I considered posting a lot of my nsfw content, but after talking about it with people familiar with staff I decided against it. All my works are decidedly not to SV's preferences and I have not been told anything that works make me reconsider not posting 100k+ words of (trans) men kissing and sometimes fucking onto this particular website. Especially since the general consensus at the time was "post and find out" combined with "SV throws epic shit fits about dudes kissing but not chicks kissing because muh demographics." Without stopping to think about why the demographic spread might be that way.
So I haven't had any comments to drop on the essay in general, but since I'm a member of Staff and a pretty high-ranking one at that, first and foremost I'd like to thank you for your comments; I think trans women often get the lion's share of "space" on internet communities where trans people are prominent, and especially on SV where we are blessed to have so many trans women, but so few trans men that it was a surprise to see you post at all. Secondly, though, I should say that SV's preferences have changed over time, and while it's true that the forum in general has had something of a bias towards favouring lesbians (though the most normal quest protagonist is a cishet dude, lmfao), there's not really a culture of homophobia like that. And certainly, it is not something I can imagine the Staff would be unwelcoming of.
There are actually a number of porn and porn adjacent communities here on SV, I myself post one of the sexier stories on the site, with more wild fantasies than you can shake a washing machine at! There are definitely people willing and able to discuss these things, or else I would never get comments. (Though for my part, updates have slowed more as the world has devolved, I admit.) There are puritans on here, as there are everywhere, and there does seem to be a sort of "culture of pretending sex doesn't exist" to some extent outside those threads, but that is mostly because people are afraid to try it rather than because people are incapable of engaging if you do.
There's an expectation you will get shouted down that doesn't seem to manifest in reality, which I think comes from the... sociality of SV as a space? I saw someone say SV is like Thanksgiving dinner or the Family Reunion, with histories going back years, and I think that has something to do with it. There simply aren't many environments IRL to safely discuss kink with people you have other kinds of conversations with unless you are already in a specifically kink-adjacent space, and it's maybe weird to see people recontextualized that way for some members? Hard to say, I am relatively new at the table.
Either way, don't count out sex on SV, is what I'm saying! We need more sexy stories and discussions, not less.
It's funny but the thing I'm most worried about when discussing this on SV is actually the opposite. The average user, as far as I can tell, is a cis guy in his twenties or thirties and (not to be dismissive) it's primarily an issue to do with how and why that exact demographic consumes pornography. The labels of sex-negative and sex-positive feminism have equipped a whole generation of men with the ability to reflexively dismiss critique of porn and the culture of porn. It's not per se actively malicious, rather a misapprehension of what sex positivity and negativity are meant to mean fueled by the bias of benefiting from porn to a much larger degree.
Historically SV has been kinda bad at discussing things in this space. It's not been, for example, very good at discussing the relative overrepresentation of lesbians in porn consumed by heterosexual men and what that actually says in a feminist context. Conversely, SV is also pretty bad at discussing sex-positive representation in non-porn media. It's like there's a distinction being drawn between porn where you have to be super sexy and not-porn where you have to be not sexy at all and I think that's a problem with the way that society and SV specifically frame it.
So I'm leery of posting about this on SV for those reasons. I just don't trust the random average user enough to respond seriously.
So I haven't had any comments to drop on the essay in general, but since I'm a member of Staff and a pretty high-ranking one at that, first and foremost I'd like to thank you for your comments; I think trans women often get the lion's share of "space" on internet communities where trans people are prominent, and especially on SV where we are blessed to have so many trans women, but so few trans men that it was a surprise to see you post at all. Secondly, though, I should say that SV's preferences have changed over time, and while it's true that the forum in general has had something of a bias towards favouring lesbians (though the most normal quest protagonist is a cishet dude, lmfao), there's not really a culture of homophobia like that. And certainly, it is not something I can imagine the Staff would be unwelcoming of.
I like this site overall. I disagree with the general consensus on certain things but overall it's a pleasant experience to visit. But there's a very odd problem with its content. Now, before you ask why this isn't in the fanfiction subforum, it's because I feel that the issue may also be...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
I'm not sure if I can look at this thread, current SV, and agree with your post tbh. Especially when SV itself had a big influence in fucking up my POV of my gender and my sexuality back when I thought I was a woman. I only returned to the website in the past three months after years away. And I did post some of my writing, which was largely ignored outside of a handful of people. The way SV puts mostly underage anime lesbians on a pedestal doesn't even result in just mlm content being sidelined, but has met with absolute shit-lost tier anger at MLM and at young anime lesbians growing up to be butch. Queer people have fled the website due to these things. Some of the very angry people have gone on to become staff.
I like this site overall. I disagree with the general consensus on certain things but overall it's a pleasant experience to visit. But there's a very odd problem with its content. Now, before you ask why this isn't in the fanfiction subforum, it's because I feel that the issue may also be...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
I'm not sure if I can look at this thread, current SV, and agree with your post tbh. Especially when SV itself had a big influence in fucking up my POV of my gender and my sexuality back when I thought I was a woman. I only returned to the website in the past three months after years away. And I did post some of my writing, which was largely ignored outside of a handful of people. The way SV puts mostly underage anime lesbians on a pedestal doesn't even result in just mlm content being sidelined, but has met with absolute shit-lost tier anger at MLM and at young anime lesbians growing up to be butch. Queer people have fled the website due to these things. Some of the very angry people have gone on to become staff.
For sure, I definitely don't think Sufficient Velocity is in an ideal position, and I wish there would be more MLM content, I think it's absolutely an issue. But I should note that while the SV Has an Odd Problem thread was an extremely important thread and definitely highlighted a real problem that still persists to this day, it's also from four years ago. I was a man when that thread was made. While it is again true that Sufficient Velocity does put lesbians on a pedestal to a degree, the most normal quest protagonist remains the largely generic cishet man. Many things have changed since that thread was posted, not limited of course, to the genders of many of the people involved in it. I'm definitely not telling you what you say is invalid; as I said, I still do believe there is a lamentable lack of M/M content on the site, and while I can humbly brag that I am personally writing something which includes an M/M relationship, that is hardly representative of the site.
Not to distract from the thread as a whole, and Garg's interesting essay, of course, but I personally also know many queer people who have joined the site because of other factors. It is not experiencing a queer exodus. Far from it. But of course, it is true that the easily fetishizable anime lesbians who never prove a threat to compulsory heterosexuality unfortunately find more favour on SV than even the relatively tame - by patriarchal standards - butch/femme lesbian relationship. It is lamentable. A frustrating state of affairs.
EDIT: With all that said, of course it should also be said that I think my position gives me a perspective that to some degree might be unhelpful here. After all, I don't really experience the forum as you do, and have a very, well, top-down perspective of the whole thing. So you should definitely feel free to dismiss this if you don't feel like it represents the forum you currently see. My perspective is limited, in a sense, by its wideness. I am perfectly willing to accept that I am simply out of touch with the forum you engage with.
