On Gun Girls, Shemales, and Futanari

June 19, 2019

On Gun Girls, Shemales, and Futanari

It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power. —Chuck Palahniuk

I was first inspired to write this after choosing illustrations for my article on the US 2nd Amendment, well over a year ago when I was still living in Burma. But, I put it off for maybe obvious reasons. This will be a wild one, and unsuitable reading for children, nuns, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Also many conservative Buddhists (including alt-Right-wing ones) who have knee-jerk negative reactions to transgenderism, or even just to naked girly pictures, will likely disapprove. Still, though, it is a more or less philosophical, or at least anthropological, investigation of human tendencies, in this case the phenomenon of heterosexual men being stimulated and attracted by images of young women posing with weapons of death, or flaunting a penis.

The origins of my interest in this subject go way, way back to my childhood. When I was a boy my father, a gun collector, subscribed to the Shotgun News, which had all sorts of gun-oriented stuff for sale, along with military surplus, Nazi memorabilia, samurai swords, etc.; and one item I saw advertised was videos of young women shooting machine guns while wearing bikinis. At the time I guessed that it was stimulating to some guys mainly because of the outrageous jiggling caused by the recoil—which no doubt really is a factor, although as you may find, I have developed another theory to account for the fascination. Anyway, I pretty much forgot about bikini girls with machine guns until many years later, just a few years ago in fact.

What revived my interest in gun girls, philosophical and otherwise, is the fact that I began reading a conservative political blog called Power Line. Every Saturday there is a feature called “The Week in Pictures,” which usually ends with a photo of an attractive young woman holding a gun. She isn’t necessarily scantily clad, and is usually holding a pistol; but I realized that there is a special attraction to a young, pretty woman packing a firearm. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with jiggling, or even exposed skin. There’s just something hot about it.

It turns out there are lots of pictures on the Internet featuring young women shooting guns, or just holding them or posing with them. There are entire websites dedicated to this, as well as groups on social media. One sub-genre features women wearing military gear and shooting state of the art assault weapons. The common factor is that they are young, attractive women who are somehow seen as more attractive because they are in possession of a deadly weapon. There are lots of similar pictures of women wielding swords out there too.

I really do want to understand the nature of the human animal, including my own nature, and I must admit that I am mildly stimulated by images of beautiful women firing (or just holding and posing with) weapons of death, especially if the women in question don’t have much clothing on at the time. The guns they are posing with are not just affectively neutral props, and add something to the stimulating effect. This is manifestly not an attraction for “empowered” women in a feminist sense; it is not a matter of attraction for toughness or “butchness” or lethality in and of itself. There is seemingly a different principle involved concerning men liking the likes of Sarah Connor, Trinity, Rita Vratasky (in the film Edge of Tomorrow), Imperator Furiosa, etc. etc. in feminist propaganda action movies, or of musclebound, steroid-laden female bodybuilders. The phenomenon of the gun girl evidently does not involve a sexual attraction to tough, strong women, as these girls are often exaggeratedly feminine in all respects other than the hardware they are packing.

It seems fairly certain that to some degree, at least, the gun is phallic. To some degree we have a beautiful young woman handling a big, hard phallic symbol—or if it’s an automatic pistol, a small, hard phallic symbol. But although the weapon may be associated with male genitalia it is still not exactly counterintuitive that a heterosexual adult male would find such images attractively stimulating. Women do things with male genitalia quite often, and it does not seem to make them less feminine in the minds of men.

However, there is another phenomenon which I think is similar, but which is more counterintuitive, and that is the spectacle of the shemale. For those of you who are outrageously naïve, shemales (also known as T-girls, etc.) are transgender “women” still endowed with male genitalia, who pose or “act” for pornographic pictures or videos. Images of these persons are much more abundant on the Internet than images of gun girls, and one may often be exposed to them on an ordinary Google images search if one’s “safe search” filter is turned off. Although I have been physically celibate for many years, I am nevertheless heterosexual by temperament; even so I have to admit that, so long as “she” looks like a real, pretty woman except for the dick, such images are stimulating in an erotic sense. They are “hot” in a way that reminds me of gun girls.

