ARTHUR. Fuck is in the air; it’s overpowering; it
carries you away with it, sucks you right up.

If you’ve ever seen sissy porn, you’ll know that turning people female is exactly what sissy porn says it does. Also known as forced feminization or “forced fem,” sissy porn seems to have begun circulating principally on the microblogging platform Tumblr in or around 2013. The genre is characteristically user-generated rather than produced by a traditional studio: in large part, sissy content creators would appropriate videos, stills, and animated GIFs from mainstream heterosexual or “shemale” pornography—intellectual property is notoriously difficult to protect in today’s porn industry—and modify this material with captions altering their original meaning. In late 2018, when the microblogging platform moved to ban graphic sexual content, sissy porn creators, like many other sex workers, were forced to flee to other platforms, including Twitter and Instagram.

Sissy porn’s central conceit is that the women it depicts (some cis, some trans, mostly but not always white) are in fact former men who have been feminized (“sissified”) by being forced to wear makeup, wear lingerie, and perform acts of sexual submission. This is executed through the unique form of second-person address in which captions are typically written: sissy porn directly addresses its viewers and presumes to inform them of their own desires: “You love to be fucked in the ass,” for instance, or “You want to suck cock.” (Sissy porn often uses cock as an uncountable mass noun, like water or sugar, presumably because there can always be more.) Captions further instruct viewers to understand that the very act of looking at sissy porn itself constitutes an act of sexual degradation, with the implication that, whether they like it or not, viewers will inevitably be transformed into females themselves. This makes sissy porn a kind of metapornography, that is, porn about what happens to you when you watch porn. In other words, sissy porn takes the implicitly feminizing effect of all pornography (even the most vanilla) and promotes it to the level of explicit content—often with spectacular results.

At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the gay male critic Leo Bersani famously wrote that public horror of anal sex betrayed a hateful envy of the “intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” Sissy porn takes this literally. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is. At the same time, sissy porn remains wholly uninterested in who’s doing the fucking. Men appear, when they appear, only in fragments: a hand, an ass, a stray leg. Tops are props; their function is purely structural. “To call a man an animal is to flatter him,” Valerie writes in SCUM. “He’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.”

Sissy porn makes frequent use of fetish objects—makeup, lingerie, breasts, high heels, and the color pink—but unlike the classical Freudian fetish, these objects promise castration, instead of warding against it. For Freud, the fetish was a clear substitute for the “absent female phallus.” The little boy, traumatized by the discovery that his mother has no penis and fearing lest the same fate befall his own, looks for reassurance to an object that can replace that penis—a high-heeled shoe, for instance, or the touch of velvet. The fetish is thus “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.” Yet even Freud knew that the fetish, in disavowing castration, thereby implicitly acknowledged it; sissy porn exploits this weakness, transforming the fetish from an assurance that the penis will be kept safe into a guarantee that the penis will be lost forever. This means that, in cases where the sissy is a trans woman, even her own fetishized penis becomes a symbol of castration. If her penis is limp, it is mocked for its tiny size and called a “clitty”; if it is hard, this is simply proof that she is enjoying her degradation.

In fact, to be a sissy is always to lose your mind. The technical term for this is bimboification. Captions often instruct viewers to submit themselves to hypnosis, brainwashing, brain-melting, dumbing down, and other techniques for scooping out intelligence. “Why do I like the concept of being a Bimbo?” asks one user. “It’s because my brain is always full. I’m always worrying if Master truly loves me. Am I enough? Am I making good choices? Do people actually like me? How can I live in a country like this with this current political climate? Where else could I even imagine going?” The gestures most often looped in GIF format almost always register the evacuation of will: wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads. Even the GIF format itself communicates this, a kind of centrifuge for distilling the femaleness to its barest essentials—an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.

Sissy porn did make me trans. At very least it served as a neat allegory for my desire to be female—and increasingly, I thought, for all desire as such. Too often, feminists have imagined powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force, and they’ve forgotten that more often than not, desire is this external force. Most desire is nonconsensual; most desires aren’t desired. Wanting to be a woman was something that descended upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection—or a mental illness, at least if you believe the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where gender dysphoria can be found sandwiched between frigidity and pyromania. The implication is obvious: No one in their right mind would want to be female.

Which, remember, is all of us.