Censor Reports in the Commonwealth Army in W.W. II by Jonathan Fennell

Whereas there is an abundance of sources available regarding the decisions and activities at the top of the strategic chain of command, considerably less survives at the bottom. The behaviors expected of the soldiers by their political and military leaders exert ‘overwhelming dominance over the archival record.’ Therefore, ‘the influence of an authority-generated model’ for understanding warfare, and history for that matter, ‘persists even in the most innovative works.’ In this sense, it is not surprising that the role of Winston Churchill, and other war leaders, and the decisions of senior commanders in the field, dominate the history of the Second World War. In a similar vein, it is the records related to the size of armies, the movement of men and machines and the productive capacities of combatant nations that mostly survive in archives. The accessibility of such records facilitates the portrayal of war as a complex game of chess, where the interplay between numbers, tactics and ruses decides the outcome of events.


The great military philosopher, Carl von Clausewitz, was not the first to criticize such a mechanistic and potentially deterministic understanding of history. Military practitioners and theorists have long emphasized the relevance of ordinary men in battle, of ‘unquantifiable’ and ‘intangible’ factors. Scholars have addressed the challenge of integrating the ‘unquantifiable’ and ‘intangible’ into the history of war in a number of ways. Some works on, for instance, the German and American armies in the Second World War, use attitudinal surveys to illuminate the experience of the citizen soldier at particular places and periods of time. Such studies, however, are few and far between and their findings are often highly contextualized; their relevance to  understanding the attitudes and behavior of combatants more generally in the Second World War is limited. Most other studies use personal recollections and memoirs to provide impressions of troops and dynamics within  units, but these sources suffer from serious methodological shortcomings, not least the fallibility of individuals’ memories, especially where interviews take place decades after the event; additionally, prevailing cultural and social interpretations of the meaning of events can often distort the recollections of historical actors. Contemporary recorded diaries or letters are more reliable as historical sources, but it is often difficult to amass a representative sample of such sources for an army. Moreover, as sources they tend by their very nature to be unrepresentative. Men ‘who were predisposed to keep detailed accounts of their military service were generally better educated and more articulate than their comrades, which means that they were more likely to be officers and also, perhaps, more likely to hold idiosyncratic views about the Army.’

This book circumvents these problems by leveraging the processes that the British and Commonwealth Armies themselves used for assessing the personal concerns of troops, their broad social and political perspectives, and their willingness to fight. It interrogates sources such as censorship summaries  (of soldiers’ mail), morale reports and official statistics on rates of sickness, battle exhaustion, desertion, absence without leave and self inflicted wounds. Many of these sources are newly discovered or have been underused in existing accounts. For example, 925 censorship summaries, based on 17 million letters sent between the battle and home fronts during the war are used in this book . . .

Censorship was undoubtedly unpopular with many troops but within the regulations, correspondents retained ‘their right’; to ‘express freely their own opinions’ and, indeed, according to the War Office, ‘most writers seemed to forget the censor, whether the base censor or their officer – when they write.’ .  . . [Furthermore] the use of censorship allowed the Army to react with great speed to the needs of the men. Those in charge of unit and base censorship, on learning of a defect or problem, would write to officers in command of units and formations. These interventions would typically lead to concrete action to address concerns. Divisions, battalions, companies and platoons in need of cigarettes, clothing, better equipment, leadership, or rest, would be identified through censorship and action would be taken .  .  .


Fighting The People’s War [End Note]

The story  that emerges from this study of the British and Commonwealth Armies in the Second World War  is far more radical and challenging that that which is found in much of the public discourse. While there can be little doubt that the majority of soldiers did their duty in the war, not least the 217,809 who lost their lives, others mutinied, some ran away, surrendered too readily or broke down under pressure. It is important that such observations should not be construed as criticism of the natural courage of the average British and Commonwealth soldier. Given the extraordinary and terrifying sacrifices that were demanded and expected of ordinary young men, it is hardly surprising, in the prevailing socio-economic circumstances, that  the largely working- and lower-middle class individuals that made up the vast majority of the Army would have, at times, failed to live up to the martial ideal. Unequal, class-conscious societies breed disengaged and under-motivated citizen soldiers. The blame for the ‘great imperial crisis’ of 1940- to 1942, or the rather ‘sluggish’; operations of 1943 and 1944, does not lie dominantly with the institution of the Army or the ordinary citizen soldiers, but to a very large extent with the political classes and the British and Commonwealth sites more generally. It was the British Imperial system, of which the armed forces were just one part ,that was to blame for the loss of Britain’s place in the world.

