Sissy Porn at Princeton University

Trans-identified male presents lecture on forced feminization pornography

In April 2020, a trans-identified male named Río Sofia gave a presentation for Princeton University titled Forced Womanhood!, after his exhibition in 2017 at Cooper Union College, wherein Sofia displayed photographs and video of himself in scenes modeled on sissification pornography. In sissification, or sissy pornography, sometimes also called “forced femme”, men are ostensibly ‘forced’ into traditional feminine sex roles, including being made to wear makeup, pink frilly dresses, and lingerie, as well as to perform acts of sexual submission. The genre emerged from BDSM practices of dominance, submission, and sadomasochism, and the male participant, as well as viewers, are encouraged to experience sexual arousal through the humiliation of being degraded as though they were women.

Princeton University is an ivy league institution that consistently ranks among the top private universities in the United States. Founded in 1746, it is the fourth-oldest institute of higher learning in the nation, and in 2021 ranked #12 globally. The average annual cost, before scholarships or financial aid, is $74,150, according to the US Department of Education.

The description of the exhibition on Sofia’s website states:

"Río Sofia first encountered forced feminization pornography in 2015 while thumbing through fetish magazines at a shop in Manhattan. In sissification porn, where men are forced into womanhood as a form of punishment or humiliation, she found a rich underground [of] visual language that complicated her understanding of transgender representation. Within the context of BDSM, these depictions of gender transformation suggest coercion and a loss of (male) power, depictions that contradict developing narratives in the mainstream that celebrate gender transition as an empowering form of self-determination.

In this project, Río inserts her body into the forced feminization narrative by utilizing self-portraiture and existing conventions in print photography. Forced feminization imagery in many ways parallels Catholic religious iconography. By using similar formal techniques involving composition, lighting, and the gaze, both establish for their reader a divine and unquestionable order of social hierarchy.”

Sofia has presented these ideas and images at other reputable institutions in the US, including The New Museum and Rutgers University.

The complete presentation continues on for an hour and a half. I have therefore edited it into a more manageable summary of 11 clips, each two minutes or less, highlighting what I believe are the most relevant — and the most brazenly misogynist — arguments. I will summarize the information first, then offer a brief rebuttal.

[...]

Introduction

“Río’s recent body of work explores forced feminization porn. Forced Womanhood! resonates with me because it was telling a different story: sissies being locked in chastity devices, husbands forced to transition and stuffed into their wives’ closets. Río’s art directly confronts gender’s coerciveness and it’s non-agentiality, through synthesizing a wide and fascinating history of visual representation. From mid-century femdom magazines and underground comics, to Catholic iconography, and Italian Renaissance art. Río’s work has been exhibited widely, including at Cooper Union, for which she received her BFA in 2017, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the New Museum, and the UNO gallery.”

The presenter is RL Goldberg, a lecturer in Princeton’s English Department, whose alma mater is Harvard University.

Río Sofia begins his presentation by saying, “Bear with me as we expand into the constellation of ideas around forced feminization, forced womanhood, feminism, and porn!” He then begins to discuss forced feminization pornography magazines and points out that there are often advertisements for ‘feminizing’ hormones located in the back pages of such publications. Medical literature regarding gender identity ‘treatments’ uses this same term, ‘feminizing’.

For example, the official website for University of California at San Francisco states:

“The goal of feminizing hormone therapy is the development of female secondary sex characteristics, and suppression/minimization of male secondary sex characteristics. Sexual and gonadal effects include reduction in erectile function, changes in libido, reduced or absent sperm count and ejaculatory fluid, and reduced testicular size. Feminizing hormone therapy also brings about changes in emotional and social functioning.”

“There’s a network of people that are also around this. There’s actually a culture around forced feminization and sissy porn.

There are alternative ways of transitioning. When we talk about these kinds of stories, whether they’re fictional or real, some of them go as far as coercing breast implants, or forcing their husbands to wear a chastity device for six months, or putting their husband on hormones.”

Pornography As A Religion

Sofia compares BDSM pornography to classical Catholic religious iconography, specifically what he describes as the deliberate compositional choices which reinforce a sense of hierarchy: “to establish a sense of hierarchy… similar elements are being employed to suggest who’s in power, who’s in control, and who is not.”

Sofia is not wrong in noticing an element of BDSM in Catholic artwork. Traditional Christianity associates suffering, self-sacrifice, and the ability to endure torment with moral fortitude.

Psychologist Sam E. Greenberg, in his 2019 paper “Divine Kink: A Consideration of the Evidence for BDSM as a Spiritual Ritual”, writes:

“Throughout the history of Christianity, the pious practiced asceticism, self-mortification, and martyrdom to prove their spiritual devotion. Self-flagellation, the wearing of sackcloth, and ritual deprivation through fasting or abstaining from pleasures were common. The Roman Catholic church endorsed the religious and spiritual value of pain and suffering, and encouraged its use as mitigation for sinful action.”

He also quotes Andrea Beckmann, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Lincoln, UK, from her book The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion: Deconstructing Sadomasochism:

“The lack of areas of spirituality that were formerly satisfied by religious rituals left a void in Western consumer societies. The filling of this void might be one of the broader social meanings that the increased motivation to engage in the ‘bodily practice’ of consensual ‘SM’ in contemporary consumer culture signals.”

