The classic explanation for this fetish is the revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s theory of negrophobia as a kind of murderous envy: the white man, projecting onto the black man the “infinite virility” he worries he lacks, proceeds to revenge himself against the latter, prototypically in the form of lynching. What sissy porn’s use of the trope suggests, however, is that when Fanon supposed that the negrophobe might be a repressed homosexual, he was only half-right. The paradox of white supremacy, of course, is that it’s actually an inferiority complex: the white man, who could have just as easily fantasized that the black man’s penis was smaller than his own—it would be fantasy either way, after all—nevertheless opts to imagine himself as a sexual failure, going limp in the presence of the black man’s unlimited sexual potency.
In other words, the true threat, which in Sissy Mindy’s post becomes an alluring promise, is not that the black man will prevent the white racist from being a man, but that the black man will remind the white man that he never wanted to be a man in the first place. Sissy Mindy registers this anxiety with the hashtags she places on the post, which include “BBC slave,” “black supremacy,” and “white genocide.” The last of these is a decades-old conspiracy theory about government-run white extinction programs (immigration, low fertility rates, abortion, etc.) that’s recently found new life as a popular alt-right talking point on social media. In this form, sissy porn becomes, as it were, the truest version of itself: a parodic expression of the altright’s most repressed sexual fantasies. The cheeky implication appears to be not only that becoming female is a bit like dying, but also that white sissification might constitute a form of erotic reparations for the devastation wrought by chattel slavery.
That’s a joke, of course, whether or not you find it funny. No one actually expects one blow job to change anything. In a sense, that’s the point: females and politics never mix. After decades of tedious feminist debates over agency, one thing is clear: women may be capable of political action, but females never are. Ultimately, the phrase forced feminization is redundant: the female is always the product of force, and force is invariably feminizing. This is why environments designed to forcibly masculinize their inhabit-ants—college fraternities and the US military come to mind—inevitably end up expressing their central contradiction (anyone forced to be a man couldn’t possibly be a man) not just through rape and sexual assault (of both men and women by men), but also with a set of hazing rituals in which men are forced to undergo feminizing sex acts. It’s also why the same contingent of feminists who seek to unmask trans women as male pretenders may almost always be relied upon to cast sex workers as the feminized victims of human traffickers—there is too much female among each group and not enough woman. If sex workers were really women, they would rescue themselves from the sexual objectification that makes them women; if trans women were women, they would have the good sense not to be.
GINGER. Let your soul sway gently in the void.
When I finally debuted the piano project at the end of the term, I delivered a manifesto I had prepared to accompany it. I wrote it very quickly, in two or three nights, deep into the dark morning. I still have it on my computer, tucked with embarrassment into some dusty folder, like a letter from an ex. The thing is called “Apocalypse Manifesto: Towards a Radioactive Art.” It’s intentionally messy: a thicket of mismatched fonts, upside-down text, collaged black-and-white images. Grand statements about artistic practice are punctuated by weird sexual outbursts. (“Oh god dick give it to me baby,” I write, a baffling reference to Fluxus artist Dick Higgins.) Andy Warhol makes two appearances, or at least his work does: first, a Marilyn Monroe silk-screen, turned on its side and covered in text, with the words mass culture above it (I know); then, the album art for The Velvet Underground & Nico, duplicated severally, each banana sloppily pasted over the next—another clever dick joke, I must have thought. I was obsessed with Allan Kaprow’s 1986 essay “Art Which Can’t Be Art.” I reproduced a big chunk of it in my manifesto:
I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday life from all but the memory of art. I could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it.
Sentiments like these soothed me. I was stridently anti-institution in those days. “There are no museums which are not history museums,” I crack in a footnote. In the final pages, I point out that every manifesto is an apocalypse, in the original sense of both words: revelation. True art, I thought, would become coterminous with life itself. True art would be nothing at all.
As I was writing this book, I was invited to give a talk at a film festival in the Midwest. Not a “talk,” exactly—the programmer who spoke to me referred to it as a Provocation, a brief, challenging performance intended to force the audience into wrestling with a difficult or strange idea. Casting about for an idea, I began to imagine something akin to Cut Piece, which artist Yoko Ono famously performed at Carnegie Hall in 1965, not far from the hotel in Chelsea where Valerie was then putting the finishing touches on Up Your Ass. You can find videos of Cut Piece on YouTube. During the performance, Ono sits onstage with her legs tucked under her, wearing a long-sleeved black blouse and a black skirt. Her hair is in a short, clean bun; her face is impassive. On the floor next to her, there are some long silver scissors. You can hear audience members moving around, chatting, giggling. One by one, participants male and female approach her and cut into her clothing with the long silver scissors that sit beside her. Some are modest, others forceful, still others amused. About seven minutes in, her blouse is gone, and a young man in a puffy white shift gleefully appoints himself the one who will cut off her camisole, and then her bra. When he cuts her bra straps, she holds the cups in place with crossed hands. Ono breaks character briefly here to roll her eyes at him. The audience laughs, because it’s funny, and it’s also horrifying. The term “death drive” is too strong to describe what’s going on in Cut Piece; it’s more of a death drift, limp and aimless. Yoko isn’t doing anything, after all; that’s the whole point. She’s being done to. She hasn’t given her consent so much as given up consenting.
