Chu - Females: A Concern

First published by Verso 2019
Andrea Long Chu 2019

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-737-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-738-8 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-739-5 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Everyone is female.

The worst books are all by females. All the great art heists of the past three hundred years were pulled off by a female, working solo or with other females. There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets. A list of things invented by females would include: airplanes, telephones, the smallpox vaccine, ghosting, terrorism, ink, envy, rum, prom, Spain, cars, gods, coffee, language, stand-up comedy, every kind of knot, double parking, nail polish, the letter tau, the number zero, the H-bomb, feminism, and the patriarchy. Sex between females is no better or worse than any other kind of sex, because no other kind of sex is possible. Shark attacks exclusively target females. All the astronauts were female, which means the moon is a female-only zone. The 1 percent is 100 percent female. The entire Supreme Court is female. The entire United States Senate is female. The president is, obviously, a female.

Females dominate the following professions: zookeeping, haberdashery, landscaping, investment banking, long-distance trucking, lutherie, consulting, talent management, tort law, taxidermy, real estate development, orthodontia, prison administration, and the mafia. Not all females are serial killers, but all serial killers are female, including the necrophiles. The entire incarcerated population is female. All rape survivors are females. All rapists are females. Females masterminded the Atlantic slave trade. All the dead are female. All the dying, too. The hospitals of the world are full of them: females in beds or gingerly walking about, full of pain, recovering, slipping away. All the guns in the world are owned by females.

I am female. And you, dear reader, you are female, evenespeciallyif you are not a woman. Welcome. Sorry.

This book began life as an essay on a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas called Up Your Ass. Solanas is mainly remembered for two things: self-publishing the SCUM Manifesto in 1967, a darkly funny polemic against the government, the money system, all men, and most women; and shooting artist Andy Warhol at his studio, the Factory, then located on Union Square West in Manhattan, in 1968. The play usually appears as a possible motive for the shooting: Since sending him a copy of the script in 1965, Valerie had been nagging Andy to produce Up Your Ass, and her paranoia that he was playing her increased in tandem with his indifference. As Breanne Fahs writes in her biography of Solanas, Valeries anxieties were both based in fact and somewhat bizarre; Andy had lost the play in part because of frank disinterest, in part because of Andys sloppiness, and in part because he generally neglected everyone in his sphere who felt passionately about anything.

Up Your Ass, or, From the Cradle to the Boat, or, The Big Suck, or, Up from the Slime is a weird, fascinating play. The unpublished manuscript reads like a very enjoyable undergraduate one-actrough, raunchy, highly narcissistic, and so blatantly irreverent that its tone can feel impossible to parse. I dedicate this play to me, Valerie writes on the first page, a continuous source of strength and guidance and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion, and faith this play would never have been written. Two additional acknowledgments follow: Myselffor proofreading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism, and suggestions, and an exquisite job of typing. Ifor independent research into men, married women, and other degenerates. This is vintage Valerie: impossibly serious, seriously impossible. Its one of the reasons I love her.

The antihero of Up Your Ass, Bongi Perez, is a caustic, wisecracking panhandler in tennis shoes and a loud, plaid sports jacket who spends the play catcalling broads, turning tricks, and grumbling about the coming destruction of the male sex. Indeed, Bongi, equal parts man-hater and chauvinist pig, is a clear stand-in for Valerie, who wrote Up Your Ass while grifting her way around Greenwich Village in the early sixties, poor, often homeless, doing sex work, hanging with street queens, loitering in cheap automatsshooting the shit, as she liked to say. Up Your Ass reflects this lifestyle: angry, gross, delighting in its own wit; a mostly plotless, often pornographic burlesque populated by broad sexual and racial stereotypes (a shit-eating secretary, a pompous male intellectual, a white-and-black pair of pickup artists). Its a fascinating read, but difficult to imagine performing without wearing an audience thin. The first full staging of Up Your Ass, devised by experimental theater director George Coates in 2000, seems to have compensated for the scripts shortcomings by setting most of the dialogue to sixties pop songs. The same production also featured an all-female cast.

Up Your Ass might be most interesting as a precursor to the SCUM Manifesto, copies of which Valerie would start handing out around the Village in 1967. Several times during the play, Bongi longs aloud for the end of the male sex, suggesting in one instance that men be eliminated through technology-assisted fetal sex selectiona bloodless genocide. The idea horrifies Russell, a white-collar worker who fancies himself a sophisticate. The two-sex system must be right, he protests, its survived hundreds of thousands of years. So has disease, Bongi shoots back. The exchange will make its way into SCUM almost to the letter. It doesnt follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist, Valerie writes there. When genetic control is possibleand soon it will beit goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects.

But Valerie would go further than that. If Up Your Ass only hinted at the coming male extinction, the SCUM Manifesto advanced the thesis that men are already female to begin with. The male is a biological accident, Solanas declares in her opening salvo. The Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. In fact, she suggests, the entire history of human civilization consists of mans sublimated attempts to fulfill his repressed desire to complete himself, to become female. On its own, this claim might provide the basis for a formidable theory of gender, but Valerie adds another wrinkle. The traditional division of male and female traitsbrave, assertive men and weak, dependent womenis an enormous scam perpetrated by men. In truth, the opposite is the case: women are cool, forceful, dynamic, and decisive, while it is men who are vain, frivolous, shallow, and weak. The male has done a brilliant job, Valerie admits, of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.