“…the phrase forced feminization is redundant: the female is always the product of force, and force is invariably feminizing.”
This caught my attention - all of your article did, but this quote did so to a particular degree.
To clarify its significance to me, I’ll rephrase it as: “the use of male force against another person, of either sex, feminizes them;” and, contextually (and reductively, as Chu’s work is), this becomes something along the lines of “to be male is to dominate; to dominate is to meld the two essential elements of masculinity, which are power-over, and sexual violence; and the person so aggressed against and forced against their will is, by that male’s triumph, *made female,* which, to masculinity, means subject-to, overcome, and (specifically) sexually debased - which is the lesson essential to knowing what being female is.
Despite my utter contempt for Chu and for his theories, this way of defining what being feminine is, therefore what being female should and must be, while not new, resonated newly. I felt that my understanding of the male sex-and-dominance paradigm - the “why” of *why* do men, almost universally, sexually threaten and rape, why do men make and use porn, why do men harass women and feel free to demand our time and attention, why do man want harems, why do men fight, why do men make war against each other and claim their victor’s right to the conquered side’s women, girls, and (other) belongings - was made clearer. To win, to force, is in and of itself sexual to them, because it places them at the apex of masculinity - the hero-despot-(successful narcissist) that all men accept as better than they are, and all women, perforce, belong to.
I hope I’m expressing myself clearly. Feminism has been the lens through which I see and analyze the human world - in that sense, this idea isn’t at all new; Dworkin, Daly, Frye, and many other women have articulated it before.
Perhaps I found it so helpful because Chu’s premise - that force is what a man is, that forced is what a woman is, and that within trans ideology, these are the functional definitions of both - that allowed me to make a little more sense of the logic inherent in that ideology.
In any case, thank you for your shedding of light on the impenetrable toxic, woman-hating, -needing , and -fearing sludge that trans/queer theory is.
You are very right on Chu in that, ironically, his work provides evidence of male dominance and female subordination. There is a peculiar spin, though: Chu argues that maleness does not exist—only as defective femaleness, per his appropriation of Solanas. As he asserts, “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Chu removes the oppressor class—the male sex—from the very dynamic of oppression, thereby making femaleness itself an ontological state of being oppressed: a queer manipulation in metaphysics. Oppression becomes a state of being, not a social condition imposed on the basis of sex. Chu’s use of Solanas in ‘Females’ seems akin to the masochist writing the script to have women subject him to whipping. In this way, Chu’s framing actually has a more insidious function to naturalize oppression at the ontological and metaphysical level—that is, “to be,” being as such, is oppression itself.
Chu’s work seems like valuable evidence supporting the critique of transgenderism. My experience reading other male writers has been similar in seeing evidence supporting the radical feminist analysis of sexual objectification. In his ‘Women in Love’ (1920), for instance, D.H. Lawrence writes:
- - - - -
“He found in her an infinite relief. Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. It was wonderful, marvellous, it was a miracle. This was the ever-recurrent miracle of his life, at the knowledge of which he was lost in an ecstasy of relief and wonder. And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist. The terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation.” (p. 358)
- - - - -
What is Lawrence’s passage if not an earlier iteration of Chu’s core argument that femaleness constitutes a state of being a vessel, where man can displace “all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death” from himself onto her? Just over fifty years later, in ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ (1971), Norman Mailer writes:
- - - - -
“Where a man can become more male and a woman more female by coming together in the full rigors of the fuck—a sentimental notion to which the Prizewinner was bound to subscribe—homosexuals, it can be suggested, tend to pass their qualities over to one another, for there is no womb to mirror and return what is most forceful or attractive in each of them. So the male gets more womanly and the queer absorbs the masculinity of the other—at what peculiar price literature, not science, will be more likely to inform us . . . Yes, it is the irony of prison life that it is a world where everything is homosexual and yet nowhere is the condition of being a feminine male more despised. It is because one is used, one is a woman without the power to be female, one is fucked without a womb, that is to say without awe. For whatever else is in the act, lust, cruelty, the desire to dominate, or whole delights of desire, the result can be no more than a transaction—pleasurable, even all-encompassing, but a transaction—when no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived.” (pp. 171-173)
- - - - -
Where traditional woman hating, à la Lawrence and Mailer, emphasizes the womb, solely in the capacity for man impregnating woman, from “the full rigors of the fuck,” Chu does not even need to do so. Fucking remains about female subordination, but the force upon her becomes divorced from reproduction entirely, simply her existence as such. From Chu’s perspective, at least what his ‘Females’ tells us, femaleness is a state of being oppressed, not becoming oppressed: an inescapable bondage, this “universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness,” as Chu holds it to be (p. 12). On the superficial level, Chu differs from the assertions of women’s sexual object status seen in Lawrence and Mailer. But, at heart, Chu expresses the same metaphysical misogyny, except hiding behind a mask which makes it possible for him to assert that he, too, is female, thereby lessening the criticism that he would otherwise receive. Had Chu written his work in the absence of his identity claim, it would likely have never been published. “Female masking” camouflages the metaphysics of male sexual domination. To quote from Dworkin’s ‘Pornography: Men Possessing Women’ (1981), “The metaphysics of male sexual domination is that women are whores” (p. 203). Reading Lawrence and Mailer with Chu, old and new, we can think of his ‘Females’ as part of the literary tradition of woman hating.