I performed six times at the film festival, each time before a documentary about an evasive stage magician. I began by announcing that I had in my hand a small remote control, and I needed a volunteer to hold on to it for me. The remote had a button with an arrow on it, and I invited the volunteer to press that button as many times as she liked for the remainder of the performance. (Five times out of six, the volunteer was a woman.) I explained that I was a writer who tended to write about gender and sexuality, and that I also had recently purchased a new vagina—by which I meant, I had paid a plastic surgeon to rearrange my old bits into some new bits. “So I got to thinking,” I would say, letting my gaze wander toward the ceiling. “What if I came out onstage with a vibrator inserted into my vagina, and what if I solicited a volunteer and gave them a remote control, and what if that remote control had a button on it which, when pressed, turned the vibrator on, and what if I gave my consent, in front of everyone, for the volunteer to press that button as many times as they liked for the duration of the performance, and just let everyone watch?”
By this point, the audience was laughing—as much, I hoped, from suspicion and scandal as humor. I told them about Cut Piece and why I admired it. I told them, as a friend of a friend had suggested to me, that we might call my hypothetical performance Cunt Piece. I suggested to the audience that this would be a private show, between me and one other person. “The rest of you wouldn’t actually be watching the performance, you’d be watching yourself fail to watch it,” I told them. “Maybe you’d be listening to see if you could hear the vibrator, maybe you’d be watching my face to see if I betrayed any signs that the vibrator was on, but at the end of the da
y you probably wouldn’t be able to see the volunteer, to see if she was actually pressing the button, and even if you could see, you wouldn’t be able to tell if the remote was working, and even if it was working, you simply couldn’t be sure whether I actually did have a vibrator inside me, or whether I even had a vagina at all, or whether I had just made the whole thing up just to fuck with you.”
And that was it. For the most part, I was telling the truth. I had, in fact, recently undergone vaginoplasty. I did, in fact, have a vibrator on my person, but it was a small clitoral vibrator, not an insertable one, and it didn’t have the size or power to genuinely arouse me. I would have liked it to, actually: it would have created more risk on my part, instead of the mere illusion of risk. But I could, in fact, feel it every time the volunteer pressed the button on the remote, which most of them did—even after learning that by doing so they might have been having sex with me at a distance. A few even seemed to become emboldened by this possibility, pressing the button over and over with gusto.
At no point did I mention Valerie. The performance was too brief to describe my attraction to her, my obsession with her work. It was exactly the kind of sexual stunt that Valerie both loved and loved to hate: unreadable, vaguely hostile, but also weirdly passive, right at the nexus of SCUM and Daddy’s Girl, where most women, including Valerie, lived. Perhaps I also felt possessive. It was a private show after all, but its audience of one had died thirty years before, probably from emphysema, kneeling on the floor of her room at the Bristol Hotel in San Francisco. Praying, I suppose, to no one.
ARTHUR. I am terrible, aren’t I?
In the summer of 1967, Valerie was frequenting the Factory, trying to cajole Andy Warhol into directing and producing Up Your Ass. One day, she interviewed him, and he recorded it. On the tape, Andy asks Valerie if she works for the CIA. Valerie asks Andy how he gets off. Other parts play as if she is interviewing him to lead the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.
VALERIE. What effect has SCUM had on your life?
ANDY. Uh, it makes me like girls more.
VALERIE. Why? …
ANDY. Before they were only boys.
VALERIE. Now they’re what?
ANDY. Girls … That girls didn’t exist before.
VALERIE. You thought there were only boys.
ANDY. Yeah.
VALERIE. That there was only one sex.
ANDY. That’s right.
VALERIE. And now you know there are two.
ANDY. Now there are two …
It’s disorienting for me to read this now. Andy is my birth name. It’s alien to me now, like an old photograph, or a leg that’s fallen asleep. A few people still use it, but this is my fault. When I first came out, I told people I would be going by Andi. When spoken aloud, the living name was identical with the dead one.
At the end of Up Your Ass, Bongi meets a woman named Arthur. “That’s not my name; it’s my husband’s,” she explains. It’s not clear whether Bongi wants to fight her or fuck her; before long, the two are shooting the shit. They discuss the tedium of Arthur’s marriage, her husband’s insatiable sex drive. For a bit, they are interrupted by Arthur’s son, a whiny boy of five or six who has, in an attempt to give himself an erection, gummed up his pee-hole with glue. Arthur waves him off with contempt. She hates her life. She’s seen the same shrink as Ginger, the turd-eating Daddy’s Girl, but it hasn’t made a difference. “I’ve tried relating to the emptiness,” she confides, “but it doesn’t work—he doesn’t relate back.” In an unexpected reversal, Arthur propositions Bongi. “I bet you’d be a crazy lover,” Arthur flirts. “Actually, I’m a lousy lover,” Bongi admits. “I’m too good a talker.” It’s true; she is. As much as Bongi spends Up Your Ass talking about being a woman of action, it’s mostly just that: talk. It’s Arthur, the woman with her husband’s name, who ends up doing something. Her son comes back, crying and asking her to keep him company. She strangles him instead, burying him on the street. Murder concealed, Arthur joins Bongi in harassing a passing broad, “a beautiful, low-down, funky doll”—just Valerie’s type. The play ends.
