ALVIN. I guess it’s just the romantic in me.
Bongi flags down a nicely dressed man with the intention of hustling him into buying her dinner. (Valerie did this kind of thing all the time.) His name is Alvin, and he fancies himself a ladies’ man. He reads all the “more zestful men’s magazines—Tee-Hee, Giggle, Titter, Lust, Drool, Slobber, and, just for thoroughness, Lech.” His apartment is arranged around an enormous revolving bed he read about in Playboy. “Why’d you approach me?” he asks Bongi, fishing. “You must have sensed something unusual.” She gives a practiced pout. “Sensed it! I was overwhelmed by it,” Bongi exclaims. “Any woman can see you’re a ball of fire.” She ushers him to a nearby expensive restaurant; she’ll end up giving him a brisk hand job in the alley for twenty-five bucks. He scurries away, disappointed not to have been given a chance to perform.
In 2013, onetime child actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote and directed a romantic comedy called Don Jon. In the film, Gordon-Levitt stars at Jon Martello, a latter-day Don Juan from a working-class Italian-American family in New Jersey. Jon’s reputation for being able to bed any woman he pleases has earned him the nickname “Don Jon” among his friends. But Jon has a secret: he’s addicted to online pornography. The film depicts his addiction through a series of quick, graphic cuts: the chirpy fanfare of a booting-up laptop, the unassuming triangular play button of a pornographic video, a close-up on Jon’s face, a climactic musical cue, a hand pulling a tissue from a box and then the same tissue, now crumpled, tossed into a wastebasket to the sound of a digital file’s being deleted. This masturbatory loop is mirrored, during the day, by Jon’s unbroken Sunday routine: Jon fastidiously making his bed, Jon cursing at other drivers, Jon running up the steps to church, Jon’s face behind the confessional window, Jon swaggering to the weight room at the gym, Jon pumping iron to the rhythm of a Hail Mary, Jon eating dinner in a wifebeater at his parents’ house while his macho father yells at a televised football game. The message is clear: Jon’s in a rut.
Jon’s addictive behavior ends up sabotaging his budding relationship with a beautiful girl named Barbara (Scarlett Johansson, obviously), who finally puts out after he starts taking a night-school class in order to escape his current employment in the service industry. When Barbara nearly catches him sneaking out of bed to watch porn, Jon puffs out his chest and tells her that only “fucking losers watch porn.” He’s talking about himself, of course. Whereas being on top means he’s expected to “do all the work” in sex with women, pornography does all his desiring for him. “I don’t gotta say anything, I don’t gotta do anything,” he explains in voiceover, “I just fucking lose myself.” Jon’s eyes slide in and out of focus, his mouth hangs slightly ajar, his skin dimly electric with the guilty glow of the screen. Like all men, Jon watches porn not to have power, but to give it up.
In short, pornography feminizes him. This is where the film’s implicit theory of pornography—call it anti-porn postfeminism—both joins and splits with those of its forerunners in the sex wars. Don Jon basically agrees with the MacKinnonite doctrine that porn is structured by the eroticization of dominance and submission—but it locates this power dynamic not in the sex acted out between the commanding men and degraded women onscreen, but in the sex unfolding between the addictive pornographic image and the essentially female viewer it dominates. When Barbara discovers that Jon’s browser history is stuffed full of porn sites, she will accuse Jon of having “more sex with that thing”—his screen—than with his own girlfriend. When she leaves him, he relapses hard, barely leaving his apartment for days.
Luckily, Jon finds help, in the form of an emotionally fulfilling relationship with a wise older woman named Esther whom he meets at night school (Julianne Moore, obviously). After making slow, tender love to Esther on her couch, Jon mans up: he stops sleeping around, starts singing in traffic, mixes up his routine, stands up to his domineering father, and never watches porn again. In Don Jon’s concluding montage, Jon and Esther stare into each other’s eyes while Jon’s voiceover describes their new, “two-way” kind of love. “I do lose myself in her,” he confides, “I can tell she’s losing herself in me, and we’re just fucking lost together.” The film closes with Jon and Esther making gorgeously sunlit love in Jon’s bed, each penetrating the other’s eyes with their own in an accelerating series of radiant shot–reverse shots. Neither of them, we are asked to believe, are female.
BONGI. Downright perverse.
Almost every night, for at least a year before I transitioned, I would wait till my girlfriend had fallen asleep and slip out of bed for the bathroom with my phone. I was going on Tumblr to look at something called sissy porn. I’d discovered it by accident one night, scrolling lazily down a pornographic rabbit hole. At first, I’d been into JOI videos—the acronym stands for “jerkoff instruction.” In a typical JOI, a solo female performer directs presumptively male viewers to masturbate, in detail. The whole thing is unusually meta, even for porn: many JOI actresses will explicitly shame viewers for wasting their time masturbating instead of fucking a real woman like herself. Humiliation is therefore a frequent theme. Orgasms are often ruined or withheld entirely; affectations of disgust or amusement at the thought of the viewer’s tiny penis are common.
But these videos pale in comparison to sissy porn. In the right corner of Reddit, you can find a whole genre of posts concerned that sissy porn has irreversibly altered the course of their lives. “Did sissy porn make me trans or was I trans all along?” a worried user asks in a post from 2014:
About 3 years ago, I discovered sissy hypno videos, which in a nutshell are flashing subjective images telling you to wear panties, be girly, suck cock, and even take hormones. I became completely obsessed with these videos. Nothing got me off like these. It got to the point where I started wearing panties and imagining myself as a girl when I would masturbate.
