this is the landing page for birzeblog

welcome to my rudimentary website. this is an archive of my work and a place where i will optimistically put more of my stuff in the future. currently though it's a work in progress as i port over my literally hundreds of pages of notes, essays, and miscellaneous posts of interest. it's likely this website will be continually (and rudimentarily) updated; i'm not good at technology, so you may have to keep up with this manually. building a website has unfortunately never really been my thing.

election season 2026

a list of people you should support in 2026 | a list of people you should oppose in 2026

as of March 6, 2025, i've begun compiling these two self-explanatory lists of candidates you should and should not support in 2026, and the reasons you should do that. these are to date as of July 10, 2025.

latest updates:
a furry declaration on pornography ‖ happy birthday, GamemasterAnthony ‖ on the matter of visibility in the furry subculture ‖ a theory on the recurrent furry moral panic ‖ on the tension of furry artistry and high culture ‖ on the matter of the acceptable target ‖ Femlandia (Christina Dalcher) is kind of a bad novel ‖ August 2025 posts ‖ July 2025 posts ‖ April 2025 posts ‖ March 2025 posts ‖ January 2025 posts ‖ November 2024 posts ‖ October 2024 posts ‖ September 2024 posts

a furry declaration on pornography

or, Freak power!

Alyaza Birze (April 23, 2026)

canonical link: "a furry declaration on pornography"

I’m not at all embarrassed at the use of the word freak. I think the way things are going in this country today, it’s a very honorable designation, and I’m proud of it.
— Hunter S. Thompson

Most people seem to want to visit sex as if it were a brothel or a shooting gallery, get their fixes, and then go home without getting busted and publicly labeled as perverts or sex fiends. They don’t want to try to integrate whatever they find in pornography that is so rewarding with the rest of their lives.
—Patrick Califia-Rice, “Sexual Outlaws v. The Sex Police”

as a furry, i reject in principle the following notion: that pornography is mere masturbatory material, and that its defense need be no more complex than a civil libertarian sentiment of “let people enjoy things.”

certainly it is the case that pornography need not be complicated or intellectual to justify its own existence—pornography should exist for its own sake, be made for its own reasons, and be engaged with on its own merit. but there is a subtle denigration, a sort of backhandedness, even in that not-uncommon sentiment that pornography is simply ‘art that makes you horny’ and that for this reason the fuss made of it by moral crusaders is undue. because the truth is even mere ‘art that makes you horny’ is itself an artform and an expression of collective eros—a kaleidoscope of pleasure and perverseness and prefiguring—which merits our absolute defense on all of its grounds.

my objection here is not least because horniness—a feeling that certainly overlaps with but is hardly synonymous with pornography—seems like quite a bad barometer through which to even insinuate or defend what is pornographic. but more pressingly my objection is one to the distilling of pornography into such a simple platitude. can the pornographer not conjure feelings just as any other artist could with their craft? can a pornographic work not carry within itself deeper literary, artistic, or political meaning; or engender feelings and fantasies that cross language and culture; or even simply make one feel more at ease with themselves through a mechanism besides titillation? indeed, i would argue that far more threatening to the status quo is the tendency of pornography to profoundly facilitate one's own social, sexual, and political development by prompting such questions—by making apparent that the sexual world is, and can be, more than a heteronormative box and its vanilla flavoring.

little wonder, if this is case, that pornography—this great frontier of sexual liberation—has always been so surveilled and policed, and now finds itself directly scrutinized under the auspices of ‘protecting children,’ ending ‘exploitative’ sex work, or combatting ‘obscenity.’ it is essentially subversive—queering—of all it touches. and it should go without saying that these are just new pretenses to attack this queering, this queerness itself; just pretenses to justify the age-old policing and problematizing of anything which deviates from a cisgender, heterosexual norm. but—just as bathhouse raids and crackdowns on cruising did in previous generations of queer liberation—these pretenses nonetheless clarify what is to be done, which is defend pornography on a fundamental level.