The British and Commonwealth Armies, in fact, demonstrated a remarkable ability to reform and adapt their doctrine, training regimes and management of manpower in the extraordinary challenging situation that unfolded between 1939 and 1945. Had the complex array of state systems that made up the British Empire demonstrated a similar willingness and ability to reflect and reform, issues with morale and combat performance might not have developed to the same extent.


In the end, a sufficiently large number of key individuals in the British and Commonwealth Armies, such as Montgomery, Adam, Auchinleck and Slim, came to understand the character of the challenge faced in the Second World War. Strategy was iterative and multi-levelled, a decision-making continuum where decisions on means and ends at each level affected decisions on means and ends at all other levels; strategy could be driven from below to the same extent as it was defined at the top [1]. This insight escaped some national leaders, including Churchill, with profound consequences. In his obsession with defeating Germany, the Prime Minister lost sight of the goals and ambitions of the ordinary man, the smallest cog in the ‘machinery of strategy’, but a vital one all the same. For the citizen soldier, the war was not an end in itself; it was a step towards a greater aspiration, political and social reform. To endure, power had to be built on a bedrock of justice and social cohesion [2].


A critical understanding of the place of the Second World War in British and Commonwealth history is perhaps now more than ever important,. The dominant narrative, which characterizes the British and Commonwealth soldier as stolid, but apolitical and uninterested in the broader meaning of the war, encourages the perception that the outcome of these great events were in the hands of a small group of elite and powerful persons,. The soldier, in this version of history, lacks agency; he appears as a paw in the games of great men. The reality was really quite different,; bitter contestation characterized much of the interaction between the state and the individual and from that interaction, the post-war settlement was forged. The censorship summaries and morale reports indicate that the war made soldiers more aware of the limits of individualism and the degree to which they were dependent on their fellow citizens for prosperity, security and well-being. As General Alan Brooke, who would become Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in October 1940, through all the ‘destruction, uselessness and havoc I can see some progress’:

Progress that could never be achieved without the upheaval of war. Long standing institutions and social distinctions are shattered by war and make room for more modern methods of life. Those that would never release what they hold in peace, are forced to do so in war, to the benefit of the multitude. Ultimately I suppose that human beings from much suffering will become wiser and will appreciate that greater happiness can be found in this world by preferring their neighbors to themselves.

Brooke understood that almost every aspect of the soldiers’ lives required cooperation, sharing and teamwork; extreme individualism or selfish behavior was not only undesirable and inefficient in times of war but potentially life threatening.


The war demonstrated the extent to which combat effectiveness was dependent on the cohesion of British and Commonwealth societies. It was also apparent that the experience of the front line had spawned a dynamic desire for reform, that the troops yearned for the camaraderie and equality of the battlefront to be present on their return home to ‘civvy street.’ The great political awaking as a consequence of the war was to have profound implications for the future of the Empire and the socio-political history of all the British and Commonwealth countries.




[1] Montgomery, for example, adjusted his strategies to conform to the levels of morale and training of the troops at hand, he did not ‘ask them to do more than could be reasonably expected of them.’ At times they might be expected to perform well in static defensive positions but not in aggressive offensive operations that require independent initiative on a unit by unit basis, and thus higher levels of motivation. Likewise, it is one thing to ‘break into’ the defensive positions of the enemy, it is another to to ‘break out’, through and around the enemy.
[2] ‘It was only after the battle of France, as a genuine threat to national survival emerged, that the desire to imbue the war greater meaning began to take coherent form in the public discourse. A much-quoted Times leader in July 1940:

If we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy that maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction, we think less of maximum production (though this too will be required) than of equitable distribution.