For sure, I definitely don't think Sufficient Velocity is in an ideal position, and I wish there would be more MLM content, I think it's absolutely an issue. But I should note that while the SV Has an Odd Problem thread was an extremely important thread and definitely highlighted a real problem that still persists to this day, it's also from four years ago. I was a man when that thread was made. While it is again true that Sufficient Velocity does put lesbians on a pedestal to a degree, the most normal quest protagonist remains the largely generic cishet man. Many things have changed since that thread was posted, not limited of course, to the genders of many of the people involved in it. I'm definitely not telling you what you say is invalid; as I said, I still do believe there is a lamentable lack of M/M content on the site, and while I can humbly brag that I am personally writing something which includes an M/M relationship, that is hardly representative of the site.
Not to distract from the thread as a whole, and Garg's interesting essay, of course, but I personally also know many queer people who have joined the site because of other factors. It is not experiencing a queer exodus. Far from it. But of course, it is true that the easily fetishizable anime lesbians who never prove a threat to compulsory heterosexuality unfortunately find more favour on SV than even the relatively tame - by patriarchal standards - butch/femme lesbian relationship. It is lamentable. A frustrating state of affairs.
EDIT: With all that said, of course it should also be said that I think my position gives me a perspective that to some degree might be unhelpful here. After all, I don't really experience the forum as you do, and have a very, well, top-down perspective of the whole thing. So you should definitely feel free to dismiss this if you don't feel like it represents the forum you currently see. My perspective is limited, in a sense, by its wideness. I am perfectly willing to accept that I am simply out of touch with the forum you engage with.
To bring this back in line with the essay as you said, but still tie into my previous post and some of your own here, I have also spent the past four years trying to get people into SV after explaining what quests are. I've gotten people interested in interactive fiction. I've seen people run quests on Twitter and AO3. Largely queer cis(ish) women and trans men with a handful of trans women I've met via AO3. I haven't been able to get a single person out of dozens to stay or make an account. This is because they all found SV to be very uncomfortable or hostile, even with prior warning to the issues it has.
If I were a visiting trans guy who was told about a cool website full of people writing fiction together, and saw these essays, I don't think that I would stay regardless of the singular quest where an alien uses they them pronouns. Me, I've been using SB since I was 14 and SV since it was launched. I'm accustomed to the culture here and I don't expect it to change anymore. SV is almost impossible to get into as a queer person or just as a woman unless you are used to these spaces from a young age.
Has it gotten better? A bit, yeah. I'm not sure essays like this would have been remotely postable in 2018! There's a semi active spiritual successor to a mlm quest that's dear to my heart going on, I've spotted a good amount of queer quests besides, and the pronouns are a cool touch. I'm reading a really creative quest where a communist elf lady has talked about gender within a nation almost entirely made of humans. It's not exactly something players seemed to notice, but it's nice. There's also quests I know about because I know the writers, via SV queer stuff originating way back then.
But when I see essays like this, and in particular this one trans woman Taylor fic which had her whole thing be transition powers followed up by trans woman and trans person being synonyms with ZERO mention of anyone else existing, the thing where you were surprised to see me at all is not surprising to me. The fact that I posted my comments at all is because I became fed up with a running theme that I think this and many other spaces actively has right now. As might have been more obvious in my initial post here.
Thankfully, I haven't been met with any hostility like I often do in reddit so that's great. I genuinely do appreciate the thanks for my posts in this thread and I've pretty much finished putting my thoughts into Proper Diplomacy.
If I were a visiting trans guy who was told about a cool website full of people writing fiction together, and saw these essays, I don't think that I would stay regardless of the singular quest where an alien uses they them pronouns. Me, I've been using SB since I was 14 and SV since it was launched. I'm accustomed to the culture here and I don't expect it to change anymore. SV is almost impossible to get into as a queer person or just as a woman unless you are used to these spaces from a young age.
It stings to be called out this way, as does the suggestion that this is not a place for women and queer people (as a bi trans woman I'd like to imagine that I can be called that) though I can't in good conscience say it's undeserved. However, I would want to explain my perspective a bit, because it may help to clarify why I write the way I write here. And just to be crystal clear, none of the frustrations I vent below are supposed to be some kind of an excuse for the exclusions you rightly point out in my writing. But I do have my own reasons for focusing so firmly on trans women, and those reasons are not due to the lack of awareness of there being trans men in the world, or even lack of interest in them.
The essays I publish on SV are basically composed of notes scribbled on the margins of my academic work. I'm a queer and trans studies scholar by focus, who mostly deals with issues surrounding BDSM and punk cultures. And here's the thing: my specialties, and especially queer theory, have been very heavily influenced by masc-of-centre people. Aside from gay cis men, it was butch lesbians (like Judith Butler) and transgender guys (like Jack Halberstam or Paul B. Preciado) who made it, and it shows. It's why there is so much (mostly unspoken) resentment towards the classics of queer theory among younger, trans women scholars who feel terrifically underrepresented in scholarship.
I feel that way too, at times. Last year, I've published an article in a major feminist journal on trans womanhood in punk; aside from a few pieces on Laura Jane Grace it was the first bit of scholarship specifically on trans women in punk culture since Vivian Namaste's work in the very early 2000s. And though things are changing now, when I was writing it, I could easily find extensive discussion of butch lesbians and trans men in punk (especially around Tribe 8, dykecore, queercore, and to a degree riot grrrl) but the few mentions of possible transwomanhood in early punk cultures i've run into were penned from a terf position.
Similarly, in BDSM studies, there is - as I have already mentioned - a wealth of writing about trans masculinity. In fact, feminist defences of sadomasochism (the ones penned against rad-fem attacks on it I've mentioned here and there) tend to foreground those specific forms of desire and embodiment. There are numerous papers and book chapters on leatherdykes and leatherbois, on Gayle Rubin's or Pat Califia's love affairs with gay fisting clubs of the 1980s San Francisco, on the making of the transmasculine in queer BDSM scenes (Robin Bauer's work) comes to mind. Meanwhile, there is barely anything - and nothing substantial - specifically on trans women in BDSM.
Those aren't just omissions of theory, those are also experiences of my academic life more broadly. Now, to be entirely fair, Poland as a country has a famously significant population of trans men compared to trans women (any kind of solid statistical data is hard to get, but as late back as 2015, estimates suggested that trans men outnumbered trans women in this country something like 6 to 1 or 9 to 1). What this means in practice that for some of my colleagues I am the first trans women they have met, having been previously acquainted with a number of trans men. When I taught my course on trans studies, again I've had a number of openly masc-of-centre people among my students, and not a single openly trans femme one. It can get somewhat alienating at times.
SV-adjacent communities have, therefore, been the first place for me to actually come into contact with a significant population of other trans women, and it is primarily with them in mind that I write what I post here. This entire conversation kind of showcases the perils of such presumptions about your audience, but to a degree, it is also enabling. I am not hugely fond of SV culture either, but it is also the first place I've been able to post this kind of work to, and I say it as someone with a platform already. I am a published author, academically and in cultural press, and every time I try to pitch something about, say, trans girls and BDSM or trans girls and punk to the latter, I get the same stock rejection: that it is too niche, that it doesn't speak to broad enough audience, that it won't rake in the necessary clicks. And then I'm told to review another slew of books by cis gays.
But this, of course, needs to be set against the fact that trans masculinity is barely present in most public discourses on transness, and especially in popular culture's views on it. So it is a bind, basically, and not happy with any way it is resolved.
Something here sits a little uneasy with me, in the pit of my stomach, and I think in a bit of dark irony it goes back to the catgirl essay a little.
