Which orifice? What organs? Who cares? Andrea Long Chu says all the quiet parts out loud

 

Which orifice? What organs? Who cares?

Andrea Long Chu says all the quiet parts out loud

MARY HARRINGTON

The award, in May, of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism to New York Magazine writer Andrea Long Chu, occasioned howls of outrage from gender-critical feminists. This was not prompted by the actual essays mentioned in the award, though. Rather, the fury stemmed from Long Chu’s real claim to fame: saying all the quiet parts out loud on gender ideology.

The central provocation on this front is Chu’s 2019 monograph Females, described by Verso as “a genre-defying investigation into sex and lies” and by gender-critical writer Lauren Smith as “poorly disguised misogyny”. Females draws together Chu’s personal development toward transgender identification, a re-read of work by SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas, and a baroque theory of pornography and desire, into a central, controversial thesis: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it”.

Gender-critical feminists regularly denounce trans identities as constructed from male fantasies of womanhood, rooted in porn-inspired fetish, and committed to erasing female biology. What, then, to make of a transgender writer who embraces all this? Females abstracts “femaleness” from bodies, argues that for men castration is a site not of fear but arousal, and declares “Sissy porn did make me trans”. Then - adding insult to injury - declares that all of this is not just positive, but a universal feature of the human condition. The reflex response is outrage.

The wave of Pulitzer-related fury prompted me to re-read Females. When I did, I came to a startling conclusion. Yes, Females is misogynistic. But mostly it just says the quiet parts out loud. For – with support from many feminists - women were on our way to being erased, and replaced with male projection and porn-inspired fetish, long before Andrea Long Chu showed up to argue that this was a good thing.

Females does indeed dismiss the importance of female bodies to femaleness. “I am not”, Chu avers, “referring to biological sex”. Rather, Females views as the essence of “femaleness” as something “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.” And the quintessence of femaleness, in this view, is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”.

In case this is not aggravating enough, Chu inverts decades of feminist campaigning against porn, theorising pornography not as an attack on women but a metaphor for the subject’s construction as female. In Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?, a 2018 essay whose themes are incorporated in Females, Chu argues that “to watch pornography is essentially to have the burden of desiring taken out of your hands”. Thus, to watch pornography is to be relieved of desiring, and in this way to “make room for the desires of another”: that is, to become female.

In case this wasn’t inflammatory enough, Chu then embraces the feminist accusation that trans identities are rooted in porn-induced sexual fetish – only to suggests that far from being a criticism, this highlights our universal femaleness. Females argues that “sissy porn”, a genre that dramatises and eroticises the forced, humiliating feminisation of males, encapsulates the ambivalent cocktail of fear and desire aroused in males by the prospect of castration. Employing the visual language employed to depict the “female”, of “wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads”, sissy porn stages a feminisation that is, Chu argues, common to us all.

And sissy porn further feminizes, in that it evacuates the viewer’s own desire in favor of this ambivalently eroticised castration-fantasy. It is thus a kind of “metapornography”: that is, “porn about what happens to you when you watch porn”. And, Chu asserts, this “metapornography” is highly effective: “Sissy porn did make me trans”.

On its own terms, this is a compelling enough description of the dynamic relationship between porn consumption and paraphilia. But is it female? Erotic paraphilia is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon; given this, can we really characterise this psychic topography as quintessentially female?

This is the core feminist objection to Females: that the highly sexualised conflation of femaleness with objectification and loss of selfhood is not a feature of womanhood, but of male sexual fantasy. There is no shortage of feminist theory dedicated to challenging this framing of women’s bodies and subjectivities. Describing the very thing feminism resists as the essence of femaleness is, from this perspective, not only outrageously antifeminist but outrageously offensive.

But Andrea Long Chu is arguably following to its logical conclusion a trajectory embraced, indeed fiercely defended, by the mainstream women’s movement. For the contemporary culture of eroticised objectification Females encapsulates is inextricable from one of the keystones of contemporary female freedom: artificial contraception.

