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The Catgirl Manifesto:An Introduction

by Christina X

FOR RICHARD CALDER

With all the writing and reading about gender that's been done in the last thirty years, some aspects of the topic are still close to taboo. In "The Catgirl Manifesto: An Introduction", Richard Calder gets up close and personal with one of those topics: the way certain female attributes seem to render a large number of men incapable of rational reactions. Calder, "writing as Christina X," has disguised his tale as an academic essay, so this "story" has no characters and no plot. Nonetheless, the jury (and your editors) found it quite gripping. The tone, the style, and the London setting all seemed to call for keeping the British spellings on this one piece.

The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our knowledge about sexuality are not to be saught in the ideal, promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality, and certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utilization), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex. The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and examinations; the anguish of answering questions and the delights of having one's words interpreted; all the stories told oneself and to others, so much curiosity, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained -but not without trembling a little- by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable "pleasures of analysis" (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has been cleverly fostering for several centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex. Must we conclude that our sciencia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars erotica, and that it is the Western, sublimated version of that seemingly lost tradition?
-Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
Volume 1, An Introduction

The following manifesto (indeed, the manifesto, as it has come to be known) was initially deconstructed in terms of its most obvious antecedents: the calls-to-arms of the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, and (in light of the fact that it is signed by a woman and has such a transgressive agenda) other so-called, if less celebrated, manifestos, such as Valerie Solanas's SCUM manifesto, and the c**t statements- texts, that is, that constitute acts of poetic terrorism.
The manifesto first came to public attention in June 1997 after an op-ed article appeared in the London Independent. With a dismissive humour typical of early reports, parliamentary correspondent Ian Rathschilde wrote: "MPS' offices have been overwhelmed by mass mailings of a quasi-pornographic piece of agitprop. This so-called 'manifesto' has elicited more than snorts of disgust. Indeed, a certain cabal of Tories- perhaps recalling how well their 'Back to Basics' campaign fared- are by all accounts planning to raise the matter during Prime Minister's question time. Not merely to once again remind the public of the size of the average parliamentarian's mailbag, it seems, but to appropriate that high ground only recently relinquished to the heirs of sixties permissiveness. The offending manifesto, it is argued, is the work of a maenad-like contingent of 'Blair's Babes.' Its sole objective? To bury conservative as thoroughly as many in the party once thought it possible to bury socialism in the days when they could not count on New Labour to do the job..."
A spate of articles in the national dailies followed. And soon afterwards, the manifesto- sealed in plain manila envelopes affixed with occult symbols associated with the rites of Enochian sex-magick- began to show up in public places (places corresponding, roughly, to the psychogeographical "hotspots" listed in section two of the manifesto itself): "...the towpaths of canals, deserted night-time wharves, abandoned warehouses, factories, shopping malls, the moonlit arches of monstrous bridges, the platforms and tunnels of metropolitan railway stations, the fire-escapes of tenement blocks, the shadow-haunted depths of condom-littered alleyways..."
The impact on British youth culture was profound. The summer of 1997 was, in some respects, similar to that of 1977, when punk found a short-lived apotheosis in the conjunction of the Sex Pistols and the Queen's Silver Jubilee. As with punk, the new, wholly radical slew of music and street fashion inspired by the manifesto's lurid aesthetic (an aesthetic which, in turn, was surely adumbrated by the dark excesses of twentieth-century nihilism) was first championed by art-school students. St Martin's in London's Charing Cross Road represented the vanguard. There, rants, fads, and crazes were quickly coalescing into a cult. Indeed, a vox pop carried out in St Martin's lobby and published in Dazed and Confused revealed that more than one student considered the manifesto's catalogue of conspiracy to be not only intoxicating, but also true.
Commentators have often wondered at the gullibility of these young men and women. How, they wonder, could students (most of whom might be expected to possess a more-than-average degree of analytical intelligence) take on board the grotesque suspensions of disbelief necessary for accepting the manifesto's cod-scientific premise? The manifesto is, after all, fantastical in the extreme, and resembles nothing so much as pulp science fiction. The following passage, for example (from the "Phylogenesis" section) details the mutagenic effects of a 1972 supernova flare-up in Leo Minor:

