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 19th 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.]
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 19th 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 18th
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.”
“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.
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.”
“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.”
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