Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (6 page)

Little girls learn all this because it’s important that they don’t question what they’re supposed to want, and who they’re supposed to want to be, to be with and to bring into the world. Don’t have kids too early, that’s what poor girls do, but don’t forget to have them as soon as you can afford the nanny. And if you are the nanny? Well, just wear a cute dress and smile and hope you get home in time to finish your schoolwork or put your own kids to bed. What, are you tired even thinking about it? Does something inside you shiver at the thought of forty years of ruthless conformity, or time and expense and hunger and self-hate and sacrifice, all for the chance, only the chance of being safe and loved? Do you worry that you won’t ever be enough?

Well, you’re right to worry. Of course you won’t be enough. You can never be enough. Only perfect, beautiful women deserve love and fulfilment; you, on the other hand, are weak, ugly, lazy and fat. If you aren’t happy, it’s your own fault. You should have worked harder. You should have eaten less and saved up for that nose job. You should have been smarter, thinner, nicer, taller, whiter, prettier, more in control of your ghastly self. Worrying about not having enough is still coded masculine, although poverty is still, overwhelmingly, a feminine experience.
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Men want objects; women are objects. Men’s first desire is to have enough things and do enough things; women simply want to be enough. Men want; women are wanted. And for women, to be undesirable is still a real existential threat. Women who are not stereotypically attractive, young and able-bodied often speak of feeling ‘invisible’ – as if they don’t exist.

UNSPEAKABLE HUNGER

The more powerful women become, the more we are taught that our bodies are unacceptable. Many of the most influential women in the world, from pop stars to media tycoons, have faced public battles with their weight that the tabloid press is only too happy to catalogue and exaggerate. Others, particularly politicians, have faced popular ridicule for the apparently scandalous surfeit of flesh on their perfectly normal-sized bellies and bottoms.

A report published in a recent issue of the
Journal of Applied Psychology
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revealed that the pay and influence of test groups of women in America and Germany consistently rose as their weight dropped below the healthy average, even when controlling for other factors that affect both weight and pay. By contrast, weight gain was an indicator of financial success for males up to the point of extreme obesity, when men too begin to pay a professional penalty.

Causality is always difficult to establish. Even with a rigorous study, it is impossible to say conclusively whether the women lost weight because their salaries rose, or whether their salaries rose because they lost weight. One thing’s for certain, though: in Europe and America, fear of female flesh is fear of female power, and Western society’s stage-managed loathing for women’s normal-sized bodies is deeply political. Even at the very top of the food chain, women’s hunger must be contained at all costs if the present state of things is to continue. Thus far, and no further, and it’d be nice if you had a run around with the hoover while you’re up there. 

This study is hard evidence of what most women with a scrap of personal and professional ambition have understood instinctively for the majority of our lives: that our success in life and at work is likely to be in inverse proportion to the number of spare inches of meat on our bones, and that our normal, healthy bodies are not wanted in positions of power. After a century of feminism, a few women are now permitted to hold authoritative roles in business, media and politics – but only so long as we take up as little physical space as possible. If there’s one type of woman the media can’t stand, it’s a political heavyweight.

That’s nothing, however, when compared to the utter horror society reserves for larger women who are also poor. The fact that in Western countries, where quantity of food access isn’t as problematic as quality, being overweight is as likely to be a symptom of poverty and malnutrition has only cemented the barely concealed disgust of the cultural right for working-class women who take up too much space.

From the boardrooms to the streets, women’s anxiety to keep our body mass as low as possible is based on legitimate fears that we will be punished if we attempt fully to enter patriarchal space. No wonder so many of us are starving.

The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything. Where once feminists complained of women’s ‘second shift’ of housework and childcare outside the workplace, the obligation to be highly achieving now infects every part of life: we must be academically successful, socially graceful, physically attractive, sexually alluring but not too ‘slutty’, talented but not ‘pushy’.

One of the first things girls learn is our own powerlessness. I mean our physical powerlessness: the idea, true or untrue, that boys are stronger and fitter, and always will be. Some months before the Olympic games,
Grazia
magazine published an editorial detailing the exercises athletics champions do to train their bodies – all posed by fashion models in couture gowns arranged to give the impression they were barely able to lift the props in their hands.
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Strong-bodied women do not impress advertisers, that’s why the pictures of the actual athletes were in miniature at the bottom of the page. Women aren’t allowed to look like they might be able to fuck you up. The only thing we are allowed to punch is a pillow, preferably in our underwear with a camera flashing, and pillow-fighting patriarchy isn’t even going to slow it down.

The battles of the young girl under late capitalism are the battles of the age, for dignity and gender and identity. The young girl, whose abjectness is part of her charm, is supposed to know better than anyone else that her misery is her own fault. She senses that she is fashioning herself into a commodity, meat for the cubicle moulded in plastic, but when her soul rebels she assumes the problem is that she isn’t a good-enough commodity, and works harder to shave off her strange and painful edges.

So, she works. All girls work. We spend money we don’t have in order to express the inner self we wish we had, the good and beautiful creature who deserves to be saved. We all know, as every working person who watches films knows, that our true self is rich and pretty and popular, and if we only put on the right clothes and learn to walk the walk, that’s who we will become. Fulfilment is an individual, and not a structural matter, and it is mediated by rigid conformity, which is of course the best way of being an individual, just like everybody else.

Perhaps the cruellest trick played on my mother’s generation was the way they were duped into believing that the right to work in every low-paid, back-breaking job men do was the only and ultimate achievement of the women’s movement. Yes, in most Western countries, women now have the legal right to be paid equally for any job a man can do, although they have to get the job first.

