*** 3/3 ***
Females by Andrea Long Chu.
I bought this book at one of my two favourite bookstores in the world: McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan, NY. It was one of the ones recommended by staff, and generally, when you have bookish staff and a great selection of books, it is almost always right on. To heck with Amazon’s AI! Support independent bookstores!!!
It is a feminist book. Without doubt. Arch-feminist even. It is radical.
When I picked it up, I had no idea that the author also happened to be trans, which is largely incidental, but occasionally becomes directly relevant.
The central tenet of the book is that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” It is a provocative statement, and one which, in the argument, comes true. She disconnects the feminine from biological sex but also gender, and describes instead, the feminine as a state of being and relating to the world which boils down to pleasing others and getting fucked. That women are not necessarily feminine, but that they need to cultivate a balance of feminine and masculine to alchemize, to survive, to thrive.
She touches on a large number of very taboo topics, including incels, feminism, the manosphere, sissy porn, being trans, gender norms, politics and social structure, patriarchal power. Its all in here. And she manages to do it in few than 100 pages…really packing it in. You can fly through it in one sitting. Some of the sentences are as sharp as torn sheet metal.
The central thesis of the book is that femaleness is a universal characteristic defined by self-negation, against which all politics, including feminist politics, rebels. Hence: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
Here is a sampling of the book (NB…except that which is […] I am quoting and paraphrasing liberally (and without permission…but because I really like the book, I hope it doesn’t matter, and that you will all go out and buy it. Yay!):
I’m so female I’m subversive
The book begins with a look at the play Up Your Ass, by Valerie Solanas, known as well for having shot Andy Warhol for losing one of her manuscripts. One of the characters in the play ‘longs aloud for the end of the male sex’:
“Men might be eliminated through technology-assisted foetal sex selection—a bloodless genocide.” The idea horrifies a white-collar worker named Russell she is speaking with.
“The two-sex system must be right,” he protests, “it’s survived hundreds of thousands of years.”
“So has disease,” she shoots back. “It doesn’t follow that the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist. When genetic control is possible—and soon it will be—it goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects.”
Valerie Solanas writes in the SCUM Manifesto, a later work, that men are already female to begin with. “The male is a biological accident. The Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at gene stage. The entire history of human civilization consists of man’s sublimated attempts to fulfil his repressed desire to complete himself, to become female.” What she proposes as a solution to the malaise is misogyny against men.
Eventually the expression “female of the species” will become redundant
The female is defined as any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. This means that femaleness is bad for you. The meaning of female in the book is not about biological sex, nor gender. Femaleness is ontological, not anatomical, rather a universal existential condition, the one and only human consciousness. To be is to be female. Therefore, while all women are females, not all females are women. Indeed, the majority of females are not women. And since everyone is female, what matters is how we cope with it. Men and women should not be understood as opposites, but rather the two most common phyla of the kingdom females.
She posits that human civilization represents the attempt to suppress and mitigate femaleness. That this is the purpose of human endeavour, most perfectly expressed as politics. “The political is the sworn enemy of the female. The root of political consciousness is that one’s desires are not one’s own but a vehicle for someone else’s ego. One is female, but wishes it were not so. Politics is therefore, anti-female.
The history of feminism is of feminists not wanting to be women anymore, at least under the existing terms of society. Feminists didn’t want to be female anymore, advocating for the abolition of gender, or proposing new categories of womanhood unencumbered by femaleness. The corollary of this is that feminism both opposes and expresses misogyny.
She Has Penis Envy. She Should See an Analyst
Men and women, for Freud, represented partial, imperfect solutions to the universal threat of castration. The presence or absence of a penis is incidental to castration anxiety; the idea of one is sufficient. According to Freud, women had lost a penis. Penis envy in girls diverts a mother desire to a father desire, and then later to a husband, who will give her a baby as a penis substitute. Extreme penis envy in women, thought Freud, would result in frigidity or at worst, lesbianism.
Freud recognised his theory of castration anxiety as misogynistic. Freud conflated the mythological Medusa of Greek myth, just one look to turn a man to stone, with an expression of castration anxiety. Medusa serves as a reminder that the male still has a prick.
A more obvious interpretation is that the boy who sees the female genitalia considers the possibility that his penis will be remove, and secretly finds the idea arousing. [This is certainly the case with me]. “Women don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy.” The castration complex is not a fear of being castrated, but rather that once having been castrated, he will like it.
