Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (12 page)

At least, that’s what they tell me in their letters. I would despair, if I didn’t get so many letters. For every man who takes time out of his busy schedule of hating himself to tell me I’m an evil, frigid Feminazi who deserves to choke on his vengeful erection, there is another who just wants to know what he can do to help prevent rape. Or who is upset because no matter how hard he tries, he can’t get a job in this recession and he feels like less of a man because of it. Sometimes I get emails from male college students shyly confiding that they think they might be feminists and is that all right, in the way that one might ask whether or not the purple rash they’ve developed is quite normal. Not one of these men has expressed a desire to be a ‘provider’, but there is an anguish in their need to communicate.

A great many men and boys do not want to be ‘providers’, or ‘hard men’, just like a great many men and boys do not want to dominate women as they have been taught to do. Almost all of the young men and boys I’ve been close to in my life have wanted something quite different. Much as I’d like to put that down to my unending, knicker-moistening attraction to limp-wristed, nerdy bisexual communists with funny hair and sad eyes, I’ve known and loved enough of them to understand that it’s a little more complicated than that. There are more and more men and boys who are failing to see any part of themselves reflected in the mirrored cage of what Jackson Katz calls ‘The Man Box’.
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They want to crack open the cage, and join the others.

Because there have always been the others. That’s the last great secret of this supposed ‘golden age of masculinity’ that’s been destroyed by feminism: it never really existed in the first place, because at every stage of human history, no matter what contorted, narrow vision of ‘manhood’ society relied upon to keep its wars fought, its fields tilled, its factories staffed and its women in check, there have been men who would not or could not conform. Men who were too poor, or too queer, or too compassionate. Men who were too physically small, too shy, too disabled, too sensitive or too gentle to bear the clunking fist that was supposed to squash them all into a single understanding of what it meant to be ‘manly’. Men who were big and brawny and wanted nothing more than to run away to the city and paint pictures. Men who loved sex but didn’t want to get married or have kids. Men who wanted to be submissive to women, or to other men, and didn’t consider it a weakness. Men whose skill was in caring for children and the elderly. Men who just weren’t terribly impressed with the prospect of spending forty years hitting things with sticks for a living. Those men have always existed, quietly giving the lie to the notion that there has ever been one way of ‘being a man’.

The reason for a compassionate feminist approach to men is not to spare their feelings. Quite the opposite. Compassion is necessary precisely because to live full lives as we move towards a society that treats women as fully human, men will be required to see themselves and their experience in a new and painful light.

The sort of compassion that is useful to men and boys seeking to escape a world of violence, misogyny and emotional constipation is not the compassion of a priest who forgives sins, but of a doctor who looks at a suffering idiot who waited too long to get an oozing wound checked out and says, firmly and accurately: I’m afraid this is going to hurt. 

Of course it’s going to hurt. But then, it hurts already. The deep pain that the twisted mess of modern masculinity causes a great number of men is not often spoken about, because if it were permitted expression it would not be felt as rage or hate, but as fear and loathing, as confusion and self-doubt, or simply not being sure what the fuck we’re supposed to be these days. And that’s just not manly.

What we are asking men to do is hard. Let’s be perfectly clear: we have created a society in which it is structurally difficult and existentially stressful for any male person not to behave like a complete and utter arsehole. The fact that not a few of them manage to be decent humans anyway is to their credit.

The gains that women have made in the workplace, our new relative freedom from the obligation to get married, bear children and submit to male power at home and work are framed uncomplicatedly as a loss to men and boys. It’s as if there were a fixed amount of equality in the world and giving more to women automatically meant taking it away from men. Freedom doesn’t work like that. Freedom is one of the few things in the world that enriches the people who give it to you, even if they give it unwillingly. Men of conscience have no idea how much they will love living in a world where women are permitted to live, work and fuck as free and equal agents, in a world where humanity comes before gender.

Feminism must address men’s issues not as an afterthought, but directly, and passionately, because right now there is a conspiracy of silence around men and gender. If male identity is to stand a chance, men and boys must accept that the old distributive model of patriarchal power is gone. It never really existed for most people anyway. What the men of tomorrow must do is let it go with grace. Retain some dignity over a perceived loss of power, and people who are not men might speak to you honestly about what real powerlessness looks like.

Please understand that I have no intention of making feminism one jot less threatening, or persuading men that feminism will not change their lives because it already has, and it will continue to do so before we’re done, and that’s a good thing. It’s not that you can’t afford feminism. However broke you are, you can’t afford a world without it. And I can’t wait for us to get started.

Seriously. I can’t wait. I can’t wait for us to meet one another as equals. I can’t wait for the liberation of human potential that’s got to come when one half of the human race does not live in fear of the other. Where we can wear what we want and love who we like with no anticipation of violence. Those who are creating it, men and women and everyone else, do so by trying to live more freely than is strictly safe in this monstrosity we call modern life.

With every passing year I meet more men and boys who are as sick of restrictive gender norms as the rest of us, and who are prepared to do something about it, to live lives which make space for difference, and to stand up for those who do the same. The task is not easy. To reject the violent rituals that come with being raised male is to risk violence, to risk making mistakes and looking stupid, to risk having one’s pride hurt profoundly, and I am moved by the courage of the men and boys in my life who take those risks. They are the strong ones. They are the ones who know that true strength involves the capacity to adapt, because when you fall, if you can’t bend, you break. They are the ones with the power to make the world new. And as long as I remain a political creature, I will stand in solidarity with those men.

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Anticlimax

A revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo

Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic of Sex

SLUT TALK

Here are the situations in which I have been called a slut: when I have spoken out or spoken up. When I have had the audacity to ask for money or fame instead of keeping my legs and mouth shut like a nice girl should. When I have been political in public. When I have left my bed unmade and floors unscrubbed and gone out making trouble. When I have taken too many lovers and prioritised my work over making them feel special. And finally, most incongruously, while fucking.

