BONGI. Let the guys ram each other in
the ass and leave the women alone.

As she catcalls women on the street, Bongi is joined by two pickup artists. The stage directions identify them as “two cats, one white and one spade.” Spade here means “black,” a slang term dating back to the Harlem Renaissance; coming from a white girl like Valerie, it sounds like a slur. The men hit on Bongi, who rebuffs them, before turning their attention to the same women she’s been bothering. The white one makes a polite, ineffectual pass at a flashy girl walking by. “Beat it, Little Boy,” she spits. His friend thinks he can do better. “Step aside and let a man operate,” he boasts.

SPADE CAT. Good evening, Goddess. Forgive what may sound like mere hyperbole, but to me you are a goddess.

CHICK. I can well understand your reaction; you’ve captured the inner me. Is that Boy Scout over there a friend of yours?

SPADE CAT. A mere acquaintance, but enough of an acquaintance for me to know he’s not at all the man for you; his technique’s as washed-out as his skin.

CHICK. And yours’s as intense as yours?

SPADE CAT. You’re perceptive.

The caricature is so obvious that the chick reads it as quickly as the reader. She’s also, well, into it. As she and the spade cat retire to his place to get better acquainted, the white cat shuffles off, grumbling in dejection. “I may as well turn in my yo-yo; all the swinging chicks’re either queer or they go with spades,” he pouts. “A white man doesn’t stand a chance nowadays.” In a clever director’s hands, the scene might be an effective satire of what we could call a right-wing fantasy of national cuckoldry: the emasculated white man, spit-roasted by black men at one end and lesbians at the other, resigns himself to a life of sexual frustration. An incel is born.

On August 12, 2017, a group of neo-Nazis, Klan members, and alt-righters held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the murder of antifascist protestor Heather Heyer. Three days later, the prolific sissy porn creator known as Sissy Mindy—who has frequently posted topical content—posted an image to her Tumblr featuring a white woman performing oral sex on a black man. Her head is fully sideways, her eyes wide, as if surprised by its girth. “Fight against intolerance and racism,” reads the overlaid caption. “Suck big black cock.” The trope of the black man’s penis as large, threatening, and tremendously potent is an old one, of course, the standby excuse for lynchings and white supremacist terror, and it’s found all across the pornographic spectrum, where it’s known as BBC—from glossy mainstream series like Blacked, in which nubile white girls lose their interracial virginity, to one of sissy porn’s closer relatives, cuckolding porn, in which white boyfriends and husbands are forced to watch, and occasionally participate, as black men fuck their eager wives and girlfriends.

The classic explanation for this fetish is the revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s theory of negrophobia as a kind of murderous envy: the white man, projecting onto the black man the “infinite virility” he worries he lacks, proceeds to revenge himself against the latter, prototypically in the form of lynching. What sissy porn’s use of the trope suggests, however, is that when Fanon supposed that the negrophobe might be a repressed homosexual, he was only half-right. The paradox of white supremacy, of course, is that it’s actually an inferiority complex: the white man, who could have just as easily fantasized that the black man’s penis was smaller than his own—it would be fantasy either way, after all—nevertheless opts to imagine himself as a sexual failure, going limp in the presence of the black man’s unlimited sexual potency.

In other words, the true threat, which in Sissy Mindy’s post becomes an alluring promise, is not that the black man will prevent the white racist from being a man, but that the black man will remind the white man that he never wanted to be a man in the first place. Sissy Mindy registers this anxiety with the hashtags she places on the post, which include “BBC slave,” “black supremacy,” and “white genocide.” The last of these is a decades-old conspiracy theory about government-run white extinction programs (immigration, low fertility rates, abortion, etc.) that’s recently found new life as a popular alt-right talking point on social media. In this form, sissy porn becomes, as it were, the truest version of itself: a parodic expression of the altright’s most repressed sexual fantasies. The cheeky implication appears to be not only that becoming female is a bit like dying, but also that white sissification might constitute a form of erotic reparations for the devastation wrought by chattel slavery.

That’s a joke, of course, whether or not you find it funny. No one actually expects one blow job to change anything. In a sense, that’s the point: females and politics never mix. After decades of tedious feminist debates over agency, one thing is clear: women may be capable of political action, but females never are. Ultimately, the phrase forced feminization is redundant: the female is always the product of force, and force is invariably feminizing. This is why environments designed to forcibly masculinize their inhabit-ants—college fraternities and the US military come to mind—inevitably end up expressing their central contradiction (anyone forced to be a man couldn’t possibly be a man) not just through rape and sexual assault (of both men and women by men), but also with a set of hazing rituals in which men are forced to undergo feminizing sex acts. It’s also why the same contingent of feminists who seek to unmask trans women as male pretenders may almost always be relied upon to cast sex workers as the feminized victims of human traffickers—there is too much female among each group and not enough woman. If sex workers were really women, they would rescue themselves from the sexual objectification that makes them women; if trans women were women, they would have the good sense not to be.