Very similar to shemales in pornography is futanari, or depictions of feminine, sexually nubile-looking hermaphrodites. It began as a genre of Japanese hentai, or sex comics, and later evolved into creations of 3D computer animation and Photoshop. The images are similar to those of actual shemales, although being more artificially generated they tend to be more exaggerated: often they are more emphatically feminine with regard to everything except for what is often an impossibly immense phallus. They may have both male and female genitalia, or only male, but otherwise they are usually portrayed as adorably cute girls. (The Japanese can be really perverse in their erotic tastes, with cartoon hermaphrodites barely forming the tip of the iceberg—but we needn’t get into that.)

Exaggeratedly large genitalia on a woman is usually perceived as unattractive, as one can see for oneself by examining medieval Chinese erotica; a huge, gaping vulva, with or without hair, tends to be a turnoff. As a general rule, if female genitals are to be esthetically attractive, especially in an erotic sense, they should be rather small and dainty. Thus the outrageous exaggeration of genitals on a female figure is strangely more effective if the genitals are male.

mercifully pixelated for the squeamishly modest

I seriously doubt that latent homosexuality accounts for an appreciation for shemales and futanari in most men, any more than for gun girls—despite “gender-fluid” PC fashion trends or any kink-oriented Freudian theories out there. It appears to be a fairly straightforward assumption that the weapons held by gun girls, or the weapons they are sprawled next to, are phallic to some degree, yet the girl remains quite feminine in her attractiveness; in fact the sexual contrast with the hard, powerful masculine object accentuates her femininity. Considering this, it is not too far of a stretch to make the same assumption with regard to “dick girls.” Ironically, the penis (or weapon of death) accentuates a woman’s femininity rather than making her seem masculine, even if she happens to have a huge, veiny, 18-inch-long monster dick. So I’m hypothesizing that the same basic principle causes (some) heterosexual males to be pleasurably stimulated by all three kinds of “girly pictures”—all are images of very feminine beauties in possession of a starkly contrasting masculine weapon, so to speak. Their beauty, and even their femininity, are somehow accentuated by proximity to or interaction with aggressive, masculine, penetrative hardware.

It seems that a gun girl is not more attractive simply because she is endowed with a symbolic phallus. Sexy women don’t need to be holding the weapon, or wearing it: a girl sprawling among various military hardware, or on a tank or (grounded) fighter plane, can have a similar effect. In such cases it appears not to be a woman being more attractive because she has a symbolic penis, but rather she is more attractive because of the sexual esthetic contrast of soft femininity and hard masculinity in general. Her femininity is more pronounced when contrasted with its opposite.

I suppose that the same is true for shemales and futanari: The pretty hermaphrodites are attractive to some heterosexual males not because they have a penis, but because the penis is in stark contrast to the otherwise feminine, attractive form, thereby rendering it more pronounced and thereby more attractive. This is evidently also the case in hardcore pornography, in which the woman is exaggeratedly feminine not because she has a penis instead of a vagina, but because she has a penis IN her vagina. Her femininity is highlighted, so to speak. This is even more pronounced in some of the more extreme forms of pornography, for example images of a woman taking on several men simultaneously. Her femininity is magnified or multiplied by being counterbalanced, so to speak, by the masculinity of several men. This probably also explains the outrageous foot-and-a-half-long horse cocks on some of the futanari cutie-pies. It’s a matter of the affective stimulation of stark contrast of masculine and feminine, which accentuates the feminine.

Some women may really feel empowered with a pistol or an assault rifle in their hands, and I have no intention of demeaning that, being a patriotic American who appreciates a free citizen’s right to bear arms. Nevertheless this little étude concerns the psychological state of the men who look at gun girls, etc., and particularly the reasons why they enjoy looking at them. (Seriously, I’m also not writing this to justify finding some shemales attractive; rather I’m trying to make sense of the situation. And I do have to admit that sexuality is an interesting subject.) But bearing arms does make women equal to men in a way that bitching, complaining feminism cannot. This is something for feminists to consider, especially considering that most of them are probably in favor of abolishing Americans’ right to bear arms. Not only does packing a gun make a woman approximately as physically dangerous as a man, but it also enhances her own attractiveness in a strange, subliminal way, which is another idea for feminists to consider—the ones who aren’t lesbians, I mean, and who wouldn’t mind being attractive to men.