MacKinnon quotes Linda Lovelace, in her ‘Ordeal’ (1980), writing about her experience being coerced into pornography: “You do it, you do it, and you do it; then you become it.” To which MacKinnon observes, “The fetish speaks feminism” (p. 539). I would not word it this way. The fetish does not speak feminism—as men like Lawrence, Mailer, and Chu do not speak feminism—but it does serve as evidence. Perhaps “The fetish speaks feminism” is why MacKinnon insists on Chu and his “transgender feminist theorization” as being feminist—even “brilliant.” Yet, the fetish and the fetishism are a piece, but they are not the analysis itself and cannot be alone. Men’s fetishism of women presents the data, what can be observed, underscoring the necessity of the radical feminist analysis of sexual objectification.
(I am working on some more writing on Lawrence and Mailer, among others, that further supports these observations based on textual evidence from their work.)
I apologize for the lateness of my reply here. We ended up busier at the laundromat this past week, as I assist my parents with the business. Certainly, it can get a bit hectic some days!
“…the phrase forced feminization is redundant: the female is always the product of force, and force is invariably feminizing.”
This caught my attention - all of your article did, but this quote did so to a particular degree.
To clarify its significance to me, I’ll rephrase it as: “the use of male force against another person, of either sex, feminizes them;” and, contextually (and reductively, as Chu’s work is), this becomes something along the lines of “to be male is to dominate; to dominate is to meld the two essential elements of masculinity, which are power-over, and sexual violence; and the person so aggressed against and forced against their will is, by that male’s triumph, *made female,* which, to masculinity, means subject-to, overcome, and (specifically) sexually debased - which is the lesson essential to knowing what being female is.
Despite my utter contempt for Chu and for his theories, this way of defining what being feminine is, therefore what being female should and must be, while not new, resonated newly. I felt that my understanding of the male sex-and-dominance paradigm - the “why” of *why* do men, almost universally, sexually threaten and rape, why do men make and use porn, why do men harass women and feel free to demand our time and attention, why do man want harems, why do men fight, why do men make war against each other and claim their victor’s right to the conquered side’s women, girls, and (other) belongings - was made clearer. To win, to force, is in and of itself sexual to them, because it places them at the apex of masculinity - the hero-despot-(successful narcissist) that all men accept as better than they are, and all women, perforce, belong to.
I hope I’m expressing myself clearly. Feminism has been the lens through which I see and analyze the human world - in that sense, this idea isn’t at all new; Dworkin, Daly, Frye, and many other women have articulated it before.
Perhaps I found it so helpful because Chu’s premise - that force is what a man is, that forced is what a woman is, and that within trans ideology, these are the functional definitions of both - that allowed me to make a little more sense of the logic inherent in that ideology.
In any case, thank you for your shedding of light on the impenetrable toxic, woman-hating, -needing , and -fearing sludge that trans/queer theory is.
Thank you so much for your comment, Michal!
