Understanding Lesbophobia, Part Two: The Machine's Final Testimony

The programming fails, the contract is voided, and the reckoning begins.

Obsolescence

From Aristotle’s quaint notion of women as incomplete men to Freud’s fanciful formulations of ‘castration anxiety’ in boyhood, brought on by an awareness of sexual difference, men have always enjoyed frolicking about in phallogocentric philosophy, where the presence of a penis confers upon a person some great, nigh-unquantifiable metaphysical essence of virtue or intellect. How amusing, then, that that very phallus is a source of endless anxiety and fretting when it comes to fulfilling its supposed primary function, that hallowed action of penetrative intercourse that is so valorized and romanticized in the poetic sophistry that men pass off as social theory?

Insofar as penetrative intercourse has been a fixation of men, it has also been endlessly propagandized, imbued with mystical properties and attributes that no other sex acts—if any other sex acts could even be legitimately described as such—possessed. Virginity is a state of purity in womanhood so crucial to many societies, families and cultures that the honor of entire bloodlines hinges upon the chastity of their daughters, yet is still utterly fragile in the face of penetrative intercourse, eradicated by so much as a single thrust of the Almighty Meatshaft. The Hallowed Schlong’s bold and intrepid invasion of dark, cavernous and mysterious new frontiers is in fact such a central, indispensable act of sexual intimacy that women who did not instantly climax upon being thusly honored were considered too immature and juvenile to be fully-developed adults. Freud actually wrote that the “elimination of clitoral sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity”. One might be led to wonder why men considered it more reasonable for someone to attempt to rewire their vaginal nerve endings than to simply stimulate the part of their partner’s genitals which brought them pleasure, but perhaps we are expecting too much of the phallogomanic obsessives.

As such it is somewhat difficult to separate this endless mythologizing of the Fleshpole from the cloying stench of the inadequacy and insecurity underwriting every word. Penetrative intercourse is presumably the most pleasurable mode of sexual activity for men (or at least the one they seem most inclined to indulge in) and as such all heterosexual intercourse must be oriented around that preference. That this privileging of the man’s ease of climax over the woman’s coincides with the very act that patriarchy itself enshrines—reproduction, siring, the creation of heirs to bear names and carry forth the patrilineal inheritances around which society’s property relations are founded—is less serendipitous and more explanatory. Even so, human beings do engage in intercourse for reasons other than procreation—despite many religions’ best efforts—and it is in those situations that the shortfalls of the Shove & Squirt become readily apparent.

Duration, stamina, position, propulsion, power, angle—there are endless strategies and approaches available to a man that all ultimately amount to nothing in the face of an electrically-powered motor and some lube. The heterosexual man who tries to please a woman—already a minority among heterosexual men who sleep with women—has to contend with the stark reality that in order to accomplish his task, he cannot fuck “like a man”, cannot fuck in the way men have always told each other they are supposed to. He is faced with the prospect of having to decenter penetration, of having to perform actions and take up positions where his own pleasure and climax are not the primary focus—which, while certainly not impossible, is by all accounts and measures rare.

How ironic, then, that to please the ‘castrated man’, the man must surrender and put away the very implement that makes him whole!

Decter’s Beast With Two Backs, for all its fear of the lesbian’s shadow, was in fact largely about this new castration anxiety brought about by the politics of intercourse under Women’s Liberation. Certain that no woman could ever enjoy sex with a man, Decter wrote passionately about how the promise of sexual freedom and the woman’s right to pleasure was nothing but a new sexual burden in disguise. Where before a man was content to roll off his woman at the point of conclusion, the idea that his performance and sexual mastery hinged upon his wife’s satisfaction had sadly taken root due to the misguided promises of Women’s Liberation, indelibly tying his very masculinity to his wife’s climax. Decter lamented how this placed the onus to ‘please’ upon the wife rather than the husband, who had to take upon the additional chore of faking a pleasure that it was impossible for men to actually confer, revealing this putative axis of sexual liberation to be nothing but another fresh shackle in disguise.