to defend pornography, i believe, is to defend one's affirmative right to visibility without compromise. it is to preserve one's right to see themselves—and others like them—love and be loved; and fuck and be fucked; and not be policed and problematized for this;

to defend pornography is to defend one's affirmative right to pluralistic expression. it is to preserve one's right to transgressive preferences, genders, sexes, identities, possibilities. . . rather than resign to the narrow-minded binaries and vanillaism of heteronormative society;

to defend pornography is to defend one's affirmative right to queer lives that one has not yet known, and yearns for; to queer lives that one is living, and breathing, and defending; and to queer lives that one has lost, and preserves the memory of. it is to preserve one's right to a queer utopianism, to prefigure a world in which one simply is, without question, without fear;

and to defend pornography is to defend one's affirmative right to be a freak and a faggot and a deviant and a degenerate, not least because to be these things is only proper when ‘deviance’ is anything other than a white, heterosexual nuclear family and ‘decency’ means nothing less than our own deaths—

we must recognize, in short, the integral erotic role pornography has in realizing what Simon Watney describes as the “mutual erotic possibilities of the body” and deriving “potential sexual pleasure from every part of itself and its surroundings.” and we must likewise recognize the integral social role of pornography, and its ability to help facilitate, as Foucault puts it, the creation of “unfor[e]seen kinds of relationships” that call into question the basis of heteronormativity.

and we must recognize that what we are defending—through pleasure and perverseness and prefiguring (and to paraphrase Patrick Califia-Rice)—is a world in which genuine sexual liberation is not only a privilege for the well-to-do but possible for all. it is the glimmer of a future in which everyone genuinely get to decide what they will experience; and can let go and trust that their limits will be respected; and can be assured everything that happens is done for their benefit.

happy birthday, GamemasterAnthony

It's my birthday today, and I'm 33! That means only one thing...BRING IT IN, GUYS!!! *every character from every game, comic, cartoon, TV show, movie, and book reality come in with everything for a HUGE party*
— GamemasterAnthony (February 28, 2008)

February 28 was GamemasterAnthony's birthday. presuming he is still alive, he will be 51. presuming he is still alive, he is probably still posting online. sometimes i think about this.

i do not think about this because he is important—he is not. he is in fact just some guy, his post is no more interesting on paper than any other piece of forum miscellanea. but in its capricious majesty, the internet has elevated GamemasterAnthony into something more, something beyond himself. he is now a punchline, a stand-in for every piece of ‘immature’ earnestness and sincerity that one can conjure. the whole significance of this man's birthday is nothing more than “look at this 33+n year old man and the funny way he talks about his birthday—the childlike demeanor of his posting, the manner in which he plays with his toys.”

how strange it is that so much can be gleamed from what is essentially a piece of digital ephemera. our times online are so depersonalized and dehumanized, so colored by irony and insincerity in the avoidance of cringe, that to anyone beyond a certain level of investment in the internet it seems hard to imagine another GamemasterAnthony, hard to imagine anyone who would want to be seen like him. nevermind that the average person posting online is exactly like him, is able to take sincere joy in themselves in this same way, is not tempered by the thought of being judged for ‘childishness’ or sincerity.

it's a curious prison for one to be in, one that evokes the words of Naomi Klein: what and who can be trusted? what is genuine and what is for show? maybe the reason GamemasterAnthony has been elevated is because we of this damaged internet milieu wish to return to his time, to his norms; but more likely, there is no reason at all.

on the matter of visibility in the furry subculture

canonical link: "on the matter of visibility in the furry subculture"

There's a lot of unspoken and assumed pressure for furries to be patrons of the arts. This mostly manifests on who wins the lottery for the attention economy on social media. [...] If it isn't a suggesting fursuit photo or cute art, [furries] aren't going to waste their time. This can make it feel like you have to spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted in the fandom.

