04 03 25

Long Chu, Females

If you’ve ever seen sis­sy porn, you’ll know that tur­ning people female is exact­ly what sis­sy porn says it does. Also known as for­ced femi­ni­za­tion or “for­ced fem,” sis­sy porn seems to have begun cir­cu­la­ting prin­ci­pal­ly on the micro­blog­ging plat­form Tumblr in or around 2013. The genre is cha­rac­te­ris­ti­cal­ly user-gene­ra­ted rather than pro­du­ced by a tra­di­tio­nal stu­dio : in large part, sis­sy content crea­tors would appro­priate videos, stil­ls, and ani­ma­ted GIFs from mains­tream hete­ro­sexual or “she­male” pornography—intellectual pro­per­ty is noto­rious­ly dif­fi­cult to pro­tect in today’s porn industry—and modi­fy this mate­rial with cap­tions alte­ring their ori­gi­nal mea­ning. In late 2018, when the micro­blog­ging plat­form moved to ban gra­phic sexual content, sis­sy porn crea­tors, like many other sex wor­kers, were for­ced to flee to other plat­forms, inclu­ding Twitter and Instagram.

Sissy porn’s cen­tral conceit is that the women it depicts (some cis, some trans, most­ly but not always white) are in fact for­mer men who have been femi­ni­zed (“sis­si­fied”) by being for­ced to wear makeup, wear lin­ge­rie, and per­form acts of sexual sub­mis­sion. This is exe­cu­ted through the unique form of second-per­son address in which cap­tions are typi­cal­ly writ­ten : sis­sy porn direct­ly addresses its vie­wers and pre­sumes to inform them of their own desires : “You love to be fucked in the ass,” for ins­tance, or “You want to suck cock.” (Sissy porn often uses cock as an uncoun­table mass noun, like water or sugar, pre­su­ma­bly because there can always be more.) Captions fur­ther ins­truct vie­wers to unders­tand that the very act of loo­king at sis­sy porn itself consti­tutes an act of sexual degra­da­tion, with the impli­ca­tion that, whe­ther they like it or not, vie­wers will inevi­ta­bly be trans­for­med into females them­selves. This makes sis­sy porn a kind of meta­por­no­gra­phy, that is, porn about what hap­pens to you when you watch porn. In other words, sis­sy porn takes the impli­cit­ly femi­ni­zing effect of all por­no­gra­phy (even the most vanilla) and pro­motes it to the level of expli­cit content—often with spec­ta­cu­lar results.

At the cen­ter of sis­sy porn lies the asshole, a kind of uni­ver­sal vagi­na through which fema­le­ness can always be acces­sed. In the mid­st of the AIDS cri­sis, the gay male cri­tic Leo Bersani famous­ly wrote that public hor­ror of anal sex betrayed a hate­ful envy of the “into­le­rable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the sui­ci­dal ecs­ta­sy of being a woman.” Sissy porn takes this lite­ral­ly. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is. At the same time, sis­sy porn remains whol­ly unin­te­res­ted in who’s doing the fucking. Men appear, when they appear, only in frag­ments : a hand, an ass, a stray leg. Tops are props ; their func­tion is pure­ly struc­tu­ral. “To call a man an ani­mal is to flat­ter him,” Valerie writes in SCUM. “He’s a machine, a wal­king dil­do. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what ? Surely not plea­sure.”

Sissy porn makes frequent use of fetish objects—makeup, lin­ge­rie, breasts, high heels, and the color pink—but unlike the clas­si­cal Freudian fetish, these objects pro­mise cas­tra­tion, ins­tead of war­ding against it. For Freud, the fetish was a clear sub­sti­tute for the “absent female phal­lus.” The lit­tle boy, trau­ma­ti­zed by the dis­co­ve­ry that his mother has no penis and fea­ring lest the same fate befall his own, looks for reas­su­rance to an object that can replace that penis—a high-hee­led shoe, for ins­tance, or the touch of vel­vet. The fetish is thus “a token of triumph over the threat of cas­tra­tion and a pro­tec­tion against it.” Yet even Freud knew that the fetish, in disa­vo­wing cas­tra­tion, the­re­by impli­cit­ly ack­now­led­ged it ; sis­sy porn exploits this weak­ness, trans­for­ming the fetish from an assu­rance that the penis will be kept safe into a gua­ran­tee that the penis will be lost fore­ver. This means that, in cases where the sis­sy is a trans woman, even her own feti­shi­zed penis becomes a sym­bol of cas­tra­tion. If her penis is limp, it is mocked for its tiny size and cal­led a “clit­ty”; if it is hard, this is sim­ply proof that she is enjoying her degra­da­tion.

In fact, to be a sis­sy is always to lose your mind. The tech­ni­cal term for this is bim­boi­fi­ca­tion. Captions often ins­truct vie­wers to sub­mit them­selves to hyp­no­sis, brain­wa­shing, brain-mel­ting, dum­bing down, and other tech­niques for scoo­ping out intel­li­gence. “Why do I like the concept of being a Bimbo?” asks one user. “It’s because my brain is always full. I’m always wor­rying if Master tru­ly loves me. Am I enough ? Am I making good choices ? Do people actual­ly like me ? How can I live in a coun­try like this with this cur­rent poli­ti­cal cli­mate ? Where else could I even ima­gine going?” The ges­tures most often loo­ped in GIF for­mat almost always regis­ter the eva­cua­tion of will : wil­ting faces, trem­bling legs, eyes rol­led back into heads. Even the GIF for­mat itself com­mu­ni­cates this, a kind of cen­tri­fuge for dis­til­ling the fema­le­ness to its barest essentials—an open mouth, an expec­tant asshole, blank, blank eyes.

Sissy porn did make me trans. At very least it ser­ved as a neat alle­go­ry for my desire to be female—and increa­sin­gly, I thought, for all desire as such. Too often, femi­nists have ima­gi­ned power­less­ness as the sup­pres­sion of desire by some exter­nal force, and they’ve for­got­ten that more often than not, desire is this exter­nal force. Most desire is non­con­sen­sual ; most desires aren’t desi­red. Wanting to be a woman was some­thing that des­cen­ded upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection—or a men­tal ill­ness, at least if you believe the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where gen­der dys­pho­ria can be found sand­wi­ched bet­ween fri­gi­di­ty and pyro­ma­nia. The impli­ca­tion is obvious : No one in their right mind would want to be female.

Which, remem­ber, is all of us.