faildaughter
Failure and femininity
If you're reading this you're probably chronically online so I'm going to assume some things. I assume you've heard of the "would you rather have a thot daughter or gay son?" meme. You've seen men say in so many different ways "I don't want a daughter" in response to a woman posing provocatively, talking about sex, what have you. You've also probably borne witness to the vitriol women spit at other women whose lives they find morally conflicting and offensive; you may have also been a spitter. The subjects of this particular kind of outrage have one thing in common: they're what the aggressors see as faildaughters. Every woman is, when viewed from a certain angle, a faildaughter. What defines a faildaughter is engaging in what is perceived as intentional public degradation of the self.
There are, of course, the most obvious targets: girls with Onlyfans accounts, porn actresses, women doing vaguely sexual TikTok dances. Anyone who provides the sexual services that men create the demand for is seen as contemptible. When Riley Reid (who, to be clear, has done problematic things separate of this) posted pictures of her getting married, Twitter was filled with guys talking about how they felt sorry for her husband. Though they consumed her pornography, liked her pictures on Instagram, possibly bought fleshlights shaped like her vagina, they saw her as less than human—they couldn’t conceive that she could be in an actual relationship, that someone else could see her as worthy of love and care, that she could be a mother.
Virginie Despentes, from King Kong Theory:
Masculine grace and coherence in a nutshell, “Give me what I want, I beg you, so that I can spit in your face for doing it.” These days the budding porn actress is made aware of this as soon as she enters the profession: she is told repeatedly, so she isn’t under any illusion, that there will be no way back. Oh, we do like our women vulnerable, endangered, and branded. They pay a high price for having having left the straight and narrow and for having done it publicly.
I was thinking recently about Marie Calloway, who was an alt-lit phenomenon when I was a teenager. She was known for autofiction—written in flat “Asperger’s” prose—about losing her virginity, sleeping with an intellectual hero who already had a girlfriend, working sporadically as a sex worker, having a threesome. People were fascinated with her. They also despised her. She was writing, openly and without particular emotion, about the parts of the female experience that our culture deems most shameful. How dare she want validation, want to be objectified, express the desire to be loved by inappropriate men, have sex in exchange for money, seek out pain?
No one would make fun of a heterosexual man for wanting validation from attractive women. In fact, he’s perceived as defective in some way if he doesn’t—the way men prove their masculinity in the modern world is through their sexuality. But female sexuality is seen as inherently shameful. If you like conventionally attractive men, you’re shallow and despicable. If you like someone conventionally unattractive, you must be attracted to him for his money or motivated by hypergamy. If you don’t want to have sex you are a prude, disappointing, will probably be cheated on by your partner. If you are sexual you are promiscuous and not worthy of love and commitment. Heterosexual sex, even when consensual and mutually beneficial, is often framed as something the man takes and the woman gives. It follows that it's seen as de facto an act of submission in service of the man. This is partly why promiscuity in women is seen as offensive - because how we perceive sex has been shaped by how men experience and enjoy it.
How some people view it: to be female is to fail. Bitchy Jones, who wrote a blog (complaining) about (the state of) femdom, wrote about how degrading it is that when men want to be submissive, they dress up as women. Because the most humiliating thing most men can think of is being forced to be female. Men are failsons only if they're feminine in the wrong ways. In other words, failsons are faildaughters, hence the "gay son" part of the aforementioned meme. The gay son is equally as threatening as the thot daughter because it's assumed he takes the role a woman implicitly takes in a heterosexual relationship. This, of course, isn't to imply that men aren't subject to crushing + restrictive gender expectations - topic for another time.