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.