The crisis of 1940 was much more than a military crisis; it was a ‘political-military’ crisis.( low moral in the British Army contributed significantly to the defeat- ‘airbrushed’ out of history by the successful evacuation at Dunkirk when Hitler inexplicably ordered his troops to stop their advance.). It has the effect of undoing Conservative dominance in Parliament ( Churchill had to take Labor into his cabinet), but also ‘;of radicalizing much of the population. Before May 1940, little had been asked of the British people by the state; as a consequence, ‘little was given’ in return. From that moment, ‘attitudes changed’ . . .but not Churchill’s, he insisted on postponing reform until after the war, at which point he was rewarded by being thrown out of office.

Roderick Hudson by Henry James

The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is; with a detachment that flowered little by little into free anecdote – quite as if they had been the adventures of some other, some different, ass. He related a half dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this ventilation, wondered, with laughter, that such absurdities could have been. Rowland sat perfectly grave –he kept it up on principle. Then Roderick began to talk of a half a dozen plastic ideas that he had in his head, and set them forth with his old inimitable touch. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassee had, poor dear, in her make-up, some wonderful, beautiful lines. Rowland at last said that such experiences might pass if one felt one was really wiser for them. ‘By the wiser,’ he sententiously added, ‘I mean the stronger in reconsidered and confirmed purpose, in acquired will-power.’

‘Oh, don’t talk of such dreadful things!’ Roderick answered, throwing back his head and looking at the stars. This conversation also took place in the open air, on the little island in the rushing Rhone where Jean-Jacques himself so far  from remarkable for the control of his course, is enthroned in bronze as the genius of the spot.

“This will, it seems to me, is an abyss of abysses and a riddle of riddles. Who can answer for his properly having one? who can say beforehand that it’s going in a given case to be worth anything at all? There are all kids of uncanny underhand currents moving to and fro between one’s will and the rest of one – one’s imagination in particular. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one’s organism, like the heart and the liver. Mine, I know – that is my imagination and my conscience – are much nearer together. It all depends on circumstances. I believe there’s a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his power to choose is destined to snap like a dry twig.’

“My dear man,’ said Rowland, ‘don’t talk about any part of you that has a grain of character in it being ‘destined.’ The power to choose is destiny. That’s the way to look at it.’

‘Look at it, my good Rowland,’ Roderick answered, ‘as you find most comfortable. One conviction I’ve gathered from my summer’s experience,’ he went on – ‘it’s as well to look it frankly in the face – is that I’m damnably susceptible, by nature, to the grace and the beauty and the mystery of women, to their power to turn themselves ‘on’ as creatures of subtlety and perversity. So there you have me.’


Rowland, so ‘having’ him, stared, and then strolled away, softly whistling to himself. He was unwilling to admit even tacitly that this speech had really the ominous meaning it seemed to have.

The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray

Introduction

Producing guilt may or may not be fine, but stimulating intelligent action is better. And intelligent action always needs to have its way paved by a practical estimate of the situation. The immediate objective of the polemics in The Omni-Americans is to expose the incompetence and consequent impracticality of people who are regarded as intellectuals but are guided by racial bias rather than reason based on scholarly insight. How is it that you white people who otherwise seem knowledgeable and competent are suddenly so obtuse about something that is as obvious as the fact that human nature is no less complex and fascinating for being encased in a black skin? Don’t you know that the direction of such stupidity is just the kind of general confusion that will destroy all of us? Don’t you know that prisoners sleep better than jailors? Get wise. As of know you are working against your own interest as much as that of your black compatriots! Furthermore, to the extent that your misdefinitions are picked up by Negroes, you are only aggravating the problem. This just simply is not the time for the politics of unexamined slogans.

Part One


The historian Constance Rourke (author of American Humor: A Study of  the National Character and The Roots of American Culture), unlike many such historians, assumes quite accurately that there were time-coulisses in the pre-Columbian past that were relevant to the understanding of the American experience. Of the Boston Tea Party, for example, she wrote ‘it may well be a question whether the participants enjoyed more dumping the tea in the harbor masquerading in war paint and feathers and brandishing tomahawks. ’On the frontier,’ she goes on to say, ‘whites had adopted Indian dress and used Indian weapons, among other things, keeping the names of villages, for instance, even when the original inhabitants had been ruthlessly expelled.’