The physical traits, in themselves, were stark. In a survey of five-hundred Reinhardt and non-Reinhardt females (which tabulated sexual attractiveness according to an ascending scale of universal indices such as classic 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio and regularity of feature), those 5% who had mutant DNA not only topped every category, but did so by substantial margins. Yet this attractiveness was not, strictly speaking, beauty. Beauty is human. Instead, Reinhardt females were said to possess an exceptional, unwholesomely sweet, prettiness. A prettiness informed by a feverish, hysterical, ever-present passion, which gave them the appearance of being forever sickening for forbidden fruit. Their physiognomy was classified as "neotenic"- a biological term that refers to the retention of larval, immature, or juvenile characteristics in the adult of the species. Renoir had celebrated the glamour of the neotenic. (Albert Aurier, the critic and Symbolist poet, had described Renoir's female subjects as possessing the "beautiful, deep, azure, enameled eyes of dolls, of adorable dolls, with flesh molded of roseate porcelain." Why, asked Aurier, should Renoir depict a woman as beautiful "since it suffices to show that she is pretty. Why show her as intelligent, or even as stupid, why as false, as disagreeable? She is pretty! Why should she have a heart, a brain, a soul? She is pretty! Be reasonable, like me, and don't make such a fuss over the pseudovitality of that marvellous and oh so adorable pretty little automaton...") Reinhardt females were certainly Renoiresque, but theirs was a corrupted innocence- the look of an ingenue permanently in heat, as if Renoir had collaborated with Delacroix, Rops, and Moreau. It lent them that air of morbidity that was later to have such devastating consequences.
The behavioural traits, however, were even starker. These included extreme degress of exhibitionism; an overriding need to be admired and pampered; infantilism; hyperaesthesia; a hatred of maternity and childbirth; and a tendency to spite, deceit and treacherousness in direct proportion to deferred gratification. In test after test, the Reinhardt psyche was revealed to be a seething miasma of sexual obsession. But surely the most bizarre, and disturbing, trait was one that would surely have been classified as a communicable disease, if its effects on others had not been so obviously psychosomati: a desire- as instinctive as the silky murderousness of a cat's- to drive human males insane with lust. Not figuratively, but literally. In this, Reinhardt females proved themselves all too successful. (The sexual aura of the Reinhardt's subject was, it seemed, as real as a "normal" human being's electrical field, if incomparably more powerful.) Men who came into contact with them, or who were seduced, and even men who did as little as fantasize about them, sometimes fell victim to a form of voyeuristic catatonia or "nympholepsy." Characteristically, a nympholept would lose all interest in life and spend his days in bed, or staring mutely out of a window, self-hypnotized by the images of the filles fatalis that infested his overheated imagination. Some such invalids were even prone to seizures. The medical establishment spoke of nympholepsy in terms of "nymphetic autism", (1) pointing out that there are accounts in medical literature of people who are not autistic in the sense of suffering from a developmental disorder but are described as "autistic" in reference to the more general, dictionary-definition of autism meaning "absorption in fantasy."

An absorption in fantasy- the manifesto almost seems to be describing its readers, or at least those who were to become its acolytes. But why this fantasy? Those fleeing "the real" might have chosen something more sophisticated; that they didn't points to some dark, hermetic power lurking at the manifesto's heart, obscured by the cliches and self-repetitive tropes of sado-masochistic erotica. According to Susan Sontag (in her essay The Pornographic Imagination): "...'the obscene' is a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more profound than the backwash of a sick society's aversion to the body. Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness- pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuos yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself." We must look, then, beyond the manifesto's stage props, it's theatrical machinery. The following excerpt, focusing on the British government's creation and sanctioning of WIDOW, seems culled from a science fiction novel that might have been written by Krafft-Ebbing; yet as we all know, it continues to warp the fabric of everyday life by a process of reverse-mimesis. Like unbelievers entering a ruined chapel spraypainted with graffiti, we find ourselves in the awkward position of acknowledging that here is a reality greater than our own.

Normal males had little chance of arresting catgirls; they were too easily seduced, too often the victim of nympholepsy. A catgirl's sexual defence/offence mechanisms, though mysterious, were real. And Felis femella prowled the world's cities with little fear of being apprehended, or even censured. But the handful of special recruits who formed the top-secret unit called WIDOW (Worldwide Investigation into Death, Orgasm and Womanhood) had proved themselves immune. In fact, not only did they have an unfailing ability to recognize a Reinhardt female on sight, without benefit of corroborative DNA testing, but also had a deep-seated, obsessive need to bring them to justice. And, for these men, justice meant death.
Were they barbarians? Savages? Contemptible butchers? In Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir a distinction is made between two forms of cruelty. The first comes from stupidity; the other is "the fruit of extreme organic sensibility." Sade describes men who have such "organic sensibility" through the mouth of his libertine-philosopher Dolmance: "If they are driven to extremes of cruelty, their goals are determined by intelligence and niceness of feeling- in short by their sensitivity. Cruelty liberates their feelings." Such were the men of WIDOW.

