Boy meets girls

Girlyman Pumped by Arnold Brooklyn pop trio weighs in on governor's political incorrectness Proving that he hasn't completely given up the entertainment business, new California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has refused to apologize for recently calling uncooperative state legislators "girlie men."

The members of the Brooklyn folk-pop trio that named itself Girlyman don't think he needs to. They just wish the press would get the spelling right.

"It's important to spell it with a Y," jokes Nate Borofsky, the sole male in the three-piece group. With their full-length debut set for reissue in September on Indigo Girl Amy Ray's Daemon Records imprint, the band maintains the Web domain at girlyman.com. As for the alternate spelling, Borofsky says with a laugh, "I believe that's a porn site, sadly."

Composed of onetime Boston-area solo performer Borofsky and the former duo of Doris Muramatsu and Tammy Greenstein, three songwriting friends who first met at Sarah Lawrence College, Girlyman specializes in a brand of music they call "delicious acoustic harmony-driven gender pop."

"We have a distaste for traditional gender roles and stereotypes," says Borofsky. Remember Who I Am, the band's debut, features a song by Greenstein about "getting a straight woman to try new things," he says. Greenstein, who recently changed her first name to Ty, also has a forthcoming song called "Young James Dean," about boyish-looking girls.

"Ty, she's more masculine," says Borofsky. "Whereas I often wear makeup – eyeliner, lipstick – onstage. It's part of who we are."

Though several politicians have expressed deep displeasure with Schwarzenegger for his sarcastic remark ("blatant homophobia," cried one state senator; "as misogynist as it is anti-gay," complained another), the members of Girlyman have been amused by the episode.

"I think it's funny," says Borofsky. "It illustrates a lot about gender in our culture right now -- this uber-masculine governor calling other politicians 'girlie men.' The problem that people had with Gray Davis was that he was boring. Certainly Gov. Schwarzenegger is anything but that."

In Schwarzenegger, Borofsky notes, the concept of the all-powerful male leader has taken on an ironic twist: The former actor first came to prominence, after all, as a scantily clad bodybuilder. "And the main audience for photographic images of pumped-up men is probably the gay male community," says Borofsky.

The governor's "girlie men" quip paid tribute, of course, to the old Dana Carvey-Kevin Nealon Saturday Night Live sketches about Hans and Franz, two ridiculous Teutonic bodybuilders clearly based on Schwarzenegger. Though the members of Girlyman didn't intend to pay direct tribute to SNL, "the sketch has definitely followed us around," says Borofsky. "I can't count the number of times people have pronounced our name with a German accent."

JAMES SULLIVAN