The idea of BDSM as a religious ritual has merit, particularly when considered as an aspect of consumer culture, as Beckmann suggests. Sadomasochism is the sexualization of power politics; it naturalizes a toxic ‘master-slave’ paradigm, a role that some religions could also be said to fill. The idea of a need for a higher power, or a need to be dominated unquestioningly, can be said to exist in both religious practices as well as BDSM.

In consumer cultures, corporate interest can take on the aspect of the reigning authority. Significantly, BDSM practices require the purchasing of various appurtenances; objects come between human intimacy and as a result, humans themselves become little more than extensions of objects.

Moreover, pornography consumption can act as a unifier among those who may otherwise have differing views or interests. It appeals to men across the political spectrum. Pornography, in many ways, is the propaganda of patriarchy. This can be thought of as the “common erotic project” that Andrea Dworkin refers to in Our Blood when she says:

“The pornography of male sadism almost always contains an idealized, or unreal, view of male fellowship. The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this — since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it. Each man, knowing his deep-rooted impulse to savagery, presupposes this same impulse in other men and seeks to protect himself from it. The rituals of male sadism over and against the bodies of women are the means by which male aggression is socialized so that a man can associate with other men without the imminent danger of male aggression against his own person. The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.”

Sofia next plays an audio clip from a 2010 talk given by Nina Arsenault, a Canadian trans-identified male, platformed by conference organizer Ideacity. Arsenault is introduced at the conference as a “performer of femininity” who has “retained her penis.”

Upon sitting, Arsenault immediately spreads his legs open wide, which he explains is because “when I sit like this, I feel the most penetrative, and I want to penetrate you… your mind.”

Arsenault has had 60 cosmetic surgery procedures over the course of 8 years. He has written two autobiographical plays titled, The Silicone Diaries wherein he played Barbie. “In night life I impersonate Jessica Rabbit,” Arsenault says, “and I’ve also been hired to represent Barbie at her official birthday party that Mattel threw at the opening night of Toronto fashion week.”

Half-way through his presentation, Arsenault lashes out at feminists who criticize the objectification of women and angrily speaks of the “rejection that women should have plastic surgery, believe in beauty,” and the idea that “we should all stop objectifying women,” views that he clearly disagrees with. “The democratization of social networking sites has been invaluable for me to disseminate my ideas,” says Arsenault, who goes on to state:

“I started objectifying my body at a very young age, probably about 3 or 4 years old, because I knew that I had the spirit of a young girl inside me, but the body of a boy… I create art from obsession. When I make art I… think of imagery, it’s in my mind, and then I check in with what’s happening inside my body.” (Here Arsenault looks down at his lap). “My body will respond to the thoughts with sensation. It’s very exciting… what’s happening inside my genitals… and inside my anal sphincter. The images that arouse in me the greatest sensation, those are the things that I create art from. My art is not created from a place where I’m trying to ease the suffering of other women.”

In a way, feminists should be grateful to Arsenault for his honesty. The assertion that women do not exist in bodies reduces women to sexualized fantasies, while allowing men to claim ownership of both a ‘female mind’ and a ‘female body’: divide and conquer. Objectification of women and girls is a pillar of gender identity ideology, though few males who appropriate womanhood are quite as willing to say the quiet part aloud as Arsenault.

Sadomasochism

“You’ve got other really fun things, like this idea of disempowerment. Here you’ve got the castration — sorry, I mean the beheading of Holofernes — and then on the right, you’ve got the same thing,” Sofia says, alluding to a pornographic image of two males engaging in a sex act as a woman ‘forces’ one of the men into what would be the submissive female role in heterosexual BDSM practices: bound, with a slave collar, being sexually abused. Sofia does not elaborate on why he believes these two images portray “the same thing”. Presumably he is attempting to establish a correlation between a man being violated as a woman and death; that the loss of the masculine role — castration — is metaphorically equivalent to being killed. Framed this way, the common euphemisms of transgender activism can possibly be traced back to BDSM practices and the narrative that has been constructed around fetishes.

For instance, so-called dead naming (referring to a trans-identified person by their birth name) could also be considered as a reference to ego death, or the complete loss of subjective self-identity. This framework could assist in explaining why it is that trans activists insist that words are literal violence, where the act of naming men as men, for example, deconstructs their illusory, projected self.

In turn, it is possible that linguistic ‘transphobia’ can elicit a similar thrill as the sort induced by being humiliated, even when the humiliation is not a taunt, but the truth. In this sense, the public is unwittingly being duped into participating in BDSM, either as the dominant — those who criticize gender ideology — or submissive — trans activists themselves. Crucially, material reality, especially women’s reality, is being used as the vehicle for this rouse.

When one considers that BDSM practices involved in forced feminization revolve around humiliation as a key point of arousal, this also could implicate an element of sexual pleasure involved for some in being considered to be subjugated or oppressed — that the male claim to a female identity is, in itself, a fetishization of women’s systemic subordination. (read much more)