Nor did Constance Rourke overlook the Negro elements that have long been so deeply embedded in what she refers to as the ‘national character.’ ‘The Negro’, she writes in a reference to a visit by a European to the America of 1795, ‘was to be seen everywhere in the South and in the new Southwest, on small farms and great plantations, on roads and levees. He was often an all but equal member of many a pioneering expedition. He  became, in short, a dominant figure in spite of his condition, and commanded a definite portraiture.’ What is more, Rourke’s acclaimed scholarly investigations of the origin and development of black face minstrels did not lead her to confuse elements of the national character with the folklore of white supremacy. Quite the contrary, her image of The American is a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro. In tracing this composite, she was not unaware of the profound implications of homo Americanus as a vernacular adaptation, modification, and extension of homo Europaeus, whom Paul Valery once described as a combination of ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and Judeo-Christian.

The three interwoven figures in the native fabric loomed large, Constance Rourke explains, ‘not because they represented any considerable numbers in the population but because something in the nature of each induced and irresistible response. Each had been a wanderer over the lands, the Negro a forced and unwilling and wanderer. Each in a fashion  of his own had broken bonds, the Yankee in the initial revolt against the parent civilization, the Negro in a revolt which was cryptic and submerged but which nonetheless made a perceptible outline.’ Such figures, she goes on, were the embodiment of a deep-seated ‘mood of disseverance, carrying the popular fancy further and further from any fixed or traditional heritage. Their comedy, their irreverent wisdom, their sudden changes and adroit adaptations provided emblems for a pioneer people who requires resilience as a prime trait.’  (Italics added.) .  .  .

It is all too true that Negroes unlike Yankees and the backwoodsmen were slaves whose legal status was that of property. But it is also true – and as things turned out- even more significant- that they were slaves who were living in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before. That the conception of being a free man in America was infinitely richer than any notion of individuality in Africa of that period goes without saying.

That this conception was perceived by the black slaves is shown by their history as Americans. The fugitive slave, for instanced, was culturally speaking certainly an  American and a magnificent one at that. His basic urge to escape was, of course, only human – as was his willingness to risk the odds; but the tactics he employed as well as the objectives he was seeking were American not African. In his objectives, he certainly does not seem to have been motivated any any over-whelming nostalgia for tribal life. The slaves who absconded to fight for the British during the Revolutionary War were no less inspired by American ideas than those who fought for the colonies: the liberation that the white people wanted from the British the black people wanted from white people. As for the tactics of the fugitive slaves, the underground Railroad was not only an innovation, it was also an extension of the American quest for democracy brought to its highest level of epic heroism. Nobody tried to sabotage the Mayflower. There was no bounty on the heads of its captain, crew, or voyagers as was the case with all conductors, station masters, and passengers on the northbound freedom train. Given the differences in  circumstances, equipment, and, above all motives, the legendary exploits  of white U.S. backwoodsmen, keel-boatmen, and prairie schooner-men, for example, became relatively safe when one sets them beside the breath taking escapes of the fugitive slave beating his way south to Florida, west to the Indians, and north to far away Canada through swamp and town alike seeking freedom – nobody was chasing Daniel Boone! .  . .

Even the black militants own insight into the pragmatic implications of the heritage of black people in America is often only one-dimensional. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if they are more impressed by the white propaganda designed to deny them their very existence than by the black actuality that not only motivates but also sustains them. In any case, they speak of their own native land as being the White Man’s country, they concede too much to the self-inflating estimates of others. They capitulate to the con game which their ancestors never fell for, and they surrender their birthright to the propagandists of white supremacy, as if one could exercise the right of redress without claiming one’s constitutional identity as citizen!

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and the so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society. . .

The Moynihan Report, which insists that Negro men are victims of a matriarchal family structure, makes no mention at all of the incontestable fact that aggressiveness of white American women is such that they are regarded as veritable amazons not only in the Orient but also by many Europeans and not a few people at home. But then the Moynihan Report also implies without so much as a blush that all of the repressions, frustrations, and neurosis of the white Organization Man add up to an enviable patriarchal father image rather than the frightened insomniac, boot-licking conformist, ‘The Square’ which even those who are too illiterate  to read the “Maggie and Jigs’ and ‘Dagwood’ comic strips can see in the movies and on television. Shades of father Jack Lemmon and Tony Randall.

