Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (28 page)

That change in consciousness is coming from below. It’s going to be led by women and queers and outsiders and their allies. It’s going to come from ugly girls. Fat girls. Girls who aren’t thin enough, rich enough, white enough. Girls with thick thighs and bellies that wobble and voices that carry – that resonate. Girls who are fucking angry. Girls who fuck for money. Old women. Trans women. Single mothers. Low-paid workers. Sex workers. There are so many ways to fall off the plinth patriarchy erects for the ideal woman. Eventually you’re going to have to decide if you’re going to wait to fall, or if you’re going to jump.

Here are the worst things you can call a woman: ugly. Slutty. Fat. Bitter. Bitch. Cunt. The worst thing anyone can say to a woman, in short, is that she doesn’t please you. We must get used to giving the answer: is that all you’ve got?

I have always found comrades in those who helped each other answer back.

This is still a violent, bigoted world, a world of neoliberal patriarchy that loves to make you hate yourself, especially if you’re young, or poor, or weird, or a woman. To make you hurt yourself. To make you police the behaviour of others so that they remain as cowed as you feel. To cope with the intimate terrorism of neoliberal patriarchy we’ve got to work on giving fewer fucks. We’ve got to work on having no shame because we need no shame, because none of us do, unless we have hurt another person. We must be comfortable with knowing too much, but never knowing our place.

We’ve got to stop letting stale old men define our dreams. We must refuse to be ashamed of our desires, of our ambition, of our energy. We must refuse to judge others by any standard other than that of kindness and decency. We must not start out by apologising for all that we are.

It’s about saying no and expecting that no to be respected. It’s is about owning your own capacity to consent, and exercising it actively, again and again – not just in sexual terms but in political terms, too.

Because when we are done hating ourselves and hurting each other, we can get on with asking for what should be ours by right. 

Neoliberal patriarchy gives us choice, but not freedom. No choice in an unfree society can be a truly free choice. The choice between this boss and that, the choice between marriage and penury, the choice between shame and self-denial, the choice between degrading work and debilitating poverty, all of these choices are meaningful, but they are not the same as liberty. Feminism and radical politics are about demanding more than a choice between one type of servitude and another. They are about insisting on our right to live with dignity, our right to shelter and sustenance and learning and the means to take care of one another.

I’m writing this on New Year’s Day. This was a factory once. The gusty old warehouse where I’m living has been gutted and fitted with makeshift heaters and now eight queer kids live here, plus a rolling population of homeless activists, stray girlfriends and travelling refugees from the London rent crisis. In the empty offices, somebody has put in bedrooms, a kitchen, a cooker. The water is boiling for tea. Around me the sound of breathing swells and stills. People have laid down sleeping bags amongst nests of cables. This is our factory now.

I sit cross-legged like an urchin on top of my red suitcase. I have scattered its contents across two continents, on the floors of squats and artists’ lofts and hotels and strangers’ apartments, under tarpaulin at occupations and in the dressing rooms of cabaret shows. Every time I think I’ve found a place to unpack, my heart goes hunting for something new. And every time I lose hope, I find more of these places. Spaces where those who have found themselves exiled from the world of good behaviour by choice or circumstance live together in something like freedom for as long as they’re allowed. Here we are, down and out in the global village. Around me in the quiet euphoria of the morning, sleeping young people are breathing in and out, drunk and dreaming. It’s really easy to feel that you are dreaming alone. In a world where the powerful have little to fear except collective resistance, it is easy to feel that you are the only one who wants to live differently. Freedom can be a fearful thing. Wanting it can make you feel crazy.

But we have the technology now. We have the tools to liberate us from the privations of biology and the means to communicate without the mediation of the powerful and their paid mouthpieces. We have the technology to speak back to power not just in one voice, but in many.

A time is approaching when the humanity of women and girls and queer people and our allies will be understood in practice rather than acknowledged in passing. I believe that together we will find the courage to rewrite the old, tired scripts of work and power and sex and love, the old stories about what it means to be a beautiful woman, a strong man, a decent human being. I believe that the time is coming when those stories will be heard in numbers too big to silence. The great rewriting is already under way. Close your eyes. Turn the page. Begin.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

 
1
    For this reading of neoliberal ideology I am indebted to Richard Seymour’s analysis in
Against Austerity
, Pluto Press, London, 2014.

 
2
    Valentine M. Moghadam, SHS/HRS/GED, ‘The Feminization of Poverty’, UNESCO, July 2005,
http://www.cpahq.org/cpahq/cpadocs/Feminization_of_Poverty.pdf

 
3
    See Natasha Walter,
The New Feminism
(London: Virago, 1999, new edn); see also Sarah Jaffe, ‘Trickle Down Feminism’,
Dissent
, winter 2013.

