Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (24 page)

It would help if we could distinguish this ideal of love, this grab-bag of twee, semi-sexual heteronormative romance rituals, from all the other potential kinds of love. To ease that process, I find it best to think of that narrow romantic fantasy in its proper place, as Love™.

Love™ is the other side of the pornographic narrative; the other side of Sex™. It is the story told in the light where the machinistic, vengeful clusterfuck of most straight porn is the story told in the dark, and the thing about stories is that somebody made them up. 

The competing narratives of hypercompetitive patriarchal porn and fairy-tale for-ever romance are meant to be polar opposites. They are certainly almost never part of the same plot, outside the widely and unjustly ridiculed universe of cheap ladies’ paperbacks. But there are some important similarities. Both stories, Love™ and Sex™, hold us up to impossible standards. Both demand that we see another person as less than human, merely a body filling a prewritten role in our script for romantic or erotic ecstasy. Both are wildly unrealistic, and both set us up to fail.

Back in the real world, most people’s lives exist on a spectrum somewhere between One True Love and meaningless rutting. Even those of us taken in by the fantasy know this to be the case, and yet it’s frowned upon to speak of that spectrum in positive terms. We are required instead to acknowledge that any person or pair of persons failing to achieve Love™ or Sex™ are doomed to live terribly sad lives, blue of gonad and broken-hearted. 

EITHER WAY YOU’RE ON YOUR KNEES

In many social situations, it is now more acceptable to say you don’t believe in God than it is to say you don’t believe in love. Love™ has become devotional, especially for women. We search for it, profess belief in it, make sacrifices for it. Love™ is considered the passion besides which all others are inferior – especially for women, who are not permitted any greater love. ‘To give proof,’ as the Tiqqun collective observe, ‘it would be enough to recall how, through the entire process of “civilisation”, the criminalisation of all sorts of passions accompanied the sanctification of love as the one true passion.’
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The quest for Great Love is the ultimate devotion, the ultimate sign of being a good woman who can command the interest of men. Some of us may have loosened the vice of religious misogyny, but we still find ourselves on our knees. Love™ demands demonstrations of faith in the face of logic. ‘The perfect person is out there,’ we say to our friends who are single and sad, as if merely repeating the mantra might make it so.

One of the most misunderstood lines by Karl Marx is the hoary old quote about religion being ‘the opium of the masses’. This is usually taken to mean that religion is an intoxicant, a mug’s game, and that people who fall for it are deluded. What Marx went on to say was that ‘religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world.’ The thing about opium, you see, is that it isn’t just addictive – at the time, as writer and theorist James Butler notes, ‘opium was a medicine and comfort while also being a potent drug’. Religion, like opium, was a refuge from the anxieties of the age, replacing personal, individual despair with a whole new set of problems. Right now, romantic love as we know it functions in much the same way.

We don’t just fall for all of this romantic faff because we’re stupid, or gullible, or weak. We fall because we want to, because we need to believe that something will make the rest of our lives safe and meaningful. The postures of romance, particularly straight, married romance, allow us to reject the grim meat-hook reality of work and death even as they fashion us for it, pairing us off into little pockets of pain and passion: you and me against the world, baby. We fall in love because it’s easier than learning to swim in the stuff.

Why must we ‘fall’ in love? Why must love be a lapse? Why can’t it be better than that? Here I am, talking like a zealot, when what I really mean to say is just this: modern love is like finding yourself lost and starving on a street you don’t know. You walk into a late-night grocery store with hunger boiling in the pit of your belly and find the shelves stacked with cupcakes, brightly coloured, sugar-sweet, perhaps with a cartoon smile painted on in frosting.

If you’re lucky, cupcakes are just what you want. If you’re unlucky, it’s cupcakes or nothing. And even if you do want those cupcakes, because after all, cupcakes are what everyone’s selling, that kind of sugar will make you crash hard if you don’t keep eating it. So when the first cupcake is gone, you have another, and then another, as many cupcakes as you can buy, bingeing until you feel sick, until you never want to see another fucking cupcake again, but still you’re terrified that without them you’ll starve. 

