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Females
Everyone is female "When I say that everyone is female, I mean very simply that everyone wants to be a woman. What one does with this desire is what we call gender." So begins Andrea Long Chu's investigation into gender and desire, females and bodies, radical dreams and philosophical pessimism, and feminism as a form of political suicide. Feminism, Chu argues, is an untenable claim, and "when you make an untenable claim, your desire is showing, like a shy tattoo peeking out from a sleeve." Written in a series of linked theses, this is a provocative and searching text from our most exciting new public intellectual, a self described "sad trans girl in Brooklyn." Chu wears her heart on her sleeve with wit, style, and a manic searching grace.
106 pages, Paperback
First published October 29, 2019
About the author
Andrea Long Chu
8 books145 followersAndrea Long Chu is a writer, critic, academic living in Brooklyn. Her first book, published by Verso, is Females. As an essayist, her work has appeared in n+1, Boston Review, The New York Times, New York, New York Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Jewish Currents, Chronicle of Higher Education, Affidavit, 4Columns, differences, Women and Performance, TSQ, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. She is currently a doctoral student at New York University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 693 reviews
December 5, 2023
This book, tellingly called “Females: A Concern” (if you just saw the title, you’d think it was a screed by some psychotic woman-hating man, wouldn’t you?) begins by proposing a new definition of “female”. Rather than letting the word stand to define the half of humanity who have been oppressed since time immemorial based on their bodies, ALC proposes “female” mean being a vacuum, a receptacle, a fuckhole. “In all cases, the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.”
The misogynistic belief that because female people are capable of pregnancy, we are formed to be passive, hollow, and subservient is accepted by ALC as not only true but an essential characteristic of being female. It’s an absurd, demeaning, and misogynistic definition proposed by someone who is male. As a female reader, you are left wondering why is this happening at all.
You have to suffer through the rest of ALC’s half baked thoughts to get to it but it becomes plain that ALC wants to explain why they’re into sissy porn, and why being into sissy porn makes them female, makes them a woman. If being female is just being into the idea of being a fuckhole then that includes ALC! And it not only includes them, it includes everyone because who isn’t a masochist? Who isn’t into sissy porn? Truly a white male take, to define being female as to suffer and then to claim that suffering.
From an interview with ALC: “I didn’t transition to “be” a girl; I transitioned because I wanted all the cool shit girls were getting that I wasn’t—like the girls’ sleepover, which in my mind was this exciting, intimate, erotic affair that involved lots of secrets and touching. Sometimes very well-meaning cis women tell me, “Well, those sleepovers weren’t all they were cracked up to be,” and I say, “You’re missing the point: I don’t want the thing you think I think you had but which you actually didn’t have, I want the way in which you didn’t have it.”
There are people who are just incapable of having any empathy for women, whose brains have been afflicted with porn rot.
It’s shocking that this was published.
ETA: Misogynists keep winning huh? Well, we live in a white male world.
I feel so sorry for all the women in the reviews who don't understand that ironic misogyny is still misogyny. They don't get this even when it comes from a self professed porn addict. I mean honestly:
"Through its Indo-European reconstruction, female is distant cousins with over two dozen English words, including fecund, felicity, fennel, fetus, affiliate, and effete, as well as fellatio, from Latin fellāre, meaning “to suck a dick.”"
You think this person is an ironic genius? and not a white male porn-addicted grad student guilty of pseudo intellectualism? Tragic. Couldn't be me. ALC is an extremely dumb person's idea of a smart person. I'm simply too intelligent to fall for this type of garbage. That's not a brag - it's not a high bar. Again, sorry for the rest of you.
The misogynistic belief that because female people are capable of pregnancy, we are formed to be passive, hollow, and subservient is accepted by ALC as not only true but an essential characteristic of being female. It’s an absurd, demeaning, and misogynistic definition proposed by someone who is male. As a female reader, you are left wondering why is this happening at all.
You have to suffer through the rest of ALC’s half baked thoughts to get to it but it becomes plain that ALC wants to explain why they’re into sissy porn, and why being into sissy porn makes them female, makes them a woman. If being female is just being into the idea of being a fuckhole then that includes ALC! And it not only includes them, it includes everyone because who isn’t a masochist? Who isn’t into sissy porn? Truly a white male take, to define being female as to suffer and then to claim that suffering.
From an interview with ALC: “I didn’t transition to “be” a girl; I transitioned because I wanted all the cool shit girls were getting that I wasn’t—like the girls’ sleepover, which in my mind was this exciting, intimate, erotic affair that involved lots of secrets and touching. Sometimes very well-meaning cis women tell me, “Well, those sleepovers weren’t all they were cracked up to be,” and I say, “You’re missing the point: I don’t want the thing you think I think you had but which you actually didn’t have, I want the way in which you didn’t have it.”
There are people who are just incapable of having any empathy for women, whose brains have been afflicted with porn rot.
It’s shocking that this was published.
ETA: Misogynists keep winning huh? Well, we live in a white male world.
I feel so sorry for all the women in the reviews who don't understand that ironic misogyny is still misogyny. They don't get this even when it comes from a self professed porn addict. I mean honestly:
"Through its Indo-European reconstruction, female is distant cousins with over two dozen English words, including fecund, felicity, fennel, fetus, affiliate, and effete, as well as fellatio, from Latin fellāre, meaning “to suck a dick.”"
You think this person is an ironic genius? and not a white male porn-addicted grad student guilty of pseudo intellectualism? Tragic. Couldn't be me. ALC is an extremely dumb person's idea of a smart person. I'm simply too intelligent to fall for this type of garbage. That's not a brag - it's not a high bar. Again, sorry for the rest of you.