Why did reverse-mimesis occur? Perhaps because the manifesto's first acolytes were, if nothing else, celebrants of the postmodern, the post historical- indeed, the post everything- adrift in a world of contested meanings brimful with parody and pastiche. The manifesto created believers out of those who found themselves abandoned to an already unstable universe.
By summer's end, copies of the manifesto were mailed directly to television companies, this method of distribution and its outcome fitting the pattern of a classic "media prank" such as utilized by the likes of Malcolm McLaren and his spiritual mentor, Abbie Hoffman.
(According to its practitioners, the art of the media prank lies in telling people what they want to hear; to mimic and manipulate mass media by exploiting its sensationalism; and to expose the contradictions of the mass media, and, by extension, the contradictions and essential fraudulence of all modern control systems.)
The watershed came with a Channel 4 documentary screened on 6 September 1997, entitled "Postmodern sadism: sick vogue or new religion?" According to the voiceover that began the programme (over images of inner city housing estates and teenage girls attired in hyperskirts, tutus, Empire-waisted babydolls, thigh boots, and a host of fashion accessories that, over the course of the summer, had come to define the now familiar pret a porter "popcat" style(2)): "Jean Paul Sartre once said that though French literature is known, outside France, for its humanism and rationalism, it had always produced works that were secret and black, such as those by Sade, Lautreamont, and Bataille. If we can accept that agitprop, or Outsider Art, is literature, too, then maybe Britain has appropriated that tradition." In hindsight, the most remarkable aspect of the programme was the appearance of the 90-year old Dominique Aury, who (as "Pauline Reage") had written the classic Story of O. Aury claimed that Dr Evegny Reinhardt, the manifesto's key figure, was a real person, and moreover, that she had known him when he had worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. (This represented the first instance of semantic displacement- the colonization of reality by the meta-virus, or meme, buried in the manifesto's heart.) Aury remarked: "In those days, he was friend to many literary figures, though he was particularly close to Robbe-Grillet. But he was like myself. Not only books provoked his fantasies. And talking to him, I learned that a common experience bound us together. The experience of childhood. I had a very powerful subjective life when I was a little girl. And my fantasies continued all through my adolescence, an adolescence that had been as lonely as his. He had his own fairy tales, you see, just as did I. For him, it was the tales of the succubus. Tales of the daughters of Lilith.(3) There are spirits, demonic spirits that are so beautiful, so expert at lovemaking that after enjoying one a man could not possibly be content with a mere mortal woman. And such was his fate, after he had been visited by the little succubus he called Omphale..."
On 11 November 1997, the television schedules announceed a follow-up, entitled "Phylogensis: Dr Evegny Reinhardt, Painter." Channel 4's press office denied that any such programme had been commissioned, let alone scheduled for broadcast. And yet, despite these denials, the programme aired at its appointed time. A 30-minute documentary with rudimentary production values, it focused on Reinhardt's early years, when he had painted several portraits, it was said, of adolescent succubi, conjured up by demoniacal litanies gleaned from the works of Dr John Dee and Edward Kelly- Magdalena, Scarlett, Cliticia, Faye, Vanity, Narcissa, Severine, Faustina... and the Omphale that Aury had mentioned in her interview.
The remainder of the programme constituted an evaluation of Reinhardt's artistic output. A few days later, paintings attributed to him (which Sotheby's was later to describe as belonging to his "mediumistic" period) started to appear on the world art market. Yet every attempt to locate the man failed. The Pasteur Institute had no "Reinhardt" on their records, and the international scientific community professed ignorance of his work.
It was at this point that, for reasons still not wholly clear, the manifesto was supressed. Random House had planned a first-run of 100,000 copies, but the stock was destroyed while still at the printers. Dark rumours abounded that a "Part II" was in the offing, its contents so explosive as to be adjudged liable to precipitate a level of controversy, and indeed panic, that would far exceed that surrounding the Marian apparition at Fatima. It is likely, however, that government was using these rumours as an excuse to do what many had urged from the beginning. That is, to circumvent the Obscene Publications Act by invoking national security, and having Special Branch officers seize both copies and distributers of the manifesto under existing anti-terrorism legislation.
Freud, in questioning why the taboo on the perversions is sustained with such rigidity, said that it was because "they exerted a seductive influence, as if at bottom a secret envy of those who enjoyed them had to be strangled." Marcuse, in his re-evaluation or Freud, argued that "the perversions express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee their order."
Envy and fear. The British establishment, and those legal and moral systems of control that guaranteed its authority, were under threat, and it reacted as it had done on so many similar occasions: by traducing, demonizing, and illegitimizing the threat, transplanting it from the realm of discourse into the realm of silence. We may conclude by quoting Angela Carter (from The Sadean Woman): "It is fair to say that, when pornography serves- as with very rare excpetions it always does- to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society, it is tolerated; and when it does not, it is banned..."
The government- criticized, in liberal quarters, for high-handed censorship- soon had an opportunity to gag even its most vociferous opponents. In the wings, mass hysteria was simmering. It would soon come to a boil, providing a growing coalition of reactionary forces with a casus belli.
The "Feline Spring" of 1998 would herald an annunciation. In may of that year choreomania struck. Its parallels with the European dancing crazes of the fourteenth century were immediately evident. Raves that often had involved hundreds, or thousands, of people, now involved hundreds of thousands in open-air venues the length and breadth of the British Isles. They would last for weeks and, as the crisis deepend, months. Previous e-fuelled raves had been largely peaceful; this new phenomenon was characterized by violent, Dionysian frenzy. And those most affected were female members of the neo-pagan cult that had spontaneously emerged out of the exigencies of the manifesto's Weltanschauung. Symptoms included screaming, hallucinations, convulsive movements, chest pains, hyperventilation, crude sexual gestures, and other pathologies consistent with episodes of epidemic hysteria. Dehydrated, exhausted, a dancer might be hospitalized and, after routine examination, be found to display the same mental (and some said even physical(4)) characteristics as those catalogued by Reinhardt when his pro bono work with deviant, mentally disturbed young women, had led him to speculate that he had discovered a new species, or subspecies, of human being.
It seemed logical, then, for those females afflicted with the dancing craze to be categorized as suffering from "Reinhardt's syndrome."
The dance mania continued to spread. In a wild fusion of flamencos, pole-dancing, can-can, tango, and, most importantly, belly dance ("Dance is the oldest art, the heart of all ritual," Reinhardt had said. "And belly dance is the oldest of dances"(1)), each dancer strove to interpret the entire repertoire of "dances of death" cited by the unnamed WIDOW agent in the manifesto's "Private Dancer" section and in Reinhardt's analysis of "Death and the Maiden" in the section entitled "Sex-death and its Significance for the Evolution of the Human Orgasmis Response":

