Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (19 page)

The man who sent this message is the sort of scum that rises to the surface of the cybersphere out of our deep and roiling instincts to hurt and shame other people, those who believe that the only true democracy is the democracy of hating. He is the blogger the government fears, the one with dirt on everyone, the one who hates liberals and anyone who dares to have principles in public almost but not quite as much as he hates women.

Particularly young women, or pretty women. Half the traffic to his site is driven by revealing or demeaning pictures of female journalists, politicians and public figures, close-ups on breasts and bottoms, fuelling comment threads full of one-handed rape fantasies where any and every woman in a position of influence can be ‘taken down a peg’. He says he’s going to put my breasts on the Internet.

He wants me to know he has power over me.

In the few years I have spent as a young woman with a sizeable online following, I have learned just what a fearful thing it still is to be female in public life, how much resilience and stamina it takes to weather the inevitable attacks. One of the most common insults flung at women who speak or write in public is ‘attention seeking’ – a classic way of silencing us, particularly if we are political.

The fact that ‘attention seeking’ is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale. From the moment we can speak, young women are ordered not to do so. Little girls who talk too much, who demand the respect they have earned, are ‘attention seeking’, and that’s very bad. Little boys who do the same are ‘confident’ or ‘engaging’. Men in public life, whether they are celebrities or politicians, rock stars or radio DJs, actors, activists or academics, are almost never accused of being ‘attention seeking’, with the possible exception of Bono. For a man to seek attention is no crime: attention is men’s due. Women, however, are supposed to be silent. We are not accorded the same right to speak. We are still little girls demanding ‘attention’, and we should learn our place.

The notion that women should be seen and not heard is not confined to the Internet. The popular dead-tree press has always profited from objectifying some women and judging others. Readers are invited to pass judgement upon women’s beauty, upon their sexual behaviour, their fitness or unfitness as mothers, the shape of their bodies, the wobbliness of their thighs and their ability to snap back into a size six swimsuit two days after giving birth, and that judgement is the reader’s reward for skimming lazily over whatever propaganda the red-tops are peddling that day in the guise of news.

Even as women continue to be under-represented as journalists and editors, body-shaming, objectification and witless woman-hating filler copy remain the stock in trade of the ‘professional’ media. That trend is only becoming more pronounced as the Internet undercuts its bottom line. Tabloids are now relying more and more on lazy sexism to sell papers, and the news economy of misogyny is more pernicious than ever as it is experienced in real time online. The woman-hatred of the popular press is in no way separable from the sexism of amateur blogs and web forums: plenty of sexist trolls have regular gigs as print columnists, and the commentariat still behaves like a frat club. Meanwhile, tabloid misogyny such as the
Daily Mail
’s ‘sidebar of shame’, with its crowing over muffin tops and upskirt shots as bad as anything you’ll find on Reddit, legitimises the danker, more covert troughs of gynophobia online.

It is in this climate, in this news economy of misogyny, this society where the male gaze is monetised as never before, that the worst thing any woman or girl can be is ‘attention seeking’. Women are supposed to be looked at, but never listened to. We should be seen, but not heard – and God forbid we actually try to direct that attention or appear to enjoy it. If we raise our voices, we are ‘attention seeking’, and a woman who wants attention, never mind respect, cannot be tolerated. If you’re a woman and somebody calls you ‘attention seeking’, that’s a sure way to tell you’ve made an impact. It’s yet another slur that should be a source of pride.

PATRIARCHAL SURVEILLANCE

We cannot perfectly control our online selves any more than we can control the contours of our flesh. Bodies, like data, are leaky. Out of the mess of bodies and blood and bones and pixels and dreams and books and hopes we create this mess of reality we call a self, we make it and remake it. But obtaining a naked or next-to-naked picture of another person gives you power over them.