In practice, however, women are not working at the top of the pay and employment scale in large numbers. We are instead over-represented in low-paid, underpaid and unpaid work, just as we always have been, in domestic and care-sector work and other professions that remain at the bottom of the social heap in terms of pay and social status precisely because that work is traditionally done by women. The idea that this represents the end point of feminist progress needs to be done away with, and quickly.

PERFECT GIRLS

Society understands that young girls are fucked up. That’s part of their charm. They’re not just objects, they are abject, terminally unable to cope with the exigencies of adult life, of the bewildering array of life choices modern society offers us, from vaginal butchery to jobs in the service sector. Western womankind is collectively imagined as a toddler let loose in a candy store, so overwhelmed by the range of options that it has an ungrateful tantrum and is sick on the floor. And fucked-up young girls grow up to be miserable women: study after vaunted study tells us that women and girls are as miserable as they have ever been, overworked, exhausted, taking prescription medication in three times the numbers of men.
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The front pages of celebrity magazines shriek out a chorus of successful women on the verge of mental and physical collapse: this star is starving herself, this one is depressed, this one is drinking herself into a nightly stupor until her children are confiscated. It’s a myth that pleases the powerful. Women have all this equality and opportunity now, but we can’t handle it. Maybe we weren’t meant to have it in the first place.

It’s hard growing up; it’s easier to grow sideways, to veer off from becoming a person and just be a girl instead. After all, it’s what your family want. They want you to be pretty and pleasing and no trouble at all. It’s not because they hate you and want to keep you down, but because they want what’s best for you, and objective observation of the world suggests that girls who are ugly and troublesome tend to have problems, or become problems, and nobody wants you to be a problem. It’s what your boyfriend wants. He has not been raised to expect a relationship with a real human being, but a sidekick, a helpmeet, a wank-fantasy made only-just flesh. And it’s what your boss wants. He – or she – wants you to play the game. Be a good girl. Smile and make people feel comfortable; accept low pay, long hours, the occasional grope in the corridor, compete with other young women to be the prettiest and most compliant, the hardest-working, the girl everyone loves. Just don’t ever aspire to be more than that.

Being a girl, being That Girl, is easy if you’re white and averagely pretty. There’s no trick to it. You don’t even have to totally excise the parts of your personality that don’t fit, the parts that are smart and difficult and loud and angry and ambitious and masculine and mature. You just dial those parts down until they become background noise, dial them down and down until the male ear can’t pick up their frequency and pretty soon you won’t even be able to hear them inside your own head. Tune them out and swallow them down like the hot meals you can’t eat any more because That Girl must stay slim and fragile if she wants to be beautiful and loved. And you do want to be beautiful and loved. 

Most of all, it is tiring. It is tiring to be constantly scrambling for the moving edge of perfection, denying yourself rest, forgoing sleep, fighting to be better at everything. Perfect girls know that they must constantly improve. Perfect girls don’t sit on the sofa eating biscuits, even when their very favourite show is on. Perfect girls are always working: when they are not at school or on the clock they are working out, and when they aren’t working out they are volunteering, shopping, or running a social life like a frantic start-up. The cruellest lie they were told as girls was ‘it’s what’s on the inside that counts’. It is not what’s on the inside that counts. Perfect girls don’t get a day off. Characters who are largely fictional rarely do.

Here are a few more things perfect girls don’t get.

They don’t get to eat a slice of birthday cake without considering its fat content. They don’t get to put themselves first, or even second. They don’t get to make mistakes, which means they never really get to grow up, which means they can only ever get old, which is a fearful thing for girl-children. They don’t get to go out looking sloppy and roll down a hill in the park just for the hell of it.

And if they fail, if they fuck up, they don’t get forgiven.

This is why girls are so much more employable than young men in all the shitty, less-than-subsistence-level service jobs they’re trying to cram young people into across Europe and America. Girls are better at pleasing other people and plastering on the pretty grin even when we’re screaming inside. That’s what being a girl is. 

Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called ‘emotional labour’, not because there’s anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we’re trained to it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile. 

THE PRIVILEGE OF REBELLION

The Beat Poet Gregory Corso, when asked why there were so few women among the half-mad, celebrated, drug-taking, sexually experimental Beat Writers of the 1950s, said: ‘There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them.’
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Sanity is still socially determined, just as rebellion is still riskier if you’re a girl. It is as much about how you behave as it is about how you feel. You can be collapsing on the inside but as long as you can put your make-up on and smile for your boss or teacher, you’re okay. Conversely, you can be a functioning weird kid who just happens to have non-standard priorities and that shit can get you shoved on behavioural medication, deemed anti-social or locked up, depending on where you live.

Sanity is socially determined, and the bar of normality for women and girls is dauntingly high, a task requiring training. None of this means that distress is not real. On the contrary: it is often the effort to appear normal, the staggering amount of existential and personal work it requires to be the sort of perfect girl we’re all told gets to be loved and happy, that creates the distress in the first place.

You can spend your whole life being a perfect girl, never growing up, just gradually, resentfully, growing old. Choosing to grow up is painful, after all, especially if you’ve picked up on the fact that becoming a grown woman is the worst possible thing a girl can do. Don’t get older. Don’t talk back. Don’t think too hard, it puts ugly lines in your forehead. Stay pretty and perfect and pliant and silent. You can have whatever you want as long as you don’t ask for too much: let the magazines and adverts decide what you really desire, defer to your boyfriend and your teachers and your boss. We know what you want better than you do, and if you have a problem with that, we have a pill for what ails you.