Everyone is female, and everyone 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 internalizing 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 a social expression of someone else’s sexuality. In the former case, one takes an object ; in the latter case, one is an object. From the perspective of gender, then, we are all dumb blondes.
This need not be controversial. Feminists far less outrageous than Valerie 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 the 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 antipornography feminist Catharine MacKinnon, whose 1989 book, Toward a Feminist Theory of the 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 the 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 holds up : “Hold still, we are going to do your portrait, so that you can begin 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 though 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 that 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 exist, 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 have to give 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 is 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 a right to be. You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.
You do not get to consent to yourself—a definition of femaleness.