Feminism against Progress by Mary Harrington

Author:Mary Harrington [Harrington, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

6 Meat Lego Gnosticism

Trans women as we know them now are the melding of technocapital with the human race and the expropriation of it towards its own ends […] Their flesh is how the machinery beneath infiltrates the human race. It breaks these lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human towards the lesbian autoproduction of demons.

n1x, ‘Gender acceleration: A blackpaper’1

Universal basic dissociation

I DON’T REMEMBER exactly when I stopped just being my body, only that the change coincided roughly with puberty. One moment I was a child who ran, climbed, wrestled and played. And the next, I was a squatter in an unfamiliar meat suit: an awkward operator of this unwanted encumbrance, without which I couldn’t interact with the world.

That feeling didn’t really go away until I was well into my thirties. I don’t think I’m alone in this, or very unusual. Many women, feminist or not, have pointed out that the transition to adult female and thus to a body considered ‘fair game’ for sexual evaluation by men can be deeply uncomfortable.

When my household first got online, towards the end of the 1990s, my world changed overnight. Here was a placeless place where I could just be, without fretting about whether my tummy made rolls when I sat forward, or if my thighs were rubbing, or whether others were looking at me with desire or disgust. Online, ‘me’ meant the ‘me’ I wished I could be: a creature of pure thought.

I often recall that sense of liberation and possibility when I read accounts written by individuals born long after me, of their journey into identification as transgender. One young woman who made that journey, Helena, describes how she found life as a new-minted adult female stressful – much as I had. But where the culture of anything-goes sexuality was only getting started in the 1990s of my adolescence, Helena reached puberty at the height of the ‘sex-positive’ 2010s, by which time a majority of American adolescents had a smartphone and pornography was endemic.

Helena describes how female adulthood seemed ‘hypersexualized and pornified’. But anyone who questioned whether it really was ‘empowering’ for women ‘to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men’ ended up being derided as ‘vanilla’. And ‘a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women’. Not unreasonably, she concluded that if the whole world saw this setup as good and feminist, but she didn’t experience it as such, the problem must be her: ‘I must not have really been meant to be a girl, because if I was, this wouldn’t all be so scary and confusing.’2

Steven also found puberty distressing, and shared Helena’s discomfort with the adversarial behavioural norms now normalised for men and women within the so-called ‘sexual marketplace’. For where the prevailing culture offered Helena a supposedly ‘empowered’ role as the degraded object of male desire, it offered Steven the opposite role, as one of the men who perpetrates this violence.

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