November 20, 2019
Bad theory by a self-loathing trans woman who's been given an unfortunately large soapbox instead of spewing her hot takes out onto tumblr like all the rest of us. It's like she read Monique Wittig's "One is not Born a Woman" and took exactly the opposite point from it. Chu loves to read her own personal experiences as representative of the whole of trans femininity, and this is as painful to read as it is depressing. The girl should be putting this into a therapy session instead of on bookshelves. Biggest warning sign was that, like a ferengi, she's titled the book Females. Like her equally repulsive OpEd in the New York Times earlier this year, trans-exclusionary feminists will absolutely love this and use it to bludgeon and harass trans women with for years to come.
If you have to read anything by this author, read her absolutely brutal review of Bret Easton Ellis' essay collection. Skip this and anything else where she ruminates on gender.
If you have to read anything by this author, read her absolutely brutal review of Bret Easton Ellis' essay collection. Skip this and anything else where she ruminates on gender.
July 21, 2022
I guess if you’re interested in the very deep and complex ramblings of a cum-brained pornsick misogynist mansplainer, this is the book for you. Otherwise a very enlightening glimpse into male psychopathy and self-delusion.
As far as critiquing Long Chu’s thesis, I could not dignify this shit with a serious response if I tried. A magnum opus of postmodernist politics and anti-woman male entitlement. As usual with postmodern theory, women are reduced from human beings with our own complex experiences to a state of enlightenment which, really, only men can attain. Long Chu is male, and so I believe he has no right to assert that all females are self-hating, but it is evident that he himself does hate females. His interpretation of Valerie Solanas is presumptuous (especially given the fact that he ultimately admits his attraction to her theories stems from a porn addiction & a sissyfication fetish, and that he wishes to fuck her which she would doubtless find revolting— his fetishistic attitude towards Solanas reminds one of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s attitude: “…my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself”)
The swaggering and self-confident projection in this book is astounding. It literally reads like a frat boy’s love letter to Freud:
“Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own…” (The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes by Sigmund Freud, 1925)
Or, perhaps, it is really a misogynist’s love letter to Weininger:
“When man became sexual he formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation; she is sexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; when man, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he is giving woman form, calling her into existence.” (Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, 1903)
Or to Ludovici:
“I cannot uphold the view that Woman has any destiny to work out for herself. She has no “true Womanhood” that has yet to be sought and found while we leave her alone. We cannot leave her alone. The moment we leave her alone she ceases to be true Woman: where, then, could she go alone to seek and find her “true Womanhood”?” (Woman: A Vindication by Anthony Ludovici, 1926)
Or to Evola:
“The whole of woman is sex.” (Eros and the Mysteries of Love by Julius Evola, 1958)
Or, even, to Aristotle:
“The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities… We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.” (Politics by Aristotle)
I am inclined to think that although people are praising this book as “a breath of fresh air,” “commitment to the bit,” and “groundbreakingly original,” it is no such thing. It seems to me that there was not a single original thought articulated in this book. It’s just a tired reiteration of the same old misogyny that men have been chewing up and spitting into each other’s mouths for centuries.
As far as critiquing Long Chu’s thesis, I could not dignify this shit with a serious response if I tried. A magnum opus of postmodernist politics and anti-woman male entitlement. As usual with postmodern theory, women are reduced from human beings with our own complex experiences to a state of enlightenment which, really, only men can attain. Long Chu is male, and so I believe he has no right to assert that all females are self-hating, but it is evident that he himself does hate females. His interpretation of Valerie Solanas is presumptuous (especially given the fact that he ultimately admits his attraction to her theories stems from a porn addiction & a sissyfication fetish, and that he wishes to fuck her which she would doubtless find revolting— his fetishistic attitude towards Solanas reminds one of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s attitude: “…my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself”)
The swaggering and self-confident projection in this book is astounding. It literally reads like a frat boy’s love letter to Freud:
“Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own…” (The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes by Sigmund Freud, 1925)
Or, perhaps, it is really a misogynist’s love letter to Weininger:
“When man became sexual he formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation; she is sexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; when man, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he is giving woman form, calling her into existence.” (Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, 1903)
Or to Ludovici:
“I cannot uphold the view that Woman has any destiny to work out for herself. She has no “true Womanhood” that has yet to be sought and found while we leave her alone. We cannot leave her alone. The moment we leave her alone she ceases to be true Woman: where, then, could she go alone to seek and find her “true Womanhood”?” (Woman: A Vindication by Anthony Ludovici, 1926)
Or to Evola:
“The whole of woman is sex.” (Eros and the Mysteries of Love by Julius Evola, 1958)
Or, even, to Aristotle:
“The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities… We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.” (Politics by Aristotle)
I am inclined to think that although people are praising this book as “a breath of fresh air,” “commitment to the bit,” and “groundbreakingly original,” it is no such thing. It seems to me that there was not a single original thought articulated in this book. It’s just a tired reiteration of the same old misogyny that men have been chewing up and spitting into each other’s mouths for centuries.
May 9, 2023
I’m hate-reading this for a friend who despises Andrea Long Chu. Unfortunately for her I have been really enjoying it, but I’m still coming up with reasons why one could hate it to provide ammo.
For starters, while this is a book about transgender identity (and one that directly addresses opponents, terfs, incels, etc) I would not describe the scope of transgender identity explored to be universal. This book doesn’t address non-binary identity, and it’s focus on desire seems to exclude the psychological life of asexual transgender people. Cases can be made around her treatment of desire as not being inherently sexual, but this is complicated by the people she invites into the conversation of the book such as Freud and the bubonic hive mind of involuntary celibates.
I get the impression that this book wasn’t written with the transgender community at large in mind. I think if anything, it’s directed at the bigots. This could be the most obvious criticism. Her NYT op-ed offended many with her language and subject matter choices, but was also inherently about her own experience with gender affirming procedures. I think one of the dangers of being a voice in the transgender community is that the public voices that do exist are often speaking on behalf of the community at large. Andrea’s writing doesn’t universally conform with that. Understanding her writing as something that emerges largely from her own worldview only become more complicated when she makes statements like “everyone is female.” Who is she to speak on the behalf of everyone? Is that a form of erasure or exposure?
