Andrea Long Chu

« Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female, » proclaims the SCUM Manifesto. The paradox of the male libido is that it isn’t actually male. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the manosphere, that awfully named borough of the Internet where pickup artists, men’s rights activists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way, and other alt-right communities go to commiserate, swap tips, and air their woman-hating and racism without fear of reprisal. At the heart of the manosphere lies the conviction that men—paradigmatically, though not always, white men—have lost status in the past fifty years, ultimately thanks to the rise of feminism. To awaken to this fact is to take the red pill—a phrase borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, whose hacker protagonist Neo is given the choice between a red pill and a blue. The latter will return Neo to his simulated everyday life with no memory of the choice ; the former, which he picks, transports him out of the Matrix and into the real world where humanity has been enslaved by sentient machines. In recent years, the alt-right has co-opted the scene as a parable for seeing past feminist brainwashing to the truth : feminism is a disease, all women wish to be dominated, and nice guys finish last.

Of course, another interpretation of the red pill is possible. Trans women have claimed The Matrix as an allegory for gender transition since at least 2012, when director Lana Wachowski publicly came out as a trans woman while doing press for the film Cloud Atlas. (Her sister and codirector Lilly followed suit in 2016.) The symbolism is easy to find in the plot : Thomas Anderson’s double life (he’s a hacker by night), his chosen name (Neo), his vague but maddening sense that something is off about the world (« a splinter in your mind, » resistance leader Morpheus calls it). Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. You get it.

And then there’s the red pill itself, less a metaphor for hormone therapy than a literal hormone. Many have pointed out online that back in the nineties, prescription estrogen was, in fact, red : the 0.625 mg Premarin tablet, derived in Matrix-like fashion from the urine of pregnant mares, came in smooth, chocolatey maroon. Trans allies on Twitter now gleefully brandish this fact as a well, actually–style rejoinder to the alt-right’s recent co-optation of the red pill scene as a parable for « awakening » from feminist brainwashing.

There’s something to this. Taken seriously, it suggests that the manosphere red-piller’s resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. In this reading, 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. His desire to increase his manhood is not primary, but a second-tier defense mechanism. Those around him assume he is a leader, a provider, a president ; but his greatest fear is that they are mistaken. He radicalizes—shoots up a school, builds a wall—in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them.

But there’s another level. The Wachowski sisters, even if they knew about Premarin, could never have predicted that the most common form of prescription estrogen today would be blue. Aquamarine, actually—a tiny, coarse 2 mg estradiol pill supplied by Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva that turns to powder in your mouth. At present, I take the blue pill twice a day, once upon waking and once before bed, sending myself back into the simulation. By this logic, the hidden trans woman of The Matrix is not the messianic Neo, but Cypher, the sleazy traitor, who agrees to hand Morpheus over to the machines in exchange for being reinserted into the Matrix. « Ignorance is bliss, » he tells the agents, mouth full of juicy, nonexistent steak. (Recall that cipher is an old word for zero.) « I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing. You understand ? »

Valerie would have approved of hormone therapy, I think. The SCUM Manifesto alludes, positively, to a futuristic world where men are transformed into women « by means of operations on the brain and nervous system. » This was one of SCUM’s nongenocidal solutions for the few men who might remain after the revolution. Another, hinted at in a footnote, sounds a lot like the Matrix—a vast virtual reality network that men would willingly plug themselves into as « vicarious livers. » « It will be electronically possible for [men] to tune into any specific female [they want] to and follow in detail her every movement, » Valerie explains, declaring it a « marvelously kind and humane way » for women to treat their « unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings. »

Isn’t that the whole point of gender—letting someone else do your living for you ?

If you’ve ever seen sissy porn, you’ll know that turning people female is exactly what sissy porn says it does. Also known as forced feminization or « forced fem, » sissy porn seems to have begun circulating principally on the microblogging platform Tumblr in or around 2013. The genre is characteristically user-generated rather than produced by a traditional studio : in large part, sissy content creators would appropriate videos, stills, and animated GIFs from mainstream heterosexual or « shemale » pornography—intellectual property is notoriously difficult to protect in today’s porn industry—and modify this material with captions altering their original meaning. In late 2018, when the microblogging platform moved to ban graphic sexual content, sissy porn creators, like many other sex workers, were forced to flee to other platforms, including Twitter and Instagram.

Sissy porn’s central conceit is that the women it depicts (some cis, some trans, mostly but not always white) are in fact former men who have been feminized (« sissified ») by being forced to wear makeup, wear lingerie, and perform acts of sexual submission. This is executed through the unique form of second-person address in which captions are typically written : sissy porn directly addresses its viewers and presumes to inform them of their own desires : « You love to be fucked in the ass, » for instance, or « You want to suck cock. » (Sissy porn often uses cock as an uncountable mass noun, like water or sugar, presumably because there can always be more.) Captions further instruct viewers to understand that the very act of looking at sissy porn itself constitutes an act of sexual degradation, with the implication that, whether they like it or not, viewers will inevitably be transformed into females themselves. This makes sissy porn a kind of metapornography, that is, porn about what happens to you when you watch porn. In other words, sissy porn takes the implicitly feminizing effect of all pornography (even the most vanilla) and promotes it to the level of explicit content—often with spectacular results.

