Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (26 page)

So here’s what I’ve learned, in twenty-seven years of reading books and kissing boys. Firstly, averagely pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe. Trust me. I should know. Those of us with an ounce of lust for life are almost universally less interesting than we will be in our thirties and forties. The one abiding secret about us is that we’re not fantasies, and we weren’t made to save you: we’re real people, with flaws and cracked personalities and big dreams and digestive tracts. It’s no actual mystery, but it remains a fact that the half of the human race with a tendency to daydream about a submissive, exploitable, transcendent ideal of the other seems perversely unwilling to discover.

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose. 

Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic – but it’s a risk you have to take.

LOVE (:) YOUR JOB

Under late capitalism, love has become like everything else: a prize to be won, an object to be attained, a commodity to be hoarded until it loses value or can be traded up for a better bargain. On the other hand, if we are to believe the truly staggering amount of pop propaganda on offer, Love™ is also something that is, by its very nature, free – something that must absolutely never involve money or value exchange of any kind, if it is to be deemed ‘true’ love. 

The insistence that Love Always Comes Free – that Love™ cannot ever be related to money or value exchange – is remarkably convenient. Because it turns out that Love™ is also the theoretical basis for most of the work done for free, largely by women, so that the mechanisms of profit and production can be maintained. Most of the work of childcare, cooking, cleaning, personal care, helpmeeting and mopping up your husband’s ego after a hard day’s wage labour is not recognised as ‘real work’ because it is done out of ‘love’ – and if love workers ever questioned their conditions, their love would automatically be less worthwhile, less genuine, than the love of all those girlfriends, wives, mothers and daughters who do their duty with a silent smile and a bottle of Valium in the bottom drawer. 

Love can also be work. Love is, in fact, difficult and challenging as well as rewarding, and even at its most exciting is deeply involved with money. I’m not trying to argue that childcare, housework and the work of supporting partners through waged labour should necessarily be paid, although if I did, I wouldn’t be the first to do so. It is important, however, to recognise that a lot of the work that women do remains unpaid or underpaid because we think of it as ‘love’, as a moral expression of feeling rather than a practical task of immense and tangible value. A lot of that ‘second shift’ of caretaking that is worth untold billions every year and is still performed largely by women, is exempted from consideration and left undiscussed precisely because it is understood as ‘love’, and ‘love’ always comes for free.
⁹
A good job it does, because if it didn’t there’d be a hell of a bill to pay.

For men, Love™ does not mean work in the same way that it traditionally has done for women. For men, Love™ is more likely to mean continuing in one’s occupation of choice with the support of a partner who cherishes and believes in you, will take care of you when work exhausts you, will handle all the arrangements for the care and upbringing of your children so you don’t have to think about it, and will provide you with your preferred form of sexual release at the end of the working day. The fact that this is a fantasy doesn’t stop it standing in the way of real progress on the domestic front and making a lot of men and women miserable along the way. 

There are a growing number of men who have come to shoulder a portion of the domestic burden, and even a minority who work as primary carers for children, but that minority is still small – and enormously culturally under-represented to the extent that such arrangements still fail to register in the life plans of most young men. The weary narrative of the ‘male provider’ or ‘breadwinner’ continues to be a source of anxiety for a great many men despite having little historical basis in fact, there having been very few historical moments when women’s work has been confined solely to the home. Nonetheless, for men the boundaries between love and work are clearly drawn. For men, love is supposed to be the reward you get in return for work; for women, love is work in itself. 

Marriage used to be understood as an essentially economic arrangement. In this age of Disney Princesses and One True Lovers, marriage is still an economic arrangement, and one that is beneficial to any state whose wealth is based on property ownership, as evidenced by the panicked efforts of successive government to formalise and reward it within the tax system. That’s one reason why even those queer people opposed to marriage on principle nonetheless insist on their right to ruin their lives on the same way straight people have been able to for centuries: because there’s money at stake. 

Online dating has brought a lot of joy to a lot of lonely people – between 20 and 35 per cent of new relationships now begin on the Internet – but it has also formalised the similarity between one’s professional and romantic CVs. In many cases the only way you can tell if a person is applying for a role in the back office or your bedroom is whether or not they have included a picture of themselves drunk at a festival riding an inflatable alligator to prove that they like ‘having fun’. You tell your potential boyfriend the same lies you tell your potential boss: I’m easy-going, flexible, low-stress and cheerful, just like you want me to be.

Love is supposed to be what makes us human. Why, then, is what we so commonly think of as love so easy for machines to imitate? Valentine-bots are programmed to stalk online dating sites scamming desperate people – often but not exclusively women – by going through the motions of passion. Romance is many things, but it is not a Turing test: its language and rituals are so well understood that a simple computer programme can imitate them quite easily. 

If love is becoming more like a job, with schedules, interviews and promotion grades, then it is certainly the case that work is becoming much more like romance. Social scientists now speak seriously of ‘emotional labour’ – the elements of customer service, people-pleasing and ritual soothing of egos that are now part of the daily routine of most bullshit jobs. Bosses don’t just want a job of work done: they want you to smile while you’re doing it.

There’s another important way in which romantic love has become like work under neoliberalism: it is at once all-consuming and precarious. You are expected to pour the whole of your energy, all of your passion, time and enthusiasm into one endeavour, even though you know that it could end at any time if the magic disappears, or the economy tanks.