But this simply isn't true. You only benefit from those things if you're trying to win a popularity contest in your own mind and become an influencer on social media. Your Twitter follower count isn't your worth to your friends, and if you think that it is, you have the wrong friends.
— Soatok, “Is there extreme classism in the furry fandom?” (17 February 2022)

this is not an essay about whether there is “extreme classism” in furry subculture, a question i find myself uninterested in answering at length because i think the answer is obvious. (yes.) but it is an essay about the language adjacent to this question—about the ‘attention economy,’ about the ‘popularity contest,’ about ‘acceptance in the fandom’ and to what things this is tied. because the truth is this: the subtext that none of this matters if one has the right friends, the right mentality is little more than wishcasting. such a thing can only be true if one believes that furry subculture is in some sense socially meritocratic, a community—to adapt a phrase from Dennis Altman about the gay bathhouse—that is far removed from the “bondage of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterise much of the outside world.”¹ but the subculture is not a meritocracy any more than the gay bathhouse of which Altman spoke was a utopian ‘Whitmanesque democracy.’

one may say with conviction that there is no need to ‘spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted,’ but this is not really true. the furry without the signifiers of furrydom will probably not get far socially; the furry with money to splurge on these signifiers will probably pay their way to into many social groups. to buy off people is cheap, to buy commodities cheaper still. disposable capital lubricates ownership of the very luxury commodities (art, VR models, fursuits) upon which furry subculture is built, and the ownership of these luxury commodities in kind facilitates the accretion of social capital and attention—visibility, in other words.

indeed, visibility within the subculture is often just a byproduct of what identities are privileged under the existing social order outside it. this dynamic can be felt across many facets of identity, but in furry spaces it most often reflects class hierarchy. the spirit of the ‘suspiciously wealthy furry’ is not an ex nihilo invention; the specter of the furry tech worker, the white-collar wage-earner, looms in almost every furry space. true, these phantasmal furries are over-invoked. (one presumes the median furry cannot be described as any of suspiciously wealthy, or tech-worker, or otherwise white-collar.) but discursive abuse does not really change what these phantasmal furries signify to many: a growing material hierarchy and inequality within the subculture—facilitated through visibility—that cuts against its meritocratic founding mythos.

and if visibility is not physical capital—if it does not convert one-to-one into success, or spend one-to-one into popularity or stability—it still greases the wheels much as literal capital would. by its very nature visibility is a form of social capital: it opens doors; creates opportunities; provides chances for things to happen that otherwise would not, just as physical capital can. if our subculture is a lottery of attention, then we neither enter it nor play with equal odds and it debases us to pretend otherwise. hierarchy and inequality reify visibility and always have; one cannot negate material reality by having the ‘right’ friends (as though friendship is fungible or trivial) or by tuning out the ‘popularity contest’ (as if one can simply opt out of the social forces to which they are subject).

of course, i do not want to overstate the case. some level of social hierarchy and therefore inequality is immutable. we cannot redistribute intangibles like attention or visibility on Marxist grounds, nor would such a thing even be desirable anyways. the perception of hierarchy or inequality of social status is also not synonymous with genuine hierarchy or inequality; particularly in online spaces—so manipulated by algorithms and so corrosive to how we relate—one may attain a very warped sense of what one's place ‘should’ be.

but these are complications, not refutations; that we cannot completely level the playing field and might attain a false consciousness of where hierarchy or inequality exists does not invalidate the very real hierarchy and inequality that does exist. if we speak of a world in which ‘[furries] aren't going to waste their time’ unless something is a ‘fursuit photo or cute art’—a luxury commodity—then we are speaking of, resigning ourselves to, a world in which there is a split between those who have and those who have not. we are resigning ourselves to the dichotomy between those whose sole visible representation was bought by the leftover between rent checks; and those whose visibility in art never evokes the cost of living at all. we are resigning ourselves to sociality in which some will never be so fortunate as to ‘be seen’ at even one furry meetup; and some will be able to arrange their lives around these spaces and their social circuits. we are throwing up our hands and allowing some to suffer tremendously at the hands of another for want of visibility; and allowing others to weaponize their visibility in the service of harm. and we are resigning ourselves to a world in which there are those who will, every day, bear the shame of begging others to live because it is what little leverage their visibility allows them; and those who will, each day, never know the indignity of groveling because their visibility has already paid the bills.

