• Andrea Long Chu ⋅ Females 04 03 25

    Everyone is female. The worst books are all by females. All the great art heists of the past three hun­dred years were pul­led off by a female, wor­king solo or with other females. There are no good female poets, sim­ply because there are no good poets. A list of things inven­ted by females would include : air­planes, tele­phones, the small­pox vac­cine, ghos­ting, ter­ro­rism, ink, envy, rum, prom, Spain, cars, gods, cof­fee, lan­guage, stand-up come­dy, eve­ry kind of knot, double par­king, nail polish, the let­ter tau, the num­ber zero, the H‑bomb, femi­nism, and the patriar­chy. Sex bet­ween females is no bet­ter or…

  • Andrea Long Chu ⋅ Females

    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.…

  • Andrea 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…

  • Andrea Long Chu ⋅ Females

    “Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female,” pro­claims the SCUM Manifesto. The para­dox of the male libi­do is that it isn’t actual­ly male. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the manos­phere, that awful­ly named borough of the Internet where pickup artists, men’s rights acti­vists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way, and other alt-right com­mu­ni­ties go to com­mi­se­rate, swap tips, and air their woman-hating and racism without fear of repri­sal. At the heart of the manos­phere lies the convic­tion that men—paradigmatically, though not always, white men—have lost sta­tus in the past fif­ty years,…

  • Andrea 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…