In this age of images, the right to request no photos is a sign of truly intimidating social status, of money, power or both, and women, especially young women, almost never have that right. We don’t have it in the privacy of our own homes, among friends, in our beds, with our lovers. Especially not with our lovers. In the retail corridor at the New Jersey Porn Expo, shoved in between stall after stall of tacky sex merchandise, was one unobtrusive stand selling hidden cameras, ‘for personal security’.

The stallholder was cagey about why there was such a market for concealable recording gear of the type that could be easily stashed out of sight in, say, a bedroom. Some of our customers are just extremely keen on security, he insisted. Watch out for that blinking light, the panopticon eye flashing at the edge of sight.

The surrender of that power can be hugely sensual when it is done with consent – or sickening when it’s coerced. Not so long ago, teenage boys would demand joyless fingering or badger female schoolmates into giving them a feel of their developing breasts in order to prove themselves cool and grown-up: nowadays a titty-picture does the job twice as well. A naked picture is never an empty boast: it is proof, proof of your power over another person, and culture still tells us that power over another person is what makes a boy into a man.

Sexist trolls, stalkers, mouth-breathing bedroom misogynists: all of them attack women out of a hatred, in part, for the presence of women and girls in public space, which is what cyberspace remains, for now. Those threats, however, are made infinitely more effective by public officials warning parents of young girls to keep their daughter offline if they don’t want them harassed, groomed or ‘sexualised’, a term that seems to refer to the magical process whereby preteen girls catch a glimpse of some airbrushed boobs on a pop-up ad and are transformed into wanton cybersluts, never to be reclaimed for Jesus.

The message is remarkably similar, in fact, to the lectures one imagines young girls receiving before contraception, legal abortion and the relative relaxation of religious propriety: your sins will never be forgiven. One slip is enough to disgrace you for life. Naked on the Internet is different from being naked anywhere else, because there’s always a record: or there could be. We grow up understanding that past indiscretions can never be erased. Don’t let your guard down or your skirt up for an instant, or you’ll be ruined: not just pictures, but words, promises, furtive late-night search histories will follow you for ever, and you will always be ashamed.

Although the technology is new, the language of shame and sin around women’s use of the Internet is very, very old. The answer seems to be the same as it always has been whenever there’s a moral panic about women in public space: just stay away. Don’t go into those new, exciting worlds: wait for the men to get there first and make it safe for you, and if that doesn’t happen, stay home and read a book.

People learn to code by playing in coded space. We learn the Internet by being there, by growing there, by trial and error and risk-taking. If the future is digital, if tech skills and an easy facility with the Internet are to be as essential as they appear for building any kind of career in the twenty-first century, then what are we really saying when we tell girls and their parents that cyberspace is a dangerous place for them to be? We’re saying precisely what we’ve said to young women for centuries: we’d love to have you here in the adult world of power and adventure, but you might get raped or harassed, so you’d better just sit back down and shut up and fix your face up pretty.

Perhaps one reason that women writers have, so far, the calmest and most comprehensive understanding of what surveillance technology really does to the human condition is that women grow up being watched. We grow up learning that someone is always looking at us and checking for misbehaviour, checking that our skirts are long enough, our thighs tight enough, our grades good enough, our voices soft enough. Whether or not anyone is actually watching and checking at any particular moment is less important than the fact that they might be, and if a lapse is observed the penalties will be dire.

Patriarchal surveillance was a daily feature of the lives of women and girls for centuries before the computer in every workplace and the camera in every pocket made it that much easier. The emotional logic of state and corporate surveillance works in very much the same way: the police, our employers, even our parents with network connections may be watching only one in a thousand of our tweets, one in ten thousand of our indiscreet Facebook messages, they may only be watching one in a hundred CCTV cameras of the tens of thousands deployed around every major city, but we must always act as if we are observed and curb our behaviour accordingly.

The Internet is only ‘public space’, of course, in the way that a bar, a sidewalk or a shopping-mall are public space: ultimately, someone rich and mysterious owns that space and can kick you out if they don’t like what you’re doing there. Being aware of surveillance changes how you behave, how you live and love and tie your shoes and eat breakfast, what you say in public, what you read on the subway.

