What it might feel like for women
Many are praising Louise Perry’s review of Andrea Long Chu’s book Females. I like this passage:
The feeling of desperate, conflicted desire is a thread running through Chu’s writing. Where she departs from mainstream trans activism is in vocalising that conflict, rather than wishing it away: “What I want isn’t surgery; what I want is never to have needed surgery to begin with. I will never be natural, but I will die trying.”
It is impossible not to feel compassion, despite the fact that Chu does not spend even a moment wondering what it might feel like for cis women — a little over half the human race — to be the objects of all this longing. To engage with her writing as a female reader is to be constantly coming up against passages that trigger unease:
I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend . . . for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.
Reading this, I happened to be sitting in a hospital waiting-room and looked at the women around me: tired nurses, frail elderly ladies, mothers pacifying screaming children, and not a pair of Daisy Dukes in sight. Observing femaleness in its unvarnished reality, I am forced to wonder whether Chu’s idea of womanhood is dependent more on an idealised image than on day-to-day reality: more on Solanas the dominatrix than on Solanas the person.
Wonder no more: yes of course it is. That’s one of the things that drives us up the wall: the obsession with the surface, the trivial, the appearance-based, the sexy, and the indifference to coupled with ignorance of the ordinary humdrum every day reality. The thinking of “woman” as a fetish as opposed to a brute physical fact that brings a lot of ordinary human drudgery with it (as does being a man, of course).
Next comes the last paragraph, which is a gem.
But then Chu is hardly alone in her preference for fantasy. Females, and the praise for Females, is the product of a school of feminism now dominant in academia that has abandoned interest in the material aspects of women’s lives and has instead embraced confection and self-obsession. This form of feminism is far more interested in the supposedly liberating power of lipgloss and orgasms than in the difficult business of incrementally improving the lot of women and girls. When a porn-obsessed writer can be lauded as a feminist prophet for describing the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” we should wonder how on earth we got to this point. Chu’s writing may be funny, engaging and thought-provoking, but this is not a feminist book in any meaningful sense of the term. This troubled and talented writer is in need of a hard-nosed editor and a cold shower.
Keep your blank, blank eyes to yourself, bub.
The whole review is worth reading. I was struck by this bit (quoting Chu):
And that’s just it, isn’t it? “Identifying as a woman”≠”being a woman.” Hence the insistence on requiring other people to “acknowledge” one’s femaleness.
To me, it just sounds like a narcissistic privileged Brooklyn hipster romanticizing his own mental illnesses for attention. There’s tons and tons of people like that in hipster art scenes. Always has been. And the narcissistic “art” they produce is usually tedious.
When I hear young TIMs report feeling “euphoric” when someone treats them like a woman, I know they have never, indeed, been treated ‘like a woman’. When people treat me ‘like a woman’, it makes me angry, tense, nervous, or depressed. I would rather be treated as a person, something all too many of us rarely get to experience, as the men surrounding us treat us like objects.
Indeed. And when I hear people talk about feeling euphoric I also think, that’s addiction language. No one should be medically altering their body in search of euphoria. If roleplaying as a woman gets you high, you should be in treatment.
In connexion with Screechy Monkey’s comment #1 & Iknklast’s comment #5, I remember in Jan Morris’s book, the author writing of the excitement felt when dressing and making up as a woman, and her enjoyment of the experience of a man making a (gentle) pass at her. The validation by the generosity or ignorance of others is taken as important, because it appears to show that you have actually become a woman. But what in fact comes across in Morris’s writing is not the simple enjoyment (or otherwise) of such experiences, but the individual beneath the cultivated appearance taking pleasure in the fact that (s)he can pass as a woman – I remember, in my mis-spent youth when I was working as a labourer on a building site taking a certain pleasure in being regarded by members of the middle classes and above as a working-class boy despite my middle-class origins. The pleasure lay in a sort of double consciousness, akin to that felt by the actor. There was, I felt, a peculiar disconnexion between what Morris’s interpretation of her experiences and feelings and what was actually happening within her.
And there was also the rather childish pleasure, in my case, in succeeding in a minor deception, one that occurred because of other people’s assumptions and not because I was setting out strongly to deceive.
I can relate a little to the feeling of “euphoria” when I remember being allowed to buy my first lipstick when I was eleven years old, or those first few public recognitions that I wasn’t a kid anymore, but a “young lady” who could sit at the Grown-ups table or be seen reading mature magazines like “Tiger Beat” and “16.”
I’m not sure the comparison is flattering, though.
Chu’s book sounds like a rather vivid first-person description of autogynophilia— which trans activists hotly deny exists.
Tim, #5. I haven’t read that book am unaware of the context around that part you mention, and I’m wondering: do you think that Morris was conscious of the fact that he was misinterpreting the cause of those pleasurable feelings?