I do think you have a really important and necessary point to make here, Hyacinth, and I appreciate speaking up in a context that is clearly very painful to you. This touches on ideas that are painful all around, a bit, I think. You are right that it seems like SV doesn't attract a lot of women and queer people - the last stats I have show a pretty large percentage of cis men, and it has its roots in forums that I think are even more overwhemingly dominated by a particular userbase that way. Probably not dissimilar to reddit.
There is, of course, a large and vocal minority of queer women on sv after that, but I think for various reasons not in a way that is satisfying to you or would speak to the culture you are thinking of, when you say those words. I think gargs essay on terminally online trans women was kind of trying to examine that issue from another end. It's ultimately a pretty dark sort of question, at least to me, because it raises a lot of other ones? If women aren't comfortable, generally, in spaces like this site, why am I here? Is the proper explanation that I am used to these sort of spaces, and have been since a young age - a kind of "male socialization" that lingers over me? Or is it that I am missing something essential about womanhood that, if I had it, would be obvious to me? Easier to ask than answer, I think. There is some untouchable gulf of experience here that I don't know how to cross.
For me, Lowkey hostility is just something I'm used to from basically any space, online or physical, that I've ever been in. I don't think it's a particularly "male" trait that I'm willing to settle for an uncomfortable space so long as it lets me pursue some of my interests. At this point that just feels like a learned survival skill
Okay, I feel deeply ashamed to admit I do not understand what I read here. Individually I think I understood most of the words mean but my reading comprehension is I think failing me.
My main takeaways were I'm afraid only such:
A vocal group of feminists defines Womanhood through objectification.
Pornography sometimes involves people being strapped to chairs.
Gay sadomasichists didn't bring about the Third Reich.
Forced Feminisation is a very powerful phenomenon who's interpretation is disive.
Love helps maintain social bonds.
Gender as a social construct is considered a radical as opposed to a self evident reality evidenced by extreme differences in performing gender when looked at through a species-wise lens.
Sorry, I have no training in feminist literature and am typically very disinterested in sex. Or at least not sex as traditionally defined as intercourse. Or maybe my existing background in reading is clouding my vision more than my lack of reading.
This may be because I do not care deeply about my own gender or sex besides being annoyed that I occasionally have to deal with an unwanted libido, unwanted fantasies and extra organs that might just grow cancerous one day.
For while I thought that attitude meant I was some sort of Aro/Ace but I'm pretty darn sure these days I'm just some weirdo with submission fantasies who's terrified of the complications of relationships because I don't grasp most emotions especially well and don't want anyone else to feel pressured to deal with that.
All that said I do have couple of trans-identifying associates and I do desire to be of assistance to them as much as to anyone else so I do read these things in the hope of maybe learning something useful and applicable.
I don't identify as trans or as a woman, but not as my society's ideal version of a man** either, and not with a desire to reach that state either.
Heck some part of me thinks we'd get at least a years worth of world peace if all gendered concepts were erased from all human minds and artifacts.
If It were not for humans being willing to harm each other over such concepts I could just not care, sadly that is one thing that does seem clear to me. Some people find such things to be motives used to cause harm.
I'm certain if I toured the world declaring myself a sissy* I'm certain I'd be murdered before such a tour could end where it started.
After reading this I think I'll spread it around I'm probably in the minority by feeling extremely alienated and confused after reading this. I certainly have no idea where I would fit into this framework.
Above all I hope I'm not coming across as dismissive, I really do want to learn more about experiences within my species very different from my own.
Hopefully when I reread this again after some more sleep more of it will click.
*That sounds like it comes closest to my mental image of myse in common parlance, though still very far from it. For example I don't think I'd be alarmed if my penis got replaced with a mechanical pleasure button and a tube with a cap.
IDK I think my disinterest in having breasts comes from them looking like they'd be annoying to have, they seem like they'd make it harder to fit into cramped spaces and give people back pain.
If everyone could start from a blank base I'm not sure why they would appeal to anyone.
Hell, I'd probably be cool with redesigning most of my body from the ground up if I could, but I don't think there would much I'd see as a man or a woman in a typical phenotype after the fact.
**I get the impression that the western male ideal is something akin to males wishing to become something akin to lions. That is stupid very hairy, musclebound creatures who need fight each other often to reach agreements and for whom plausibly friendly alliance is the best they should expect from one another. Really none of which I desire .
It also seems an unrealistic expectation to ask of nearly anyone at least as a constant.
The trouble with extracting "truth" from the influence of cultural ideas on human psyches is that well, everyone is influenced by said ideas differently.
If you try to decipher the "true nature" of concepts such as objectification or being made feminine from how they play out in one person's psyche, then you might wind up with totally different "truths" than if you had analyzed a different person. And what may ring to one person as "uncomfortable truths" of cultural concepts may ring to another as toxic bullshit.
I do think this essay is onto something worth analyzing, though, for all that it is very much not universally applicable. "Femininity equals objectification" is a common cultural concept, and by extension, so is "objectification equals femininity". People might internalize this stuff whether they like it or not - you cannot consent to existing in and being influenced by a culture, after all. I think this essay is tackling some very important concepts for some people - particularly certain demographics of trans feminines, me included.
Even if it is not logical, or reasonable, or objectively true, I can absolutely relate to the idea of one's mind processing submission, degradation, or objectification as somehow intrinsically feminine, and therefore latching onto such things as a source of gender euphoria.
The ideas put forth in this essay are, perhaps, stemming from toxic bullshit - but it is toxic bullshit that I have internalized, for better or for worse. And if I want to sincerely love myself, I need to accept and reclaim even the parts of myself that have been irrevocably influenced - perhaps even swayed - by misogynistic culture.
TL;DR: This essay, to me, is about internalized (trans)misogyny and how that can influence the psyche, sexuality, and culture of trans feminines, and I have found it quite relatable.
It is the last part that is pivotal. Fantasies of submission and violation are nothing new— plenty of women have them. But most girls I know who share this particular taste for violent objectification verging on self-annihilation, and for the twinned undoing of a personhood that makes a female have something in common: they tend to be trans.
Yeah, I think this is pretty well explained by this:
"that kidnapped bride triumphant shit is everywhere in straight stories, it gets told over and over and over again and eroticized in the weirdest ways.
...
I was talking an ex-cult friend of mine about romance novel storylines when they brought up how marriage is the only way straight women can dodge the horrifying shame of experiencing eroticism, the inappropriate feeling of which is supposed to be able to make god and your parents stop loving you. My friend explained that this is why you see so many kidnapped brides and arranged marriages in straight stories. The protagonist needs a culturally dictated non-consensual out so that she can feel erotic without life-threatening levels of shame. She can dissociate and compartmentalize different varieties of shame into any number of fragments and choose to inhabit the best and least sinful, which redeems and saves her. My friend said it made perfect sense to them according to the way they were raised. I threw in that it reminded me of my abuse days, of the way you could console yourself for feeling so tough and strong for putting up with appalling treatment, and they agreed. Plus, I added, it proves your love and value at the same time. Putting up with rough treatment at first, but being so good and sweet that you achieve better treatment in the future, it reminds me of that "keep sweet" attitude all those bigamist cult survivors kept mentioning." - gatheringbones.tumblr.com.