Hell’o Gorgeous
A woman who makes herself beautiful does not do so out of self-regard, but because she has emptied herself out and assumed their desires as her own.
The Tasteless Faggot
There have long been feminists who have sought to repress male-to-female transsexuality on the grounds that it expressed a quintessentially male fantasy of womanhood. TERFS (trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists). The classic text of the TERF is Janice Raymond’s book, The Transsexual Empire: The Meaning of the She-Male, whose author claimed that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the female form to an artifact, appropriating the body for themselves. She goes on to say that transsexuality is a perverse extension of sexual objectification, “the ultimate conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society. Men possess women.”
Raymond is a bigot who makes no effort to conceal her distrust for trans women and for medical interventions such as genital surgery or hormone therapy. What delicious and hypocritical irony that the crown Queen of TERFs regards nothing with greater horror than the prospect of someone having their penis chopped off! A trans woman who passes, and how is beautiful is the TERF’s greatest nightmare.
You Wouldn’t Be Bad Looking if You’d put on a skirt and look like a woman
All gender is internalized misogyny. Gender is not the misogynistic expectations a woman internalizes but the process of internalizing itself. The self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism. Gender is just as much a social construct as money or laws are. What is unique about gender is that it expresses the desires of another. It has a complementary relation to sexual orientation. If sexual orientation is basically the social expression of one’s own sexuality, then gender is basically a social expression of someone else’s sexuality. To be gendered is to be objectified.
She quotes a powerful passage from anti-porn feminist Catharine MacKinnon’s book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. She gives examples.
“Each element of the female gender stereotype is revealed as sexual. Vulnerability means the appearance of easy sexual access; passivity means receptivity and disabled resistance, enforced by physical weakness; softness means pregnability by something hard. Vulnerability seeks shelter, inviting the embrace that becomes the invasion, trading exclusive access for protection. Woman’s infantilization evokes pedophilia; fixation on dismembered body parts (the breast man, the leg man) evokes fetishism.”
MacKinnon claims that “sexuality determines gender, not the other way around.” For her, men and women are constructed through an “eroticization of dominance and submission” whose central process is non-consensual sexual objectification. “Man fucks woman; subject verb object.” To be female is to be an object.
The author of this book asserts, however, that MacKinnon misses something crucial. Femaleness is not just restricted to women. Gender is always a process of objectification: transgender women know this probably better than most. Gender transition begins, after all, from the understanding that how you identify yourself subjectively is worthless. If it were this easy, transition would be as easy as thinking it. But if there is a lesson from the transgender experience, from pronouns to surgery, it is that gender has to be given to you by other people. Gender exists only in the generosity of strangers.
You do not get to consent to yourself—a definition of femalenss.
Everybody Knows that Men have More Respect for Women who are Good at Lapping up Shit
There is the woman in the office who is the quintessential “Daddy’s Girl”. She says that labour pain feels good. She is flattered by sexual harassment [Star Child?], and loves to be thought of as one of the boys.
You don’t know what a female is
The words female and male, despite apparent similarities, are unrelated etymologically. Both derive from French. Masculus is the diminutive form of mas, or male as of an animal. Femina means “she who suckles”. The word cousins of female are fecund, felicity, fennel, fetus, affiliate, effete, and fellatio, from Latin fellare, meaning “to suck a dick.”
The word female came into linguistic usage in the 1300’s mainly in reference to their childrbearing capacity. The word did not gain the technical sense of “human mammal of the female sex” until the rise of biology in the 19th century. The man known as the father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, operated on enslaved women in his own backyard in the antebellum South. The distinction between females and women as a social category, developed precisely to identify the black woman as female without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced precisely at the juncture where gender was denied.
Thanks to the research of French endocrinologist Alfred Jost, in the 20th century we finally learned that the default sex of the mammalian foetus is female. Gynecologist Marci Bowers, a pioneer in the field of male-to-female gender surgeries, describes the vaginoplasty technique she has honed over years as a basic principle of embryology. “As everyone has female genitalia early in gestation, the goal of the procedure to reverse the current anatomy to its earlier configuration. The human embryo is originally female, coming male only with the introduction of a masculinizing agent; hence a vagina can be created from a penis by surgically rewinding the tape of early-stage sexual differentiation.”
