04 03 25

Long Chu, Females

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.