"[forcefem] is the only way [trans] women can dodge the horrifying shame of experiencing [gender], the inappropriate feeling of which is supposed to be able to make god and your parents stop loving you." - in-servo-necessitas.tumblr.com.
I don't think it's even necessary a feminine thing, I (a cis male) fantasized about being raped by my female teachers in middle and high school for pretty much exactly this sort of reason (it was the way of expressing attraction to them that was least threatening to my self-concept). If you want something, but you've internalized that it's bad to want that thing, imagining having it forced on you can be a very appealing fantasy; if it's forced on you then you get to experience it while also maintaining your self-concept as the sort of person who doesn't want it, or maybe sometimes it's just that if it's forced on you that saves you the hard work and pain of subduing the part of yourself that refuses to permit you the thing. Fantasizing about having the thing inflicted on you in a way that's painful and humiliating fits with this logic, the worse it is the better your defense against the charge of secretly wanting it. Also, if mainstream society says "this is erotic, but you shouldn't want it because it's also frightening, disgusting, degrading, and sinful, and if you openly want it we will punish you for that and you will deserve it," a pretty obvious way to subvert that control is to basically answer "the price of having this thing is to be repulsive, degraded, sinful, and deserving of the punishment which we will gladly inflict; do you really want to be that?" with Chad "Yes" meme.
In those arrangements, my feelings are not a factor, so it doesn't matter that I am afraid, or emotionally shut in, or afraid of men. It doesn't even matter that I am closeted, because in my fantasies, I'm little more than an object, and so indisputably a female.
Honestly I do want to preface my thoughts with, hey, cis gay. And that I recognize that this essay is very much at a tangent to my own life, originating from a place that's only partially analogous to my experiences and moving towards needs and desires for actualization that in a main part I don't share. But I did want to say that at this point in particular, and later parts of the essay where it echoes this, I felt an intense like- moment of Understanding. Of being Seen in the sort of way that feels a little like someone's taken a scalpel to your chest and that I appreciate it and feel a sort of flinch in equal measure.
I'm not trans, I'm not even especially femme, and in many ways, while I can absolutely appreciate it in others, I don't have any inner connection with or aspirations towards that aesthetic, that identity, that mode for myself. But I can really identify with, I think, with the conflicting desires to lose agency in shaping yourself, to be more effectively made into something you don't know if you can completely become; to rationalize that desire into something softer and empathetic, and to reject that and leave it sharp and kind of vicious and keen.
I don't mean to presume, and I don't mean to like- infringe I suppose would be the word. And I am sort of embarrassed that I'm half restating, half regurgitating things you said in your essay like I'm trying to scrape through a college seminar course. But I thought it might be worthwhile to state what I felt was the keenest point of intersection, for me personally.
Finally, I would also tentatively make a point that some of the questions of relationship between feminisation and the patriarchy that I touch upon have relevance in more specifically gay masculine context. Gay BDSM cultures have a long history with various kinds of femmophobia, and in fact old leather as a subculture arose in no small part as a way of distancing oneself from the stereotypical queens. It's what Bersani gets at. I think you could take this as a starting point for thinking about specifically trans masculine forced feminisation kink, and then use it to blow a gap in the entire radical feminist analysis of the apparatus of feminisation. Incidentally, it is not that far from what Preciado does in parts of Testo Junkie. It is also not something I am equipped to explore. To return to my previous point, the history of the role of feminisation in the context of gay life requires a different approach and attitude from the one I am working with.
It is kinda interesting because something I did feel I was struggling with as I read the essay was like- trying, on reflex, to find a way to analogize it to my life, my frame of reference, my own desires and preferences and obviously it wasn't a clean or even good fit. But I do appreciate you bringing this angle up and explicating and expounding on it, if only a little. I think it does hhhhhelp, in a way, to ground the rest of the piece for me. Especially the bits that touch on the exaggeration of the macho, the reaching for this almost oversexed, ultra-masculine caricature that still exists too close to the feminine and submissive, if only by direct inversion, to be stable or tolerable for a heteronormative society. And how much a masc identity is often reflexively contextualized and contrasted with a femme identity. Dependent upon it in some ways.
I guess, more than anything, I do want to say I really do appreciate your efforts to dissect and discuss feelings and modes of being that often seem like they might genuinely be too snarled and messy and self-contradictory to effectively explore. Even if, honestly, a good chunk of it flies over my head I find it encouraging and like- challenging. And I genuinely want to provide a thoughtful response, even if I'm not really sure I can always muster one.
Okay, I feel deeply ashamed to admit I do not understand what I read here. Individually I think I understood most of the words mean but my reading comprehension is I think failing me.
My main takeaways were I'm afraid only such:
A vocal group of feminists defines Womanhood through objectification.
Pornography sometimes involves people being strapped to chairs.
Gay sadomasichists didn't bring about the Third Reich.
Forced Feminisation is a very powerful phenomenon who's interpretation is disive.
Love helps maintain social bonds.
Gender as a social construct is considered a radical as opposed to a self evident reality evidenced by extreme differences in performing gender when looked at through a species-wise lens.
Sorry, I have no training in feminist literature and am typically very disinterested in sex. Or at least not sex as traditionally defined as intercourse. Or maybe my existing background in reading is clouding my vision more than my lack of reading.
As someone with a similar read on this, I want to elaborate:
The post feels like a set of well defined muscles with no tendons, ligaments, or bones. It just flops around uselessly.
Even if you accept everything in the post as 100% true, I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be.
I thought for a second when the post explains how the other interpretation makes a specific TERF theory unlikable, that that would be the point, but then that was followed by, 'that TERF theory says the Nazis were gay', which ruined that line of discussion for me because there's no point debating theory with a person delusional enough to think the Nazis were gay.
So really it leaves me with a big, 'Okay, and...?'
I'm not sure if that's intended or if I'm missing something.
Thank you dearly I thought I was the only one missing the point.
Like yes being loving and empathetic ought to trump TERFism or other attitudes based on exclusionary attitudes and or bigotry but I'm not sure how that relates to the other points on display.
I thought the whole essay was circling forced feminization but I couldn't make out what the takeaway was supposed to be.
Maybe those who engage with such don't fit within most feminist theories because many are overly narrow. Is that meant to be the takeaway?
Yet if that is so I see little advocacy here to replace such theories with something more useful and practical in the real world.
There are actually a number of porn and porn adjacent communities here on SV, I myself post one of the sexier stories on the site, with more wild fantasies than you can shake a washing machine at!
Okay I admit confusion on how this can work with rule six? ''We do not allow content which is pornographic'' seems extremely clear cut to me? Maybe there was some ruling somewhere that clarifies this that I have missed?
Okay I admit confusion on how this can work with rule six? ''We do not allow content which is pornographic'' seems extremely clear cut to me? Maybe there was some ruling somewhere that clarifies this that I have missed?
Written sex scenes are distinct from posting a porn video or something similar that would be visually obscene. And also the rule's interpretation has shifted a bit over time, since the closure of the NSFW sub forum.
So the distinction is one of pornography vs erotica, essentially mental images vs visual ones? I did not bring up sex scenes, as in only a portion of a story being sexual in nature, given the discussion seemed to be on stories made for the basis of being well ''porn' was the phrase used.