Similarly those white Americans who express such urgent concern when reading test scores of Harlem school children do not conform to white-established norms seem to forget that some Negroes know very well that all the banality and bad taste on television and the best seller lists comes from and is produced for those same norm-calibrated whites. But Sancho Panza was far from being the last man of the people who had to go along with the pedantic foolishness of cliché-nourished bookworms. Nobody in his right mind would ever seriously recommend illiteracy as a protection against brainwashing, to be sure; but still and all it may have been his illiterate immunity from the jargon of the fashion magazines that enabled the little boy in Grimms’ fairy tale to see that the emperor’s fancy new clothes were nothing more than his birthday suit.

There may or may not be something to be said for being an enthusiastic black sheep in a school system that emphasizes conformity to the point of producing a nation of jargon-and -cliché-orientated white sheep. Nevertheless, one factor that is always either overlooked or obscured in all interpretations of the low academic performance of Negro pupils is the possibility of their resistance to the self-same white norms that they are being rated by. What some white teachers refer to as being the apathy of Negro pupils, competent black teachers are likely to describe as lack of interest and motivation. Black teachers know very well that when there is a genuine Negro interest there is seldom any complaint about Negro ability. And yet most social science technicians persistently interpret low Negro test scores not in terms of lack of incentive but in terms of a historic and comprehensive cultural deprivation. . . .

Most Americans have been conditioned by a school system and communications media that have over-promoted the methodologies and the categories of social science at the expense of the more comprehensive wisdom of the humanities and the arts – leaving their sense of context deficient. In any case, they appear have to become also fascinated by pretentious terminology and easy oversimplifications that they no longer remember what experience is really like. If so, perhaps it is only natural that they no longer realize how complicated human life is, even at its least troubled and freest. Which, of course, means that they are not likely to realize how rich and exciting its possibilities are either. And yet such people, who confuse metaphorical ghettos with real ones, are often regarded as expert planners and programmers! They are not. They are polemicists, and often more useful to the other side than to their own . . .

More fundamental and no less obvious is another fact which the racism that underlies most discussions about American identity almost always obscures: In spite of the seemingly hypnotic spell that updated versions of the Huck Finn or Norman Rockwell plug-ugly and the shirt collar as Anglo-Saxon  and Gibson girl images exercise over so many self-effacing, assimilation-bent European immigrants, there is no standard melting pot mold for the American Image. The only official image is the eagle. There has never been a standard image, and currently, for all the emphasis on norms, nothing seems to change more than the points of conformity.


As stated before, race is hardly as useful index to human motives as is culture and As for behavior or life style, no other people in the land have as yet evolved a characteristic idiom that reflects a more open, robust, and affirmative disposition towards diversity and change. Nor is any other idiom more smoothly geared to open-minded improvisation. Moreover, never has improvisation been more conditioned by esthetic values – or at the same time been more indicative of the fundamental openness that is the necessary predisposition for all scientific exploration! Improvisation after all is experimentation.

When such improvisation as typified Negro music, dance, language, religion, sports, fashions, general bearing and deportment, and even food preparation is considered from the Negro point of view, there is seldom, if ever, any serious doubt about how Negroes feel about themselves or about what they accept or reject of white people. They regard themselves not as substandard, abnormal non-white people of American social science surveys and news media, but rather as if they were, so to speak, fundamental extensions of contemporary possibilities

The whole world defers to the supremacy of American political and economic power mechanisms. Negro attitudes toward the so-called white cultural establishment, however, are entirely consistent with the pragmatic improvisational irreverence that most Negros display towards so many other established patterns and values. As a result, many things that most other Americans seem to accept as models for reverence and emulation, Negroes, not unlike jam-session-orientated musicians, use mainly as points of departure. Even when Negroes sets out to make literal imitations of white people, they often seem to find it impossible not to add their own dimension.

The creation of an art style is, as most anthropologists would no doubt agree, a major cultural achievement. In fact, it is perhaps the highest as well as the most comprehensive fulfillment of culture; for an art style, after all, reflects nothing so much as the ultimate synthesis and refinement of a life style.