The poster, currently living as a gay man, is “95% percent sure” that she is a closeted transgender woman, noting her preference for female playmates as a child and extreme postpubescent social anxiety, her failure to become aroused during sex with men (no matter how studly), and her sometimes suicidal depression at the thought of continuing to live as a man. But the fear expressed by the title—namely, that the poster’s obsession with sissy porn has made her want to become a woman—hangs over the whole post. Posts like this one describe feelings of shame, anxiety, confusion, and alarm. They fear that real trans women just aren’t into this kind of thing. One user writes that despite her never having felt male and her hatred for erections, when she told her therapist that she was addicted to sissy erotica, her therapist told her she just had a kink. “Real MTFs don’t do that,” said her therapist. “Ever.”
In fact, transsexuality has a long history of being considered a paraphilia. Since the eighties, sexologist Ray Blanchard has defended the classification of transsexual women into two distinct erotic types. Trans people and their advocates have largely rejected this typology, not least because Blanchard—a truly loathsome man who on his own justifies the inclusion of “psychiatrists and clinical psychologists” on SCUM’s hit list—considers trans women to be male. “All gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented toward men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women,” he proposed in a 1989 paper. He named the latter tendency autogynephilia, coined to sound like the Greek for “love of oneself as a woman.” With this concept, Blanchard seems to have been interested in shifting sex researchers’ focus from the transvestite’s fetish objects—for instance, “the physical properties of clothing used for cross-dressing (silky textures, striking colors)”—towards a more fundamental erotic investment in the idea of the self as female.
Never uncontroversial in sexology circles, Blanchard’s work was introduced to a broader audience in 2003 by The Man Who Would Be Queen, a lurid little volume that billed itself as a popular book about unpopular truths. The book’s author, psychologist J. Michael Bailey, leans heavily o
n the theory of autogynephilia, which he presents as settled scientific fact. The theory has thus become a touchstone for trans-hating feminists looking to cast trans women as male perverts. “The term transgender was coined … to create a more acceptable face for a practice previously understood as a ‘paraphilia’—a form of sexual fetishism,” writes noted transphobe Sheila Jeffreys in a book that cites Blanchard’s work liberally. Jeffreys also happens to discuss sissy porn at length. “The use of the term ‘sissy’ is illuminating since it is very clearly a term of abuse based upon women’s subordinate status,” she claims, disgusted. “There is no positive association with women attached to this practice, only a degrading and demeaning one.”
What Blanchard hoped to describe with the term autogynephilia was, of course, exactly what the SCUM Manifesto had described twenty years earlier as the psychological disease shared by all men. Indeed, if everyone is female—and I’m hoping you’re starting to believe that they are—then autogynephilia describes not an obscure paraphilic affliction but rather the basic structure of all human sexuality. This is not just because everyone has an erotic image of themselves as female—they do—but the assimilation of any erotic image is, by nature, female. To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.
ARTHUR. Fuck is in the air; it’s overpowering; it
carries you away with it, sucks you right up.
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.
BONGI. Let the guys ram each other in
the ass and leave the women alone.
As she catcalls women on the street, Bongi is joined by two pickup artists. The stage directions identify them as “two cats, one white and one spade.” Spade here means “black,” a slang term dating back to the Harlem Renaissance; coming from a white girl like Valerie, it sounds like a slur. The men hit on Bongi, who rebuffs them, before turning their attention to the same women she’s been bothering. The white one makes a polite, ineffectual pass at a flashy girl walking by. “Beat it, Little Boy,” she spits. His friend thinks he can do better. “Step aside and let a man operate,” he boasts.
SPADE CAT. Good evening, Goddess. Forgive what may sound like mere hyperbole, but to me you are a goddess.
CHICK. I can well understand your reaction; you’ve captured the inner me. Is that Boy Scout over there a friend of yours?
SPADE CAT. A mere acquaintance, but enough of an acquaintance for me to know he’s not at all the man for you; his technique’s as washed-out as his skin.
CHICK. And yours’s as intense as yours?
SPADE CAT. You’re perceptive.
The caricature is so obvious
that the chick reads it as quickly as the reader. She’s also, well, into it. As she and the spade cat retire to his place to get better acquainted, the white cat shuffles off, grumbling in dejection. “I may as well turn in my yo-yo; all the swinging chicks’re either queer or they go with spades,” he pouts. “A white man doesn’t stand a chance nowadays.” In a clever director’s hands, the scene might be an effective satire of what we could call a right-wing fantasy of national cuckoldry: the emasculated white man, spit-roasted by black men at one end and lesbians at the other, resigns himself to a life of sexual frustration. An incel is born.
On August 12, 2017, a group of neo-Nazis, Klan members, and alt-righters held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the murder of antifascist protestor Heather Heyer. Three days later, the prolific sissy porn creator known as Sissy Mindy—who has frequently posted topical content—posted an image to her Tumblr featuring a white woman performing oral sex on a black man. Her head is fully sideways, her eyes wide, as if surprised by its girth. “Fight against intolerance and racism,” reads the overlaid caption. “Suck big black cock.” The trope of the black man’s penis as large, threatening, and tremendously potent is an old one, of course, the standby excuse for lynchings and white supremacist terror, and it’s found all across the pornographic spectrum, where it’s known as BBC—from glossy mainstream series like Blacked, in which nubile white girls lose their interracial virginity, to one of sissy porn’s closer relatives, cuckolding porn, in which white boyfriends and husbands are forced to watch, and occasionally participate, as black men fuck their eager wives and girlfriends.
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