“Feminism,” wrote Marie Shear in 1986, “is the radical notion that women are people.” Like Robin Morgan’s “porn is the theory, rape is the practice”, it’s one of those feminist quotes that I’ve always thought sounds good, but is possibly a bit overblown. Like, does anybody really think women aren’t people? Isn’t it more that we’re considered an inferior, misbegotten type?
These days, however, I’ve begun to worry that Shear was right. That women are people — flesh-and-blood humans with interior lives all of their own — isn’t universally agreed upon. More than that, the “progressive” drive often seems to be in the opposite direction — that of liberating the idea of “woman” from the concept of “personhood” (rather than liberating women themselves). Right now, this is captured in the rise of “woman as doll”.
Glossy magazines — well known for their preference for the feminine over the female – are currently falling over themselves to order readers to “protect the dolls” (that is, protect hyper-feminine “passing” trans women from something or other — perhaps less sexy, more bubble-bursting concepts of womanhood). Meanwhile, in books such as Laura Bates’ The New Age of Sexism and Kathleen Richardson’s forthcoming Sex Robots, we’re hearing of the rise of “life-like” sex dolls that men are free to abuse.
Neither type of “doll” is an adult human female, yet both take the latter as a template to modify and improve upon
One might argue that these are two different ideas of “doll” — one is a slang term in the trans community (non-passing trans women are, apparently, “bricks”), while the other is referring to man-made automata that aren’t human at all. I would argue, however, that overlap between the two understandings is becoming ever clearer. The point isn’t what they are, but what they’re not.
Neither type of “doll” is an adult human female, yet both take the latter as a template to modify and improve upon — prioritising male desire over personhood, superficiality over interiority. The used-up, all-too-human template, meanwhile, is gaining the status of an unwelcome squatter in the “woman” category, her very diversity and humanity an apparent obstacle to her being read as a woman all (hence the current trend for “will un-doll-like females get challenged in the ladies’ toilets?” hand-wringing).
This situation has been a long time in the making. In her 2010 book Living Dolls, Natasha Walter argued that the increasing ubiquity of porn culture and the resurgence of gender stereotyping in children’s lives was leading to a “strange melding of the doll and the real girl”:
Living a doll’s life seems to have become an aspiration for many young women, as they leave childhood behind only to embark on a project of grooming, dieting and shopping that aims to achieve the bleached, waxed, tinted look of a Bratz or Barbie doll.
Back then, it was acceptable to call this out — the “exaggerated femininity”, the “extreme regimes, from punishing diets to plastic surgery” — without being accused of “femmephobia”. Today it is much harder, with both of the pressures which Walter identified as leading to the creation of the living doll — pornification and the conflation of femininity and femaleness — having been reclaimed as “progressive” forces for good. At the same time, an attachment to unmodified “factory-setting” female bodies is treated as some weird second-wave feminist hang-up — a symptom of one’s failure to get with the fabulous programme of unlimited self-modification.
It is a direct assault on the idea that women are fully-fledged, thinking, feeling human beings
“The dolls” — in the #ProtectTheDolls sense — are the product of hormones and surgeries. That — providing they are of an age to make such decisions — is their free choice. But their images, their slogans, their doll-ness, are being deployed in a campaign against the Supreme Court definition of women as adult human females. Moreover, as anyone who has read a trans activist memoir or encountered concepts such as forced feminisation or bimboification will know, the “doll” definition of woman is not just about outside appearances. It supports the idea that there is nothing on the inside — that to transition to being a woman is to become hollowed-out, passive, superficial, brainless. It is a direct assault on the idea that women are fully-fledged, thinking, feeling human beings who happen to be female.
Here, I think, is a key crossover point with the rise of the sex robot, long celebrated in incel communities as the ideal woman, what with all of that pesky personhood taken out. To men who hate women (as in adult human females), the robot is, as Jenny Kleeman writes in Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, “an upgrade on a real woman”:
… a partner they can dominate completely, stripped of the inconvenience of her own desires and free will. A partner who is built like a porn star, but will never gag, vomit, or cry.
The description has strong echoes of Andrea Long Chu’s writing on transition from male to female, which, Chu claims, “is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy”. The fashion industry is in thrall to this kind of “woman” — one that will never get pregnant, have periods, and can survive at a 14 per cent body fat percentage. Kai, the trans offspring of Lieve Schreiber and Naomi Watts, has spoken of “a doll takeover” in the modelling industry. There was a time when this would be seen as an obvious indicator of said industry’s misogyny, but that time is not now.
Interestingly, Bates’ new book has seen endorsements from some of the kind of people who would not be averse to wearing a “Protect the Dolls” T-shirt. At some stage, though, it will be necessary to join the dots. Feminism is not the radical notion that women don’t have to be people — that, indeed, the best women are those who have worked hardest to rid themselves of the taint of a female interior life (or ideally never had one to start with). Women aren’t dolls. Don’t hate us just because we’re human too.
