Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (13 page)

Sexual liberation has been cut out and hammered down into sexual neoliberalism: rigid, suffocating conformity masquerading as freedom. Don’t be fooled by the skin-mags and flesh-flashing music videos. We’re in the middle of a sexual counter-revolution, and it starts with the ritual shaming of women and girls for daring to be creatures that lust.

TELL ME AGAIN ABOUT LIBERATION

In societies ravaged by the financial incompetence of rich men, it is the sexual incontinence of young women that is deemed the real danger to our children’s futures. An epidemic of wanton slaggery is depicted, and little girls have to be protected from themselves, even as men on both sides of the Atlantic and the political spectrum queue up to justify rape.

Liberal and conservative lawmakers alike have come out in public to defend rapists, to excuse sexual violence as ‘bad bedroom etiquette’ or something less than ‘legitimate rape’, to explain that rape is inevitable, that the best way to protect oneself from it is to say ‘no’. If that ‘no’ isn’t respected, well, that’s what you get for being born on the wrong side of the right chromosome.
⁵
We are told, again and again, that it is sexuality itself that is bad for women. In fact, what hurts women and girls is sexual control, just as it always has been – and the backlash is on.

Telling little girls to ‘just say no’ is official policy on sex education curriculum on several continents. But that does no good when it turns out that that ‘no’ won’t always be respected. It’s even less use in a sexual culture where ‘no’ is one of the most erotic things a woman can say. The fetishisation of female resistance – the erotics of ‘no’ – is ancient, but it is not immutable.

The ideal woman is fuckable, but never actually fucks. If she isn’t a virgin she is, at least, perpetually refusing your advances; if she wants to ‘catch’ a man she must give every appearance of not wanting him, dropping his calls, not returning texts, playing ‘hard to get’. Real men don’t want women to want what they want; instead of a meeting of minds and squishy bits, sex is all about her submitting to his desires. Girls learn from their peers, from magazines and even from their mothers that they’ll never get a boyfriend if they dare express desire, let alone lust. Doing so makes us objects of ridicule, clingy, needy, hysterical bitches who have been stupid enough to abandon the one power we’re really allowed: the power to manipulate men with sexuality.

That’s the one power women are really permitted, even if only a few of us, even if only for a small part of our lives, and only grudgingly. Of course it doesn’t come for free – it comes with the constant threat of violence if we go too far, if we push him too much, if we send the wrong signals or have the audacity to change our minds. A woman who voluntarily abandons that power, a woman who is proud of her sex drive, who pursues men, who is predator rather than prey, who wants to meet her lovers as equals theoretically and horizontally, a woman like that will never be respected. Not when the emotional logic of neoliberalism still resists the idea that women are human beings with talents beyond prick-teasing and pregnancy.

More and more these days, sex looks like work. When the female orgasm was first discussed openly in the 1970s,
⁶
it was a revelation – it is now an obligation. If you can’t make it, you have to fake it: produce pleasure, or pretend pleasure, doesn’t matter, as long as you produce.

An orgasm is a bit like a smile: if you don’t feel like it, you can fake it till you do. A woman without a smile on her face is a threat. Who hasn’t been yelled at in the street – cheer up, love, it might never happen! – even when it already has? You look so much prettier when you smile. Smiling exercises all the right muscles in your face, it’s practically exercise.

Did you know that when you smile, if you hold it for long enough, after a while you’ll start to feel happy? Yes, I knew that, too – it’s in all the magazines. Smiling is like fucking: if you’d rather not, maybe you should give it a try anyway, if your boss or your boyfriend would rather you did. Let’s have no sulky faces. You’ll get into it after a while. You’ll learn to enjoy it. You’ll learn.

Since the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, women have more sex, but not freely, and not without fear of punishment that is social and sometimes physical. Dress like a slut and get raped; don’t expect police protection if you engage in sex work or sleep around; break a man’s heart and get battered. The ‘cuckold’s defence’ for partner violence, whereby husbands whose wives had cheated on them were given lesser sentences for beating and even killing them, was taken off the statute books as late as 2009 in many countries, including Britain.
⁷

The simple fact is that women do have sex, and lots of it, for reasons that are nothing to do with marriage or propriety. It’s not just a few prostitutes or ‘bad’ women who fuck as if we already live in a world where we can’t be punished for it; having sex with several partners before or outside long-term relationships has become, with the exception of strictly religious communities, the norm. ‘Waiting until marriage’ is now seen as unusual, a minority lifestyle choice, almost a perversion, which of course it is, and always was. Like any perversion, the ‘purity before marriage’ fetish is perfectly healthy in its proper place between private individuals, but as soon as it’s enforced, it starts to stink of social control.

Sex by its nature is not bad for women. If the pursuit of pleasure remains a risky business for us it is because society makes it so, particularly if we are queer, or transsexual, or poor, or women of colour, or sex workers, or vulnerable. The social cost of actually having sex, rather than merely appearing to want to have it, is what damages women; sexual control, not sex itself, is what harms all of us.

BAD EDUCATION

September 2000. That time has come again. Last year’s obligatory sex education class was run by the school nurse, a jolly middle-aged woman in a navy-blue shirt who owned a truly astonishing collection of full-frontal photographs of the most damply oozing sexually transmitted infections. This year, however, the nurse is sick. Her job has been given to a newly arrived languages teacher, Miss Green, owing to the notion that telling a roomful of sniggering, murder-eyed fourteen-year-olds everything they think they already know about fucking will burn all that youthful idealism right out of her.

We wait for Miss Green in the classroom like a pack of hunting dogs waiting for dinner. She comes in with a stack of videos and gives us an evil grin. An hour later half the boys are hiding their faces and all the girls are open-mouthed and angry. We have just watched information reels about how hard it is to get an abortion when you can’t pay privately, and how you’re forced to beg and cry and plead for basic autonomy over your own body.