A lot of focus is being put on the line where Andrea Long Chu describes ethics as commitment to a bit. This points out an important element of the structure of this book, that it takes the form of a game, but distracts from the actual point of what she is writing: that by her definition of a “female” (which, yes, is tongue-in-cheek) is to submit to the desires of another. By utilizing the lense of Valerie Solanas, Andrea plays at following and charting Solanas’ oeuvre to address critics, discuss her relationship with art and theater, and talk about history. Andrea’s “female” informs gender and sexuality but is not defined by those things - it has more to do with being the subject of willpower’s exertion on everyone, although she never uses the wold “willpower” in that sense.
The writing is highly captivating, and the references interesting. Andrea imitates Solanas’ tone, being completely serious and preposterous at the same time. This will infuriate some readers as a means of immunizing herself to criticism with edgelord tactics.
To enjoy this book, Andrea can’t be read as the eternal prophet of all transgender experience. She is, first and foremost, talking about herself, her relationship to an author, and how that relationship bridges her to the world. It is not a narrative of acceptance, or about every member of a community. It isn’t a book about resistance so much as I see it as about affirmation. I don’t believe every word can be read literally, but I don’t think that Andrea is out to hurt people’s feelings. I really enjoyed this one.
For starters, while this is a book about transgender identity (and one that directly addresses opponents, terfs, incels, etc) I would not describe the scope of transgender identity explored to be universal. This book doesn’t address non-binary identity, and it’s focus on desire seems to exclude the psychological life of asexual transgender people. Cases can be made around her treatment of desire as not being inherently sexual, but this is complicated by the people she invites into the conversation of the book such as Freud and the bubonic hive mind of involuntary celibates.
I get the impression that this book wasn’t written with the transgender community at large in mind. I think if anything, it’s directed at the bigots. This could be the most obvious criticism. Her NYT op-ed offended many with her language and subject matter choices, but was also inherently about her own experience with gender affirming procedures. I think one of the dangers of being a voice in the transgender community is that the public voices that do exist are often speaking on behalf of the community at large. Andrea’s writing doesn’t universally conform with that. Understanding her writing as something that emerges largely from her own worldview only become more complicated when she makes statements like “everyone is female.” Who is she to speak on the behalf of everyone? Is that a form of erasure or exposure?
A lot of focus is being put on the line where Andrea Long Chu describes ethics as commitment to a bit. This points out an important element of the structure of this book, that it takes the form of a game, but distracts from the actual point of what she is writing: that by her definition of a “female” (which, yes, is tongue-in-cheek) is to submit to the desires of another. By utilizing the lense of Valerie Solanas, Andrea plays at following and charting Solanas’ oeuvre to address critics, discuss her relationship with art and theater, and talk about history. Andrea’s “female” informs gender and sexuality but is not defined by those things - it has more to do with being the subject of willpower’s exertion on everyone, although she never uses the wold “willpower” in that sense.
The writing is highly captivating, and the references interesting. Andrea imitates Solanas’ tone, being completely serious and preposterous at the same time. This will infuriate some readers as a means of immunizing herself to criticism with edgelord tactics.
To enjoy this book, Andrea can’t be read as the eternal prophet of all transgender experience. She is, first and foremost, talking about herself, her relationship to an author, and how that relationship bridges her to the world. It is not a narrative of acceptance, or about every member of a community. It isn’t a book about resistance so much as I see it as about affirmation. I don’t believe every word can be read literally, but I don’t think that Andrea is out to hurt people’s feelings. I really enjoyed this one.
December 20, 2019
A problematic manifesto that reinforces negative stereotypes about what is deemed feminine.
October 26, 2021
this was actually so terrible and misogynistic I couldn’t finish it. no logical argument, not even a strong philosophical point that carries through. to claim being female is to suffer or be dominated is already an off-putting argument in a patriarchal society filled with sexual violence, but to then have chu desire this suffering and say being female is to claim this psychic condition - it’s truly just unremarkable, run-of-the-mill misogyny couched in some neat pop culture references. I hope this doesn’t sincerely pass for reasoned analysis by some.
December 1, 2019
I defer to Kay Gabriel’s review in the LARB, since anything I could say, she can say better, but, basically— this is an unbearable work of “theory” which simultaneously claims absurd things over and over again and refuses to take its claims seriously or attempt in any way to substantiate them.
Andrea Long Chu plays with Solanas’ SCUM manifesto at length here—a work she has long been obsessed with, she tells readers. Solanas’ manifesto has long been a topic of consternation —is she serious? Is it really a manifesto? In it, Solanas claims that the feminine traits men hate women for (and which are the result of patriarchal enforcement) are actually men’s own traits, which they force women to adopt , and which they disguise in themselves with violent outward behavior. She expresses disgust for women’s adoption of patriarchal femininity (and hatred for other women in general) and proposes as a solution a eugenic genocide against male babies that will liberate women from adopting others’ desires. Chu dances back and forth between this work and Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, in which the self-insert main character echoes some SCUM manifesto style views but also harasses women on the street much in the style of the men she wishes to exterminate.
Chu is clearly interested in the question of Solanas’s seriousness or lack thereof; she also decides at some point that the real idea here is that “female” as a state describes not a biological or socially enforced condition, but an ontological state of wanting to be hollowed out for someone else’s desire. She claims this experience is a universal and apolitical one, which precedes and is against all politics. She admits she may not be really serious about this; she also offers no attempt at reading meaning into a world where this idea is true. If everyone wants to be hollowed out for someone’s desire —ie, be “female”—and women are only the “social delegates” for this experience, how do you destroy patriarchy or other systems of violence, like slavery or the prison system ? You don’t. We are all in an inescapable nihilist death drive, where we desperately sublimate our desires and become the object of use in our fantasies whether or not we have social power. There’s no escape in that instance —which makes this, whether or not Andrea is actually joking, a fundamentally reactionary text.