NOTES:

1. Despite being obvious psychobabble, the term "nymphetic autism" was subsequently used by health care workers who attended the aftermath of the "Feline Spring" of 1998, shortly before "Reinhardt's syndrome" itself entered the medical vocabulary.

2. A different, wholly human, kind of catgirl had existed in Japanese pop culture for some years prior to the manifesto entering the public domain. Nekomimi (that is, "catgirl") fashion had played a significant role in kogaru street culture. Its emphasis on kawaii ("cuteness") and cosplay ("costume play") provided the elements of what wasto become a female acolyte's requisite personal style. That summer the "Elegant Gothic Lolita" look that had had Japanese girls dressing up in outfits that would traditionally be worn by Victorian dolls, was imported and transformed into the "Industrial Gothic Lolita" look. (School uniforms in a variety of styles, Eton jackets, extra baggy jumpers, and floppy white loose socks vied with or complemented plastic skirts, stockings, perilously high heels, chains, and exotic corsetry.) For Reinhardt females, life was a neurotic masquerade, in which they continuously fretted about how to maintain the delicate balance between cuteness and whorishness.

3. Interestingly, the conclusion to Story of O presents the reader with an image of Lilith. O is brought to a party naked but for an owl mask- a mask inspired, it is said, by one worn by the artist Leonor Fini, who was to go on to illustrate a luxury edition of Story of O in the 1960s. Lilith, according the Hebrew legend, was not only Adam's first wife, but also the Queen of Hell and Mother of the Succubi. In Greek mythology, the Little Owl was the bird sacred to Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom and death.. But the owl symbolism goes deeper, pointing to O as a Lilim, or daughter of Lilith, for whom the owl was also holy. The figure of Lilith- the dark side of the Great Goddess- is secondary only to the figure of Reinhardt in the manifesto's iconography. Indeed, is Reinhardt is a prophet- which, these days, so many consider him to be- then Lilith is his revelation.

