An Appreciation Part 2

Similarities may be overlooked, but differences demand explanation. In a patriarchal society, wherein men rule, it is men who must explain women, not women who must explain men, and, since men regard themselves as normative, women are considered to be aberrational. In the Western world, until about 100 years ago, women were explained as inferior, weaker versions of men—as pale imitations, as it were, of their betters, or, as Sigmund Freud would have it, as castrated males possessed of "penis envy."

It has been said that it is the winners, not the losers, of military campaigns who write their nation's history. Likewise, it is the ruler, not the ruled, who defines (or assigns) the meanings and values of persons, places, and things in their societies. It hardly needs to be mentioned that, in defining such meanings and values, those who do so do so according to their own purposes.

Men have defined women as providers of pleasure, as domestic servants, and as bodies upon whom they may beget children—usually, in this order. To hear men tell it, women have breasts primarily for men's benefit, as means by which to provide them with pleasure, and only secondarily to suckle infants. Likewise, women's vaginas are not for the purpose—at least, not primarily—of incubating babies, but for the same purpose as the anus, the hands, and the mouth, which is to say, again, to pleasure men. In the final analysis, to be female (or, at least, feminine)—and one may be feminine without being a woman—is to be fucked, as I suggest in my short story "Transformation," is to be fucked.

Shemales (by which term, as I use it, I mean "chicks with dicks," that is, male-to-female transsexuals who, having otherwise completely feminized themselves, opt to retain their male genitals rather than to undergo sex-reassignment surgery) offer an opportunity to even more drastically separate women—or man-made women (the impulse to create the perfect woman, which is to say a man-made woman, remains as strong, or stronger, today as it was when it inspired Pygmalion to carve Galatea)—from her biological, or reproductive, function.