Our expectations of love and marriage have become ever loftier even as lifelong partnership ceases to be the norm: a recent study
¹⁰
showed that where once one could at least acknowledge that a romantic life partnership was about expediency, sharing the bills and having someone on hand to put up shelves, now the things that we expect from marriage are more abstract and urgent: true kinship, decades of erotic fulfilment and a sense of spiritual completeness.

Even as our expectations of Love
^TM
become more frantic, the pressure is on for this ideal bond to replace the human kindness confiscated by the world of work. The purpose of dating, as far as the market is concerned, is to produce households. We are sectioned off into couples in order to make the production and reproduction of ‘human capital’ easier – self-reproducing family units isolated in their own struggle. Romantic love is both the consolation and respite from the privations of work and the means of making that work sustainable. 

Women, in and out of romantic relationships, carry the burden of emotional labour. We do the work of healing and mending that we have always done.

Under late capitalism almost all of us are damaged goods, but it is women who end up trying to fix that damage, or at least keep the gears greased so the machine carries on functioning. I see so many bright, brilliant women pouring their energy into salving the hurt of men who cannot turn to each other for comfort. We do it as sisters, as mothers, as friends, and especially as lovers and wives, because of the sheer number of men and boys who are socialised out of intimacy with anyone they’re not fucking.

We pay with our time, with our emotional energy, with our attention and care, because that’s what women do, and that’s what love is: trying to carry another person’s pain and stress, even if they resent you for it, which they frequently do. As I said earlier, you can’t save the world one man at a time. That doesn’t stop many of us trying.

Thirty years ago, it was common for women to be expected to do the washing up after any gathering as a matter of course. Now we’re stuck cleaning up the emotional messes of modern life – and late capitalism has left us with an unending stack of dirty dishes. A great many of the brightest and bravest women I know are constantly soaped to the elbow in the gunk of men’s silent distress. This would be hard enough if we didn’t have our own shit to deal with.

As work and housing become more precarious, as it becomes more normal to move hundreds of miles to find employment, and as ties of geographic community are eroded by austerity, romantic partnership is now expected to provide the main source of emotional as well as economic support. As Richard Kim and Lisa Duggan note in their seminal article ‘Beyond Gay Marriage’
¹¹
romantic love and marriage are now expected to do more even as ‘the net effect of the neoliberal economic policies imposed in recent decades has been to push economic and social responsibility away from employers and government and onto private households. The stress on households is intensifying, as people try to do more with less . . . In more and more cases, the sole remaining resource is the cooperative, mutually supporting household or kinship network. But if marriage is the symbolic and legal anchor for households and kinship networks, and marriage is increasingly unstable, how reliable will that source of support be?’

In her book
Against Love
, Laura Kipnis notes that ‘the conditions of lovability are remarkably convergent with those of a cowed workforce and a docile electorate . . . how very convenient that we’re so willing to police ourselves and those we love, and call it living Happily Ever After.’ Fear of loss of love makes us hesitate. It chokes the impulse to freedom at the back of the throat before it is spoken. If we have to behave in order to be loved, if we cannot be fulfilled without it, of course we will do whatever it takes to make love happen – even at the cost of our personhood.

Your job is now your boyfriend: neither of them can be trusted to stick around, so you’d better make sure they know how much you love them. You have to be passionate about your work, even if your work is lining up packets of pasta shapes on a shelf. You have to pretend that you dreamed of pasta arrangement as a child; that all you’ve ever wanted is to stack carbohydrate staples in a supermarket, and even though you and your line manager both know it’s not true, you’ve got to say the words and hold the smile. You must love your job so much that if you weren’t getting paid, you’d do it for free: all waged labour has become the Girlfriend Experience.

LOVE AND OTHER ADVENTURES

Is there any more pitiable creature than the single woman? Samhita Mukhopadhyay, writing in her book
Outdated
, fears not: ‘When she is not the stereotypical bubblegum popular culture notion of the “single gal about town”, she is at her most reviled and feared: on welfare, representative of the failure of femininity, a threat to masculinity, a threat to the family, a spinster, a cat lady, bitter, alone, jealous, never been kissed, and I could go on.’
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The reality remains that ‘Women who do it on their own bear the financial, social and emotional cost of being single in a society unwilling to truly support their lives.’
¹³
Women learn to fear being ‘left on the shelf’, to associate it with poverty and isolation.

We are all encouraged to feel sorry for ourselves if we are single, to consider ourselves incomplete, but women in particular are urged to consider themselves inferior if their time is not spent comforting and cosseting a man, and ideally children too. I have been single, in the strictest sense of the word, for some years, and although I haven’t been encumbered by children, I have found it a marvellous adventure.

In 2011, the summer of rage and riots, I kiss a girl and she tastes of cigarettes and gin and I like it. She says she wants to be a mistress for ever. We met because we were sleeping with the same boy, and he isn’t entirely comfortable with how close we’ve become. I buy her a cupcake from a posh sex shop. The cupcake has icing on it shaped like a cunt with a little clear sugar glaze trickling obscenely off the frosting folds. She laughs and eats it right there in front of me because she is hungry.

And then months later, on my balcony in late summer with tea and fags and ripped tights like dirty old ladies in training, I tell her that I want us all to be together. I love her and I love him and I love seeing them together, and when it’s just the two of us we share something he isn’t allowed to see, something private. We met at a protest, me pinching one of her cigarettes, which was and still is my way of telling her I need her. We’re not the marrying kind. But he – he says no. He says we can’t do it, it doesn’t work with three, even though that’s the only way it’s ever worked between us. It’s against the rules.