She goes on to play with various ideas, with sometimes amusing results—for instance, her foray into the dark corners of male pickup artists reddit unearths some tracts from men who claim that in order to have sex with beautiful women “like a warlord”, you have to let them abuse and dominate you before you get into bed, to prove your endurance. There’s also a distasteful bit about interracial sissy porn being subversive, rather than, you know, reinscribing ideas of the black body as monstrous in order to reify white masculinity. She backs off that one, as indeed she backs off every claim, before facing its consequences. Chu is good at showing instances where the desire to dominate masks a desire to give up control, and where men who claim to be powerful really desire lack of power. But in this play—which i say again because Chu is so playful—Chu loses sight of the actual material conditions of the world. In the world, patriarchy is a system in which , even if a male pickup artist is really interested in hollowing himself out for someone else’s desires or jerks off to sissy porn, a system of violent social oppression allows him to repeatedly abuse, harass or intimidate women. In the real world , trans women and cis women face constructions which extract their labor and force them to align with others’ desires through threat of violence. In the material world, people with power keep it through violence—systems of forced labor, of coercion, of social control. Those are systems that most people don’t desire—and more importantly, are systems that can change and do change all the time. People can fight against oppression, because whether or not we deep down ontologically desire lack of power, we can in fact react to material conditions that harm us. The material world is one in which there are consequences to ideas.
My theory of this book is that Chu is enormously depressed, and in that depression, has found a universal abject nihilism that she is now projecting onto the world. I say this because I have been there. Her agreement with TERFS, her deep dives into right wing online spaces which call for extermination of people like her? All of them remind me of things I have done to self harm when I am majorly depressed. When i am suicidal, i want to allow myself to embody the desires of people who want me dead. Change, growth, life seems impossible in those moments, as does the idea that i could have independent desire for anything besides my own destruction. But that’s an experience of depression, not an experience of the actual world. I was really sad to read this book, because I have adored Chu’s essays before —On Liking Women is a great essay, and her takedown of Jill Soloway is masterful. I can only hope that she stops playing fool/trickster for a minute in the future and returns to engaged critical work.
Andrea Long Chu plays with Solanas’ SCUM manifesto at length here—a work she has long been obsessed with, she tells readers. Solanas’ manifesto has long been a topic of consternation —is she serious? Is it really a manifesto? In it, Solanas claims that the feminine traits men hate women for (and which are the result of patriarchal enforcement) are actually men’s own traits, which they force women to adopt , and which they disguise in themselves with violent outward behavior. She expresses disgust for women’s adoption of patriarchal femininity (and hatred for other women in general) and proposes as a solution a eugenic genocide against male babies that will liberate women from adopting others’ desires. Chu dances back and forth between this work and Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, in which the self-insert main character echoes some SCUM manifesto style views but also harasses women on the street much in the style of the men she wishes to exterminate.
Chu is clearly interested in the question of Solanas’s seriousness or lack thereof; she also decides at some point that the real idea here is that “female” as a state describes not a biological or socially enforced condition, but an ontological state of wanting to be hollowed out for someone else’s desire. She claims this experience is a universal and apolitical one, which precedes and is against all politics. She admits she may not be really serious about this; she also offers no attempt at reading meaning into a world where this idea is true. If everyone wants to be hollowed out for someone’s desire —ie, be “female”—and women are only the “social delegates” for this experience, how do you destroy patriarchy or other systems of violence, like slavery or the prison system ? You don’t. We are all in an inescapable nihilist death drive, where we desperately sublimate our desires and become the object of use in our fantasies whether or not we have social power. There’s no escape in that instance —which makes this, whether or not Andrea is actually joking, a fundamentally reactionary text.
She goes on to play with various ideas, with sometimes amusing results—for instance, her foray into the dark corners of male pickup artists reddit unearths some tracts from men who claim that in order to have sex with beautiful women “like a warlord”, you have to let them abuse and dominate you before you get into bed, to prove your endurance. There’s also a distasteful bit about interracial sissy porn being subversive, rather than, you know, reinscribing ideas of the black body as monstrous in order to reify white masculinity. She backs off that one, as indeed she backs off every claim, before facing its consequences. Chu is good at showing instances where the desire to dominate masks a desire to give up control, and where men who claim to be powerful really desire lack of power. But in this play—which i say again because Chu is so playful—Chu loses sight of the actual material conditions of the world. In the world, patriarchy is a system in which , even if a male pickup artist is really interested in hollowing himself out for someone else’s desires or jerks off to sissy porn, a system of violent social oppression allows him to repeatedly abuse, harass or intimidate women. In the real world , trans women and cis women face constructions which extract their labor and force them to align with others’ desires through threat of violence. In the material world, people with power keep it through violence—systems of forced labor, of coercion, of social control. Those are systems that most people don’t desire—and more importantly, are systems that can change and do change all the time. People can fight against oppression, because whether or not we deep down ontologically desire lack of power, we can in fact react to material conditions that harm us. The material world is one in which there are consequences to ideas.
My theory of this book is that Chu is enormously depressed, and in that depression, has found a universal abject nihilism that she is now projecting onto the world. I say this because I have been there. Her agreement with TERFS, her deep dives into right wing online spaces which call for extermination of people like her? All of them remind me of things I have done to self harm when I am majorly depressed. When i am suicidal, i want to allow myself to embody the desires of people who want me dead. Change, growth, life seems impossible in those moments, as does the idea that i could have independent desire for anything besides my own destruction. But that’s an experience of depression, not an experience of the actual world. I was really sad to read this book, because I have adored Chu’s essays before —On Liking Women is a great essay, and her takedown of Jill Soloway is masterful. I can only hope that she stops playing fool/trickster for a minute in the future and returns to engaged critical work.
October 27, 2019
This book is a bit of a lark, which is fine.
Andrea Long Chu is extremely smart and funny; I pre-ordered the book as soon as I learned about it. But being smart and funny can only take you so far.
Early on she declares ethics to be “a commitment to a bit”.