This truth stands in stark contrast to the Biblical creation myth in which Adam is created first and then Eve is created from one of his ribs. Eve was first. It should be called the Eve Principle, not the Adam Principle.
Our Reality is That We’re Men
Valentine Saint-Point, a French fascist of the early 20th century, remarked, “Feminism is a political error.” Men and women can only be whole by integrating both male and female elements. What is missing from both sexes is virility. The only way for women to fulfil themselves will be to undergo masculinization. But the words she uses to describe female is femelle, which is what is usually used to refer to livestock, not human females.
The writer makes a powerful confession, evoking the cocktail of her righteous feminist anger, but in her male body, masturbating, and being furious about rape while simultaneously consuming porn.
She confesses, “it would be years before it would occur to me that I might be a woman. If the thought had presented itself then, I would have batted it away like an insect. I hated being a man, but I thought that was just how feminism felt. Being a man was my punishment for being a man. [Gosh. Where have I felt that before?]
Why Are Girls Called Chicks? After all, men have the peckers.
The paradox of the male libido is that it isn’t actually male. Look no further than the manosphere, lurking place of the incel and men’s rights activist. At the heart of this zone is the conviction/fear that white men have lost status over the past fifty years, mainly thanks to feminism. The alt-right sees post-feminist brain-washing to the truth: feminism is a disease, all women wish to be dominated, and nice guys finish last.
The manosphere’s resentment of immigrants, blacks, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. He is an abortive man, a beta trapped in an alpha’s body, consumed with the desire to be female and desperately trying to repress it. Those around him might see him as a leader, but he fears he is a fake. He radicalizes, rapes, shoots people, builds walls, joins the army, in order to avoid transitioning, to root the girl right out of him.
The Incel
The idea is simple. Women are attracted to men. For evolutionary reasons, however, they are also picky. Incels see this as women having impossibly high standards. They naturally prefer men with stronger frames (a frame is a term from the male pickup world, and means social placement. You can also read it as gender). Mike Haines, a leader in the incel field writes, “Women want to submit to you. They want to submit to a strong man. But she can’t submit to you if your frame is weaker than hers…and she will test you to test your frame.” This means, ironically, that male seduction should be a passive process. Successful men, Mike argues, have endurance.
Bizarrely, there is an unexpected reversal of roles. If a woman is to be sure of a man’s worth, she must first dominate him. The man must learn to look forward to his submission “Women are wired in such a way that they can’t become wet for a man unless he’s overcome some kind of resistance to get her.”
The patriarchal system of sexual oppression therefore existed not to express man’s maleness, but to conceal his femaleness.
“He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is.” Valerie Solanas.
According to Mike, “women will test you brutally when they want to sleep with you.” [I find this both uncanny and amusing given my own love for the dominatrix, archetype of the unattainable woman…someone I pay to play out games of never possessing. Go figure].
Divisions in the Manosphere
The manosphere is deeply divided about the issue of pornography. For many, pornography and the addiction to masturbation which accompanies it is genuinely dangerous for men. The far-right Proud Boys who became known for beating up antifa protesters on the Upper East Side of NYC in 2018, require that members subscribe to No Wanks, giving up masturbation and pornography for 30 days. At the end of a cycle, Proud Boys are given the option of a single cheat wank. [Does this sound like chastity to you?]
Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness. Feminists have been debating porn for decades. For activists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, pornography, with its graphical depictions of female degradation, was the patriarchal institution par excellence. Others who might be described as “pro-sex” wondered how to like sex and still be feminist, or to enjoy the pleasures of dominance and submission. These groups ended up debating each other around a central question: can women have sex without being fucked? Is that feminist sex is?
The answer for many is to have sex with whomever you wish, male, female, trans, straight, gay, bi, even all at once. What doesn’t fit is the quasi-religious moralism that anti-porn feminists cultivate.
Men watch porn not to have power, but to give it up. A man doesn’t have to do anything, just sit back and sing to the Queen. Pornography feminizes him. Porn is structured by the eroticization of dominance and submission. Despite what is largely an onscreen depiction of women giving up power to men, the only real power exchange taking place is between the viewer and the film itself.
The opposite of porn, genuine intimacy, true and deep human connection, is active, and is the opposite of female…Ironic considering that we consider female sexual traits to want the emotional connection. It is subversive when she gets it.