4. While it is true that many subjects had undergone lipoplsty, augmentation mammoplasty, abdominoplasty, and, of course, umbilicoplasty, cosmetic surgery could not alone explain the depth and intensity of metamorphosis, leading some researchers to propose a new biological paradigm involving a physical equivalence between memes and genes.

5. The idea that all belly dancers wear rubies in their navels dates, it is often said, from fifties Hollywood, and is a legacy of the Hayes code: a series of rules and guidelines for the movie industry after the Fatty arbuckle scandal and the backlash it engendered. Bejewelling the navel was Hollywood's way of getting around the censor's demands that the navel should not be shown.
However, the question of the "rubi in the navel" is, in reality, far more complex, and the practice (both in fifties movies, such as King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba, in which Gina Lollobrigida sports a rubricate umbilicus, and, more recently, as adopted by pop icons such as Britney Spears and Shakira) may well be a responce to atavism.
In the ancient world, the "Town of the Sacred Courtesans" was Uruk, a place sacred to Ishtar, the goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and war. Ishtar was the Sumerian goddess Inanna given a Semitic name. She was the courtesan of the gods. In Babylonian times, when the Goddess cultures flourished, Lilith was called the "hand of Inanna." It was her duty to gather men from the street and bring them into the temple, to be served by the cult's sacred prostitutes. Lilith, Inanna, and Ishtar are often portrayed in statuary and relief as possessing a burning navel.
Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, was also the goddess of death. She performed a "dance of seven veils" when she descended into the underworld to reclaim her paramour, Tammuz. The ruby is emblematic of her wounded belly, the bleeding fulcrum of female sexuality and life. When Salome danced the dance of the seven veils, she danced a dance of death, not only for the Prophet whose new religion so opposed the old, but for herself. As such, her dance was both seductive and autoerotic, like all belly dance and, indeed, all dances of death.
The contemporary fashion of navel piercing is then perhaps a subconsious attempt to represent and embody the burning navel and all that it stands for. This atavism has been foregrounded, of course, by the manifesto, whose female acolytes worship images of the Queen of Sheba and Salome- both celebrated as avatars of Lilith- as well as less well-known incarnations of the Goddess, such as Helen of Troy, Lucrezia Borgia, and Mata Hari. Male acolytes, too, of course, have responded to the question of "the ruby in the navel" by not only arguing that it is symbolic of WIDOW's decision to exterminate Felis femella by ritual, umbilical wounding, but that it demonstrates that the manifesto reaveals to humankind more general, symbolic truths pertaining to sex, death and the "self-enthrallment" of the Reinhardt female.

6. The witch-craze was a pogrom against women. It embodied sex crime. Until the mid-1500s, the much quoted scripture Exodus 22:18 had used the gender neutral maleficos for the word "witch." By the mid-sixteenth century, new translations were feeding the fires of gynocide. In Luther's Bible Exodus 22:18 reads "Die Zauberinnen soltu nicht leben lassen." ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.") But in this translation the word for witch refers solely to females. In La Saincte Bible, published in 1566, the word chosen for witch is also feminine. 'Thous shalt not suffer a witch to live' had come to mean 'Thou shalt not suffer a woman to live.' By the 1600s witchcraft was considered a sex offence and prosecutors were predisposed to conceive of witches as beautiful, predatory young women. Fellatio was considered a particularly heinous criminal act. It was a form of vampirism whereby the demonic female- with her insatiable lust for seminal fluid- would suck out a man's essence and thus weaken and contaminate him.