I ask because the description of your own experience makes it very clear that you were more than aware that you hadn’t suddenly transitioned to a working class lad any more than Morris had suddenly become an actual woman; the pleasure (in both cases) was in the successful deception. I’m wondering if Morris’s interpretation was an actual belief in the power of props (clothes, make-up, deportment, etc.) to effect an actual ttransformation – an unconscious self-delusion, if you will – or if it was an act of self-deception as deliberate as the intent to deceive others whenever he went out in his female persona.
@Tim Harris – it is a warm feeling of being accepted as “one of us”, a honorary member of the tribe . A Scottish friend referred to me as a “Scotswoman” in passing. I’m not, and couldn’t pass as one, however as I live in Scotland I was flattered and pleased.
On the general point of this article, it is exasperating that femaleness=clothes. I suppose it will come to a point that frumpy grumpy Jane in Accounts, who doesn’t care what she puts on is designated as less female than John in Accounts who wears lipstick and simpers. (Jane is especially grumpy before her menstrual cycle).
In class-ridden England there were whole swathes of literature about tradesmen (and Jews) trying to pass as English gentlemen, wearing the right clothes and not getting them quite right, inventing ancestries and buying coats-of-arms and yet being uneasy that the Real Thing was looking at them covertly askance and not allowing them in the club. This constant requirement for validation is called snobbery, and was constantly ridiculed. Ridicule seems not to be allowed in this aspiration for taking on the most superficial trappings of womanhood.
I’ve said it before – but too many cases come off not as trans individuals wanting to be women, but rather wanting a female role in a porno.
Which is to say it isn’t even that there is this idealised view of what it is to be a woman, but that it is a feminine ideal that is specifically calculated to be what your average straight guy would likely jack off to.
It is taking a “femininity” that is calculated to make a profit for some company somewhere, and trying to turn that into a personality.
I’m not even anti-porn, but cases like this look like someone identifying themselves as “hamburglar” – it isn’t real.
That is exactly what Chu is describing, Sastra.
Bruce Gorton
It isn’t calculated, though. This is what autogynephilia is–a sexual fantasy. These men are aroused at the thought of “being” women. Of course their fantasies reflect porn motifs. Porn motifs are popular–that’s why they generate profit.
When autogynephilia becomes a “gender identity”, what you’ve got is a man who wants to become the object of his sexual fantasy. His fantasy woman isn’t a humdrum female person. She’s a straight man’s fantasy, and she does the things a straight man might fantasize about.
Acolyte#5 – sorry this meant to have been sent earlier, but I made a mistake.
Morris did make the full transition. And s(he) speaks also of learning to dress, walk and behave like a woman. I found the account curious, though, because Morris (who is in many ways a very good and honest writer) craved and accepted the illusion – whether it amounted to self-delusion, I cannot really say – and of course enjoyed that ratification of gender offered by the generosity of strangers, while unconsciously (or at least not choosing to recognise other aspects of the experience), it seemed to me, enjoying the creation of the illusion – which might, unkindly, be called deception. And it seemed to me that the latter enjoyment, and the satisfaction it brought, was probably the greater.
KBPlayer#10. Yes, I largely agree, but I think it is a little different, in that you did not desperately desire to pass as a Scotswoman (as of course I didn’t desperately desire to pass as a working-class lad, though I was certainly happy to shuffle off my middle-class identity at the time). I think this ‘validation’ is, for the person involved, of overwhelming importance, though surely it must lessen in its importance as it becomes part of one’s life, as it seemed to for Morris. I once read in a book of psychiatry somewhere about the overwhelming experience that is ‘coming out’ – to himself and others – as gay for a man in middle life (as Morris was when she transformed); that it involves a sort of return to adolescence, and that, like an adolescent, the now openly gay man has to learn to live as a gay man and to go through processes that he should and would have done in adolescence had he been able to admit to his nature back in those days. What strikes me about Veronica Ivy and others is that they seem to want to return constantly to, and to repeat the euphoria of that initial experience of being ‘validated’ – and are more than willing to rely not on the generosity of strangers, but on the bullying of strangers if that is necessary to get the ‘rush’ of that initial experience again or, indeed, to get it for the first time, if they are one of those who do not transition fully and continue to appear to any eye as men. And if they don’t get it, they rage. Perhaps the rage itself is enjoyable in some ways. Most, if not all, of those who joined in the ‘cunt’ onslaught on J.K. Rowling appeared to be taking great pleasure in their twittering.
Leaving aside the question of why an ‘expectant arsehole’ (can an arsehole be expectant?) would be considered a bare essential of femaleness, what is being described there is not even a human female, it’s an inflatable sex doll.