In her important book
All about Love
, bell hooks writes that:

Now that . . . women are more economically independent, men who want to maintain dominance must deploy subtler strategies to colonise and disempower them. Even the wealthiest professional woman can be ‘brought down’ by being in a relationship where she longs to be loved and is consistently lied to.
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Women across the classes are taught to seek the love of men first, to assess our worth on the basis of how good we are at keeping and holding male attention. And across the classes, romantic humiliation can be used to bring women low. Every straight man I have ever spoken to about dating remains angrily convinced that women have all the power when it comes to romantic dealings, including the ultimate power: to accept or reject a man’s sexual advances, to put men in the ‘friend zone’, which is a mug’s game, because of course no real man would actually want to be a woman’s friend. The power to say no to sex makes women monstrous to men, feels like more than a fitting exchange for every other sort of power denied to women and girls over these long, weary generations.

This is perfectly true, as long as one believes that the power to say no to sex is respected in practice. Men as a class are incensed by that process of female refusal. They rail against it, push against it, undermine it with violence. They come out in their cowardly thousands online to protest at the idea that sexual consent should be respected.

But men, too, have equal power of refusal in relationships. They can refuse to give of themselves in a way that is equally humiliating to women who have grown up learning that they were failing on a basic level if they could not command the love and commitment of men. And that’s it. That’s how heterosexuality makes us all miserable. That’s the privatisation of love.

‘Love’ is one of those words, like ‘Freedom’, ‘Security’ and ‘Democracy’, that has been captured and tortured until it gives in to its polar opposite. Love is supposed to be the one thing you can’t kill. And maybe that’s true, if you come at it with a gun in your fist. But there are other things you can do to undermine the power of human passion. You can rip it away from kids and redeliver it processed and packaged in pink and blue cans for somebody else’s profit, like powdered milk you pay for with your heart’s blood. You can mangle it into a mode of production. You can use it to isolate people in antagonistic pairs and let them blame each other for the structural lack of sweetness in the world. You can privatise passion, annex affection. You can create the appearance of scarcity where there ought to be abundance. You can make the search for simple connection into a miserable, exhausting ritual that demands rigid gender conformity and represses the human spirit. And that’s how you kill love.

LOVE IS WORK

Almost midnight outside an occupied university building. The sexual tension between me and one of the non-elected student leaders is so thick that we can hardly see each other through it. I’m mortified by how much I want him. This cocky, jockish young man keeps trying to beat me in discussions and failing, and people are asking me when the hook-up is going to happen. Like it’s a done thing.

There’s little privacy in an occupation, but we’ve found some, in the pool of dark outside the corridor by the dustbins. It’s December and the air is bitter and the three beers we’ve had aren’t enough to keep us warm. We lean a little closer.

And this is it, this is the moment where the music soars and we make out messily under the moon and the credits roll. That doesn’t happen. Instead, he says: ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But I only kiss very beautiful girls.’ 

He’s drunk. He doesn’t mean to be that much of a prick. But we both know what he means, and it hurts because he’s right: I’m not the sort of girl who gets kissed by boys like that. I’m not a sexy little package. I’m scrappy and opinionated. I’m devoted to my work and my politics. I keep my hair cut short and my clothes clashing and I wear big boots and don’t dumb down. Attraction is only a part of it. Socially speaking, you do not put your mouth to a loaded gun.

I still feel like I’ve been dragged out and shot behind the dustbins. 

And for a moment that spins out reeling in the hurt, private parts of the heart, I wish I was a different kind of girl. A girl like the girl I see the same boy rolling under a blanket with in the communal bedding area two hours later, soft-spoken with long, pretty hair. I am eaten up by jealousy, and that’s how they get you. It’s the night before a big march, but I abandon sleep.