Sissy Porn; Downright Perverse
The author describes her own addiction to sissy porn before beginning her transition. Brave. “Almost every night, for at least a year before I transitioned, I would wait till my girlfriend had fallen asleep and slip out of bed for the bathroom with my phone…”. The essence of which is shame. Whether that is shame that the viewer is not a real man, or that “you will never get to have a beautiful woman like me.”
Humiliation is a frequent theme. Orgasms are ruined or withheld. The “tiny penis” is a common trope, whether as object of disgust or amusement. All of which serves to degrade the self-perception of that which is male in the viewer.
[I am struck with parallels to so much of the pro-Domme scene. Although humiliation is not at all my scene, or any of what is described above, I did watch sissy porn for a period in the year prior to my own acceptance that ‘now is the time’.]
Some reddit groups are focussed entirely on whether sissy porn is turning people trans. One of my favourite online Dommes speaks often about this and is concerned herself about the phenomenon. She is quite unique. She is one of the few dommes out there who actively encourages men to submit to women as a way to grow into their strength, a philosophy which I find very resonant.
The fear that sissy porn makes men want to become women hangs over these groups. There is shame, anxiety, alarm. The fear is that real trans women are into these things. Therapists even make the mistake. One patient who self-describes as having never felt male, hating erections, told her therapist of her addiction to sissy porn and was told that she just had a kink. “Real MTFs don’t do that. Ever.”
But transsexuality was originally considered a paraphilia. That narrative says that transsexual women are just men. One leading proponent of this line of thinking, Ray Blanchard wrote in a 1989 paper, “all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented towards men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women.” [Thank goodness we have moved along from that]. This is what the word autogynephilia means, from Greek, ‘love of oneself as woman’.
This theory, further popularized in the 2003 book The Man Who Would be Queen by J. Michael Bailey, has become a touchstone for trans-hating feminists looking to cast trans women as male perverts.
Another author in the same transphobic vein, Sheila Jeffrey’s, writes, “The term transgender was coined to create a more acceptable face for a practice previously understood as a [fetish]…the use of the term ‘sissy’ is illuminating since it is very clearly a term of abuse based upon women’s subordinate status. There is no positive association with women attached to this practice, only a degrading and demeaning one.”
If you accept, however, the premise of the book, that everyone is female, then autogynephilia describes not an obscure paraphilic affliction but rather the basic structure of all human sexuality. The assimilation of any erotic image is by nature female. To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.
Power and Fucking
Sissy porn is intended to do exactly what it says it will. It is also referred to as forced feminization. The central conceit is that the women it depicts (cis or trans, but mostly white) are in fact former men who have been feminized (“sissified”) by being forced to adopt female clothes, mannerisms, performative femininity, and to perform acts of sexual submission. It is usually accompanied by captions which directly address the viewers desires: “you love to be fucked in the ass” or “you want to suck cock”. Captions and voiceovers underline the idea that watching sissy porn is degrading, but that the viewer cannot help it, and similiarly, as they watch, they will be slowly, but remorselessly turned into bimbos. It is meta-pornography.
At the centre of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. Famous gay male critic wrote, “public horror of anal sex betrays a hateful envy of the intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.
“To call a man an animal is to flatter him. He’s a machine. A walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.”
Valerie solanas
Freud would roll over in his grave. Sissy porn, through its use of fetish objects (makeup, wigs, dildos, lingerie, breasts, high heels), promises castration, rather than warding against it. For Freud, the fetish was to achieve the opposite, “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.” But this acknowledgement of the role of the fetish implicitly acknowledges the possibility of castration. Sissy porn exploits this weakness and transforms the fetish from an assurance that the penis will be kept safe to a guarantee that the penis will be lost forever.
The author states, “Sissy porn did make me trans. At least it served as a neat allegory for my desire to be female.” Too often feminists have imagined powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force. But they forget that desire is this external force. Most desire is non-consensual. “Wanting to be a woman was something that descended on me like a tongue of fire, or an infection, or an illness, at least if you believe the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, where gender dysphoria can be found sandwiched between frigidity and pyromania. The implication is obvious: No one in their right mind would want to be female. Which, remember, is all of us.
Post-Note
When I bought this book, and until I was about half-way through it, did I discover that the author was transgender.
This book is an utterly different take on many of these debates which have consumed us and continue to for a long time. I found it thought-provoking, at times revolutionary. Her take is fresh and different. And maybe that is what the debate needs.
I hope many of you go out and buy this book, and I would love to hear your thoughts if you do.
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