Chu has a very distorted idea of what being a woman is
Joan Smith on horrible Chu and his horrible prize:
Pornography drips with misogyny. Teenage boys can easily find scenes of rape and sexual torture on their phones, changing the very idea of what constitutes “normal” sexual practices…
All a porn enthusiast has to do is link their habit with the magic word “transgender” and it is instantly transformed into something radical and progressive. It’s a form of cultural blindness so widespread that an author and academic who claims that violent porn persuaded him to “change” his sex has this week been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism. “Sissy porn did make me trans,” Andrea Long Chu, formerly Andrew, once wrote.
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Chu clearly has a very distorted idea of what being a woman is, conflating the idea with being passive and victimised in language so extreme that it’s distasteful to quote. The writer describes being a “sad, pretentious boy, furious about rape, hopelessly addicted to pornography”, which he would look at for hours in the bathroom while his girlfriend was asleep. Apologies to sensitive readers, but what Chu learned from this experience is that “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”.
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Porn is a huge commercial operation that makes money by defining and controlling women’s bodies. It offers not just arousal but an ideology which integrates violence into sex, so much so that young women increasingly report demands for so-called “rough sex”, including strangulation.
It’s a perfect fit for the most extreme excesses of gender ideology, whose philosophy, like that of porn, is based on the idea of womanhood as performance. What they have in common is the idea that being female involves high heels, lipstick — and passivity.
High heels are an enforcer of passivity, just as bound feet were. You can’t run properly in them, in fact you can’t do anything physically demanding in them. They’re a hobble. They slow women down, keep them close to home, make sure they can’t run or fight back.
It’s a really weird take on the dialectic of the universal and the individual.
I could say “Women don’t like high heels because they’re uncomfortable and make you feel vulnerable” because that’s what I think about high heels, and I’d obviously be full of shit because women buy and collect those things above and beyond workplace requirements, and the women who love them would immediately tell me I’m full of shit, and they’d be right.
But Chu isn’t even a woman, and for some reason he’s using “female” as a synonym for “person who gets off on sexually roleplaying a sissy bimbo” (which in my experience is NOT a common fetish among women) and then implying that this is a universal experience. I would spot Chu an “attaboy, you have codified the sissy fetish very deftly” if he didn’t imply that it’s got anything at all to do with actual female human beings. Hell, that probably explains why no actual trans-identified people seem to be congratulating Chu. He’s saying the quiet part out loud.
“Hell, that probably explains why no actual trans-identified people seem to be congratulating Chu. He’s saying the quiet part out loud.”
Yes, it’s weird. There seems to be a muted response online to Chu’s win. No happy articles about “stunning and brave transwoman wins award!”
Yes, the fact that he’s willing to say the quiet part out loud (or doesn’t know how not to) is what makes him interesting even fascinating. (If you can stomach the misogyny that is.)
Not to mention that Chu’s Pulitzer isn’t actually for the trans stuff but for his literary criticism. The people who are congratulating him on Twitter seem to be pretty much exclusively fellow lit-crit types. Much incestuous, very logroll, yay.
Praise from Roz Kaveney (of “Vast hairy prongs” infamy”) :
I have all sorts of reservations about things @andrealongchu has written, but she writes really well and deserves congratulations for her Pulitzer. Also, her getting it really boils the piss of many bad people, so there’s that too.
https://twitter.com/RozKaveney/status/1655844968794054656?cxt=HHwWgICzgbyO3_otAAAA
And the origin of Kaveney’s “Vast Hairy Prongs” statement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6ua4s8VGM