what we should—must—speak of, and dream of, is something better. we must embrace politics, and politicization, of our subculture in the service of that something better. because i will not settle in any community, any society, any system for such TINA bullshit—“all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is... it could be you!”—and you should not either.²

notes

¹ Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 79–80.

² Martin Jenkins, “Introduction” in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (Sussex: Soul Bay Press, 2009), 1st ed.

a theory on the recurrent furry moral panic

canonical link: "a theory on the recurrent furry moral panic"

[...]we should note [the public forum's] centrality for political debates where interest groups attempt to bypass the traditional structures of democratic process in order to force the enactment of laws in the name of the "good" of a population which is never actually consulted.
— Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987), p. 42

why do furries relitigate the same handful of moral panics? this is an interesting question to ponder, and many possibilities present themselves. furries are young and opinionated; furries believe themselves culturally and sexually challenging in a way that invites theorycrafting and moralizing; furry subculture is in many ways a ‘train station’ where people endlessly come and go, so there is never a baseline and never a settled consensus. all quite reasonable, all likely contributors. you may feel though, as i do, that these explanations dance around the core of what is happening here—they justify the recurrence, explain the severity, but do not get at what the purpose is exactly of these feverish bursts of discourse. in this vein i have a simple theory: these are essentially ideological confrontations and should be understood as such.

what validates this simple theory of mine is the pathology of the furry moral panic and how little it diverges from what we see in the real world. just as can be observed of a real world moral panic, we see in the furry moral panic a predictable tendency to “[play] on themes which possess deeper, unconscious resonances” that any decent person ought find monstrous—so against the babyfur one is rattled with the specter of normalized pedophilia and child abuse, and against the feral artist one is assaulted with the prospect of covert zoophilic tendencies or rape of animals. and there is always some moral panic, always some subject who must be driven out of the subculture in the name of ‘standards’ which must be ‘put beyond debate.’

but never is the question evoked by this answered—what standard of decency is being applied, and on whose behalf?—because answering it would reveal ideology, make clear that the furry moral panic acts in reality as a site of struggle between those who demand assimilation and those who do not. the moral panic itself, then, can be understood as a reflection of anxiety about diversity—especially of an avant garde variety—and the inherent difficulty in liquidating this diversity to the desired ‘decency’ and ‘normality.’ furries also seem rather predictable moralizers in this respect; it is typical of those who seek fealty to polite society to frame their desires “in the name of the ‘good’ of a population which is never actually consulted.”

to be clear, i should not be interpreted as suggesting it surprising that furry subculture fails to subvert the totality of one's socialization, or the cultural hegemony of one's media consumption. nevertheless, it makes for a rather schizoid scene (if i may be permitted to use the term) for some to find gratification in ordinary furry porn—much less in transformation, inflation, vore and such—but then turn back on it the moral framework and prescriptions of a society that would struggle to distinguish any of it from actual zoophilic desire. if in the framework of polite society we are all dogfuckers, yet we all know this is false, even from a perspective of bad faith it seems rather worth questioning the value of this framework in making social condemnations of other furries.

certainly you will not manage to become some hypothetical ‘good dogfucker’ by passing such judgements, by attempting to use the logic of the moral panic to browbeat the subculture into your desired form. the audience to whose tune you are ultimately trying to dance already knows what to think of you. they have already devised the moral framework needed to permanently otherize you, and all you have done is internalize their logic to otherize your own acceptable targets. ultimately, to appeal to ‘decency’ can play only to the advantage of one side, and that side is Watney's “imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” for whom only the total renunciation of queer identity is acceptable. it is, in a sense, an appeal to collaboration.