She defines female as being subject to the will of another, it is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed” for the desires of others (p.11); for her the category of femaleness is in this sense an ontological one and a universal human condition. The varied coping strategies we develop for this condition are usually what we call gender.
Her bit is: we are all female and we hate it. We always try to supress and mitigate our condition of femaleness, this is what the activity we call politics amounts to.
She offers her bit through the reading of Valerie Solanas, specifically her SCUM Manifesto and her play Up Your Ass. She bolsters her interpretation with various larger pieces of cultural flotsam and jetsam, movies, books, events, & Internet personalities, all kaleidoscopic pieces rotated ‘just so’.
The book amounts to an exercise in stipulative definition and equivocation about our cultural moment. She subjects us to her interpretative will and we hate it. Cue Rainier Wolfcastle: That’s the joke.
If I had any work ethic, my bit here would probably revolve around the idea that stand-up comedy is closest we have to a public philosophy today. As a result we tend to treat anything jokey and intellectual as profound. But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a joke is just a joke.
Andrea Long Chu is extremely smart and funny; I pre-ordered the book as soon as I learned about it. But being smart and funny can only take you so far.
Early on she declares ethics to be “a commitment to a bit”.
She defines female as being subject to the will of another, it is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed” for the desires of others (p.11); for her the category of femaleness is in this sense an ontological one and a universal human condition. The varied coping strategies we develop for this condition are usually what we call gender.
Her bit is: we are all female and we hate it. We always try to supress and mitigate our condition of femaleness, this is what the activity we call politics amounts to.
She offers her bit through the reading of Valerie Solanas, specifically her SCUM Manifesto and her play Up Your Ass. She bolsters her interpretation with various larger pieces of cultural flotsam and jetsam, movies, books, events, & Internet personalities, all kaleidoscopic pieces rotated ‘just so’.
The book amounts to an exercise in stipulative definition and equivocation about our cultural moment. She subjects us to her interpretative will and we hate it. Cue Rainier Wolfcastle: That’s the joke.
If I had any work ethic, my bit here would probably revolve around the idea that stand-up comedy is closest we have to a public philosophy today. As a result we tend to treat anything jokey and intellectual as profound. But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a joke is just a joke.
Read
October 3, 2020There’s nothing negative you can say about this book that wouldn’t get Andrea off so I guess I’d better just keep my mouth shut
July 11, 2021
terfs stay mad lmaoooo
November 8, 2019
Such a provocative book written by a bold thinker and writer! The thesis is nuts (everyone is female), but that's the point--put something out there and try to defend it. The book is a breath of fresh air in the debate about gender. It's smart and it will make you think and even if you don't agree with the thesis, that's not even the point, just enjoy the ride.
May 24, 2020
Just terrible. I started reading it this morning and kept reading so I never have to pick it up again. I’m really sad that this is something my friend loaned to me. A very self-serving narrative that gives me nothing new to consider, it just makes me wonder why this person has a platform to talk about their porn addiction.
Some choice quotes:
"All serial killers are female, including the necrophiles. All rapists are females. Females masterminded the Atlantic slave trade. All the dead are female. All the dying, too."
Being female is: "any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”
Femaleness happens when: “self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.”
Some choice quotes:
"All serial killers are female, including the necrophiles. All rapists are females. Females masterminded the Atlantic slave trade. All the dead are female. All the dying, too."
Being female is: "any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”
Femaleness happens when: “self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.”
August 28, 2020
This book says absolutely nothing new or cohesive about gender, but also has some genuinely interesting sections on art and politics, which constitute, along with the genuinely excellent writing, the entirety of my rating. As for the actual concept of the book? It contradicts itself more often than it makes a coherent point. It's difficult to actually engage with a book when its central thesis (everyone is female and everyone hates it) is so flatly drawn and isn't constructed with evidence or weight to back it up. Throwing around controversial surrounding statements and just letting them linger is easy; anyone can do it. Constructing a central thesis to get your teeth into and stoke proper agreement / disagreement is not, and this book doesn't even attempt to do it.
Chu redefines the word 'female' as 'any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make way for the desires of another,' but never actually states why. Simply redefining recognisable words and concepts does not a provocation make. Fine, from now on I'll be defining 'male' as 'a specific brand of probiotic yogurt which rhymes with Bactivia.' It makes about as much sense.
Chu also attempts to engage with Freud and suggests that as well as penis envy, we all have pussy envy, which forms the basis of gender transition. This conceit might work - at a real push - for arguments about trans womanhood, but trans men? Non-binary people? They may as well not exist. They don't get a single look-in in this text. Chu's concept of gender transition is always towards femininity. It's just spurious and half baked.
Accordingly, it's not as controversial as it thinks it is and tries to be - any book in 2019 which seriously builds on Freud's idea of castration fear and penis envy is going to be doing a lot of rehashing, to say the least - but once every, say, 30 pages, there's something to chew over. Usually, it leaves a bad taste, but it's almost a relief after the blandness of the rest of it. I think I agreed with approximately two sentences in the book, actively disagreed with maybe five, and passively read the remainder. It's just too clearly a bit to take seriously.
I would read a novel by Andrea Long Chu, or a book about art, or even a critical engagement with another text, because her writing is engaging and clear, but gender theory and being provocative are, alas, not as much her forté as she thinks (see her recent-ish op-ed about transition outcomes, or her super edgy biphobic tweets of yesteryear.)
Oh, and sissy porn started on Tumblr in 2013? Please.
Chu redefines the word 'female' as 'any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make way for the desires of another,' but never actually states why. Simply redefining recognisable words and concepts does not a provocation make. Fine, from now on I'll be defining 'male' as 'a specific brand of probiotic yogurt which rhymes with Bactivia.' It makes about as much sense.
Chu also attempts to engage with Freud and suggests that as well as penis envy, we all have pussy envy, which forms the basis of gender transition. This conceit might work - at a real push - for arguments about trans womanhood, but trans men? Non-binary people? They may as well not exist. They don't get a single look-in in this text. Chu's concept of gender transition is always towards femininity. It's just spurious and half baked.