The first people to notice this were men and boys who had not grown up with the expectation of constantly being watched, who were horrified by the proliferation of spyware, private and state surveillance technology, data collection, CCTV cameras on every street corner, long-range police cameras making it impossible to hold a placard in the street without your face ending up on a database. In much of North America, it is now illegal to go out with a mask or bandana over your face. But this is nothing new – at least, not for women. As the journalist Madeline Ashby writes, ‘Apparently, it took the preponderance of closed-circuit television cameras for some men to feel the intensity of the gaze that women have almost always been under . . . It took Facebook. It took geo-location. That spirit of performativity you have about your citizenship now? That sense that someone’s peering over your shoulder, watching everything you do and say and think and choose? That feeling of being observed? It’s not a new facet of life in the twenty-first century. It’s what it feels like for a girl.’
⁵

Pictures of girls are one of the Internet’s major commodities. Melissa Gira Grant, writing in
Dissent
magazine, identifies the activity of self-branding, self-promotion and social work online as a new ‘second shift’ of women’s unpaid work,
⁶
but it’s more than that. It is, in many cases, part of the work you do for your boss, making your company look good, presenting the right image; we’re encouraged to imagine that those who pay us, employ us or live with us might be monitoring us at all times, watching what we do and say. Make sure your Twitter feed doesn’t embarrass your boss. Make sure your mum doesn’t see pictures of what you did last night. Whether or not they actually are watching doesn’t matter – we’d better behave, just in case. It takes to another level the traditional pose of paranoia and anal self-retention that has for centuries been called ‘femininity’.

One of the most popular terms for all of this is ‘NSFW’, or ‘not safe for work’, an abbreviation coined on chat forums to prevent people accidentally opening links to pictures of fannies or gaping sphincters if there’s a chance their boss might be peering over their shoulder. Now, however, ‘not safe for work’ has become shorthand for anything a bit risqué. It’s rather appropriate, really, since if two decades of faux-feminist ‘empowerment’ culture have had a project, it has been to make women ‘safe for work’, rather than making work safe for women.

Women’s sexual bodies are not deemed ‘safe for work’, either literally or figuratively. We get to choose, online and offline, between the embattled paranoia of a ‘good woman’, respectful to her seniors and to men, never openly sexual, never asking questions or talking honestly about our own experiences, or the dark, tawdry world of ‘bad women’, where sluts who dare to have sex are humiliated and hurt. The ultimate power that men feel they hold over women is to drag them from one category to the other, and the Internet, with its boundless recording and publishing capabilities, can make this infinitely easier.

At the same time as girls everywhere are warned to stay offline if we want to preserve a paleo-Victorian notion of our ‘reputation’, we are told that sex and violence on the Internet isn’t ‘real’. A robot that can reach through the screen and grab your pink bits has not yet become a standard add-on with every laptop, so sex online can’t be real. Can never be coercive.

It might help if we understood, as those who have grown up with half their life on screen instinctively understand, that sex on the Internet is real sex, real pleasure, real passion, whether or not it’s ‘authentic’. In a world of soft-lighting, speed-dating, pleasure tools that pulse and buzz and tickle and shove and whine in half a million varieties of plastic and rubber and steel, in a world of breast implants, dick implants, of genitals shaved and sliced into pleasing slits and bodies pumped and oiled and choreographed to ram into one another until one of them capitulates, we should have some pillow talk over precisely what we mean by ‘real sex’.

What’s it like to date, fuck and fall in love when half your social interactions are online? A rash of textbooks and self-help manuals written in a rush of moral panic by contemporary pop psychologists would suggest that it is uniformly abject and exploitative, particularly for young women. Books with titles like
Where Has My Little Girl Gone?
and
Protecting Your Children Online
⁷
advise us to keep kids away from the net for as long as possible, instruct parents to implement filtering and censorship systems so that we don’t poison young minds or corrupt the innocence of young ladies.