You are very right on Chu in that, ironically, his work provides evidence of male dominance and female subordination. There is a peculiar spin, though: Chu argues that maleness does not exist—only as defective femaleness, per his appropriation of Solanas. As he asserts, “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Chu removes the oppressor class—the male sex—from the very dynamic of oppression, thereby making femaleness itself an ontological state of being oppressed: a queer manipulation in metaphysics. Oppression becomes a state of being, not a social condition imposed on the basis of sex. Chu’s use of Solanas in ‘Females’ seems akin to the masochist writing the script to have women subject him to whipping. In this way, Chu’s framing actually has a more insidious function to naturalize oppression at the ontological and metaphysical level—that is, “to be,” being as such, is oppression itself.
Chu’s work seems like valuable evidence supporting the critique of transgenderism. My experience reading other male writers has been similar in seeing evidence supporting the radical feminist analysis of sexual objectification. In his ‘Women in Love’ (1920), for instance, D.H. Lawrence writes:
- - - - -
“He found in her an infinite relief. Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. It was wonderful, marvellous, it was a miracle. This was the ever-recurrent miracle of his life, at the knowledge of which he was lost in an ecstasy of relief and wonder. And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist. The terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation.” (p. 358)
- - - - -
What is Lawrence’s passage if not an earlier iteration of Chu’s core argument that femaleness constitutes a state of being a vessel, where man can displace “all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death” from himself onto her? Just over fifty years later, in ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ (1971), Norman Mailer writes:
- - - - -
“Where a man can become more male and a woman more female by coming together in the full rigors of the fuck—a sentimental notion to which the Prizewinner was bound to subscribe—homosexuals, it can be suggested, tend to pass their qualities over to one another, for there is no womb to mirror and return what is most forceful or attractive in each of them. So the male gets more womanly and the queer absorbs the masculinity of the other—at what peculiar price literature, not science, will be more likely to inform us . . . Yes, it is the irony of prison life that it is a world where everything is homosexual and yet nowhere is the condition of being a feminine male more despised. It is because one is used, one is a woman without the power to be female, one is fucked without a womb, that is to say without awe. For whatever else is in the act, lust, cruelty, the desire to dominate, or whole delights of desire, the result can be no more than a transaction—pleasurable, even all-encompassing, but a transaction—when no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived.” (pp. 171-173)
- - - - -
Where traditional woman hating, à la Lawrence and Mailer, emphasizes the womb, solely in the capacity for man impregnating woman, from “the full rigors of the fuck,” Chu does not even need to do so. Fucking remains about female subordination, but the force upon her becomes divorced from reproduction entirely, simply her existence as such. From Chu’s perspective, at least what his ‘Females’ tells us, femaleness is a state of being oppressed, not becoming oppressed: an inescapable bondage, this “universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness,” as Chu holds it to be (p. 12). On the superficial level, Chu differs from the assertions of women’s sexual object status seen in Lawrence and Mailer. But, at heart, Chu expresses the same metaphysical misogyny, except hiding behind a mask which makes it possible for him to assert that he, too, is female, thereby lessening the criticism that he would otherwise receive. Had Chu written his work in the absence of his identity claim, it would likely have never been published. “Female masking” camouflages the metaphysics of male sexual domination. To quote from Dworkin’s ‘Pornography: Men Possessing Women’ (1981), “The metaphysics of male sexual domination is that women are whores” (p. 203). Reading Lawrence and Mailer with Chu, old and new, we can think of his ‘Females’ as part of the literary tradition of woman hating.
MacKinnon quotes Linda Lovelace, in her ‘Ordeal’ (1980), writing about her experience being coerced into pornography: “You do it, you do it, and you do it; then you become it.” To which MacKinnon observes, “The fetish speaks feminism” (p. 539). I would not word it this way. The fetish does not speak feminism—as men like Lawrence, Mailer, and Chu do not speak feminism—but it does serve as evidence. Perhaps “The fetish speaks feminism” is why MacKinnon insists on Chu and his “transgender feminist theorization” as being feminist—even “brilliant.” Yet, the fetish and the fetishism are a piece, but they are not the analysis itself and cannot be alone. Men’s fetishism of women presents the data, what can be observed, underscoring the necessity of the radical feminist analysis of sexual objectification.
(I am working on some more writing on Lawrence and Mailer, among others, that further supports these observations based on textual evidence from their work.)
I apologize for the lateness of my reply here. We ended up busier at the laundromat this past week, as I assist my parents with the business. Certainly, it can get a bit hectic some days!