on the tension of furry artistry and high culture

or, the trap of ‘high culture’ and the desert of the future

canonical link: "on the tension of furry artistry and high culture"

They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn’t doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today.
— Meridel Le Sueur, “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers” (1988)

i have a theorem rotating in my mind; perhaps you will agree with it, perhaps not. this theorem is roughly as follows: that high culture—the world of art mediated by the gallery, the curator, the art dealer, the buyer—is the antithesis, co-optation, and ultimate death of “furry art.” that to ever play on this terrain as a furry is (and would be) definitionally a capitulation to polite society, and an irreversible step toward the further class stratification of furry subculture. it is hard for me to explain why exactly i believe this, but i feel it is necessary to attempt such a thing given that the separation between furry art and my concocted definition of high culture is no longer complete.

what i suspect is that the artistic qualia of furry art—its aura (as Walter Benjamin might put it) and the manner in which it acts a reflection of the unique, intrinsic qualities that constitute the furry subculture and our shared understanding of it—is wholly unable to survive contact with the social ideology of high culture. likewise the ‘outsider’ status of those who make such art. in being constituted high culture, furry art is separated and alienated from the very context which made it. the qualia are lost and so is the aura; the artists are brought from the ‘disrepute’ of outsiderness to the ‘respectability’ of the gallery-form. in this respect one might go so far as to say “furry art” elevated by, or created for, high culture is not really furry art at all, nor can it be.

maybe such an assertion is an overstatement. but i am reminded here of the words of László Moholy-Nagy, the ‘relentless experimental,’ that “No society can exist without expressing its ideas, and no culture and no ethics can survive without participation of the artist who cannot be bribed.”¹ in our life these words invite the question: in a subculture congealed through social stigmatization and radical (sexual) inclusion, would the inherent conservatism of high culture not act as the very mechanism of the bribery—the very thing that would rob furry artistry of its ability to authentically reflect the qualia and aura of the subculture? and the (monied) interests of high culture and its agents especially: how could these not politically and ideologically subvert furry artistry—preclude it from achieving a “secured existence” that is “uncompromising and incorruptible” as implored by Moholy-Nagy?

indeed, we must recognize that high culture is definitionally the culture of the ruling class—an expression and extension of cultural hegemony. and what this high culture asks of its subjects, consciously or otherwise, is to ‘perfume the sewers’—to cover up each desiccating bit of the old with a gloss of the new.² the essence of high culture is amorphous, co-opting as necessary to maintain itself, cherry-picking from even the most culturally-challenging movements external to itself and rendering them agents of the very hegemony they wish to challenge. to be sure, we might concur with Walter Benjamin that “the [already] conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion”—furry is certainly met with recoil by many—but there is no innate quality of furry art, no level of aversion it can inspire, which prevents its co-optation when it and high culture meet.³ for high culture is the mechanism through which the ‘truly new’ is stripped of its distinguishing qualia and rendered the conventional. as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter note, “The value of a good,”—and the degree to which it constitutes high culture—“comes from the sense of superiority associated with membership in the club, along with the recognition accorded by fellow members.”⁴

the question is this: can there be a sort of ‘long march through the institutions’ under which furry art can retain its qualia and aura, by which furry art can challenge the perfuming of the sewers, and through which it can ultimately contest cultural hegemony? i am inclined to think no, certainly not with the absence of politicization and organization that currently characterizes furry subculture. the conundrum of the furry artist and what ought be their relationship with the agents of high culture—gallerist and curator, art dealer and appraiser—is that, in the words of Kyle Chayka, “art becomes retail surprisingly quickly.”⁵ that which challenges is seldom harder to convert into a commodity; and when art is not merely a product of one's labor but a commodity, class hierarchy and inequality are inexorably bound to follow. but perhaps this is the inevitable course of things in this subculture, so wrought already by the spectre of class division if only you know around which corners to look.