I am consistently stunned by the proportion of otherwise polite men and boys who get off on calling women bitches and whores and sluts in bed. Nominally feminist and sex-positive men ask if they can say it; the less enlightened just spit it out. Slut. Whore. It seems to be a statement straight from the mind-set that any woman who really, truly consents to sex, who really wants to meet you in bed as an equal, must be a slag, a whore, taking it – always taking it – like a slut.

Porn has a lot to answer for when it comes to the semantic variety of sex talk. A language of violence slipping off the erotic vulgar tongue, where penetration is a woman’s punishment for lust. If you like it, best pretend that you don’t.
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Let them castigate you for letting them fuck you while they do it.

Slut. It’s a slur, but it shouldn’t be.

Slut: just saying the word parts the lips a little too wide. The sloppy vowel-sound sloshed around the underside of the palate and then snatched back, too late, like some cast-off notion of reputation. Slut. It’s fun to say and it’s fun to be, as long as you abide by the principle that if you’re going to break a rule, you may as well snap it over your knee, set fire to the pieces and run away. Slut. It’s a word of power. I’m taking it back.

In the past, the word ‘slut’ was used simply to mean any woman who didn’t behave: a woman who was ‘dirty, untidy or slovenly’, a slack servant girl, a woman who failed to keep her house in order and her legs closed before marriage, a woman who invited violence and contempt. Today, in a visual culture sodden with images of shorn and willing female bodies, a slut is any woman with the audacity to express herself sexually. That should tell you everything you need to know about modern erotic hypocrisy.

The Slutwalk phenomenon began in Toronto in 2011, after a local policeman instructed a group of female university students to stop ‘dressing like sluts’ if they didn’t want to be raped,
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a point of view not unique among men in positions of power. The global protests that followed have infected the imagination of women in cities around the world, from Dallas to Delhi, who are sick of being bullied and intimidated into sexual conformity.

We like to think that we live in a liberal, permissive society – that, if anything, the problem is that there is too much sex about. This is a cruel delusion. We live in a culture that is deeply confused about its erotic impulses; it bombards us with images of airbrushed models and celebrities writhing in a sterile haze of anhedonia while abstinence is preached at the heart of government.

If I could take a red pen and annotate the world, I would scrawl ‘slut power’ in letters too big to ignore.

For over a century, ‘slut’ has been a word of censure. It has been used to hurt people and make them ashamed. The word ‘slut’ has been used to control women and girls, queer people and poor people by making them feel ashamed of what they are and what they want. It keeps them in their place by telling them that wanting more than what they’re allowed is shameful, whether that’s a kiss from a stranger, a new world order or an extra slice of cake. ‘Slut’ tells us that our bodies are there to be kept in line. ‘Slut’ tells us that being hungry and horny and human is a bad thing, that we should control ourselves before someone does it for us. Slut is a word and an idea that desperately needs to be taken back.

Slut power means speaking up. It means standing your ground when those around you are attacked for wanting too much, demanding fair treatment, for taking up too much space. Women who are political are stereotyped as ugly, slutty and masculine because that’s still the worst thing you can say to a woman who frightens you.

Being a slut doesn’t have to mean fucking around, or fucking at all. It just means refusing to see desire as dirty. It means abandoning the pursuit of patriarchal approval as far as you can. Taking away its power to cut you down and shut you up.

Good little girls don’t get off. I had the opportunity to learn this at an early age when I was thrown out of ballet class for teaching the other girls how to masturbate. I worked out how to touch myself by accident, and it was so much fun that I saw no reason not to share my thrilling discovery with my classmates. 

When the teacher caught us, it was gently suggested to my mortified mother that maybe I wasn’t suited to ballet. Perhaps one of the more masculine middle-class after-school activities, like judo or boxing, would be a better fit. I was terrible at martial arts. I’m weedy and easily startled and I hate hitting people. I just wanted to dance and have fun.

I have always been more interested in fucking than being fuckable. I’m drawn to others who feel the same. I can muddle through the rituals of sex appeal well enough when pressed, and retain a bewildered admiration for those women to whom it seems to come effortlessly, but for me sex is something you do, rather than something you stand around waiting for other people to do to you. I was too nerdy and shy to get a shag at school, but as soon as I left home, I tossed my virginity aside like ballast and soared off hunting for pleasure and adventure. 

It stuns me that female desire is still taboo. The notion that women and girls might want sex for its own sake, rather than suffer it in exchange for money or status or security, is still an idea that is resisted by society at large. We are not supposed to crave sweetness and danger and the scent of sweat on skin. 

In Britain, the release of an official report declaring that girls are being too ‘sexualised’
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has coincided with parliamentary lobbies for young women to be ‘taught to say no’.
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Join the dots with police officers telling women that ‘no’ is insufficient if they happen not to be dressed like a nun and an ugly picture begins to form. What we’re looking at is a concerted cultural backlash against female sexual liberation.

Sex is not the problem. Sexism is the problem. Arbitrary moral divisions are being renewed between ‘innocent’ women and ‘sluts’. Young women, in particular, are expected to look hot and available at all times, but if we dare to express desires of our own, we are mocked, shamed and threatened with sexual violence, which, apparently, has nothing to do with the men who inflict it and everything to do with the length of skirt we have on. Some of us have had enough.

Faced with savage public opprobrium, told that our sexuality is dirty and dangerous, some young women are keen to reclaim ‘slut’, to celebrate its implications of bad behaviour, to refuse to submit to outdated moral standards designed to keep us cowed and frightened. I’m one of them. What’s more important, though, is that we refuse to let the word sting, or draw distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women.