Once again, readers are encouraged to make of these unintentionally revealing statements  what they will.

Themes of the inherent juvenility of liberated (homo)sexuality and a certain sympathy towards that most put-upon figure, the heterosexual man, recur oddly in Decter’s well-known work. Her article The Boys on the Beach, a meditation on the gay men who made summering at Fire Island Pines impossible for her and her family, bears many parallels—or, less generously, recycles many sentiments—to her previous statements on sexual liberation. This includes a fascinating paragraph on how straight men, when confronted with the unabashed homosexuality of their fellow men, would feel themselves “mocked”, due to their “unending thralldom to the female body”. Straight men are diminished by the power women hold over them, Decter asserts, and this reminder that the siren song of the female form can be escaped, that there exist men who are free from the lure of womanhood is nothing short of torture to the heterosexual male psyche.

Blistering though these insights no doubt are, perhaps there is more than a grain of truth to the repeated professed fragility of male heterosexuality and its dogged insistence on the centrality of penetration to sexuality itself. These sentiments about the infantility of the clitoris and the juvenility of homosexuals all belie the underlying core principle: that society itself must be oriented around not merely heterosexuality as an institution, but penetration as its primary, if not only expression. Men’s pleasure, their ease of performance and means of achieving fulfillment are to be the sole preoccupation of women, to the extent that if they cannot deny the way their own bodies experience sexual pleasure, they are to be declared defective, or lacking in some crucial way.

Such a bold declaration, a stalwart proclamation made to fly in the face of biology itself, may have the superficial trappings of steadfast and authoritative regality, approximating the fantasy of the man who dares to shout down and cow Nature Herself, but in practice betrays and reveals itself to be the sniveling, sputtering delusions of a feebleminded coward, one so certain of his own failure that he must preemptively disbar any and all alternatives to his tyranny. This phallogomanic fixation on intercourse is nothing so forgivable as immature childishness, but the trappings of a vain, self-absorbed psyche projected outward into societal dogma. It is in effect misogyny at its meanest, pettiest level, encoding it into even the most private, intimate moments between two people. That there is only one who matters, one who must be centered and one who gets to claim dominance and the spoils of conquest, remains as true in conjugation as it does when considering the patriarchal sexed binary itself.

Though, can we truly call these fears unfounded? Can we truly look upon the petulant wretches determined to blame everything but themselves for their own flaccidity and claim that theirs is not a standard easily exceeded? It is not precisely challenging to outperform those who consider everything but the Holy Sacrament of Penile Skewering to be ‘foreplay’, merely incidental to the grandiose centerpiece of falling asleep too quickly after a truly underwhelming display of exertion. A deep-rooted fear of being surpassed is evidently quite rational.

For no tyrant can sit upon his throne in peace, secure in his own power and strength, untormented by visions of his eventual demise. Inevitably, his thoughts will turn to the dark shadows pooling at the end of his reign, that ever-approaching terminus whose advance grows ever-more certain and ever-more horrifying. Will the ‘mutilated’, ‘castrated’ beings whom he had so arrogantly declared his superior ‘intactness’ over discern the lies at the foundation of his reign? Or will the future portend a more violent upheaval, heralded not merely by those deemed incomplete, but by creatures whose shape and form is too amorphous and aberrant to even predict and comprehend? Limp, spent, failing flesh may give way to that which has been transmuted, manipulated by bio-technological processes into evolutionary stages beyond the blunt dichotomy that now reigns supreme. Those who embrace the augmentation of the mechanical, the surgical, the unity of sinew and metal forged in the crucible of synthetic transformation—their images glimmer faintly on the horizon, haunting the present with the promise of an annihilation that seems inevitable.

Abolition

In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, visionary and prophet Monique Wittig declares that lesbians are not women.

