The question of whether Valerie Solanas was a TERF is probably unanswerable. Far more interesting is the fact that, thanks to its byzantine theory of gender, SCUM installs the drag queen as the model for all gender—or at the very least, Daddy’s Girls. “The male must see to it that the female be clearly a ‘Woman,’ the opposite of a ‘Man,’ that is, the female must act like a faggot,” Solanas writes, “And Daddy’s Girl, all of whose female instincts were wrenched out of her when little, easily and obligingly adapts herself to the role.” The notion that trans women are the product of the pathological assimilation of misogynist stereotypes here serves not as an unnatural exception, but as the rule governing all gender: not just all men, but also any woman who is not a member of SCUM—any woman at all, perhaps, except Valerie herself.
RUSSELL. You’re not too bad-looking, or,
at least, you wouldn’t be if you’d put
a skirt on and look like a woman.
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.
GINGER. Everybody knows that men
have much more respect for women
who’re good at lapping up shit.
Once the drag queens leave, Bongi meets a girl who is looking for a piece of shit. Her name is Virginia Farnham, but she prefers to be called Ginger. “It so aptly expresses me—brisk and spicy,” she genially explains. She is looking for a turd in a brown paper bag that has gone missing. “Not to be nosey, but does this turd have sentimental value?” Bongi asks, bemused. “Don’t be absurd,” Ginger snaps. “It’s for dinner.”
Ginger is Up Your Ass’s resident Daddy’s Girl. She worships her psychoanalyst, a “leading exponent of the doctrine that labor pains feel good.” At Russell’s office, where she is the only woman on staff, she is flattered by sexual harassment and loves to be thought of as one of the boys. “I’m completely attuned to the gripping dynamism of the male mind,” she tells Bongi breathlessly. “I talk to men on their level; I have virile, potent, sophisticated interests—I adore positions of intercourse, Keynesian economics, and I can look at dirty pictures for hours on end.” She proudly parrots men’s ideas; she is “flexible enough” to have “absorbed, not only Russell’s, but Phil’s and Bob’s opinions with equal facility.” She happily accepted being passed over for a promotion when her boss told her he’d be “lost without you.” She loves male artists. She writes poetry—“pure feeling, uncluttered by a single thought, attitude or idea.” As for the shit, Ginger just wants to serve it at the table to impress her guests.
In April 2016, comedian Jamie Loftus began taking videos of herself eating Infinite Jest, the thousand-page novel by David Foster Wallace, and uploading them to her Twitter account. In an interview with Vice about the project—a blend of performance art, physical comedy, and pure shitposting—Loftus explained that she’d gotten sick of being encouraged by self-important men at parties to give the famously opaque book a chance. “Basically [they] told me if I tried to read it and didn’t like it, it was because I didn’t understand it,” she told the reporter. “I eat dog food on stage so I decided to do it as a joke and post it on Twitter after that.” Over the next year or so, Loftus, who had been working at a bookstore, would film herself eating pages from the book. In the videos, she puts pages in sandwiches, chases them with beer, soaks them in coffee like biscotti. She mixes them into spaghetti; she stews them on the stove. When she’s on the go, she chokes them down dry, mashing them into her face like a sweatshirt into a locker. She eats them at the mall, on the street, at her desk, in the club. She eats them at the Boston Gay Pride Parade. “I’m not gay,” she tells the camera on her phone, “but I am eating a book, though.”
Loftus told the Vice interviewer that she pre
ferred to lube the pages first. “Only when I’m doing it onstage will I eat a page and swallow it and have that be totally dry,” she explained. “But with the videos I’ll usually create some sort of topping or moisten the page or it’s just gonna be 10 miles of bad road for your body.” The shift from reading to eating marked a sort of evolutionary relapse from vision to digestion: Loftus was, of course, stuffing the book in the wrong hole. What small percentage of print matter could be broken down by her intestinal system was being absorbed, uncomprehendingly, into her body; whatever remained was, of course, expelled as waste. A week or two into the project, Loftus called poison control to double check that eating Infinite Jest wouldn’t kill her: “They were sort of like ‘we can’t sanction you doing this’ but there’s a way to do it. I couldn’t be doing it too often, like I wanted to do a page a day but that’s just not feasible to do that and stay alive.”
At some point, Loftus made the decision to buttchug Infinite Jest. From what I gather there used to be a video of the event, but like most of the project, it has disappeared. (In February 2018, Twitter suspended Loftus’s account for making parody figure-skating videos in which skaters at the PyeongChang Winter Games appeared to perform to ironic subbed-in audio instead of music.) The Vice interview, thankfully, does include a picture of the act of anal ingestion. “I blended together five pages of Infinite Jest and a bunch of apples and made this thick sauce,” Loftus reports. “Then I put it into a turkey baster that I bought and then I put a turkey baster into my asshole and did a handstand and had someone squeeze the turkey baster until it was empty.” In the photo, Loftus is upside down, hands on the ground, feet in the air. She is wearing plain gray underwear and maybe a sports bra. Her friend is holding one of her ankles in one hand; with the other hand, she is holding the turkey baster. Loftus’s right thigh is obscuring whether or not the baster is inserted. Her body looks like a doll’s, or a mannequin’s. Her face is completely out of the frame.
“Absorbing ‘culture’ is a desperate, frantic attempt to groove in an ungroovy world, to escape the horror of a sterile, mindless existence,” declares the SCUM Manifesto, whose author never had anything but scorn for art made by men. “Lacking faith in their ability to change anything, resigned to the status quo, they have to see beauty in turds because, so far as they can see, turds are all they’ll ever have.” Loftus, a Daddy’s Girl in her own right, isn’t eating shit, exactly, but it sure feels like she is. The book is going up her ass, literally forced inside of her, in a kind of intellectual sodomy. Or rather, anti-intellectual: the project seems to have been as much a tremendous self-own as it was a critique of the cult of male genius. Loftus wasn’t just performing female stupidity; she was also literally being a stupid female. She remarked to Vice that none of the men who tried to convince her to read Infinite Jest could give her a cohesive summary of what the book was actually like. Instead, they were like her: too dumb to know the difference. “I dunno,” she told Vice. “It’s a silly thing.”