It turns out that Miss Green of the mousy bob and unthreatening cardigan has an agenda. In one term of classes we learn a lot of things she technically isn’t required to teach us, such as positions, painkillers and emergency contraception, including a trick with a shower nozzle you can do if a condom breaks before you run out for the morning-after pill, which Miss Green acts out in eye-popping detail. What Miss Green tells us is that we should not be frightened of our bodies. She tells us that the threat of pregnancy is only terrifying because of the ongoing assault on our reproductive choices.

When you are a teenage girl, absolutely the worst thing you can do is get pregnant. Pregnancy, if you’re still in school, is synonymous with shameful life-ruinage, poverty and destitution, the doom of anyone silly and slutty enough to actually do all the things we’re only meant to look like we want to. How precisely you are supposed to avoid this fate is a matter for debate. It’s muddled by myth and sketchy sex education, skewed by shame and religious propaganda – there are a great many places in the nominally civilised world where telling young girls how to access contraception, much less giving them that access, is still against the law.
⁸
One thing, however, is made quite clear long before your tits come in and the bleeding starts: get pregnant and your life is over.

That simple fact of biological inequality – the fact that for women sex comes with the risk of pregnancy – is still the first and most important lesson young girls learn about why they are different to boys, why sex and love and life will always be different and difficult for us, why we have to be constantly on guard not to slip, not to shame ourselves or our families. Rather than teaching young girls about contraception and sexual health, we teach them shame. Rather than teaching young girls about pleasure, we teach them fear and self-hatred. And rather than teaching young boys about responsibility, we teach them suspicion and slut-shaming, teach them that sex is something they have to cheat and trick girls into giving up.

The fact that this narrative is insisted upon, despite the fact that we have the contraceptive technology to make it almost obsolete, is profoundly political.

When you are a teenage girl, all sorts of people suddenly start telling you what you can and can’t do with your body. Your sexual and physical agency belongs to everyone apart from you. People suddenly have all sorts of opinions about how you look, what you wear, where you go and who you touch; men want to use you and sometimes abuse you for sex, and the magazines you read and the culture you consume confirms that the purpose of your body is to please men, whether or not you’re at all interested in fucking them, and you probably shouldn’t be, because you’re a nice girl.

Aristotle, who was the sort of vicious misogynist that people have paid attention to for two thousand years, believed that women were incapable of higher reasoning because we are more animalistic than men, more bound to our bodies – women were bodies first before they were whole beings, and those bodies needed to be kept in line by men with muscle.
⁹
Two thousand years later, the same logic is at play at the highest levels of government. It is at play whenever lawmakers suggest that women should be forced to go to counselling before they can have an abortion.
¹⁰
It is at play whenever the state decides it knows better than women what our sexual autonomy should look like. It is at play when one in five women will be raped in her lifetime,
¹¹
and the public conversation is stuck on how many of those women are liars.

It is no surprise that so many women and girls have what are delicately called ‘control issues’ around their bodies, from cutting and injuring their flesh to starving or stuffing themselves with food, compulsive exercise, or pathological, unhappy obsession over how we look and dress. Adolescence, for a woman, is the slow realisation that you are not considered as fully human as you hoped. You are a body first, and your body is not yours alone: whether or not you are attracted to men, men and boys will believe they have a claim on your body, and the state gets to decide what you’re allowed to do with it afterwards.

A LOT OF KINKY FUCKERY

Things that Jean-Jacques Rousseau really liked included the philosophy of universal liberty, and having young ladies spank him into a frenzy. In
The Confessions
, he wrote: ‘To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments, and the more my blood was inflamed by the efforts of a lively imagination the more I acquired the appearance of a whining lover.’
¹²

Like a great many wealthy, important men throughout history, Rousseau was a humiliation slut. He loved to have women boss him around in bed. He was also a flasher, and liked to moon unsuspecting ladies in the street and then prostrate himself for punishment. Nobody has ever suggested that this meant that the great enlightenment philosopher secretly wished men didn’t run the world. In fact, Rousseau had some very specific things to say about women’s place in the social order. ‘Woman was specifically made to please man,’ he wrote in
Emile
. ‘If man ought to please her in turn, the necessity is less direct. His merit lies in his power . . . If woman is made to please and to be subjugated to man, she ought to make herself pleasing to him rather than to provoke him.’
¹³

Kink has been part of the sexual menu for so long that it’s hard to pretend anyone is shocked any more when it turns up on the table. The practice of male masochism, for example, has become almost idiomatic when one is discussing Wall Street workers, or the British aristocracy – despite Rousseau and de Sade, the French still refer to sadomasochism as ‘
le vice anglais
’. At no point, however, has anyone implied that men who want to be sexually dominated by women also want to be dominated by them socially and economically. Quite the opposite, if the long history of powerful men paying poor women to beat them up in backrooms is anything to go by. For women, though, the mainstreaming of kink – and particularly of sadomasochism – is supposed to prove that we’re not as into all this liberation schtick as we might think.

In a cover story for 
Newsweek
in 2012, columnist Katie Roiphe argued that the recent success of pop-porn bestseller
Fifty Shades of Grey
proves that even feminists secretly want to be shagged into submission by great, big, whip-wielding brutes. Not just in spite of our feminism, but because of our feminism. Roiphe claimed that modern women find ‘the pressure of economic participation . . . exhausting’ and that ‘for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.’
¹⁴
This is the type of bullshit faux-feminism that the mainstream, woman-hating press just loves to pump out in order to provoke a reaction, propping up its ailing business model with the titillation of hate.