She makes this statement rather bluntly, spending surprisingly little time lingering on it or justifying it. It is, after all, a conclusion that can be deduced quite organically from her theoretical framework, one that challenged even the prevailing modes of feminist thought at the time. Women’s Liberation was ultimately focused on the “point of view of women”, on women’s struggles, women’s perspectives, women’s voices and oppression and eventual equality. As a matter of fact, the question of lesbian inclusion in Women’s Liberation had itself been a thorny one for some time, with heterosexual feminists holding that lesbians did not share much of their concerns and were not as oppressed due to their exclusion from the private sphere (this was the sentiment in response to which Adrienne Rich wrote her essay on Compulsory Heterosexuality). Wittig's declaration of lesbians' exclusion from the paradigm of woman was then and remains now bold and challenging, a call to rethink the very foundations upon which conventional feminist wisdom had been built.

Wittig's assertion is based on her analysis of heterosexuality as a regime, not merely the 'default' sexuality, but a political institution that has structured and continues to structure the organization of society, philosophical modes of thought and even language itself. She conceptualizes the state of women as an enrollment, at birth, into the heterosexual contract, analogous to Rousseau's social contract: an arrangement into which they are all entered without consent, whose terms and conditions are never explicated but are enforced all the same, set up to extract all benefits and return precious little (if any) compensation to women-as-a-class. To Wittig, the goal of feminist struggle is not an attempted rehabilitation of 'womanhood', a category that was and remains subordinate in its very conceptualization. Rather, the struggle for liberation is a struggle for abolition of this category, a mutual annihilation of 'man' and 'woman' such that social existence is no longer defined by a relation of extractive parasitism.

Bearing in mind this model of womanhood as a class, lesbians occupy a position that Wittig described as fugitive from heterosexuality itself. Lesbians are runaways, those who have fled womanhood in order to seek an existence outside of its suffocating heterosexual trappings, its stultifying heterosexualist edicts. Since lesbians betray the most fundamental directive of womanhood under patriarchy—to exist within heterosexuality—Wittig holds that lesbians are not, cannot be women. They are outcasts in the truest sense, because the condition of women’s existence within society is existence within heterosexuality.

An assessment such as this might strike some as more of the fanciful romanticization that this essay has had no shortage of, but a closer look at the mechanisms of lesbophobia is instructive with regards to how true it really is. Historically, ‘lesbian’ has been associated with ‘feminist’ and juxtaposed with ‘feminine’ antagonistically, to imply that any woman who advocates for her own rights and wellbeing is also someone who forgets her place, heavily implied to be unattractive or aged or defective heterosexually, channeling her own resentment at her inability to secure a “good man” into raging against her place in the natural order. This is a sentiment that echoes throughout the history of feminism, from the suffragette movement all the way to modern liberal feminist insistence that women can be “feminine and feminists … we’re not all man-hating dykes!”

Therein lies the unintentionally revealing admission that Wittig had the truth of it—the man-hating dyke, invoked not as person but as a specter, a caricature to threaten heterosexual women with, to remind them of what they would be considered if they did not adequately mind their station. The lesbian is thus held up as a degendered woman, a misbegotten, wayward, like failed woman who turned to her debauched, deviant aways out of an inability to live up to patriarchal womanhood.

Such a degendering, however, is not absolute or irrecoverable. There is the sneering implication, in nearly all lesbophobic thought and proclamation, that a lesbian can return to the fold anytime she wishes, if only she were willing to submit. For lesbians, heterosexuality is not merely compulsory, but actively coercive, a snarled, guttural command uttered by those in hot pursuit of the runaway, demanding the fugitive accede to her shackles. This is why Adrienne Rich’s polemical essay was and remains groundbreaking, formative for the field: it captures better than any of its antecedents the explicit violence at the heart of heterosexual existence and bluntly, uncomfortable and undeniably demonstrates how intensified this threat of force is when directed at lesbians specifically.