Art is by definition a process of stylization; and what it stylizes is experience. What it objectifies, embodies, abstracts, expresses, and symbolizes is a sense of life, Accordingly, what is represented in the music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture of a given group of people in a particular time, place, and circumstance is a conception of the essential nature and purpose of human existence itself. More specifically, an art style is the assimilation in terms of which a given community, folk or communion of faith embodies its basic attitude towards experience.

That is not all. Of its very nature, an art style is also the essence of experience itself, in both the historical and sensory implications of the word. It is an attitude, description, and interpretation in action – or rather, perhaps most often, in reaction. For needless to say, action is seldom gratuitous or unmotivated. Not only does it take place in a situation, it also takes place in response to a situation.

Kenneth Burke as equated stylization with strategy. To extend the military metaphor, one can say stylization is the estimate become maneuver. In such a frame of reference, style is not only insight but disposition and gesture, not only  do calculation and estimation become execution (as in engineering), but also motive and estimation become method and occupation. It is away of sizing up the world, and so, ultimately, and beyond all else, a mode and medium of survival.

In the current social science usage, the concept of ‘survival technique’ has somehow become confused with technology and restricted to matters of food, clothing, and shelter. Human survival, however, involves much more than biological prolongation. The human organism must be nourished and secured against destruction, to be sure, but what makes man human is style. Hence the crucial significance of art in the study of human behavior. All human effort beyond the lowest level of struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style.

Certainly the struggle for political and social liberty is nothing if not the quest for freedom to choose one’s own way or style of life. Moreover, it should be equally as obvious that there can be no such thing as human dignity and nobility without a consummate, definitive style, pattern, or archetypal image. Economic interpretations of history notwithstanding, what activates revolutions is not destitution (which most often leads only to petty thievery and the like) but intolerable systems and methods- intolerable styles of life.

Most Americans know very well that the blues genre which in its most elaborate extensions includes elements of the spirituals, gospel music, folk song, chants, hollers, popular ditties plus much of what goes into symphonic and even operatic composition, is the basic and definitive musical idiom of native-born U.S. Negroes. But few if any students of America seem either to understand or even to have a serious curiosity about the relationship of art style to Negro life style. None seem to consider the blues idiom as a major cultural achievement. Not even those writers who have referred to it as being perhaps the only truly American innovation in contemporary artistic expression seem able to concede it any more significance than of some vague minor potential not unlike that of some exotic spice . . .

the blues idiom sustains an un-excelled sense of human worth and possibility, what every other non-totalitarian culture seeks and elaborates: elastic individuality, esthetic receptivity and unique blends of warmth, sensitivity, nonsense, vitality and elegance.

Females by Andrea Long Chu

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 everybody 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 imaginary, 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 females is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means femaleness, while it only hurts 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 the reactionaries describe it (permanent, unchanging, etc.), but whose nature is ontological, not biological. Femaleness is not an anatomically 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 a 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 socio-culturally available - this is what we ordinarily call gender. Men and women must therefore be understood not as irreconcilable opposites, or even two poles of a spectrum, but more simply as the two most common phyla of the kingdom of 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 everybody already does. Women hate being females as much as anybody else; but unlike everybody else, we find ourselves its select delegates.

This brings me to the seconds part of my thesis: Everyone is female – and everyone hates it. By the second claim, I mean something like what Valerie Solanas 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 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 of  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 exiting terms of society; or to put it more precisely, feminists didn’t want to be female anymore, either advocating for the abolition of gender 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 projecting.

                                   .    .    .    .    .   .

Everyone is female, and everybody 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 internalization 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 the expression of someone else’s sexuality. In the former case, one takes an object; in the latter case, one is an object. From this perspective of gender, then, we are all dumb blondes.

This need not be controversial. Feminists far less outrageous than Valerie Solanas 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 te 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 anti-pornography feminists Catherine MacKinnon, whose 1989 book, Toward a Feminist Theory of 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 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 hold up: “hold still, we are going to do your portrait, so that you can be in 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 through 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 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 exists, 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 give to 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 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 the right to be. You do not get to consent yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.