Instead, I get the laptop out and take it to a place where people are too stoned and sleepy to take notice of my pathetic little tears. This is stupid. There’s work to be done. Tomorrow tens of thousands of us are going to take to the streets to demand fair access to education, and my smashed little heart shouldn’t matter. But it does. The whole world is changing, and I just want to be the kind of girl who gets taken in somebody’s arms. In the corridor, some kids are training to resist police batons with makeshift cardboard armour, which is a great way to fuck yourself up the night before a big demo. I think about maybe growing my hair out and wearing more skirts.

And that’s how they get you.

That’s how they keep you in line. I have, from time to time, been threatened with violence for walking too proud and talking too much and wearing my hair like a robot rent-boy from the future, but those threats are easy to laugh off. But deep down, I know if I choose not to play the good girl game, I might not get as many kisses as I want. And that’s so much more terrifying.

This, then, is how women are kept in line. The threat of violence is a fearful thing, but its injustice is clear, and there is always the risk of rebellion. To threaten someone with a slap, or a kick, with broken teeth or a split skull or rape or murder, is not always enough to keep them behaving as you would want them to behave for ever. To threaten someone with loss of love, however, is a violence far more profound and painful: there are few people who would choose a long, healthy life without love over a short, painful life full of it. To tell a person that if they don’t do what they’re told they will never be loved is an existential threat akin to soul-murder. ‘If you do not do this, you will be beaten’ is ultimately far less effective than ‘if you do not do this, nobody will love you’. 

It is that fear that keeps us cowed and conformist. It is the fear that we will be unloved.

We don’t pare ourselves down and tart ourselves up and process our personality into the mould deemed most pleasing by mainstream culture because we’re stupid, or cowardly. We do it because we fear loss of love. We do it because we grew up learning, unless our parents were particularly enlightened, that we were unworthy of love unless we conformed to a certain set of rules about how to look, dress and behave. Of course, they get you coming and going.

If you do follow all the rules, if you ever get it perfectly right, then, of course, you’re a dull bimbo, a brainless fembot, just as unworthy of male respect as the ones who didn’t. You’re a cardboard cut-out girlfriend, and you can be dismissed. No woman is ever dismissable, but sometimes, if we want men to love us, we are forced to act dismissable – and don’t all good girls want men to love them?

LOVE OBJECTS

There is a princess in all our heads: she must be destroyed. At the time of writing, the entire global press has been recruiting us all into the Cult of Kate Middleton for upwards of three years, and businesses are gleefully cashing in on young women’s insatiable lust for princess paraphernalia. Fake tiaras and fashion handbooks play into the collective fantasy that one day, if you are beautiful and good enough, you too can marry the inbred great-great-grandchild of some bloodless aristocrat whose distant relations were better at murdering huge numbers of peasants than some other bloodless aristocrat.

As social mobility collapses, princess propaganda is enjoying a shocking pink renaissance, hooking grown women who should know better into the hoary old narrative of One True Love leading inexorably to titular rights to the Duchy of Lancaster. When we grow up, the princess becomes the shining girl, the good girlfriend. It may look less likely that we’ll inherit Cornwall, but we can still be somebody else’s beautiful sidekick, which is the best thing a girl can be.

We talk a lot about women as sex objects, but the reduction of women to love objects does just as much damage; it’s a degradation more intimate and enduring. The love object is a thing to be desired and pitied all at once. She is the helpmeet, the saint, the fantasy. She is never a complete person. Whatever attributes make her interesting – maybe she can cook, or sew, or shoot a gun, or solve a crime – she exists ultimately for the hero’s edification. She is nothing without him.

The notion of women as sex objects is understood. Just as many of us, however, spend our lives trying to mould ourselves into love objects. Almost every female protagonist, in every story written or designed by men, is a love object: a creature fabricated to fulfil a role in somebody else’s grand narrative. The love object is always a supporting character, even when she gets the most screentime. She delights, she entices, she is slender and beautiful and whimsical and invariably poorly written, and so many of us spend a great deal of time trying to be her.