Don't let sissy-porn addicts redefine what it means to be a woman
Redefining women from a sex class to a mixed-sex class based on male sexual projections reifies sex-role stereotypes and requires actual women and girls to dissociate body and mind. After all, we’re not allowed to say we’re women because we’re female anymore. We’re supposed to look inside ourselves and find something else that makes us women—something that has nothing to do with female embodiment—that a man can experience, too, like getting turned on by the idea of your own sexual defilement. If some men want to wear ‘women’ as masks, then women must be masks, nothing more.
This dissociation of mind and body is a disaster for women’s political organizing and it does a number on the mental health of individual women and girls, too. But sowing dissociation is a great recruitment tool for the new global empire of disembodiment.
Since the men boldly redefining 'woman' are a bunch of self-confessed sissy-porn addicts, no woman or girl will relate to the definitions they put forward.
Are you an "expectant asshole" with "blank, blank eyes"?
Didn't think so. Not much of a woman, are you?
How about: “Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”?
Still no?
"There is something about being treated like shit by men that feels like affirmation itself, like a cry of delight from the deepest cavern of my breast... To be the victim of honest, undisguised sexism possesses an exhilarating vitality."
Do you feel an exhilarating vitality at being treated like shit by men or not so much?
Meanwhile, you’re constantly prompted to accept or reject your debasement. You’re expected to package yourself as “cisgender,” which means agreeing—publicly, repeatedly—that you’re comfortable with what every girl and woman in fact chafes against as she grows up and tries to find a place for herself in the world. Every time you’re asked to give your pronouns is an opportunity to reconsider your answer.
The same gender ideology that redefines women and girls in such dehumanizing terms—as mindless bimbos, fuckable objects, costumes men can take on and off at will—also says: If you don’t feel comfortable with all of that, maybe you’re not a woman or a girl at all.
Maybe you’re a boy.
Maybe you’re nonbinary or agender or genderfluid or asexual…
Whenever men redefine women to serve their own purposes, they push women and girls to debase ourselves by continued association with 'womanhood' or identify out altogether. If men like Andrea Long Chu and Grace Lavery and Julia Serano and Alok Vaid-Menon and Jeffrey Marsh are the new authorities on what women are, wouldn’t you want out, too?
I was gob-smacked to discover a new word in this article -- reify -- that in all my 71 years I had never heard or used, and it is a fabulous word! I feel like such an idiot. How could I have missed it?
I'm not sure what "sissy-porn" is, so I don't fully understand the article. The word "sissy" is usually used for effeminate men. One thing I HAVE noticed is that the transgender phenomenon has created a new category of porn actor: the trans woman who decides to keep her male genitals and to put them on display along with her artificial breasts. Being gay, I usually look at porn that has all men in it (in which there is not a huge amount of sexism, thank God). But I am increasingly seeing images of the type of trans woman that I just described -- half woman and half man, or what used to be called a "femmy boy" back in the early days of transgenderism. This has actually become another reason for me to resent trans women -- they are invading gay porn, which heretofore was untouched by the trans phenomenon. Officially, these porn actors are males because they have male genitals, but their glamorous faces and fulsome breasts make them some kind of strange hybrid that I am unable to find attractive.
One thing I find curious is this: Supposedly trans women hate to be reminded of the fact that they are biological males. But if you are a porn actor who is putting both your breasts AND your male genitals on display, wouldn't that be an obvious reminder of your biological maleness? I suppose that there are some trans women who don't hate their male genitals, as most of them seem to.
Modern medicine is gradually turning the world into a freak show. It's true that plastic surgery can repair deformities, and that's great. But then we got the phenomenon of strange-looking people who had excessive or poor-quality plastic surgery. We also got such things as Dolly Parton's breasts (now imitated by Wendy Williams). Then there was that craze in which people of color were having their buttocks enlarged. And now medical science is giving us tall women with masculine faces (trans women) and small men with boyish faces (trans men). Some of the trans women are going in for facial feminization surgery, but there is always a residual maleness to their faces.
And now we have these hermaphrodites with both female and male body parts.
I find myself questioning everything I see. If I see a tall woman with a handsome face, I immediately wonder if she is a trans woman. Even worse, I will sometimes find myself attracted to a small, cute man (I've been attracted to small men all my life), only to realize that I may be looking at a trans man. I have nightmares about going to bed with a cute young man and finding a vagina in his pants. (No, Chase Strangio is not cute to me.)
Brilliantly expressed. Reading about girlhood and womanhood being redefined in ways that make no sense to girls and women, I had a vague sense that this reminded me of something. Then I remembered. Reading classic male authors (Dickens, Melville, Shakespeare and others) in my late teens I'd be swept up in the wonderful wordsmithing and storytelling. Until I hit an unpleasant wall--I was reading along completely immersed, looking at life through the eyes of a male character who would describe a female character in two dimensional terms that I, an actual female, could not relate to. It was disorienting and disturbing, because I was in a relationship of trust with the writer. "If THAT is a woman, then who am I?" I'd wonder. Even--maybe especially--when the woman was deified as a goddess it was disturbing and knocked me right out of the story. As a human being with human problems and aspirations, I related to Pip. As a woman, I did not relate to Estella. I did not have this experience when reading female authors. I am glad I had access to those great writers--but I took a break from male writers for a few years. No, of course it's not all men who do this to women in response to a comment. But it seems to me that the sissy porn definition of women is just a new and ugly twist on a very old theme. At least I still think Dickens is a great writer.