Knowledge runs down.

First, some definitions, without which nothing will make sense:

Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply: Everyone is female and everyone hates it (p 11).

female[:] any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another (p 11).

And some core ideas:

Femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you (p 11).

Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female (p 12).

Everyone is female, but how one copes with being female – the specific defense mechanisms that one consciously or unconsciously develops as a reaction formation against one’s femaleness, within the terms of what is historically and socioculturally available – that is what we ordinarily call gender (p. 12-13).

Human civilization represents a diverse array of attempts to suppress and mitigate femaleness, that this is in fact the implicit purpose of all human activity, and most, of all, that activity we call politics (p 13).

Gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot become gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for (p 30).

All gender is internalized misogyny (p 35).

If sexual orientation is basically the social expression of one’s own sexuality, then gender is basically a social expression of someone else’s sexuality (p 36).

To be female is to be an object (p 37).

Gender is always a process of objectification (p 38).

Gender is something other people give you (p 38).

Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness (p 63).

Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is (p 77).

Most desire is nonconsensual; most desires aren’t desired (p 79).

No one in their right mind would want to be female. Which, remember, is all of us (p 79).

Women may be capable of political action, by females never are (p 84).

True art would be nothing at all (p 86).

Ideas I loved and want to dig into more:

A bit may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real (p 19).

…make statements not because they were accurate or provable, but simply because she wanted to (p 19).

The paradox of the manifesto … is that its call to action is just that: a call, not an act … it’s too serious to be taken seriously (p 19-20).

Castration happens on both sides (p 22).

(Penis envy!)

Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone “else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism (p 35).

(Catherine MacKinnon’s “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State” and her discussion on how every element of female gender stereotype is sexual.)

If identity were all there were to gender… your gender identity would simply exist, in mute abstraction, and no one, least of all yourself, would care (p 38).

You do not get to consent to yourself (p 38).

Others, sometimes grouped under the label “pro-sex,” wondered how their feminist commitments might be reconciled with genuinely pleasurable experiences of dominance and submission – not to mention, eroticism generally (p 64)

(Pleasure and Danger conference – Barnard College, 1982.)

To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy (p 74).

(Why is captioned porn so hot?)

Too often, feminists have imaged powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force, and they’ve forgotten that more often than not, desire is this external force (p 79).

She’s being done to. She hasn’t given her consent as much as given up consenting (p 88).

unreadable, vaguely hostile, but also weirdly passive (p 90).

Bangers:

Everyone does their best to want power, because deep down, no one wants it at all (p 25).

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 fellare, meaning “to suck a dick” (p 44).

Obviously, Money’s got the name wrong – by all rights, it should be the Eve Principle, given that in the fable Eve is, well, prinicpal (p 47).

Does he even know what he’s saying? (p 47).

Taken seriously, it suggests that the manosphere red-piller’s resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria (p 54).

Isn’t that the whole point of gender – letting someone else do your living for you? (p 55).

This reminds him of the film Fight Club, because of course it does (p 60).

Men are not men. Men are never men (p 61).

No, but who cares? (p 65).

Like all men, Jon watches porn not to have power, but to give it up (p 68).

At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed (p 76).

This is such an incomplete list of the bangers because to make them make sense, you’d have to read the book. Which you should – it’s only 94 pages.

Love and buy it from your local bookstore,
Jordie