I appreciate the clarification, I think I'll bring it to the Town Hall, in that if the rules are enforced in a non obvious way it would help if that was evident from the page itself.
I want to issue a correction. In the first version of this essay, I have mistakenly attributed the view that gay sadomasochists were responsible for the rise of fascism to Julie Bindel. I want to apologize for this mistake, as this claim was made by another trans-exclusionary revolutionary feminist, namely Sheila Jeffreys. I hope neither of the two feel offended by this mistake, and if so I sincerely apologize.
It's a bit dispiriting, how closely related subcultures can become so starkly disjoint so rapidly. Diverging interests, focus on one shading into exclusion of the other, and trauma reactions in varying directions seem to tear away the possibility of a lot of interesting discussion.
I'm sometimes struck by bittersweet nostalgia when reading some of Gargulec's stuff; it takes me back to conversations I had long ago on rad-fem heavy boards, an environment I've not frequented so much in recent years. I wonder if that call back is a reflection of the state of the world having changed less than Id thought beyond my little bubble, or the politics prevalent in academia in Gargulec's region, or the result of some self flagellation in the chosen framework for these works.
I'll reference the disclaimer about projection here, but if we're speaking of things I've done out of gender validation and a bit of masochism (and a fascination with theorizing away our own agency as well), diving into literalist readings of radical feminism is certainly among them.
In some ways this essay seems like it takes a few interesting wide turns through the literature before coming full circle back to more or less where it started with a different theoretical grounding.
We divert from a "flat psychologizing" approach to avoid a slippery slope towards a statement like "you fantasize about being a woman because you can't imagine being a successful man". But is that really so different from the distillation of rad-fem definitions being presented? "Man fucks woman; subject verb object"; implies a hetero woman's sexuality is inherently false consciousness, a fantasy created through her taking on the perspectives but failing to take on the roles of the men in her life; or as MacKinnon put it elsewhere, "there is no such thing as woman as such; there are only walking embodiments of men's projected needs".
I feel like the distinction between the radical and the offensive statements in that paragraph comes down to the level of effort and generosity put into interpreting each (and of course the likelihood of them being equally applied to a cis woman). Maybe there's even a point to be made about that, that a rad-fem and a psychologist each making the same statement can mean very different things (like a lesbian and straight guy each calling their partner a slut?).
Under the conditions of patriarchy, being a woman is being less than a man – and being made a woman means being made lesser. The question of whether we can even want to be women without wanting at least a bit of that remains frustratingly open.
Yeah... I feel like this assumes a large degree of alignment between our estimation of ourselves and our estimation of others' estimation of us. But that alignment is itself something that may be effected by this sort of phenomena, since women are stereotyped as self defining more socially.
I wonder if the element of sacrifice as validation may be at play here as well, do we wallow a bit in what we lose as a validation of our desire for what we gain?
Anyway, thanks for the essay Gargulec, and for the comments everyone, the diversity is nice to see here.
And I'll look forward to hearing how love factors into the next installment.
PS. This and the cat girl essay are making me itch for statistics.
What proportion of trans women came up through which backgrounds?
Are the kinks mentioned as expected in these essays actually that prevalent compared to other demographics?
I think part of why this essay has evoked very strong negative reactions from some is because it uses objective language to describe subjective reality.
I understand why the essay does this: If we understand "objective" as "true-to-reality", and "subjective" as "true-to-person", what language should we use for "true-to-culture"?
I feel like many of us lack the linguistic tools to describe varying scales of subjectivity, and as a result, we often wind up trying to use objective language to try and emphasize that this particular subjective thing is far broader than any single individual.
But of course, this can result in miscommunications - because when we're using objective language to describe a broader type of subjectivity, then that can result in people thinking we are actually trying to describe something we think is objective.
I'm sometimes struck by bittersweet nostalgia when reading some of Gargulec's stuff; it takes me back to conversations I had long ago on rad-fem heavy boards, an environment I've not frequented so much in recent years. I wonder if that call back is a reflection of the state of the world having changed less than Id thought beyond my little bubble, or the politics prevalent in academia in Gargulec's region, or the result of some self flagellation in the chosen framework for these works.
The reason behind is kind of prosaic - radical feminism, or at least a form of it, is currently undergoing a renaissance, and this renaissance is happening well outside the gender critical sphere (because gender critical thought is mostly detached from the actual concepts present in radical feminism, even if it claims the lineage). In fact, the trans materialist sphere, which is where I find myself in currently, is deeply indebted to the radical feminist analysis of gender as an outcome of social relations, instead of an individual identity. Which is also why you are correct about my taking of wide turns before arriving close to the point departure; my argument is that radical feminism as a framework can provide an explanation for why forced feminisation works which does not rely on individual psychologizing and its attendant risks of institutionalisation, gatekeeping, and pathologizing. This should, hopefully, become more clear when I write part two of this essay, but when will that be, I don't know. Hopefully next week, but with things being as they are it may take me way longer. Fingers crossed.
I understand why the essay does this: If we understand "objective" as "true-to-reality", and "subjective" as "true-to-person", what language should we use for "true-to-culture"?
Much of what I have written is premised - as polemic tends to be - on a simple rhetorical device of "if we take X to be true, then Y". I am asking what happens if we analyse forced feminisation in trans context through the ostensibly transphobic perspectives of radical feminism, which I had hoped would both show the utility of this radical feminist framework, and the indefensibility of a certain kind of it, which claims to hold to its understanding of gender while, at the same time, refusing to apply it beyond cis people and their bodies.
I think part of why this essay has evoked very strong negative reactions from some is because it uses objective language to describe subjective reality.
I understand why the essay does this: If we understand "objective" as "true-to-reality", and "subjective" as "true-to-person", what language should we use for "true-to-culture"?
I feel like many of us lack the linguistic tools to describe varying scales of subjectivity, and as a result, we often wind up trying to use objective language to try and emphasize that this particular subjective thing is far broader than any single individual.
But of course, this can result in miscommunications - because when we're using objective language to describe a broader type of subjectivity, then that can result in people thinking we are actually trying to describe something we think is objective.
I think it may be less a matter of us lacking the language to distinguish between objective reality and cultural clusters of subjectivities, than that some of the academic traditions adopted by radical feminism that led to defining the terms of this essay usurped objective language for other purposes because they don't subscribe to the concept of an objective reality (or, to take a softer stance, they only care about objective reality when it is perceived and thus becomes part of someone's subjectivity). This can definitely lead to misunderstandings.
I'll be interested to see what the trans materialist sphere has to say in future installments, as while I'm not familiar, just judging by the name it may take a different position on that issue. And I feel like a little of that may be needed to complete the theme of the essay series.
While what was said so far may insulate trans women from certain kinds of excessive criticism for internalizing problematic aspects of femininity by pointing out that internalization is ideologically the same as any other woman's inculturation, it barely touches on how or why they're trans and thus processing their inculturation as women in the first place (and if we're ruling out individual identity, materialism, and pathologizing, where are we left to look for an explanation?).