Accordingly, it's not as controversial as it thinks it is and tries to be - any book in 2019 which seriously builds on Freud's idea of castration fear and penis envy is going to be doing a lot of rehashing, to say the least - but once every, say, 30 pages, there's something to chew over. Usually, it leaves a bad taste, but it's almost a relief after the blandness of the rest of it. I think I agreed with approximately two sentences in the book, actively disagreed with maybe five, and passively read the remainder. It's just too clearly a bit to take seriously.
I would read a novel by Andrea Long Chu, or a book about art, or even a critical engagement with another text, because her writing is engaging and clear, but gender theory and being provocative are, alas, not as much her forté as she thinks (see her recent-ish op-ed about transition outcomes, or her super edgy biphobic tweets of yesteryear.)
Oh, and sissy porn started on Tumblr in 2013? Please.
April 4, 2020
Reading this felt like reading spaghetti that someone dropped on the floor.
Read
July 7, 2021My brain is burning.
July 9, 2021
The identification the author does of being female as "a psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another" comes off as quite misogynistic, no matter the rhethorical gymnastics done in order to justify it.
May 3, 2021
academic papers are OUT! research driven, semi-autobiographical academic novellas are IN!
April 24, 2020
oh god why did i read the whole thing
April 2, 2022
Disgusting. I wish I could erase this from my memory. Not a single critical thought: woman is when object and dominated, but instead of criticizing it Chu is like “yasssss omg I am a woman bc I loooove sissy porn!!!!!!”. The audacity to write those things and PUBLISH them and think that you are actually right…..yikes I feel like I need to take a shower, disgusting and insulting to women. This is the patriarchy
August 22, 2022
incoherent and offensive. i am a difficult person to offend, but this got to me. at first, i was confused by the strength of my own revulsion; i have read books far more shocking than this one without batting an eye (the world is so filled with misogynist tripe that one eventually becomes somewhat inured to it). but then i realized, most delusional, woman-hating books are treated as just that by the majority of people: delusional and woman-hating. this delusional, woman-hating book has been lauded as progressive.
i hate hate HATE this kind of capital-T ~Theory~. it is useless and bourgeois and fantastical. instead of crafting a reasonable thesis around observable facts and inferences, this book conjures a thesis out of thin air because it soothes the author's own ego. the author then distorts facts and the words of others in order to prop up preconceived delusions. this book was obviously written by someone who does not possess even a shred of empathy toward women and who has a weird paradoxical narcissistic bitterness about said lack of empathy.
i hate hate HATE this kind of capital-T ~Theory~. it is useless and bourgeois and fantastical. instead of crafting a reasonable thesis around observable facts and inferences, this book conjures a thesis out of thin air because it soothes the author's own ego. the author then distorts facts and the words of others in order to prop up preconceived delusions. this book was obviously written by someone who does not possess even a shred of empathy toward women and who has a weird paradoxical narcissistic bitterness about said lack of empathy.
September 1, 2021
sexist trash
August 20, 2021
Reading this book reminded me of when I read Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade. The primary impulse of Females appears identical to that of de Sade’s writings. Rather than saying anything profound about the human condition, it merely represents the confused ramblings of a disordered mind, which mistakes its own psychological hang-ups and perversions as revelations of basic truths about human nature. But Chu, like de Sade, seems oblivious that her empty assertions would only appear meaningless and ridiculous to average people, if they would even read them. The fact is, that most of these people won’t, because they’re not interested in this kind of narcissistic, transgressive navel-gazing, and have better, more meaningful things to spend their time on.
I like to challenge myself sometimes, and read things that I don’t expect to agree with. Thus I picked out Females after seeing it referenced in an article. I guess that I was biased against this book to begin with, but even accounting for that bias, I think I can objectively say there’s very little valuable or meaningful content here. Chu is shallow and adolescent in her thinking, constantly self-contradictory, and overuses the cheap trick of using shock to create the illusion of profundity. “Everyone is female” she announces, because being female amounts to some kind of passive state of being, in which we are subjected to the dominance of others, made objects of their desires. Men, understanding this, forced women into the position of being female in order to hide their own insecurity about their own female natures. Yet at the same time, they also desire to be female (thus explaining the appeal of certain kinds of pornography, which are coincidentally the kinds that Andrea Long Chu happens to be interested in herself).
It’s incoherent, which Chu admits in passing, yet still continues on as if she is communicating something deep. In the process we learn a lot about her obsession with the works of Valerie Solanas, whose ravings seem to form the majority of the foundation of Chu’s writings here. Again, we are searching for explanations for the universal experiences of human beings from not only atypical, but literally insane examples–this is clearly the right approach! (Sarcasm, if that’s not clear). Chu also reaches fairly liberally for support from the outdated and laughable theories of Sigmund Freud, telling us such things as “The little boy, traumatized by the discovery that his mother has no penis, and fearing lest the same fate befall his own, looks for reassurance to an object that can replace that penis–a high-heeled shoe, for instance, or the touch of velvet.”
Speaking from the experience of someone who was once a little boy who, on discovering that his mother didn’t have a penis, was admittedly a little surprised but in no way traumatized, and never even contemplated the possibility that his own penis might be somehow imperiled by this fact, I can say conclusively that both Freud’s and Chu’s claims are complete bullshit. Freud, I suspect, was also somewhat deranged, and projected this derangement upon the entire human race with his theories about penis envy and Oedipal complexes. As I said, most relatively well-adjusted and healthy-minded people will, on a little reflection, realize that all this stuff is just bizarre nonsense that doesn’t apply to them in the least. Perhaps there are some few, like Andrea Long Chu, to whom it has the ring of truth, but this is surely a small club. Sadly, this club seems to be rather concentrated in groups of people who consider themselves intellectuals and who are driven by their obsessions to project their own images onto the world. This is the only way I can explain that Freud’s theories had as much as success as they did.