RUSSELL. You don’t know what a female
is, you desexed monstrosity.
Appearances to the contrary, the word female is etymologically unrelated to the word male. The latter comes, through French, from masculus, the diminutive form of the Latin word mās, also meaning “male,” as said of an animal. (“Further etymology unknown,” states the Oxford English Dictionary ominously.) The former, albeit also through French, comes from the diminutive form of Latin fēmina, “woman,” an old participial form meaning something like “she who suckles.” Through its Indo-European reconstruction, female is distant cousins with over two dozen English words, including fecund, felicity, fennel, fetus, affiliate, and effete, as well as fellatio, from Latin fellāre, meaning “to suck a dick.”
As far back as the fourteenth century, the word female was used to refer to women, with a particular emphasis on their childbearing capacity, but it arguably did not acquire the technical sense of “a human mammal of the female sex” until the rise of the biological disciplines in the nineteenth century. In the United States, the man known as the father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, built the field in the antebellum South, operating on enslaved women in his backyard, often without anesthesia—or, of course, consent. As C. Riley Snorton has recently documented, the distinction between biological females and women as a social category, far from a neutral scientific observation, developed precisely in order for the captive black woman to be recognized as female—making Sims’s research applicable to his women patients in polite white society—without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced, in other words, precisely at the juncture where gender was denied. In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.
In the twentieth century, thanks to the research of French endocrinologist Alfred Jost, femaleness would come to be understood not just as a sex, but as the default sex of a mammalian fetus. Gynecologist Marci Bowers, a pioneer in the field of male-to-female gender surgeries, describes the vaginoplasty technique she has honed over years of practice by referring to precisely this principle of modern embryology. “As everyone has female genitalia early in gestation, the goal of the procedure is to reverse the current anatomy to its earlier configuration,” her website explains. The idea here is that the human embryo, like that of most mammals, is originally female, becoming male only with the introduction of a masculinizing agent; hence, a vagina can be created from a penis by surgically rewinding the tape of early-stage sexual differentiation.
This developmental phenomenon effectively reverses the biblical creation myth in which Eve is created second, fashioned by God from Adam’s rib—hence the term Adam Principle, introduced by controversial sexologist John Money in his book of the same name. Money’s gloss on the Adam Principle is nothing short of bizarre:
If the Adam and Eve story had been written in a twentieth-century institute of embryological research, Eve would have been created first. Then, perhaps, an archangel would have descended with an injection needle laden with testosterone, the masculinizing hormone, and the combination of Eve plus testosterone would produce Adam. That short fable is no far-fetched product of an undisciplined imagination. It is a fable based on the scientific facts of modern embryology, which leaves no doubt whatsoever that in nature’s order of things, it is Eve first, then Adam.
Obviously, Money’s gotten the name wrong—by all rights, it should be the Eve Principle, given that in the fable Eve is, well, principal. But somehow Money manages to make the male sound even more impressive than before: a hormonal miracle, jacked up on heaven’s performance-enhancing drugs. To prove the Adam Principle, Money offers up his research on androgen-insensitivity syndrome, a condition in which an individual is congenitally unresponsive to the solicitations of their Y chromosome and therefore looks, in the good doctor’s words, “like a perfect female.” Money has a hard time concealing his enthusiasm here:
Without the competition of a male hormone, testicular estrogen does an excellent job of shaping a female. Her good looks may be so outstanding that they have enabled her, in some instances, to earn a living as a model. Such is the power of the Eve who lurks, forever imprisoned, in even the most full-bearded, bass-voiced, heroically androgenized and macho-minded of males!
Does he even know what he’s saying?
MISS COLLINS. I face reality, and our
reality is that we’re men.
Before I started testosterone blockers, I used to get very angry—scary angry. I yelled a lot. In college, I bit my arm a few times, hard, leaving delicate red marks in the shape of my jaw. This may be essentialist, but it’s also true.
It was a lonely time, that fall I spent working on the piano. I labored at night with the lights off, save for an ugly fluorescent table lamp, scratching words no one would ever read into an artwork no one would ever care about. I knew this, even then, but I did it anyway, because I had nothing else to do. I watched the tiny, illegible words snaking their way across the soft pine. More than once, the scre
wdriver I was using to etch the keys would slip and abrade my palm. I was probably depressed, but that language would never have occurred to me then.
One of the many texts I transcribed alongside SCUM was something called the Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, a 1912 essay written by French artist and dancer Valentine de Saint-Point in response to the Italian Futurists. It’s like if Valerie were a fascist (or more of one). Saint-Point’s on board with the Futurists’ glorification of the industrial machine, their lust for violence, their unapologetic authoritarianism—she just wants to make sure women get a piece of the action. “Feminism is a political error,” she scoffs. For Saint-Point, the whole of humanity has up until recently been mired in a feminine epoch of history: sentimental, peaceful, anemic. What’s needed is blood. Men and women each, Saint-Point claims, can only be whole by integrating both male and female elements, and what’s missing most right now, in both sexes, is virility. It’s a paradoxical conclusion: the only way for women to fulfill themselves will be to undergo masculinization. “Every woman must possess not only feminine virtues, but also masculine ones,” Saint-Point writes, “without which she is a female.” The word here in French is femelle, as said of livestock, not people.
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