The genital inspection unit
The genital inspection unit It is preposterous to frame the desire for single-sex spaces as hysterical or weird Artillery Row By Victoria Smith 22 January, 2025 Share Slice 1 H ow much time do rape survivors spend fantasising about having their genitals inspected by strangers every time they want to use a single-sex toilet or changing room? I’m going to suggest it’s no time at all. It might be a turn-on for some people — perhaps the kind of people for whom using such spaces would indeed be a transgression. For most people it isn’t. On the contrary, for those in need of reassurance that their privacy will be respected, the idea can be deeply distressing, worsened only by insinuations that actually, they ’re only pretending not to like it. Along with the classic “you’ve got a gender neutral toilet at home ”, the “fantasy genital inspection” argument has long been used by those who don’t think there ought to be any space on earth in which women and girls can congregate without the potential presence of men and boys. They are both stupid arguments, in which the person making them must pretend not to understand the difference between private and public space , or the point of having regulations and social norms which rely on the goodwill of others. In the case of “genital inspection s” , women and girls are told if they want any room of their own, someone would have to stand outside it, looking into their pants to make sure there was no penis present. Apparently one couldn’t just expect penis-owners to follow rules on the basis that they ’d face disapproval were they found to be breaking them . Those who claim to be no threat to women can’t be trusted to demonstrate it, therefore the only thing for it is to have no boundaries for them to overstep. They would like to liberate the word “woman” from its association with boring, adult human females This nonsense argument has been trotted out repeatedly in the US over the past week, in Democrat responses to the banning of male players on female sports teams. According to Representative Jim McGovern the bill demonstrates Republican s’ “creepy obsession with your kid s’ private part s” , whilst Katherine M. Clark claims it “puts a target on the back of every girl, every woman who chooses to play sports. The genital inspection of little girls is the wrong answer ”. Forced to concede that no one is proposing these measures in practice, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ominously declared that “when there is no enforcement mechanism, you open the door to every enforcement mechanism ”. I despise these arguments, far more than I dislike your average dumb arguments. They are not just idiotic, but cruel. Everyone who deploys them must know that some of the people they are accusing of having a “creepy obsession” with “private part s” are sexual assault survivors . They must be aware that many women and girls want spaces of their own because of past trauma. To respond with “jeez, why are you so obsessed with penises ?” is exquisitely cruel. I don’t think this cruelty is wholly accidental, either. It links to a broader trend amongst those who claim to be on the side of abuse survivors — providing the abuser is, say, Andrew Tate or Donald Trump — but won’t hear a word against the worst excesses of trans activism, hardcore pornography or the sex trade. Rather than confront their complicity in causing harm, they reflect shame back onto victims, implying that genuine fears are, in fact, fantasies. As the classic victim-blamer would say, “ they love it really .” It is clear by now that the porn-soaked Left is not invested in liberating women and girls as flesh-and-blood humans. They would like to liberate the word “woman” from its association with boring, ageing adult human females , and they would like to liberate acts of dominance and degradation from their association with abuse. They do not offer a rejection so much as a refinement of the rape culture of the Trumpian Right. It’s not that they won’t hurt women, but they won’t stigmatise the act of causing pain — at least, not when they ’re doing it. Underpinning this is an age-old belief about women, one that has found new life in pseudo-intellectual theorising that reduces them to “ an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eye s ”. women like humiliation. They ’re natural masochists. They want to be shamed. When they say they don’t, it’s actually because they do. When a woman says she wants a female-only space, what she really wants is someone on the door, ready to conduct a humiliating “inspection ”. A while ago I read an article about the writer Richard Seymour in which, having praised how seriously he takes “racism, sexism and transphobia ”, the journalist quotes from his book Disaster Nationalism : If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking “critical skill s” or “media literacy”: the fantasy is doing something for me . This instantly captured for me how many of those who attack “TERF s” as right-wing or even fascistic pretend to offer some complex analysis of motivations which actually boils down to suggesting women secretly like imagining being assaulted in public toilets. For instance, in Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler suggests “TERF s” willingly engage in “a phantasmatic reduction of men not only to their penises, but to attacking penise s” . She accuses JK Rowling of harbouring a “fantasy, namely, that trans women are really men (beware!) and that men are rapists or potential rapists (all of them , really?), by virtue of their organs (understood how?)” This is treating feminist resistance to male sexual entitlement as though it is a version of the Daily Mail Sidebar of Shame, a site that gives you an excuse to pore over things you claim to find appalling, but only because you want an excuse to obsess over them . The belief that women want to be hurt — that when they say no, they mean yes — is not exactly new. Of course it can be found amongst “traditional” men. Nonetheless, the way in which it has been manifested in, for instance, the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his fellow rapists , or the recent revelations about the author Neil Gaiman , is a product of the porn age. These were scenarios in which no one involved is saying “none of this happened” (though Gaiman is currently cagey about what did and did not). They are saying it happened, but the accuser was a willing participant. Or a willing-unwilling one. Isn’t that what all women are ? I don’t think anyone using the “genital inspection s” argument actually fears such things will take place. It is effective, though, because it merges together imaginary predators with those who want privacy because of past abuse. In doing so, it effectively silences the latter. After all, they may already fear the abuse is something they brought on themsel ves due to some inner dirtiness , and now here they are , apparently exhibiting a “creepy obsession” with children’s genitals. I think it is unconscionable for those such as McGovern, Clark and Ocasio-Cortez to have sought to score points in this way. It’s a total abandonment of compassion. Then again, I guess you can do that and sleep at night when you’ve embraced a politics which sees experiencing cruelty as just what every woman wants. Share Slice 1 Enjoying The Critic online? It's even better in print Try five issues of Britain’s most civilised magazine for £10 Subscribe Tags Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Jim McGovern Katherine M. Clark Transgender