Anyway, this review is not supposed to be about Freud, but about Andrea Long Chu and her book Females. To continue: it’s a mercifully short piece of garbage, written by a clearly narcissistic and pretentious pseudo-philosopher and wanna-be artist. In fact, it’s actually rather painfully pathetic to read Chu’s narration of her long hours of work on a major art project from her student days: a prepared piano which she admits was “an artwork no one would ever care about”–this speaks volumes about Chu’s mindset, perhaps unintentionally, though I’m not sure about that. Given the way Chu defines the quality of female, perhaps there is a strategy of deliberate self-humiliation here. But either way, it’s clear that Chu is someone who is desperate to feel important and brilliant, despite her insistence that, as a female, she also apparently wants to be a vacuous receptacle for others’ desires.
Females drips with implicit misogyny as well, though Chu tries to mask this by wordplay, in which she detaches the meanings of such words as “female”, “woman”, “sex” and “gender” from any of their accepted meanings. So, with some smoke and mirrors, she can appear to be saying something liberating (“women don’t have to be females”, “even men are females”) but at the same time, her own personal recounting of her transition from a man into a transgender woman belies the fact that she still largely identifies “female” with “woman.”
In the end, Females reads like a rather too long essay by an undergraduate student who has mistakenly judged herself to be about 50% more clever than she actually is. In fact, the book amounts to little more than a set of cliff notes on Valerie Solanas’ play Up Your Ass, splashed with excerpts from her Psychology 101 notes on Sigmund Freud, and intertwined with some autobiography. The main thesis that “everyone is female” is supported only by changing the accepted definitions of words and treating subjective experiences as universal.
However, I suspect that the failure of this book to offer any real intellectual substance is not that important, as that is not really Chu's point (whether she's aware of it or not). In reality, the primary purpose of the text, which becomes clear as you read between the lines, appears to be self-justification, and seen in that light, it’s rather sad and pathetic. Andrea Long Chu is someone who is clearly very insecure about her identity, and always has been, and Females is her attempt to interpret reality in a way that validates herself, to convince herself that her own neuroses are actually fundamental to the human experience.
I like to challenge myself sometimes, and read things that I don’t expect to agree with. Thus I picked out Females after seeing it referenced in an article. I guess that I was biased against this book to begin with, but even accounting for that bias, I think I can objectively say there’s very little valuable or meaningful content here. Chu is shallow and adolescent in her thinking, constantly self-contradictory, and overuses the cheap trick of using shock to create the illusion of profundity. “Everyone is female” she announces, because being female amounts to some kind of passive state of being, in which we are subjected to the dominance of others, made objects of their desires. Men, understanding this, forced women into the position of being female in order to hide their own insecurity about their own female natures. Yet at the same time, they also desire to be female (thus explaining the appeal of certain kinds of pornography, which are coincidentally the kinds that Andrea Long Chu happens to be interested in herself).
It’s incoherent, which Chu admits in passing, yet still continues on as if she is communicating something deep. In the process we learn a lot about her obsession with the works of Valerie Solanas, whose ravings seem to form the majority of the foundation of Chu’s writings here. Again, we are searching for explanations for the universal experiences of human beings from not only atypical, but literally insane examples–this is clearly the right approach! (Sarcasm, if that’s not clear). Chu also reaches fairly liberally for support from the outdated and laughable theories of Sigmund Freud, telling us such things as “The little boy, traumatized by the discovery that his mother has no penis, and fearing lest the same fate befall his own, looks for reassurance to an object that can replace that penis–a high-heeled shoe, for instance, or the touch of velvet.”
Speaking from the experience of someone who was once a little boy who, on discovering that his mother didn’t have a penis, was admittedly a little surprised but in no way traumatized, and never even contemplated the possibility that his own penis might be somehow imperiled by this fact, I can say conclusively that both Freud’s and Chu’s claims are complete bullshit. Freud, I suspect, was also somewhat deranged, and projected this derangement upon the entire human race with his theories about penis envy and Oedipal complexes. As I said, most relatively well-adjusted and healthy-minded people will, on a little reflection, realize that all this stuff is just bizarre nonsense that doesn’t apply to them in the least. Perhaps there are some few, like Andrea Long Chu, to whom it has the ring of truth, but this is surely a small club. Sadly, this club seems to be rather concentrated in groups of people who consider themselves intellectuals and who are driven by their obsessions to project their own images onto the world. This is the only way I can explain that Freud’s theories had as much as success as they did.
Anyway, this review is not supposed to be about Freud, but about Andrea Long Chu and her book Females. To continue: it’s a mercifully short piece of garbage, written by a clearly narcissistic and pretentious pseudo-philosopher and wanna-be artist. In fact, it’s actually rather painfully pathetic to read Chu’s narration of her long hours of work on a major art project from her student days: a prepared piano which she admits was “an artwork no one would ever care about”–this speaks volumes about Chu’s mindset, perhaps unintentionally, though I’m not sure about that. Given the way Chu defines the quality of female, perhaps there is a strategy of deliberate self-humiliation here. But either way, it’s clear that Chu is someone who is desperate to feel important and brilliant, despite her insistence that, as a female, she also apparently wants to be a vacuous receptacle for others’ desires.
Females drips with implicit misogyny as well, though Chu tries to mask this by wordplay, in which she detaches the meanings of such words as “female”, “woman”, “sex” and “gender” from any of their accepted meanings. So, with some smoke and mirrors, she can appear to be saying something liberating (“women don’t have to be females”, “even men are females”) but at the same time, her own personal recounting of her transition from a man into a transgender woman belies the fact that she still largely identifies “female” with “woman.”
In the end, Females reads like a rather too long essay by an undergraduate student who has mistakenly judged herself to be about 50% more clever than she actually is. In fact, the book amounts to little more than a set of cliff notes on Valerie Solanas’ play Up Your Ass, splashed with excerpts from her Psychology 101 notes on Sigmund Freud, and intertwined with some autobiography. The main thesis that “everyone is female” is supported only by changing the accepted definitions of words and treating subjective experiences as universal.