As the Catholic feminist Abigail Favale argues in The Genesis of Gender, legal contraception triggered paradigm shift in our understanding of sex and intimacy. With sex severed from the possibility of creating new life, it became normal to think of sex as “a recreational, rather than procreational, activity”. Women, meanwhile, are now thought of – and think of ourselves – as “naturally sterile beings” for whom “The procreational potential of sex is viewed as a switch that can be flipped, if desired, but whose default setting is “off ”.”

The fear occasioned by the alternative – normal female fertility – is evident in the routine contemporary framing of pregnancy, among young feminist women, as accident, calamity or even parasitic invasion. Chu’s Verso Books stablemate Sophie Lewis, for example, captures the body-horror view of pregnancy in Full Surrogacy Now, describing gestation as “a job that never stops, dominates your mood, hijacks your blood vessels and sugar supply, while slowly exploding your anatomy from the inside out.”

But let’s assume we make averting this calamity the centre of our politics, and thus dismiss any association between women and reproduction as “essentialist”. With sexuality liberated from its telos, what’s left on the table? In 1968, a few years after the legalisation of the Pill in both Britain and the United States, Paul VI warned in Humanae Vitae that normalising contracepted sex would in fact create the paradigm Andrea Long Chu sets out so eloquently:

a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. 

Some decades into the severing of sex from procreation, it’s clear how prophetic these words were. ‘Hookup culture’ has normalised loveless sex as the default, while young women lament “situationships” that can last months or even years, in the tacit knowledge that asking for emotional commitment is not just foreclosed but a grave faux pas. None of this would be possible were sex not radically de-risked Nor, indeed, would the pornography industry that first ballooned with the sexual revolution, and that so profoundly influenced Andrea Long Chu’s psychic development.

When Females declares that “Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”, Long Chu is articulating the logical endpoint of the trajectory Humanae Vitae warned against, over half a century ago. Once the possibility of new life is eliminated from the picture, female sexuality really does become a largely empty vessel: a matter only of enjoying, or (as in the case of most women who “perform” in pornography) simply enduring, de-personalization and penetrability. Andrea Long Chu’s innovation lies mostly in arguing that this is a good thing.

And if you embrace this as a good thing, a further corollary of unmooring sex from reproduction comes into view: the dissolution of any meaningful boundary between female reproductive anatomy and any other penetrable orifice. Females articulates this with characteristic frankness, describing “the asshole” as “a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed”, a fact distilled into the “barest essentials” of femaleness in the visual shorthand of sissy porn: “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”

And with procreation off the table, there really is no obvious reason why femaleness in the pornographic sense should be confined to biological females. If Females provokes gender-critical feminists by pointing this out, it also takes aim at heterosexual men, suggesting they, too secretly yearn for this. The book cites Leo Barsani, who argues that disgust at the prospect of a man enjoying anal sex is rooted in envy at the sight of a man who has surrendered the burden of maleness, “unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”

And indeed, having accepted the post-Pill paradigm, the ultimate purpose of sex is no longer children but anything you want it to be: for example leisure, self-actualisation, or commerce. And once you’re there, what difference does it really make what sex the passive partner is, or which orifice is penetrated? Once we accept in principle that sex is – as Favale puts it – recreational rather than procreational, we have acceded to a vision of sexual intimacy in which women are sterile by default. And from there, it’s only the smallest of shuffles to accepting womanhood as a state of generalised penetrability. And once we arrive at this unhappy place, what meaningful difference is there between a vagina and a mouth, anus, or surgically created “neo-vagina”?

It’s perhaps this that makes the arguments in Females so rage-inducing, for those who contest gender ideology while hewing to the remainder of second-wave feminism. It’s all very well protesting the collapse of “femaleness” into sexual objectification, or of female sex organs into surgically created fuck-pockets, and pointing to the violence perpetrated against women by this paradigm. But no effort to do this will be coherent unless it follows this frictionless, objectifying vision of sex-as-consumerism back to its technological wellspring.

Source: Reactionary Feminist