Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

power. This cannot be achieved simply by purchasing expensive body lotion. Men and women alike need to confront our fear of female flesh, to risk being overwhelmed by the power of women to change society and take charge of their own lives. All we need to do is acknowledge how hungry we are for that future to arrive, and take the first bite.
     

3
Gender Capital
     
    Sex class is so deep as to be invisible.
Shulamith Firestone
    The eroto-capitalist fear of female flesh has translated into a fight for gender itself. What is girlhood, after all, but shoes, clothes and conspicuous consumption? When femininity is intimately tied into the labour of objectification, the cues of gender itself can be bought and sold on the labour market. As such, any woman wishing to free herself from the mechanisms of misogyny imperils her socially-constructed sex. Why else are feminists so consistently de-sexed in the popular imagination?
     
    Feminism is construed as a threat to femininity when it is, in fact, a threat to gender as labour capital. Women of all ages who fear identifying with feminism cite the popular stereotype of feminists as hairy-legged, loose-breasted, man-hating or man-repelling lesbians who wear that most thuggishly androgyne of sartorial statements, dungarees. The stereotype has persisted for a reason: because it terrorises women with the fear that radical politics will destroy their sexuality and gender identity.
     
    Powerful women in the public eye, especially those who lobby for women’s rights, are subjected to tirades about their supposedly ‘masculine’ appearance and behaviour. Women fear abandoning our performative and submissive behaviours because we fear losing our sex. This is a legitimate fear. Women’s liberation does indeed constitute a challenge to the capitalist construction of gendered labour, however pleasant it may be to imagine that feminism can be done in five-hundred-dollar Manolos.
     
The second-wave feminine essential
    Second-wave feminism posited a reclamation of the feminine essential as an answer to the submissive, spayed, stilettoed stereotype of misogynist fantasy. An understanding that women’s bodies are arrogated spaces of political control made it easy for feminism to fall back on female body essentialism as the solution to patriarchal power. The notion, first posited by second-wave feminists, is that that behind the misogynist packaging of shoes, shopping and bland sexual stereotyping there is a ‘real’ feminine essential, centred in the ‘real’ female body, that would heal the hurt of centuries of oppression if we could only access it. This notion is utterly misplaced.
     
    A fantasy feminine essential, set against patriarchal feminine constructions and placed in binary opposition to the masculine, was never going to be an adequate foil to the machinations of capitalist patriarchy. The feminine as fact and as ideology is too dispersed and too pervasive for any one ‘feminist’ physicality to suffice. Too often, bodily essentialism disguises a retreat: a retreat from the politics of capital and labour, a retreat from the broader structures of women’s oppression, and a retreat from the true complexities of gender and sexuality. It is not enough, in short, to reclaim the female body as a site of power: we must also ask what the female body is, who has one, and how it is made.
     
Transsexual dialectics
    Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch that “The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity.” The appropriate response to psychological castration, however, is not aggressive maintenance of that polarity – nor can sex alone hold back the rampant, sterilising frigidity of capitalist gender ideals.
     
    The inadequacy of logic in traditional feminist thought about gender and sex is most self-evident when we come, as we must, to the trans question.
     
    The ideological status of trans women has rent stultifying schisms in feminist dialectic. High-profile thinkers such as Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, Janice Raymond, Julie Bindel and even Gloria Steinem have spoken out against what Greer terms “people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody.”
     
    Some prominent radical feminists have publicly declared that trans women are misogynist, “mutilated men” in awkward dresses attempting to violently penetrate the sacred space