Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (23 page)

This, in fact, is the most persistent delusional artefact of what is known as evolutionary psychology. Women are good at feeling and men are good at thinking. Women have more ‘social’ intelligence, are better able to ‘multitask’, whereas men are better at things that require the sort of focus that can only be achieved when your wife or girlfriend is sorting out dinner. Women can be almost as smart as men, but we’re smarter at different things, things like nurturing, listening, taking care of other people, managing social systems, throwing parties, publicising events and inventions men are in charge of, organising the diaries and offices of men that they might better concentrate on the important work, and, of course, raising children. Men, in other words, are good at doing, making and building things; women are good at making life easier for men. We’re not less smart, we’re just different smart. Smart at things that don’t involve being listened to or making an impact on the world. You know, different smart.

It’s a eugenics of gender that would be seen for the throat-closingly vile propaganda it is were the tests being done on people of different races, ethnicities or sexual preferences. And yet these myths persist because they are soothing, comforting, because they provide a halfway rational basis for the prejudices that poison our society. 

Otherwise rational individuals cling to bad science to justify the ongoing dismissal of women in exactly the same way people once clung to religion to provide that same justification: once, women didn’t go into research and engineering because God had designed them to be full-time mothers; today, women don’t go into research and engineering because evolution designed them to be bad at maths and better at babies. This is, apart from anything else, a terrible misuse of a respected theory.

CHANGING THE SCRIPT

I’m twenty-seven and I work and write and hunt down stories online, and right now I’m following the Pirate Party, the online-freedom activist group that became a global political movement, as it seeks to get its first representatives in a national parliament, in Iceland. In a bar where all the candidates, hackers and gamers and nerds to a man and woman, are gathered for drinks and strategy, someone starts talking about feminism, and how it makes the men feel.

I join the conversation. It’s a discussion I’ve had before. It encompasses how the guys feel when their idols are accused of rape, what they think ‘patriarchy’ means, whether women are really just overreacting – and their fear of being misunderstood. Their fear is legitimate; there is pain on both sides. Then one of them, a hacker called Jason who has been belittling the women at the table, says something that will stay with me for a long time. ‘I think you’re wrong,’ he says, ‘but I’m prepared to accept that I might not have all of the information.’

Why does he think women are wrong about how they experience gendered violence?

‘I’m not saying that. I just feel you’re trying to define me, and trying to define men, and I don’t like it.’

Has he considered that he might not have all the information about himself?

Jason manages to convey an expression of sudden quiet enlightenment under a thick and ponderous neck-beard, which is quite a feat. Over the next three days of reporting we continue the discussion. This guy wants to learn. He isn’t the first geek guy I’ve met who has come suddenly to the understanding that their information about how the world works is flawed and incomplete, nor the first to want to change it.

Geeks aren’t just the problem. Geeks are also the solution. The Internet may perpetuate prejudice and facilitate gendered violence, but it also helps us fight it. When the story of Todd’s suicide hit the press, Anonymous and other amorphous online activist groups got together to expose men who they accused of blackmailing her with nude photos. Shortly afterwards, misogynist trolls like ‘Violentacrez’ – a man named Michael Brutsch, who was behind Reddit sub-groups like ‘jailbait’ and ‘creepshots’ – began to be hunted down and identified by journalists or private individuals.
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As I write, a new mood of online vigilantism is beginning to take hold of the net, whereby people with a new understanding of misogyny and what it means aren’t prepared to wait for society to fix itself. You can hack anything, after all, and that includes sexism.

Vigilantism is what happens when the laws of the land are not fit for purpose. Right now the Internet is outstripping the conventional court system when it comes to digging out information about rapists and other sexual predators. When geeks decide to take up the cause of feminism, they are a fearful thing. The Internet is a new country, without laws or borders, and there is no reason for the old rules of men-talk-women-get-fucked to apply here for very much longer.

A networked society is only as good as the networks upon which it is built. A network that dehumanises women and denies them full, free access to the same channels men enjoy is simply not a network that works properly, and geeks, nerds and everyone who cares about the Internet as a free and open space need to understand that their network is no longer fit for purpose. Our system is broken. It needs to be updated.

As in cyberspace, so in meatspace: the networks in which we love and fuck are the same networks in which we do politics, educate one another, fight the government, change the world. If the Internet is revolutionising politics, keeping girls off the net, or at least keeping us cowed and complicit online, it is a way of shutting us out of that revolution.

The Internet is a political place, if it is a place, and a place where politics is being altered for ever. Young people, disenfranchised people, ordinary workers sitting at home with tired faces uplit by lonely laptop screens are working out new ways of finding one another in this networked world, building platforms and lines of communication that have, over the past half-decade, routinely outpaced and outsmarted governments. Every time an individual state attempts to crack down on freedom of speech online it reassures net denizens that online activism and online organising are powerful.