At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the gay male critic Leo Bersani famously wrote that public horror of anal sex betrayed 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. » Sissy porn takes this literally. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is. At the same time, sissy porn remains wholly uninterested in who’s doing the fucking. Men appear, when they appear, only in fragments : a hand, an ass, a stray leg. Tops are props ; their function is purely structural. « To call a man an animal is to flatter him, » Valerie writes in SCUM. « He’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what ? Surely not pleasure. »

Sissy porn makes frequent use of fetish objects—makeup, lingerie, breasts, high heels, and the color pink—but unlike the classical Freudian fetish, these objects promise castration, instead of warding against it. For Freud, the fetish was a clear substitute for the « absent female phallus. » The little boy, traumatized by the discovery that his mother has no penis and fearing lest the same fate befall his own, looks for reassurance to an object that can replace that penis—a high-heeled shoe, for instance, or the touch of velvet. The fetish is thus « a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. » Yet even Freud knew that the fetish, in disavowing castration, thereby implicitly acknowledged it ; sissy porn exploits this weakness, transforming the fetish from an assurance that the penis will be kept safe into a guarantee that the penis will be lost forever. This means that, in cases where the sissy is a trans woman, even her own fetishized penis becomes a symbol of castration. If her penis is limp, it is mocked for its tiny size and called a « clitty » ; if it is hard, this is simply proof that she is enjoying her degradation.

In fact, to be a sissy is always to lose your mind. The technical term for this is bimboification. Captions often instruct viewers to submit themselves to hypnosis, brainwashing, brain-melting, dumbing down, and other techniques for scooping out intelligence. « Why do I like the concept of being a Bimbo ? » asks one user. « It’s because my brain is always full. I’m always worrying if Master truly loves me. Am I enough ? Am I making good choices ? Do people actually like me ? How can I live in a country like this with this current political climate ? Where else could I even imagine going ? » The gestures most often looped in GIF format almost always register the evacuation of will : wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads. Even the GIF format itself communicates this, a kind of centrifuge for distilling the femaleness to its barest essentials—an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.

Sissy porn did make me trans. At very least it served as a neat allegory for my desire to be female—and increasingly, I thought, for all desire as such. Too often, feminists have imagined powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force, and they’ve forgotten that more often than not, desire is this external force. Most desire is nonconsensual ; most desires aren’t desired. Wanting to be a woman was something that descended upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection—or a mental illness, at least if you believe the Diagnostic and Statistical 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.

Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. If this is true, then gender is very simply the form this self-loathing takes in any given case. All gender is internalized misogyny. A female is one who has eaten the loathing of another, like an amoeba that got its nucleus by swallowing its neighbor. Or, to put a finer point on it : Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism.

The claim that gender is socially constructed has rung hollow for decades not because it isn’t true, but because it’s wildly incomplete. Indeed, it is trivially true that a great number of things are socially constructed, from money to laws to genres of literature. What makes gender gender—the substance of gender, as it were—is the fact that it expresses, in every case, the desires of another. Gender has therefore 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. In the former case, one takes an object ; in the latter case, one is an object. From the perspective of gender, then, we are all dumb blondes.

This need not be controversial. Feminists far less outrageous than Valerie have long argued that femininity expresses male sexuality pretty much from the beginning. The organizers of the famous Miss America protest in 1968—the origin of the famous bra-burning myth—railed in a press release against the « Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol » they considered the pageant to epitomize. None have put it more starkly than the antipornography feminist Catharine MacKinnon, whose 1989 book, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, features a lengthy catalogue of examples :

Each element of the female gender stereotype is revealed as, in fact, sexual. Vulnerability means the appearance/reality of easy sexual access ; passivity means receptivity and disabled resistance, enforced by trained physical weakness ; softness means pregnability by something hard. Incompetence seeks help as vulnerability seeks shelter, inviting the embrace that becomes the invasion, trading exclusive access for protection … from that same access. Domesticity nurtures the consequent progeny, proof of potency, and ideally waits at home dressed in Saran Wrap. Woman’s infantilization evokes pedophilia ; fixation on dismembered body parts (the breast man, the leg man) evokes fetishism ; idolization of vapidity, necrophilia. Narcissism ensures that woman identifies with the image of herself man holds up : « Hold still, we are going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away. »

Indeed, MacKinnon has built an entire intellectual career out of the claim that « it is sexuality that determines gender, not the other way around. » For her this means that men and women are constructed though an « eroticization of dominance and submission » whose central process is nonconsensual sexual objectification. Hence the famous line : « Man fucks woman ; subject verb object. »

To be female is to be an object—MacKinnon is right about this, I think. Where she errs is in the assumption that femaleness is a condition restricted to women. Gender is always a process of objectification : transgender women like Gigi Gorgeous know this probably better than most. Gender transition begins, after all, from the understanding that how you identify yourself subjectively—as precious and important as this identification may be—is nevertheless on its own basically worthless. If identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it—a light bulb, suddenly switched on. Your gender identity would simply exist, in mute abstraction, and no one, least of all yourself, would care.