While what was said so far may insulate trans women from certain kinds of excessive criticism for internalizing problematic aspects of femininity by pointing out that internalization is ideologically the same as any other woman's inculturation, it barely touches on how or why they're trans and thus processing their inculturation as women in the first place (and if we're ruling out individual identity, materialism, and pathologizing, where are we left to look for an explanation?).
This is a major challenge indeed, and I can't promise I'll live up to it. However, I want to mention that one of the ways this sort of tongue-in-cheek rad-fem appropriation by bad transsexual women (her words, not mine!) is the kind of a position Andrea Long Chu ends up on, which is basically saying "there are no trans women, because all women are trans". Which is an interesting provocation and probably the reason Jack Halberstam calls her out for "bullshit".
Part One Point Five: Maiden Kings and Other Technologies of Gender Assignment
Part One Point Five: Maiden Kings and Other Technologies of Gender Assignment
Chivalric sagas are a late style of Old Norse literature, characterized by a heavy presence of fantastical elements and plots in the narrative, as well as showing strong influence from the continental medieval European genres, such as the chivalric romance. A particular feature that can be found within them is a type of a character that scholars have come to call "the maiden king".
Their stories tend to be conventional. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, a specialist in Old Norse literature, breaks them down to the following structure: a woman becomes a ruler of a kingdom, either through the largesse of her father, the king, or by being the sole heir. She governs well, and the tales of her kingship attract suitors, among whom the main character of the saga can be found. She spurns those trying to woo her, often cruelly humiliating them in the process; the main character is not spared from this treatment. However, he persists in the attempts to seduce the king, and eventually accomplishes it, sometimes by the power of character, sometimes by force alone, sometimes with the help of magic. The once-frigid maiden king is then defeated, which tends to be accompanied by some kind of a punishment that she has to suffer for her previous reluctance to marry. Ultimately, however, marry she does, and the kingdom prospers.
Two things should be noted about the maiden king narratives.
First is that the central character herself is a highly ambiguous figure, gender-wise. Though Old Norse literature is often celebrated for its strong presence of "powerful female characters", many of those shieldmaidens and maiden-kings do not necessarily fall under the rubric of a "woman". Here is how Friðriksdóttir characterizes Þornbjörg from the Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar:
Article:
Þornbjörg [is] the most striking representation of a maiden-king. She fully adopts a masculine role: "passing" or masquerading as a man, she demands and receives one-third of her father's kingdom, practices masculine íþróttir such as jousting and fencing, maintains a retinue, and rejects her feminine role in both name and deed. She is not satisfied with the traditional gender role open to her, marrying a promising young man of good fortune and lineage and becoming his queen (with the derivative and advisory power that this entails), and she prefers to gain and maintain official power as a prince would. The maiden-king calls "himself " by the masculine name Þórbergr, and in this part of the saga, the character is constantly referred to in the masculine, for example, hann and konungr. When Hrólfr arrives to propose, the scene becomes both comic and theatrical: he enters the hall under the silent scrutiny of all present and addresses Þórbergr with all the appropriate formal etiquette as herra "lord".
The standard interpretation of such behavior, as outlined by Carol Clover in the landmark essay Maiden Warriors and Other Sons, is that the Old Norse logic of gender allowed a provisional assumption of a male social role by women, but only as long as said women in turn accepted a mantle of masculinity coming with such a position. Much of the narrative tension in the stories of maiden kings derives from this, and specifically from the fact that a significant part of the maiden king's assumption of masculine power relied on them being sexually unavailable.
Recall, if you please, the way the word ragr, implying a sexualized feminine passivity, could spur saga men to long and bloody feuding. The perspective underpinning this was particularly merciless for "maiden warriors and other sons", because their ability to hold a masculine role was already precarious. The implication of sexual passivity could destroy them, let alone the act of it itself. And so, maiden kings that allowed themselves to be married, and, by implication, to be slept with, could no longer maintain their status and would just revert to the position of only a woman.
Again, here is how Friðriksdóttir shows it in the plot of the Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar:
Article:
Hrólfr is violently driven away, and it is not until he has returned and defeated the maiden-king in a second battle that s/he returns to her father and abandons her assumed masculine identity. Only after this do the pronouns revert to the feminine, and from the praise Þornbjörg receives for her intellectual properties and behavior after turning to female activities such as embroidery, it can be inferred that, for the narrator, she had previously been acting unwisely, and thus her masculine masquerade and behavior is indirectly (and retrospectively) stigmatized.
Which is what brings us to the second point: namely that narratives of maiden kings are ones of corrective rape.
After all, they are a stories about how an ambiguously gendered person is "seduced" and brought "back" to being a woman through heterosexual intimacy. Sexual violence does not have to be explicit in the text (though sometimes it is, like in the Clári saga or Sigurðar saga þǫgla), the narrative structure suffices. The maiden king is destroyed in the interaction with their suitor; their pronouns revert, their rule is revoked, they return to feminine pursuits. This is then celebrated by the narration of the saga, which can finally depict the restoration of the proper social order. The logic governing this is not at all different from from the sheer brutality of the cultural idea that the gender insubordination of female masculinity can be purged away by a good fuck from a real man.
But—and here's the thing—Friðriksdóttir ends her analysis of maiden king narratives not by conceding to the textual inevitability of the reassertion of gender, but rather on a speculation of how else those stories might have been heard. What other messages could have been drawn from them, what other morals? Imagine a young person chafing at their assigned gender, listening to men tell of Þórbergr and Hrólfr, and hearing not of the inevitable return to the name of Þornbjörg, but rather of how to not repeat the mistake of marriage.
It's maiden kings, after all, who capture the imagination, not their suitors. Whether we read them as strong women, as butches, as trans men (and all those readings are justifiable and non-contradictory) they remain with us as figures of gendered possibility. Who even remembers the name of shieldmaiden Hervor's eventual husband, especially over her (his?) speech at her (his?) father's burial mound?
I seemed to myself/to be set between worlds,/ when all about me/burnt the cairn fires.
This is the perennial problem that all stories of the reassertion of the proper order in the wake of a rebellion against it struggle with: how to tell it without implying that the order did not have to win at the end, that it did not have to be this way?
An attempted answer can be found in most hentai repositories, under the combination of tags reading #forced_orgasm #mindbreak.
Pure Orgasmic Ideology
There is a particular and highly conventional kind of a pornographic depiction I am thinking of here, so let me paint you a picture. A woman sits strapped down to a chair, in the nude or semi-nude. Her legs are forced apart by the restraints, and some sort of a sexual device—a vibrator, a dildo, a piston arm of a fucking machine—is inserted into her genitals, stimulating them. Sometimes, this is accompanied by more "toys", let's say an e-stim shock-pads, tickling machines, or suction cups applied to the nipples. The woman's expression is almost invariably locked somewhere between distress and bliss. If it is closer to the former, she may be clenching her teeth in a vain struggle against the pleasures of the flesh; if it is the latter, she may be empty-eyed and completely lost to the sexual rapture of her predicament. A common visual flourish to cap off this fantasy is a screen to the side of that sexualized body, displaying some mix of data indicating the number of orgasms suffered by the woman, and her progress on the way towards having her personality and psychology obliterated. Hence #forced_orgasm, hence #mindbreak.
The orgasm ticker is the key innovation here. And—more broadly—the orgasm itself. Now, this statement may be a bit perplexing, because we are not used to thinking about the orgasm as something that can be "innovated", but rather as a timeless fixture of human sexuality. But let me explain.