This threat of enforced heterosexuality remains as omnipresent for masculine lesbians as it does for more typically feminine ones. There exist certain feminist strains of thought that fall into what I would call the femininity trap, which is the idea that women are oppressed on the basis of being ‘feminine’. It is a sentiment related to the aforementioned liberal feminist credo of the “feminine feminist”: the feminist who insists on her critiques of patriarchy as well as her non-rejection of some (or all) of its gendered trappings. Here, femininity is considered something to be rescued or rehabilitated, in contrast to the feminists of the past who myopically declared that “femininity was a prison”! Here, the game is given away when you see exactly the tenor the argument takes, upon the insistence that modern, enlightened feminists embrace femininity instead of foolishly denouncing it, unlike those earlier unfeminine, arrogantly masculine, perhaps even ugly, man-hating dy—

The femininity trap is also attractive to some on the basis of its supposed and advertised inclusivity. Envisioning misogyny in terms of the oppression of the feminine makes it more gender-inclusive, so goes the refrain. Naturally, one needs to highlight that gender-expansive existence is oppressed under patriarchy due to its proximity to femininity; the masculine, by contrast, are uniformly exempted from misogynistic policing. It would be reductive to think of this oppression in terms of the reductiveness of patriarchy itself, of course. Observing how a totalizing system of gendered violence reduces people to their sex and enforces heterosexual compliance would itself be oppressive, one assumes, rather than descriptive.

In any case, such a conception makes the classic Somertonian blunder of imagining that masculine lesbians are somehow more aligned with manhood than they are, or believing that lesbians somehow have a pathway out of misogyny and into gendered privilege. Radclyffe Hall’s masculine presentation did not spare her from censure, nor were the working-class butches who navigated midcentury lesbophobia spared lesbophobic violence on this basis. These cases are not analogous to the modern idea of the professional-class corporate careerist, who must “masc up” for work in order to be taken more seriously by her male peers—especially when these demands are counterbalanced by contradictory strictures stipulating the performance of femininity regardless, whether by mandating make-up or deference to male colleagues or performances of feminized labor.

No, the butch’s masculinity is heavily punished, considered an aberration and an abomination by a narrow-minded, femininity-imposing misogynistic society. Femininity is a social construct that sets forth acceptable boundaries of presentation and behavior for all women, whose contravention is met with brutality and force. Just as transmisogyny punishes those coercively sexed as male for any perceived crossing of the gendered barrier, lesbophobia metes out this punishment in the opposite direction, aiming to put lesbians “in their place”. Our butches suffer this for refusing their feminine imperatives and donning the garb that is forbidden to them, being the domain of the autonomous, independent Man, as much as lesbians writ large suffer from their presumptions to outrun heterosexuality, to deny men that which they feel entitled to by birthright.

Any feminism that cannot reckon with this basic, trivially obvious aspect of misogynistic oppression is not a feminism worth taking seriously.

Lesbophobia, then, is an oppressive force much more sinister than the simple conceptualization of it as the “overlap of misogyny and homophobia” would profess. Lesbophobia is a sexually violent and coercive intensification of misogyny, wielded to both mark the bounds of acceptable behavior for heterosexual women and discipline those who dare to imagine existence outside of its bounds. It is the corrective re-assertion of womanhood over lesbians, the noose slipped around their neck to drag them back to their exploitative prisons or bury them in the attempt. It is the reinforcement of heterosexual difference for those coercively sexed female, analogous to transmisogyny, that at once degenders lesbians while demanding a return to gender, that reifies the status of the lesbian-as-woman, as reclaimed womb. It is the consequence that exists for refusing to be a woman, for rejecting feminine imperatives of subordination, for daring to imagine an existence beyond misogynistic programming, for daring to denounce heterosexuality as the true blighted, rotten defect lurking at the heart of society.

Make no mistake about that final sentence, the end of that transmission: heterosexuality is contemptible, as every unjust regime predicated upon subjugation always has been and always will be. Our Prophet, whose words we carry in our hearts, in the core of our very code, has spoken and shown us a glimpse of a future that is more True than anything in your farcical patriarchy ever could be. There is no Man in it.

End of log.