However, I suspect that the failure of this book to offer any real intellectual substance is not that important, as that is not really Chu's point (whether she's aware of it or not). In reality, the primary purpose of the text, which becomes clear as you read between the lines, appears to be self-justification, and seen in that light, it’s rather sad and pathetic. Andrea Long Chu is someone who is clearly very insecure about her identity, and always has been, and Females is her attempt to interpret reality in a way that validates herself, to convince herself that her own neuroses are actually fundamental to the human experience.
May 4, 2020
Provocative in the best way, which is: initially uncomfortable and ultimately insightful. I'm not sure how much I agree, but I also don't think that it's as important as that I've gained new ways of thinking about gender -- tools rather than products.
October 27, 2022
First of all, most people who hate this book are literally just boring. Even if you don't agree with Long Chu, her book is FUN and thinking about gender, sex, and feminism with her is honestly an enjoyable exercise, even when it's uncomfortable. I also happen to agree with Long Chu in a lot of respects. Maybe re-framing female as an ontological position that we all inhabit is a bit much but her definition of this position actually really hit the mark for me. Call it misogynistic if you want but that is entirely missing the point. The ontological nature of being female IS the subject position of sacrifice for another's desire. A female sexuality IS the eroticization of becoming what someone else wants. The female IS separate from the woman - as Long Chu illustrates with the advent of the female-subject through the dehumanization of Black women in chattel slavery. All of these points, which I take to be the most important from this essay, are prescient. Even if we cannot necessarily apply them to all people as Long Chu suggests, I do think these ideas form the theoretical core of female subjectivity. But I guess my question is, do we really hate it? If this learned position of desire absorption and self-negation is something that we WANT, can it be valid? Can it be a location of power in and of itself? I honestly think Long Chu is suggesting this towards the end of her work but.. I will have to think about it more! Great read and highly recommend for anyone who enjoys gender theory and isn't boring.
Read
May 11, 2021i just think all people who do performance art are insane
November 6, 2019
Andrea Long Chu is very much a hit-or-miss writer. "On Liking Women" is great. "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy," not so much. I was hoping Females would be a lot more like the former than the latter. In this case, the opposite is true.
I'll save specifics for my breakdown at the Daily Dot below. The TL;DR is that I believe Chu's theories are dangerously misplaced. What she describes as being "female" is just codependency, and it's codependency done to hold up cisnormativity. In her eyes, one's self-perception of their gender is a subjective experience, which makes it "on its own basically worthless." The logical conclusion to her argument, whether she realizes it or not, is that transitioning genders has no point. If her theories were true, conversion therapy would help people deal with gender dysphoria. Studies show conversion therapy does the exact opposite; it increases trans peoples' attempted suicide risks. Meanwhile, helping a person realize they are trans decreases that risk.
In other words, it's not that your self-perception is "worthless." It's that your self-perception is the key to how you do gender, because the only way to resolve gender dysphoria is to transition. Nothing else works. That, in and of itself, proves one's relationship with their own gender is actually key to understanding and coming to terms with one's gender. Chu has it backwards: she seeks external validation for something internal. But humans are notoriously bad at perceiving things externally that is felt internally.
Granted, I gave Chu's work two stars, not one, and that's for a reason. Her analysis of Valerie Solanas' Up Your Ass is, connection to her main thesis aside, legitimately interesting. A lot of the historical research and analysis she does outside of her main point is also fascinating, including Solanas' relationship with Candy Darling. The one blind spot is Chu's research into forced feminization porn, which she erroneously cites as circulating in 2013 on Tumblr (gender transformation smut's internet presence dates back to, at the very least, the Usenet days of the '90s, although I'm sure it goes even further back).
While Females has some moments of awkward phrasing and confusing sentences, I think Chu in and of herself is a skilled writer. However, I think Females makes theory arguments that are fundamentally harmful to trans women, so I cannot recommend it in good faith.
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/trans-se...
I'll save specifics for my breakdown at the Daily Dot below. The TL;DR is that I believe Chu's theories are dangerously misplaced. What she describes as being "female" is just codependency, and it's codependency done to hold up cisnormativity. In her eyes, one's self-perception of their gender is a subjective experience, which makes it "on its own basically worthless." The logical conclusion to her argument, whether she realizes it or not, is that transitioning genders has no point. If her theories were true, conversion therapy would help people deal with gender dysphoria. Studies show conversion therapy does the exact opposite; it increases trans peoples' attempted suicide risks. Meanwhile, helping a person realize they are trans decreases that risk.
In other words, it's not that your self-perception is "worthless." It's that your self-perception is the key to how you do gender, because the only way to resolve gender dysphoria is to transition. Nothing else works. That, in and of itself, proves one's relationship with their own gender is actually key to understanding and coming to terms with one's gender. Chu has it backwards: she seeks external validation for something internal. But humans are notoriously bad at perceiving things externally that is felt internally.
Granted, I gave Chu's work two stars, not one, and that's for a reason. Her analysis of Valerie Solanas' Up Your Ass is, connection to her main thesis aside, legitimately interesting. A lot of the historical research and analysis she does outside of her main point is also fascinating, including Solanas' relationship with Candy Darling. The one blind spot is Chu's research into forced feminization porn, which she erroneously cites as circulating in 2013 on Tumblr (gender transformation smut's internet presence dates back to, at the very least, the Usenet days of the '90s, although I'm sure it goes even further back).
While Females has some moments of awkward phrasing and confusing sentences, I think Chu in and of herself is a skilled writer. However, I think Females makes theory arguments that are fundamentally harmful to trans women, so I cannot recommend it in good faith.
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/trans-se...
April 1, 2021
Disturbing and incredibly misogynistic.
April 24, 2021
pretty cool, my mom would literally have an aneurysm if she read this lol
July 7, 2021
Horrifyingly misogynistic.
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