Let's start with the core fantasy of #forced_orgasm #mindbreak. It can be expressed something like that: if you come enough, your brain is gonna go, and you are going to become some kind of a cock-addicted maniac no longer able to resist any sexual impulses. Orgasming too much cracks the mind in half. Also, it will probably make you into a woman.
I am going to bracket the last part and return to it later; I don't want to draw the attention to the ticking gender bomb buried under the mindbreaking sex chair ahead of the schedule. For now, let's keep imagining the person strapped to it as unproblematically a woman.
In any case, the fantasy is pure fancy. Obviously, we know that climaxing doesn't work that way. No amount of Hitachi Magic Wand will turn a person into a mindless sex lunatic. But the potency, and especially the legibility of this image—the fact we easily realize what's going on once we see the chair and the ticker—should give us some pause. Orgasming too much may not mindbreak anyone—but we are primed to believe that it could. Why?
The answer to this is that the orgasm is a problematic concept, and even though it can't destroy anyone's mind, the idea persists that even one can still make a person normal again.
This notion can be traced back to the 19th century sexology and its gradual enshrinement of the capacity to achieve orgasm (in both men and women) as the measure of sexual maturity. It is also the reason why there is so much feminist and queer scholarship which is, at best, skeptical towards the orgasm. Of course not because any of those scholars want to disprove (though there are kinds of orgasms that have merited such treatment: vaginal and simultaneous being the chief examples), but rather because the orgasm isn't just a spasm of a body in pleasure. It is also an ideology.
Now, that's a big claim, so bear with me for a moment.
She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman is the title of a best-selling book of advice, translated into multiple languages, and easily available not just in conventional bookstores, but also every feminist sex-shop with a book section that I have ever seen. As the title suggests, the book is aimed at men, and is meant to help with a perennial problem of sex: namely that the dudes don't think past the peak of their climax, and leave women unfinished, and unfulfilled.
This anxiety is old. In fact, even in the stereotypically prudish Victorian era, there was no shortage of voices coming from concerned medical specialists, that the men can't get women to come in bed, with deleterious social effects. And at its core, there is the idea that what counts in sex, what makes sex quantifiable as pleasurable is, precisely, the orgasm, the bodily sensation that attests the success of the encounter.
There is a common sense element to it. After all, we also imagine the orgasm as profoundly natural, that is entirely pre-cultural. It is figured as the feature of the body, completely separate from the higher faculties of thinking or inhabiting a society. And since men and women are supposed to orgasm differently, it can then also index gender differences. Just think here to the vast body of the 1970s and 80s cultural feminist writings singing the praise of the diffuse, capacious pleasure of woman's orgasm against the impoverished, brutish burst of a man's one.
The ideology of the orgasm, then, is that it is the truth: of sex, of pleasure, of gender. That it is a litmus test to which a body can be submitted, and by its results classified. In fact, the porn studies scholar Linda Williams derives from this the foundational structure of modern pornography, a style she understands as one focused on trying to document the orgasm, and constantly struggling with the gender differences in the register of its visibility, with the ostensible obviousness of an ejaculating penis contrasted to the opaque mystery of a woman climaxing.
("Men" and "women" here refer not to particular genders as themselves, but rather to particular cultural ideas about those genders. There should be no need to remind anyone that there is a spectacle of a woman's orgasm to be found in a spurting girldick too.)
In this, modern pornography has much in common with the 1950s and 60s research of sexologists such as Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson, who employed countless new technologies, both in social sciences, as well as in medical imagining, to come up with a way to measure and visualize the orgasm as it happens, to finally pierce the veil of mystery they worried shrouded the truth of sex.
And so, we put the orgasm first. She Comes First, and the stress is neither on she or first, but on comes. But more than that, we think about sex through the lens of the orgasm, even if none comes—-at least not in the strict sense.
When I was doing fieldwork among Polish BDSM practitioners, I kept running into people describing their kinky pleasures through the language of orgasming: shibari enthusiasts talking about "rope orgasms", lesbian tops claimining that domming gave them "emotional orgasms", and so on. The paradox, of course, is that such orgasms are not the orgasm. They are not the narrowly defined physiological reaction that Masters and Johnson managed to capture on an MRI. Instead, they end showcasing how a a purportedly obvious and experientially evident phenomenon can still splinter into countless different ways of climaxing, which are nonetheless bound together by the shared idea that where there is sex, there should also be an orgasm.
And where is the orgasm, there is also the truth. What does the orgasm ticker by the mindbreaking sex chair really register? It doesn't just sell the fantasy of the involuntary pleasure that the person strapped into the device is experiencing. It also ticks down to the point when this pleasure—those hits of the physical truth—will have been enough to strip away all the pretense from the body. "Mindbreaking" means, after all, nothing else but reducing it to its supposedly natural state.
This natural state, in this case, is of a pure sexual object, unmarred by any kind of a thought or imposition of personhood. And, as radical feminism has long taught us, a "pure sexual object" is, under the conditions of the patriarchy, another term for a "woman". But this isn't just reflected in the spectacle of penetration and submission. The mindbreaking sex chair is a machine for gender in a sense that aspires to an even more literal production of gender.
The orgasm ticker is intimately tied to a gendered idea about how women not only orgasm differently, but also that they orgasm more, and better. The idea that the sexual pleasure that women enjoy is deeper than anything men have access to is very old; it lies at the foundation of both cultural feminism's elevation of the women's sexuality, and deeply misogynistic ideas about how women are incapable of controlling their mind-shattering sexual urges. The mindbreaking sex chair literalizes both of those concepts. The body strapped to it is capable of endless pleasure (the number goes ever up!), and those pleasures are intense enough to snap the mind in half, and render it absolutely female. The body comes like a woman, and so is a woman. The orgasm is the measure of its gendered truth.
This, also, is the narrative skeleton of the fantasy of the corrective rape, but one from which all pretense has been flensed, leaving behind only the supposedly indisputable facts of flesh and sex. Unlike in the stories of maiden kings, no escape from gender is possible here, because gender is figured to reside not in the social realm, not in the relations between people, but in the ostensibly objective truths of how and how many times a body comes once subjected to specific stimuli. The fantasy of the mindbreaking sex chair is that, once you strip all pretense away from a woman's body, and remove all the cultural masquerade, it will always be only a sex object.
And yet.
The Terrifying Insufficiency of the Bio-Penis
There are cracks in the seemingly irresistible logic of the mindbreaking sex chair and, by extension, in the dreams of the orgasm-produced gender truth.
One of the generic elements of #forced_orgasm #mindbreak is that the intercourse depicted is not between a man and a woman, but between a body and a machine. The former is usually rendered feminine in the process (more on that in a moment), but it is facilitated through technology. And this is interesting, in light of my above argument that what the mindbreak sex chair is supposed to do is to bring forward the natural truth of sex. Why then the hook which reels it out of the flesh is a vibrator or a fucking machine, and not a bio-penis?