On the contrary, if there is any lesson of gender transition—from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries—it’s that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers. When people today say that a given gender identity is « valid, » this is true, but only tautologically so. At best it is a moral demand for possibility, but it does not, in itself, constitute the realization of this possibility. The truth is, you are not the central transit hub for meaning about yourself, and you probably don’t even have a right to be. You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.

You do not get to consent to yourself—a definition of femaleness.

The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply : Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.

Some explanations are in order. For our purposes here, I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. These desires may be real or imagined, concentrated or diffuse—a boyfriend’s sexual needs, a set of cultural expectations, a literal pregnancy—but in all cases, the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you. Its ultimate toll, at least in every case heretofore recorded, is death.

Clearly, this is a wildly tendentious definition. It’s even more far-fetched if you, like me, are applying it to everyone—literally everyone, every single human being in the history of the planet. So it’s true : When I talk about females, I am not referring to biological sex, though I’m not referring to gender, either. I’m referring instead to something that might as well be sex, the way that reactionaries describe it (permanent, unchanging, etc.), but whose nature is ontological, not biological. Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female : the two are identical.

It follows, then, that while all women are females, not all females are women. In fact, the empirical existence, past and present, of genders other than man and woman means that the majority of females are not women. This is ironic, but not a contradiction. Everyone is female, but how one copes with being female—the specific defense mechanisms that one consciously or unconsciously develops as a reaction formation against one’s femaleness, within the terms of what is historically and socioculturally available—this is what we ordinarily call gender. Men and women must therefore be understood not as irreconcilable opposites, or even as two poles of a spectrum, but more simply as the two most common phyla of the kingdom Females. It might be asked : if men, women, and everyone else all share this condition, why continue to refer to it with an obviously gendered term like females ? The answer is : because everyone already does. Women hate being female as much as anybody else ; but unlike everybody else, we find ourselves its select delegates.

This brings me to the second part of my thesis : Everyone is female—and everyone hates it. By the second claim, I mean something like what Valerie meant : that human civilization represents a diverse array of attempts to suppress and mitigate femaleness, that this is in fact the implicit purpose of all human activity, and, most of all, that activity we call politics. The political is the sworn enemy of the female ; politics begins, in every case, from the optimistic belief that another sex is possible. This is the root of all political consciousness : the dawning realization that one’s desires are not one’s own, that one has become a vehicle for someone else’s ego ; in short, that one is female, but wishes it were not so. Politics is, in its essence, anti-female.

This claim extends to the variety of women’s movements in the twentieth and twenty-first century that may be collected under the name of feminist politics ; in fact, the conscious discovery that being female is bad for you might be described as quintessentially feminist. Perhaps the oldest right-wing accusation brought by men and other women against feminists, whether they demanded civic equality or anti-male revolution, was that feminists were really asking, quite simply, not to be women anymore. There was a kernel of truth here : Feminists didn’t want to be women anymore, at least under the existing terms of society ; or to put it more precisely, feminists didn’t want to be female anymore, either advocating for the abolition of gender altogether or proposing new categories of womanhood unencumbered by femaleness. To be for women, imagined as full human beings, is always to be against females. In this sense, feminism opposes misogyny precisely inasmuch as it also expresses it.

Or maybe I’m just projecting.

Everyone is female.

The worst books are all by females. All the great art heists of the past three hundred years were pulled off by a female, working solo or with other females. There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets. A list of things invented by females would include : airplanes, telephones, the smallpox vaccine, ghosting, terrorism, ink, envy, rum, prom, Spain, cars, gods, coffee, language, stand-up comedy, every kind of knot, double parking, nail polish, the letter tau, the number zero, the H-bomb, feminism, and the patriarchy. Sex between females is no better or worse than any other kind of sex, because no other kind of sex is possible. Shark attacks exclusively target females. All the astronauts were female, which means the moon is a female-only zone. The 1 percent is 100 percent female. The entire Supreme Court is female. The entire United States Senate is female. The president is, obviously, a female.

Females dominate the following professions : zookeeping, haberdashery, landscaping, investment banking, long-distance trucking, lutherie, consulting, talent management, tort law, taxidermy, real estate development, orthodontia, prison administration, and the mafia. Not all females are serial killers, but all serial killers are female, including the necrophiles. The entire incarcerated population is female. All rape survivors are females. All rapists are females. Females masterminded the Atlantic slave trade. All the dead are female. All the dying, too. The hospitals of the world are full of them : females in beds or gingerly walking about, full of pain, recovering, slipping away. All the guns in the world are owned by females.

I am female. And you, dear reader, you are female, even—especially—if you are not a woman. Welcome. Sorry.