Andy Warhol shot Valerie Solanas in 1967, paying her twenty-five dollars to take part in his film I, a Man. In part, the gig was Warhol’s way of apologizing for losing the copy of Up Your Ass that Valerie had given him. “She came right over and we filmed her in a short scene on a staircase,” Andy recalled. “She was actually funny and that was that.” In the film, Valerie’s wearing the hat she always has on in the pictures of her I’ve seen; I had assumed her hair was short, but in fact she has a messy ponytail. Her voice is bouncy and natural, with a strong New Jersey accent. She’s rebuffing the advances of a man whose ass she had grabbed in the elevator. “I’m a sucker for squishy ass,” she admits, “but what else have you got?” When he persists, she finally tells him the truth. “Your instincts tell you to chase chicks, right?” she asks, a few steps above him on the stairs, gesturing with her cigarette. “Right!” he answers. “My instincts tell me to do the same thing.” Watching this, I realize that I find Valerie extremely attractive, which probably means she never would have agreed to sleep with me.
Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. The bullet damaged his stomach, liver, throat, both his lungs, and his spleen, which the doctors would remove during emergency surgery. When he reached the hospital, he was pronounced dead, and he remained so for a full ninety seconds. But death didn’t take. Andy was delirious. “I kept thinking, ‘I’m really dead,’” he later recalled. “This is what it’s like to be dead—you think you’re alive but you’re dead. I just think I’m lying here in a hospital.’”
Fifty years later, Valerie shot Andy again. This time, he did die, quickly and without hesitating. Before, there were only boys. Now there was just a girl, and no boys for fifty miles.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this book were previously presented at Columbia University, Vassar, Ursinus, UC Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and the New School; my thanks to everyone who made those events possible. A short adapted excerpt ran in New York magazine.
Between drafts of this book, I underwent major surgery. Recovery was the hardest thing I have ever done, and I owe everything to those who slowly walked my trembling shade out of the Underworld: Brandy, Charlotte, Dayna, Emmett, Harron, Jasmine, Jill, Julie, Kalani, Kate, Marissa, Melissa, Liv, Paisley, Rachael, Sarah, Smaran, Tey, Thora, Torrey, Wendy. My editor at Verso, Jessie Kindig, knew exactly what I needed and made sure I had it. My editor at life, Marissa Brostoff, forced me to say what I was saying. Sarah McCarry held my hand. Charlotte Shane blew in on a wind from the east. And speaking of weather: Sally, you told me never to thank you, and I’m still not listening.
Notes
p. 3 “I’m so female I’m subversive.” Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass (unpublished manuscript; Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum Archives, 1965), 18.
p. 3 “Andy had lost the play.” Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (New York: The Feminist Press, 2014), 118–19.
p. 4 “I dedicate this play to me” … “and other degenerates.” Solanas, Up Your Ass, n.p.
p. 4 “loud, plaid sports jacket.” Ibid., 1.
p. 5 “shooting the shit.” Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 42–44.
pp. 5–6 “The two-sex system” … “So has disease.” Solanas, Up Your Ass, 18.
p. 6 “not physical defects.” Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (London: Verso, 2004), 68–69.
p. 6 “The male is a biological accident.” Ibid., 35.
p. 6 “to become female.” Ibid., 37.
p. 7 “men are women and women are men.” Ibid., 38.
p. 7 “‘right up’ their husbands’ assholes.” Solanas, Up Your Ass, 24.
pp. 7–8 “thrill-seeking female-females.” Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 57.
p. 8 “free-wheeling, arrogant females.” Ibid., 70.
p. 8 “his maleness” … “his femininity.” Ibid., 6
8.
p. 8 “exposing herself.” Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 69–70.
p. 8 “men who intrude.” Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 74.
p. 9 “Give me a kiss.” Solanas, Up Your Ass, 1.
p. 9 “This reduces me” … “little ‘feminist’ groups.” Quoted in Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 300.
p. 10 “always selfish” … “six-inch blade.” Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 76.
p. 11 “Eventually the expression” … “a redundancy.” Solanas, Up Your Ass, 18.
p. 15 “I’m very bitter.” Ibid., 12.
p. 15 “Christ almighty.” John Logan, Red (London: Oberon, 2009), 54.
p. 18 “woman of action.” Solanas, Up Your Ass, 2.
p. 18 “But it was a joke.” Maurice Girodias, preface, in SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas (New York: Olympia Press, 1970), xi.
p. 19 “incredibly funny.” Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 34.
p. 19 “Humor is not” … “mere ‘massive education.’” Quoted in ibid., 35.
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