. Ames discusses how his friend Bucklew (under the pseudonym Harry Chandler) experimented with a sculpting material called friendly plastic until he came up with a strikingly convincing strap-on vagina, which he dubbed the mangina. What is quite innovative about Bucklew's design is that the strap-on device contains a discreet hole through which the scrotum hangs, looking remarkably like authentic labia. The penis is inside the mangina, and the whole device is attached around the waist by very thin, transparent tubing.

For gentle readers who are trying to picture this, some remarkable photos are available at www.themangina.com. Bucklew has made something of a career for himself as a performance artist (known as The Mangina) in which he appears on stage, wearing his mangina, and lets audience members touch and marvel at this wonder of modern technology.

Bucklew calls the scrotum disguised as labia the lotum, and if the suit makes the man, it is clearly the lotum that makes the mangina. Rather than being entirely made up of fake-looking plastic, a substantial portion of the mangina is real skin.

Our biology gives a very good reason why the scrotum can successfully impersonate the labia-- they are closely related organs. Early in fetal development the scrotum and the labia are the same thing. If the fetus gets male hormones, the gonads descend become testicles, while the lotum becomes a scrotum. If the fetus gets female homones, the gonads stay in the body and become ovaries, while the lotum becomes a labia. Transexual surgery exploits this similarity when it refashions the scrotum into labia or vice versa. (Penises and clitorises also come from the same fetal organ, but it is much less easy to transform one into the other.)

Nearly thirty years ago, the science-fiction writer Samuel Delany wrote a classic novel Trouble on Triton, in which people could quickly alter their gender or sexual orientation via medication. In this future world, it was possible to change gender within six hours or sexual orientation within seventeen minutes, simply by taking the right pills. If there were such pills, would we want to take them, changing from gay men to lesbians to straight men to bisexuals to straight women and then back again?

Alas, the sex change pill is likely to remain fiction forever. Perhaps the mangina is the closest current technology for temporarily changing one's gender. Now we only need someone to invent a female equivalent-- anyone up for the wo-cock or the fe-nis?