notes

¹ László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in motion (1947)

² Meridel Le Sueur, “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers” (1988)

³ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)

⁴ Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed (2004), chapter 4

⁵ Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less (2020), chapter 2

on the matter of the acceptable target

canonical link: "on the matter of the acceptable target"

From very early on in the history of the epidemic, Aids has been mobilised to a prior agenda of issues concerning the kind of society we wish to inhabit. [...] Aids is effectively being used as a pretext throughout the West to "justify" calls for increasing legislation and regulation of those who are considered to be socially unacceptable.
— Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987)

the thing about acceptable targets is that they reflect the hegemony of the ruling class, and nowhere is this so apparent as applied to the queer community. the queer, writes the Mary Nardini Gang, "[has] always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile."

that being the acceptable target in this manner engenders immense suffering and resentment is obvious; nobody, i presume, takes unconditional joy in being a part of the “resistance to regimes of the normal,” as Michael Warner once put it. there is, within all of us queers, some essence that against our own desire begs to assimilate. to become one with the ruling class. to finally exercise for ourselves the “mechanism of social control” that is inherent to labeling deviancy.¹ to—in one punch downward upon another group, particularly one that is ‘immoral’—externalize every second of our suffering and resentment in such a way that someone else can finally understand and feel.

but the assimilationist desire; the attempt to make one's self ‘normal’ and ‘respectable’ in contrast to others; the yearning to use the master's tools ‘for good’—these must always meet the reality of a heteronormative world. deviancy is degeneracy, and degeneracy must be destroyed. we are the subjects, to use a turn of phrase from Simon Watney, of “an imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” and to whom anything unfamiliar is indecent.² to this imaginary family—always of the nuclear variety, always the one who holds both discursive and ideological power—nothing besides total renunciation of queer identity, and nothing besides its placing back in the closet, will ever be good enough. the only move that can buy them off is collaboration.

your polyamorous relationship, your furry identity, your therianthropy, your most deeply stigmatized fetish—these will never be made ‘respectable’ to anybody in any position of power through sacrificing the most “undesirable” faggot to the wolves. to believe otherwise is how heteronormative society co-opts those who want to liberate into those who actually collaborate. when you accept that we must throw away certain “undesirables,” must label them “deviants,” what you are accepting is the very ideological and moral foundation upon which heteronormativity is built: only what does not transgress, what does not challenge the sensibilities of straightness, is permissible.

notes

¹ Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role” (1968), reprinted in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 27.

² Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987), p. 43

Femlandia (Christina Dalcher) is kind of a bad novel

in an attempt to balance out my non-fiction reading imbalance (currently, 78% of my reading is non-fiction) i've been working on my backlog of fiction books to read. this is easier said than done—i'm rather selective with my fiction reading—and today's entry, Femlandia seems worth singling out as a good example of what i don't care for in fiction. calling this novel consistently bad would potentially be an overstatement of the case, but i don't like it and i would not recommend you seek it out. in writing this post, i've actually bumped it down a half-star from where i initially had it, in fact.

the blurb for this novel—which i will quote verbatim below—might already tip my hand as to the sorts of criticisms that are going to be had for this novel:

Miranda Reynolds always thought she would rather die than live in Femlandia. But that was before the country sank into total economic collapse and her husband walked out in the harshest, most permanent way, leaving her and her sixteen-year-old daughter with nothing. The streets are full of looting, robbing, and killing, and Miranda and Emma no longer have much choice—either starve and risk getting murdered, or find safety. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.

Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving—and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. But something is not right. There are no men allowed in the colony, but babies are being born—and they’re all girls. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.

this is because if you've spent any time learning about second-wave feminism, your takeaway from this blurb will probably be something like "'Femlandia' is going to be radical feminism taken to a logical extreme"—and you'd be correct, because that is exactly what it is. in the novel the eponymous Femlandia is essentially a rehashed-take on a lesbian separatist or radical feminist commune from the 1970s. unfortunately, the novel does not compellingly grapple with any of the innumerable purposes, problems, and political theories these communes produced.

the most obvious example of this comes when, upon arriving in Femlandia, our protagonist Miranda is forced to undergo what amounts to a gynecology exam (to prove she was "always a woman") to gain entry to the commune. i'm sure you can see where this is going, and it is played as follows:

I’m flummoxed. “You need a half-assed gynecological exam to satisfy yourself I’m a woman? Really?”

Kate frowns at me, creating lines in a forehead that was, until a moment ago, smooth as a newborn’s. “I need to satisfy myself that you were always a woman.”[...]

“Sounds pretty exclusionary to me,” I say.

Kate shrugs. “Let me ask you something. You see how we are here, right?” She waves one hand over her bare breasts. “How free do you think we would be if we started letting in male residents?”

“If they identify as women, though—”

I’m cut off before I can finish. “They can identify as a fucking hedgehog for all I care. I’m talking about what they are. Not what they think they are or what they want to be. It’s a slippery slope. You let in one, you have to let in all. There’s a reason your mother called this place Femlandia. Get used to it.”

at face the trans-exclusionary positioning the novel takes here—which is used in the story to, in effect, violate every woman upon entry to Femlandia—is fine, and in fact would be a potentially interesting as a plot device, or alternatively as a commentary on the consequences of idealizing and essentializing womanhood. the problem is the novel does not do either of these things—in fact, it barely lingers on this detail; it barely considers the social and political consequences of such an essentialist policy (one that, again, victimizes women analogously to how the world outside Femlandia does); and it barely even addresses this detail in any real way after bringing it up. instead, Miranda does just kind of get over it despite her initial protestation, and the fact that this radical feminist commune is trans-exclusionary is taken for granted from then on because there are, as far as i can tell, no trans characters in the book. this is unfortunate. moreover, it's not very good writing, and it's a missed opportunity that directly leads to the novel's biggest problem: instead of, say, trans people being the mechanism through which the consequences of this type of feminism and separatism (and where they become misandry and bigotry) are explored, we instead get a frankly unconvincing and comically villainous level of man-hatred as a substitute.

Miranda's mom Win, for example, spends virtually the entire novel talking about men as if she is Valerie Solanas. i would call this exaggeratory but she literally kills her husband for being an annoying manchild and frames it as a suicide, and then flees when Miranda threatens to call the cops on her for this. she is rather obviously a beyond-the-pale evil character and unto itself that would not be a problem, but this is done in such an extremely silly and over-the-top way that it just cannot be taken seriously. it does not help that chapter after chapter of her rationale is anvil-blunt nonsense like this (directed in this case at Miranda for not being sufficiently misandrist)—

“I’ve known women like you. Some people call you deniers; some people call you other names. No reason to get into a name-calling match, though, so let’s just say it like it is. You’re the kind of woman who thinks that because a pile of shit didn’t fall on you, there was no pile of shit. It didn’t exist, right? It didn’t come crashing down out of the sky like a dump-truck load of manure and fall on anyone else. You didn’t get groped by an uncle or a priest or your own goddamned father, so no one else got groped. You didn’t wake up one morning and discover dried jism on your panties, so no one else woke up that way. You weren’t beaten because supper was late or cold or not what your wonderful Mr. Right had a craving for that evening, so no other woman took a beating.”