7. According to Lacan, a child's sense of self arrives externally, from a reflection, or from the imaginary. The child enters the world through the "symbolic order" represented most crucially by language. Language belongs to the Father and the patriarchal order of the phallus. Power in language is the phallus. Women "are excluded- forever outcast as 'the other'- as creatures without language. This is due to the fact that they cannot escape from the imaginary into the symbolic order, as males can." The manifesto states that after moving to London in 2005 to take up a position at University College, Dr Reinhardt published a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry. He argued that the mental aberrations of human females with mutant DNA were best understood with references to files made available to him by WIDOW. In the course of their work WIDOW had written up reports of their kills that included photographs, video footage and transcripts of recordings of young women in extremis. It was when in extremis, argued Dr Reinhardt, that the mutant female revealed the essence of her psyche. By so doing, he concluded, she revealed an evolutionary "quantum leap" in orgasmic response that, if it spread to the general populace, would herald a fearful new age.
Dr Reinhardt's central thesis was that the death, or sex-death, of the mutant female, was in may ways pre-scripted, an erotic performance improvised about certain unchanging motives and themes. It was, in other words, like so many other elements of her behaviour, seemingly hardwired into her brain. the seven major leitmotifs of the sex-death were found to follow no specific order, and would often repeat themselves, or add a hitherto unique variation, in a single "performance"; but the most common order, following a progression involving apprehension, threat, initial wounding, torture, to the final death scene, was as follows: 1) cycles of perverse disbelief; 2) lewd infantilism; 3) pleas to be made into a "pet"; 4) frotteurism; 5) display rituals; 6) begging for mercy; 7) begging for the coup de grace.
The second leitmotif- affecting speech, in terms of vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation- is the characteristic most emblematic of the Reinhardt subject's "otherness" and her status as an outcast child.

8. Some biographical information about Thackery T. Lambshead currently resides on the Web and in the apocryphal The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. It is the opinion of the editors of this edition of The Catgirl Manifesto that Reinhardt and Lambshead were brothers, perhaps even twins.

9. Monica Lewinsky graduated with a degree in psychology from Lewis and Clark College in the spring of 1995. Shortly thereafter, she accepted an unpaid internship at the White House, where she became the most internationally celebrated fellatrix of modern times. Some feminists have argued that Lewinsky was the victim of sexual opportunism at the hands of her boss, President William Jefferson Clinton. The Starr report, however, suggests that she was engaged, not only in seduction, but also in a process of self-enthrallment typical of Felis femella and the exploitative and, ultimately, self-destructive relationships they enter into with demonic males. Kenneth Starr is, obviously, as much a prototype "Inquisitor" as Lewinsky herself is an early example of a "catgirl." In Section 11 of the Starr narrative, '1995: Initial Sexual Encounters,' she admits to having read an early version of the manifesto that had, it seems, been in circulation in the US long before the full version appeared in the UK.
The second volume of her sutobiography is notable for her illuminating, post-feminist critique of Reinhardt's paper in the British Jounal of Psychiatry. In this famous quote she focuses on his categorization of the sixth leitmotif of sex-death:
"When Dr Reinhardt talks of 'begging for mercy' he mistakenly assumes that it is the victim's desire to placate her prospective killer that is uppermost in her mind. With Bill and me this was only half the story. Though fellatio is no longer taboo, it remains the case that most women condition themselves to believe that the only pleasure they themselves may expect from the act is gained from the degree of pleasure they afford their men. (It is not so long ago that human females were thought incapable of receiving real pleasure or satisfaction from penetrative sex- a time when the clitoris was either unknown, or viewed to be pernicious.) It is true: I was the President's slave, his plaything, his little kittenish pet. But for a catgirl, fellatio- though desperate- is also vampiric. I was concerned to placate; I feared rape, of course, just as, later, post-coitum, I feared the slow, painful death that Kenneth Starr seemed to promise me. (Revealed, for all to see, in the sub-text of my deposition, and promised, these days, to so many of my kind by "the catgirl manifesto's" male acolytes!) I feared Presidential power, its delicous authority. But I was always in control, the consumer, not the consumed. And I took far, far more than I ever gave. The only relationship the slave fears is that of friendship. I am a Reinhardt female, and if I adore fellatio, I also adore treachery and deceit. Like all imcompletely domesticated female animals, catgirls make dangerous pets. Bill should have known that before he played with me...

10. N.B. Following Monica Lewinsky's recent execution, some few days before this samizdat manifesto was due to go to press, her estate has proclaimed that "Part II" will be published within months and that it will be like a trump that calls an end to this age and brings about the reign of Lilith.

Wow Rye. That was definitely interesting. I had to print it out to read it; I have trouble reading for that long on a computer, but it was worth it. Very cool.