 
4
    Object! Campaign in the UK and the campaigning of German feminist Alice Schwartzer; and many more.

 
5
    In the words of Foster Friess, a major Republican donor during the 2012 US presidential elections: ‘You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.’
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/02/foster-friess-in-my-day-gals-put-aspirin-between-their-114730.html

 
6
    Nina Power in her excellent study
One Dimensional Woman
, Zero Books, London, 2009, calls this ‘Feminism™’.

 
7
    Cissexual or ‘cis’ means ‘not transsexual or transgender’; ‘cis’ is to ‘trans’ as ‘straight’ is to ‘gay’ and, of course, a good many people fall somewhere in between.

 
8
    This statement originated by Carol Hanisch in a paper of the same name in the journal
Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation
1970.

 
9
    Sarah Menkedick,
It’s Not Personal
,
http://velamag.com/blog/its-not-personal

 
10
  Quinn Norton deserves credit for this phrase. See ‘Feminism’s Twist Ending: Women and the Internet: Part Four’, https://medium.com/ladybits-on-medium/e057ed6bb9e0 9Feminism’s Twist Ending, 30 November 2013.

 
11
  
http://www.who.int/gender/documents/en/whopaper6.pdf

 
12
  Catherine Hakim,
Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital
, Allen Lane, London, 2011.

 
13
  Francis Fukuyama’s book
The End of History and the Last Man
, Free Press, New York, 1992, is based on his essay ‘The End of History?’ written in response to the end of the Cold War and published in The National Interest in 1989.

CHAPTER 1: FUCKED-UP GIRLS

 
1
    
http://www.gallup.com/poll/158417/poverty-comes-depression-illness.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=syndication&utm_content=morelink&utm_term=USA%20-%20Weight%20-%20Wellbeing%20-%20Well-Being%20Index

 
2
    See Adjustment disorder,
DSM5
, American Psychiatric Publishing, Arlington, 2013.

 
3
    See Marya Hornbacher,
Wasted
, Flamingo, London, 1999, and Lynn Ruth Miller,
Starving Hearts
, Excentrix Press, 2000.

 
4
    
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/31/education-gender-gap-girls-schools-university

 
5
    
https://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/.../GetFil.
..

 
6
    
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/5244693/harriet-harman-is-either-thick-or-criminally-disingenuous/

 
7
    
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8255909.stm

 
8
    RuPaul: ‘You’re born naked. The rest is drag.’
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/218170-we-re-born-naked-and-the-rest-is-drag
, from the autobiography
Lettin It All Hang Out
, Sphere, London, 1995.

 
9
    
www.Andred.com/who

 
10
  ‘Beauty Bill of a Lifetime’,
Daily Mail
,
21 February 2011.

 
11
  ‘The Lipstick Effect’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 28 May 2012.

 
12
  
Open Democracy
, 6 March 2012,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kate-donald/feminisation-of-poverty-and-myth-of-welfare-queen

 
13
  T. A. Judge and D. M. Cable, ‘When It Comes to Pay, Do the Thin Win?’,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20853946

 
14
  
http://greatist.com/fitness/15-olympic-inspired-exercises-try-today
, 10 August 2012

 
15
  
Astounding increase in antidepressant use by Americans
, Peter Wehrwein
,
 Contributor, Harvard Health, posted 20 October 2011, 12:46pm,  
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/astounding-increase-in-antidepressant-use-by-americans-201110203624

 
16
  ‘A Report from Naropa’ by Stephen Scobie in
Beats and Rebel Angels: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg
, Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, 2–9 July 1994,
http://www.litkicks.com/Topics/NaropaReport.html

 
17
  
http://liesjournal.net/
http://libcom.org/library/lies-journal-marxist-feminism

CHAPTER 2: LOST BOYS

 
1
    The obvious answer to which is: yes, of course I’ll make you a sandwich. It will be made of the dust of history, and I hope you choke on it.

 
2
    Susan Faludi,
Stiffed: Betrayal of the American Male
, Harper Perennial, New York, 2000.

 
3
    Barbara Ehrenreich,
The Hearts of Men:
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
, Anchor, New York, 1987.

 
4
    Ibid.

 
5
    Ibid.

 
6
    Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction to 
The Second Sex
 (1949), translated from the French by H. M. Parshley, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1953.

 
7
    Emile Durkheim,
Suicide: a Study in Sociology
(1897), The Free Press, New York, 1997.

 
8
    Ibid.

 
9
    Dan Savage, ‘It Gets Better’,
http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject

 
10
  
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/23/134628750/dan-savage-for-gay-teens-life-gets-better

 
11
  Tamara A. Lennox, ‘Occupy Rape Culture’, 5 November 2011,
http://thefeministwire.com/2011/11/occupy-rape-culture/