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

[ That romantic love consists of projecting the ideal  image-object of one’s self on the other irrespective of how the other might actually be or temporarily reciprocate the feeling and therefore inevitably dissipates, dissolves and dies in the quotidian is as old as the Enlightenment itself- I’m still searching where I first read a clear exposition of it, perhaps in Montaigne or Georg Lichtenberg, I’ll attach it here when I succeed in digging it up. Alexander  Herzen speaks of ‘Lovelaces’ in the aristocratic circles in  19^th century Russia, and Albert Murray of the ‘temptations of southern belles in America.

However her invocation of the feeling of hate for the 'female' inside is not to be taken as the whole of these complex and highly ambiguous psychic operations. It comes off as rather too narcissistic and libertarian in its political implications however apparent it seems in the extreme case. Anyway, she marches it back somewhat in the final chapters where it clearly becomes a love/hate dialectic of emotion.]

What I found in George Lichtenberg’s Waste Books ( of the late 18^th century) eerily anticipate what Ms. Chu says. Speaking of himself in the third person he wrote:

“He could not comprehend why there sometimes arose in him irresistible desires which he was nonetheless wholly debarred from satisfying. He often posed this question to Heaven as the subject of a prize competition and promised to reward a satisfactory answer with a complete denial of his former self and a calm and patient submission.”


“The prerogatives of beauty and happiness are quite different from one another. For one to enjoy the advantages of beauty other people have to believe one is beautiful; there is no necessity at all for this, however, in the case of happiness: that one believes it oneself is perfectly sufficient.”


“At times when people though I was very busy I have often been giving myself up to all kinds of dreams and fantasies for hours on end. I have felt how disadvantageous this is as regards waste of time, yet without this fantasy cure, which I usually had recourse to at the time people take the waters, I should not have reached the age I have, which is 53 years 1 1/2 months.”

For Montaigne- from whom we do not get a sense of ‘psychic operations’ in the modern sense- the ontology of sex was grounded in biology. Yet surprisingly, perhaps, subject to the force of imagination. Thus, rather credulously, he recounts the tale of a French man, who was raised as a girl, of a sudden at the age of twenty, grew a male member and subsequently a beard though at the time Montaigne met him had yet to marry. He does not offer what to us would be the simple explanation that his mother, seeking to hold a beloved and unusually formed child close to her raised him as a girl, whose puberty was delayed until the moment when the matter could no longer be concealed. Rather, Montaigne offers the tale to inaugurate a long essay on the fearsome operations of the imagination itself which he, suitably enlightened to perform the diplomacy of Kings and as an assertion of his noble status, takes pain to avoid being subjected to. One clearly detects in all this at least a  residual belief in witchcraft, limited nonetheless by a kind of protean empiricism and reliance of classical literature as the font of all true learning. The difference between Montaigne and Lichtenberg is striking and emphasizes the importance of  the history of Europe in the years between the births and deaths of these two authors.



In Carl Jung [Aspects of the Feminine translated by R. F. C. Hull] the concept of psychic operations in the ontological sense is fully developed though still grounded in biology. For him  ‘female’ (anima) and ‘male’ (animus) are distinctive operations of the soul found in both genders though by degrees of predominance. In the first instance they are instinctual or unconscious though by experience they may be revealed and subject to the regulations of ego by which a certain personal stability and modicum of happiness can be obtained. It is a matter of ‘containment’,  in the institution of marriage, for a wider social purpose. Aversive feelings, hatred, for these male or female aspects of soul both within oneself and for another arise when ‘containment’ has not been fully actualized. From this one can perhaps see how William James found Jung’s thinking more congenial to his own than Freud’s, a little more phenomenological, though of course James died before Jung’s unfortunate attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis with Nazis ideology.

I found the quote I was looking for in K-Punk, a collection of Mark Fisher’s writings under ‘Male Desire’. It’s  from Villiers de I’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve, 1877:

“The creature whom you love, and who for you is the sole REALITY is by no means the one who is embodied in this transient human figure, but a creature of your desire. […] This illusion is the one thing you struggle against all odds to VITALIZE in the presence of your beloved, despite the frightful, deadly, withering nullity of Alicia. What you love is this phantom alone; it’s for the phantom that you want to die. That and that alone is what you recognized as unconditionally REAL. In short, it is this objectified projection of your mind that you call on, that you perceive, that you CREATE in your living woman, and which is nothing but your mind reduplicated in her.”