You should read Looking For Jake by China Mieville. It's a collection of short stories with a similar feel to it. It even includes an entry for the Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

(Assuming for the moment that the catgirl "problem" actually exists, and is not a work of fiction) I believe it is less of a problem than the media would have us believe. A catgirl has a limited timeframe of maximum effectiveness. Eventually, she ages and becomes less appealing to the males she wishes to ensnare. Or, she is eliminated by normal human females who are threatened by her (as in Poison Ivy). Or, she meets a male who has evolved to counteract her. Not a WIDOW, but a male who is immune to the insanity/nymphetic autism she causes and can "reprogram" her to behave like a normal human female, i.e. marriage, family, loyalty, etc. (Speaking from personal experience here - I notice several catgirl traits in myself, which have been changed over time due to my husband's influence.)

On another topic entirely, I have to ask: Are you by any chance involved in Chaos Magick? It seems to me you'd fit right in. Your verbal intelligence, this story, your suggestions to Naito on pain control (from way in the past, but I still remember it)... Anyway, I was just curious.

It's PG. Don't worry. 3nodding

Hmm. Perhaps you're right Wobby. I overlooked the mention of fellatio in the notes... Silly me. How could I do such a thing!? lol

It isn't real, it's a work of fiction. There are some realistic elements, and life and art can certainly imitate each other, but it's intended to entertain. It's not a true scientific document.

Rye, where did you find this? I'd love to read "stories" of the same caliber, and it's tricky to find entertaining short stories like this unless you know where to start. Was it in a Year's Best Sci-Fi compilation, or something else?

YES! This is what I wanted! A real discourse on the topics and ideas presented in this story!
When I first read it, I was enamored of the 'not-quite-reality' that it represented, it seemed so believable that I could honestly accept the facts as such.

I think Reinhardt's syndrome isn't just a fictional device, that it actually does exist in our world, just on a much smaller scale than the story would claim it to be. The disdain for aging, and the near-frenetic exuberance that all youth, and young girls in particular, seem to manifest only serves to elucidate my feelings on the issue. How some adults become ***** become they are drawn to that natural energy that children possess, how the world's media overexposes sexuality and violence, and how these two intermingle can easily be thought of as an artificial crucible for the syndrome. The daughters of Lilith are already among us, they just haven't shown their hand yet.

(As an aside, the parallels between this and the PokeGirl literary setting came as a shock to me, they are so close as to be unnerving. For those who don't know what Pokegirl is, well let's say is a next-generation of the PokeMon mythos [yes, it's a mythos now], drawn to it's logical conclusion, including adult materials.)

As for where I found it, I had originally been looking for a children's book at the library's internet search function. The title was CatKid or something like that. And being an anime geek, when I saw a listing for Catgirl, I put it on request immediately. It was a story from the James Tiptree Jr. Award Anthology volume 1, a collection of stories that explore and re-invent the gender boundaries. I'll definitely give that book a try, thanks much for the recommendation!

And as for Chaos Magick, I have to admit I don't recognize the name. Is that like a guild here on Gaia or something? If what you say would indeed match those traits to it, I just might have to look into it once I found out what it is.

And yes, it is fiction, although I personally find it more believable than reality. A dissociative lean, based in part on the sensationalism present constantly in the news of the world.

Quite so, you do make a very valid point. I admit, my view is decidedly in the present age, disregarding war and such, as the average child distanced from wars likely views them as 'seperate' and 'unreal'. As the story I posted really only mentions from the past ten years or so, I took the majority of my logic base from this period of time. Yes, there were still wars and lines in the sand, but nothing nearly as drastic as the ones in the past.
But did catgirls as such exist in the past? Likely, but as the story claims their numbers are growing rapidly now, that would likely signify that their numbers were very small in the past, if indeed at all. The supposed supernova flare-up that brought them into being would obviously have no bearing on any recessive trait that could lead to the birth of catgirls beofre it occurred.
So keeping these points in mind, I felt that the average child of our age is generally 'in the prime of their youth', where having fun is just as important as anything else in their life. From that, I thought it likely that the various differences in temperament could easily seem to emulate the indifference for growing old, a sort of "Peter Pan" condition, that of never growing up and having fun forever.
But how does this bear in mind with the sexuality of a ctagirl. Very little. That is a completely different issue, one I feel I myself do not know quite enough about to say anything absolutely concrete. Yes, children or learnign the truth about gender earlier and earlier, it seems, but then again children were married before they were teens in the past. It all comes full circle.
If I rambled in this, I'm sorry. I don't have a single concrete point to stick to this time, so my logic kind of wandered all over. And again, you make a very good point.