The Post-Partisan Emporium

  "You don't lose your virginity, you gain empowerment" Planned Parenthood, Pornhub, and the toxic myth of the self-creating sexual subject MARY HARRINGTON In a set styled to resemble a classroom, the presenter delivers a 3-minute lecture on “virginity”. We learn that virginity is “a completely made up concept” created solely to inflict gratuitous shame and stigma. And the only reason it’s a concept at all is because “society” has arbitrarily opted to centre a “narrow” definition of sex, ie “penis in vagina”. We might retort that “penis in vagina” can claim to be the most important feature of sex because, for existential reasons,  it is in fact the most important . Most of us wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for “penis in vagina.”. But no matter. Saying so is against the Cyborg Sex Code: that is, the moral orthodoxy that’s replaced the vanishingly brief “anything goes” 1960s code-less sexual code. The Cyborg Sex Code now structures the modern orthodox understanding of what s...

  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 hate...