The genital inspection unit It is preposterous to frame the desire for single-sex spaces as hysterical or weird Artillery Row By Victoria Smith 22 January, 2025 Share Slice 1 H ow much time do rape survivors spend fantasising about having their genitals inspected by strangers every time they want to use a single-sex toilet or changing room? I’m going to suggest it’s no time at all. It might be a turn-on for some people — perhaps the kind of people for whom using such spaces would indeed be a transgression. For most people it isn’t. On the contrary, for those in need of reassurance that their privacy will be respected, the idea can be deeply distressing, worsened only by insinuations that actually, they ’re only pretending not to like it. Along with the classic “you’ve got a gender neutral toilet at home ”, the “fantasy genital inspection” argument has long been used by those who don’t think there ought to be any space on earth in which women and girls can congregate without the potential presence of men and boys. They are both stupid arguments, in which the person making them must pretend not to understand the difference between private and public space , or the point of having regulations and social norms which rely on the goodwill of others. In the case of “genital inspection s” , women and girls are told if they want any room of their own, someone would have to stand outside it, looking into their pants to make sure there was no penis present. Apparently one couldn’t just expect penis-owners to follow rules on the basis that they ’d face disapproval were they found to be breaking them . Those who claim to be no threat to women can’t be trusted to demonstrate it, therefore the only thing for it is to have no boundaries for them to overstep. They would like to liberate the word “woman” from its association with boring, adult human females This nonsense argument has been trotted out repeatedly in the US over the past week, in Democrat responses to the banning of male players on female sports teams. According to Representative Jim McGovern the bill demonstrates Republican s’ “creepy obsession with your kid s’ private part s” , whilst Katherine M. Clark claims it “puts a target on the back of every girl, every woman who chooses to play sports. The genital inspection of little girls is the wrong answer ”. Forced to concede that no one is proposing these measures in practice, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ominously declared that “when there is no enforcement mechanism, you open the door to every enforcement mechanism ”. I despise these arguments, far more than I dislike your average dumb arguments. They are not just idiotic, but cruel. Everyone who deploys them must know that some of the people they are accusing of having a “creepy obsession” with “private part s” are sexual assault survivors . They must be aware that many women and girls want spaces of their own because of past trauma. To respond with “jeez, why are you so obsessed with penises ?” is exquisitely cruel. I don’t think this cruelty is wholly accidental, either. It links to a broader trend amongst those who claim to be on the side of abuse survivors — providing the abuser is, say, Andrew Tate or Donald Trump — but won’t hear a word against the worst excesses of trans activism, hardcore pornography or the sex trade. Rather than confront their complicity in causing harm, they reflect shame back onto victims, implying that genuine fears are, in fact, fantasies. As the classic victim-blamer would say, “ they love it really .” It is clear by now that the porn-soaked Left is not invested in liberating women and girls as flesh-and-blood humans. They would like to liberate the word “woman” from its association with boring, ageing adult human females , and they would like to liberate acts of dominance and degradation from their association with abuse. They do not offer a rejection so much as a refinement of the rape culture of the Trumpian Right. It’s not that they won’t hurt women, but they won’t stigmatise the act of causing pain — at least, not when they ’re doing it. Underpinning this is an age-old belief about women, one that has found new life in pseudo-intellectual theorising that reduces them to “ an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eye s ”. women like humiliation. They ’re natural masochists. They want to be shamed. When they say they don’t, it’s actually because they do. When a woman says she wants a female-only space, what she really wants is someone on the door, ready to conduct a humiliating “inspection ”. A while ago I read an article about the writer Richard Seymour in which, having praised how seriously he takes “racism, sexism and transphobia ”, the journalist quotes from his book Disaster Nationalism : If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking “critical skill s” or “media literacy”: the fantasy is doing something for me . This instantly captured for me how many of those who attack “TERF s” as right-wing or even fascistic pretend to offer some complex analysis of motivations which actually boils down to suggesting women secretly like imagining being assaulted in public toilets. For instance, in Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler suggests “TERF s” willingly engage in “a phantasmatic reduction of men not only to their penises, but to attacking penise s” . She accuses JK Rowling of harbouring a “fantasy, namely, that trans women are really men (beware!) and that men are rapists or potential rapists (all of them , really?), by virtue of their organs (understood how?)” This is treating feminist resistance to male sexual entitlement as though it is a version of the Daily Mail Sidebar of Shame, a site that gives you an excuse to pore over things you claim to find appalling, but only because you want an excuse to obsess over them . The belief that women want to be hurt — that when they say no, they mean yes — is not exactly new. Of course it can be found amongst “traditional” men. Nonetheless, the way in which it has been manifested in, for instance, the trial of Dominique Pelicot and his fellow rapists , or the recent revelations about the author Neil Gaiman , is a product of the porn age. These were scenarios in which no one involved is saying “none of this happened” (though Gaiman is currently cagey about what did and did not). They are saying it happened, but the accuser was a willing participant. Or a willing-unwilling one. Isn’t that what all women are ? I don’t think anyone using the “genital inspection s” argument actually fears such things will take place. It is effective, though, because it merges together imaginary predators with those who want privacy because of past abuse. In doing so, it effectively silences the latter. After all, they may already fear the abuse is something they brought on themsel ves due to some inner dirtiness , and now here they are , apparently exhibiting a “creepy obsession” with children’s genitals. I think it is unconscionable for those such as McGovern, Clark and Ocasio-Cortez to have sought to score points in this way. It’s a total abandonment of compassion. Then again, I guess you can do that and sleep at night when you’ve embraced a politics which sees experiencing cruelty as just what every woman wants. Share Slice 1