—that is simply not a compelling or convincing caricature of a radical feminist, or any coherent political belief besides blind misandry. it would not be convincing even if Win were just a husband-murderer and Femlandia an unusually misandrist women's commune, because the logic she uses wouldn't even justify that level of action on her part. but not content to just be a husband-murderer, Win's Femlandia is upheld by a grotesque, poor-man's-Omelas system—that Win signed off on, to be clear—wherein they abuse male children and young adults as a subhuman breeder class, fit only for their semen and otherwise treated as feral livestock, to perpetuate Femlandia in the absence of male residents. there is literally no logic that could justify this (or the evil it represents) and Win hardly even tries to do so narratively, instead upholding it through brainwashing and coercion.

the effect of this is that it collapses what could be a nuanced (or at least reasonably complex) story into a one-dimensional one—Win is just a monstrous person with no redeeming qualities and no understandable belief system. she is a frankly sociopathic character whose actions in the narrative amount to taking vulnerable women under her wing, secluding them, playing upon their worst traumas, and making them into her loyal subjects. making her into a narrative manifestation of feminism with these traits is, needless to say, something that must be executed with care—care that is not really taken here and which, as a result, makes it concerningly easy to read this novel as explicitly anti-feminist. i might even go so far as to say that, because Win is so explicitly misandrist and man-hating—an avatar of what "excessive" feminism might look like—that an anti-feminist reading is the default reading you would come away with here.

a friend of mine put it like this while i liveblogged this on Discord: "thinking generously this story has a place but i don't think the author has thought about it beyond a gross caricature of the ideology." in a lot of ways this novel's narrative is, at least in what it's trying to say, not much better than a 336-page Virgin vs. Chad meme. i do not like it when a novel reads this way.

i particularly do not like it here, because there is a lot to genuinely critique about radical feminism (especially modern radical feminism), political separatism, trans exclusion, and all the other things this novel tries to touch on with at-best mixed results. the lengthy article "On Wimmins Land" by Sasha Archibald comes to my mind here, with its voluminous paragraphs about the triumphs, but also the troubles, of separatist feminist communal life and the political theories upholding it:

Establishing rules was a quagmire. How best to collectivize labor when some participants had mobility issues? How to share childcare when not all women wanted to care for young children, and not all mothers wanted to cede control? Drug-use was central to some women’s spiritual practices, but a drug bust would bring policemen to the land. Some thought it wise to have guns — commonplace in this part of Oregon — while others were adamantly opposed. Zealous efforts to achieve fairness tended to sharpen the perception of unfairness, and anarchist-minded land-dykes never entirely agreed that rules were necessary. [...] Cabbage Lane started a monthly Singles Week, during which the names of lovers-to-be were drawn out of a hat. Residents at WomanShare used Tarot to decide who would sleep in what bed on a given night, while others maintained ménages à trois. Communal masturbation was not uncommon, and loud lovemaking declared one’s right to pleasure. [...] Men were unequivocally banned from women’s lands, but the question of when exactly a boy becomes a man constituted one of separatism’s great quandaries. Some collectives allowed male children under eleven years old, some none at all, some one male child but no more, and some drew the line at breastfeeding — after weaning, male infants had to go. [...] Trans women were perceived through the distortions of cis-gendered bias, and commonly characterized as men who were using disguises to penetrate women’s attempts at privacy. Some factions espoused outright transphobic violence.

and i think a better novel would grapple with these sorts of things instead of constantly lingering on a character's belief that "[...]men were animals. She would have called them pigs but found no reason to insult a perfectly good pig with the comparison. Hyenas, maybe. Jackals. Anything wild that ran in a pack and looked out for itself first. But not anything that could be considered cute, edible, or useful." or that character's hatred of dresses because they reinforce patriarchy or—to reiterate—that character's Omelas-like system that uses male children as breeders.

so it goes in fiction. there is necessarily a great deal of shlock and slop out there and to be a part of this mass is not the worst crime. as i said to start out, though, skip this one. or if you find my descriptions compelling enough to explore for yourself—and also want to read a novel i consider a trainwreck—go check it out of a library i guess. maybe Dalcher's other books are worth financially supporting her for; this one is not.