The cultural history of a male orgasm, too, has produced its fair share of anxiety, though far less mystique than female one. The title She Comes First—serving as a rejoinder to men—is also built on the assumption that the male climax is a given, and that men should be educated towards better sex by getting them to focus on the far more complex and complicated mechanisms of women's orgasms. But this also means that male orgasm—as I have already mentioned—is always suspected of being weaker than female one, of coming too quickly and producing too little. The supposedly endless ability of women to take is contrasted with the sharply limited capacity of men to give.
This, in turn, explains why the mindbreaking sex chair relies on technological appendages which are, flatly, superior in their capacity to men. A vibrator or a fucking machine does not tire, does not have refractory periods, and won't ever suffer anxiety or an erectile dysfunction. It's the steam engine steel-driver to the flesh-and-blood John Henry of penises. Even if in the moment, the bio-penis may feel better, John Henry always dies in the end, and the luddites lose. And it is through this superiority to tiring flesh that a mind can be broken; it takes all the wonders of a civilization to come up with a force capable of exceeding the supposed orgasmic capacity of a body to gender it female.
Have women only become possible with the advent of the Industrial Revolution?
I joke, but it merits thinking about. Just as about what happens when the body strapped to the mindbreaking sex chair already has a penis.
Here, a small side note. One of the interesting features of (hetero) fetish art is that it struggles with depicting male submissivness in a way that isn't just a gender-flipped scene of female submission. Of course, I would argue that part of it comes from the fact that D/s dynamics are inseparable from forced feminisation, but the mindbreaking sex chair in specific provides a fascinating case study of what happens when a "man" is substituted for a "woman" in a fetish scene without altering any other parameters of it.
So, let's go back to the scene I have described. There is a body strapped to a chair, but instead of a fucking machine, the device stimulating its genitals is a prostate milker. What changes then?
Here's an interesting note. While the idea that a woman orgasming too much can be dangerous to her has been at best fringe in sexology, instead finding it's home mainly in pornography, men coming to the end of their mind is a notion that, for a long time, was received medical knowledge. After all, the story of the dangers of habitual masturbation are strangely close to those of #mindbreak. But, for better or worse, the end result of this kind of overstimulation has never really been figured as one of a, to quote, "cock-addicted maniac". Instead of hypersexualisation, the warning tracts against onanism warn of a thorough ruin of virility, and depict their sorry subjects as fully sapped of vital forces they have been expending so carelessly.
In a sense, self-polluters described by the likes of Samuel-Auguste Tissot, are also deeply feminized, but mostly as an accident of a binary gender logic. Since their onanism has rendered them incapable of virile masculinity, they end up as something less: kind of feminine. Those associations still work, but they fail to summon—at least not as stably—the same kind of a fantasy as of a fucking machine pumping a vagina to the sound of an orgasm ticker going up. The result of the #mindbreak should be something cock-hungry, a sexual object. The prostate milker suggests rather someone drained of their vital fluids.
Or does it? After all, it is a matter of framing, and there is nothing stopping a fetish artist from depicting the penis and the prostate milking chair in the exact same point of view as a more supposedly women's body. In fact, a body with a penis can, in the fetish art, come the same way as women do, with the same imagined potential for a multi-orgasmic self-shattering. But when such depictions appear, their underlying logic—that of the orgasm as a natural, immediately obvious, and indisputable mark of gendered distinction—begins to implode.
(Here, an argument could be made that a more "properly" gendered equivalent of the mindbreaking sex chair for men is the chastity belt—precisely the device meant to prevent a man from penetrating, and from orgasming. But it is also a tool of literal emasculation, which renders a man's arousal visible not as an impressive erection, but rather a slow drip from the groin. No surprise then, that it became indispensible in the erotic fantasies of sissification.)
And so, here we arrive at another paradox. It seems, after all, that even fantasies built on what was meant to be a highly essentialist foundation remain incapable of truly stabilizing gender and anchoring it to specific bodies and specific genitals. Sex, as it is wont to do, ends up being far more capacious than the definitions imposed upon it would demand.
Surrendering to an Assignment
But why link it all to maiden kings and their struggles? Well, for me personally it is the reason of shared fascination with both Old Norse literature, and niche pornography, but setting aside personal, prurient interests, I think that both cases I have cited show the powerful potential of wilful misreading.
I balk at the word "subversive", and wouldn't want to use it here, but I can't help but to think about how Friðriksdóttir's insight about the possibility of listening to stories of violent gender assignment otherwise can be applied to the experience of looking at a body strapped to the mindbreaking sex chair.
Because here is the thing: the stories of shieldmaidens and maiden kings are stories of a coerced gender not just at the tail end, not just because of their tendency to lapse into narratives of corrective sexual abuse. Even from the beginning, they are not free of coercion. We can read Þornbjörg's choice to become Þórbergr as evidence of a trans-masculine desire and seizing an opportunity when one arises. Or, and this is no less justified as a reading, we can assume that Þornbjörg's decision was a matter of necessity, of knowing that if she is to rule, then she must be socially a man, or else she will not be allowed to be anyone but a woman.
The solution isn't then to resolve this ambiguity in either direction and assign Þornbjörg/Þórbergr to a specific gender, but rather to point out to how it dramatizes and underlines the operation of the machine for gender, a system which takes bodies and renders them—by this or that kind of social violence—into one of a number of (usually two) categories. There is no such thing as a non-violent gender assignment. But since even coercive gender assignment can feel good (this is the core fantasy of forced feminisation), its violence too can be appropriated and claimed.
Georgette Heyer gets it, is all I'm saying. She didn't get that she gets it, obviously, and all of her books are sexist as hell, but she invented gay transsexuals and for that we and Lou Sullivan both owe her a debt of honor. Congratulations, you're a boy now; here's your sapphire. Meet me in the parlor at midnight so we can arm-wrestle and I can humiliate you.
So here is my conclusion: any representation of coercive gender assignment, no matter how strict and how deeply seeped in profoundly essentialist notions of what makes a gender, nonetheless opens itself up for wilful trans misreadings. And though I doubt it will lead, as some would hope, to the eventual downfall of gender as a whole, it is what makes it generally survivable for those forced to endure it.
But I digress; I was supposed to talk about love, and Tell Me I'm Worthless. Next week, maybe?
First and foremost, I want to express my gratitude at you for writing this. We've both talked about sexuality before obviously, and as an asexual girl, it's often hard for me to really engage with many of these things beyond the scant bits of feminist theory I read on my own initiative or pick up like a scavenger from your essays. Especially your habit of using things that I assume are regular porn tropes as academic arguments is extremely enlightening, and often helps make legible to me something I do not have the faintest clue of beyond my own intuition.
So here is my conclusion: any representation of coercive gender assignment, no matter how strict and how deeply seeped in profoundly essentialist notions of what makes a gender, nonetheless open themselves up for wilful trans misreadings. And though I doubt it will lead, some would hope, to the eventual downfall of gender as a whole, it is what makes it generally survivable for those forced to endure it.
This part, especially, I found interesting in light of how we can view things such as hair products for men as gender affirming care not all that different from the gender affirming care that trans people need to survive, though less intensely so. In the light that gender is ultimately social and in no way "essential" - playing a radfem for a moment - it seems like a natural step in light of this to thus assume that such willful trans misreadings, as you delightfully call them, are in fact in many ways natural products of gender. Though not intentional from how the gendered caste system that is patriarchy is constructed, obviously.