The Internet is a real place. It’s where we live and work and fight and fuck and make friends. Harassment, intimidation and silencing online are more than ‘just words’, and not just because they are sometimes, in my experience, photos of your head pasted on porn, cartoons of you being beaten up, or phone calls whispering about your sexual history. Whoever cooked up the idiot axiom about sticks and stones breaking bones but words being essentially harmless never knew a teenager bullied to suicide by online taunting.

Once the geek community finally wakes up to the fact that the harassment, bullying and intimidation of women online is a clear threat to the principles of freedom of speech and egalitarianism, the social space of the Internet will start to look very different. Boys grow up believing that they are the hero in their own story; girls have to learn not to see themselves as a supporting character in someone else’s saga. Fortunately, the Internet lets you choose your own adventure. Systems can be rewritten. Protocols updated. The social architecture we’re building online today will be the one the next generation grows up in, and if that looks too much like the one we did, for all our talk of futurism, we’ve fucked up. There’s time to turn it around. The system adapts, and we can rewrite it so it works better – or we can make it a playroom for the prejudices of the past. It’s up to us.

5

Love and Lies

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case

Angela Carter,
The Sadeian Woman

In New York City, romance is a bloodsport. It could hardly be anything else in this place that casts everything from brunch to bunking up as a business opportunity. Nonetheless, when I arrived at the age of twenty-five, I had expected the boggling rigamarole of dinner-dates, calendar synchronisation, expectations, hook-ups and heartbreaks I’d seen on various imported TV series to be somewhat of an exaggeration, if not an outright American lie. But then again, I thought that about breakfast pizza and Bible-belt fundamentalists. Both of those turned out to exist, too. 

New York is the holy city of industrial romance. I saw it first on television, the glowing altar to permissible passion that skulks in every single girl’s living room. My mother watches
Sex and the City
like the unlapsed Catholics in her family went to Mass. I watch it with her like going to church with Nanna as a child, less out of belief than out of anxiety to share the stories that moved the adults I cared for. 

Sex and the City
, the long-running, now dated series, starring wealthy professional women living lives of erotic luxury in Manhattan, was supposed to mean freedom – the ultimate freedom we were permitted as women – shoes and shopping and fucking, the aspirational routine of wealthy white indulgence which most of us could only fantasise about. The vibrator plugged in next to a window with a view of the Twin Towers. 

And yet somehow, so little had changed. Because despite their money, their privilege, their friendships, the great sex they seemed to be having, the jobs they apparently had, although they rarely seemed to actually do them, the weird spoilt child-women of
Sex and the City
were still miserable, still looking for something – if they hadn’t been, there would have been no story. What they were looking for was what every woman and girl is still, always, supposed to be looking for: love. For monogamous, marriage-minded romantic partnership with the man of their dreams. Every girl’s story was a love story.

This particular kind of love was what the women of
Sex and the City
and all their millions of fans were meant to want in the liberated 2000s. When they didn’t get it, or when they got it but somehow it didn’t live up to their expectations, they were bereft, for all that the show was supposed to personify the Strong Woman in her white, wealthy, Western incarnation, all 400-dollar heels and jobs squeezed in around the designated time for weeping into one’s cosmopolitan. It demonstrated that even the most powerful, liberated women the world had ever known could still be brought low by love, could still be ruined by disappointment in the quest for love.

New York is the coliseum of competitive dating. The city is lousy with otherwise decent young men who expect to spend their twenties and early thirties devastating women, and with otherwise sensible young women who develop a chilly, shark-eyed aspect as they speak quite seriously of five-year plans and appear to be calculating the number of calories in a human heart.

The whole business is highly ritualised; there is a set schedule for the first kiss, first fuck, first conversation about whether or not you’re seeing other people, and whatever you do, you can’t say the ‘L’ word too soon, or risk spooking your prey. 

Even being gay doesn’t necessarily get you out of it. The fight for marriage equality has been won on a moral and legal level in many states and countries, which is obviously wonderful, in that LGBT people deserve the right to ruin their lives in every way available to straight people. Queers have always had to live and love in a world whose emotional economy was designed by and for straight people, but now the pressure is on for everyone, particularly white, wealthy, urban LGBT people, to adopt the rituals of what writer and theorist Hannah Black calls ‘the disaster of straightness’.
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The colonisation of love by capitalist patriarchy is a deeply painful thing. It means that structural sexism and cultural violence are played out on small, private stages, which is what makes them so very hard to recognise and resist.

Human love is radical, and it is devastating. And human love has bene thoroughly captured by neoliberalism, by the mindset and mechanisms of profit.

THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

Love is a gendered thing. It also makes life worth living and politics worth doing. Everyone seems to agree that love is important – but what sort of love?

Part of the problem is our lack of language to describe love, and that problem is political. Semantic context collapse means that we only have one word, ‘love’, for the vast spectrum of passion and compassion, compersion and care that make our species worth saving. The English language has hundreds of thousands of words, including many thousands of synonyms and not counting abbreviations and acronyms, but only one to describe the very thing we’re told is most important. And of every possible definition of love, it is romantic love between couples, monogamous sexual and social commitment between two people that is considered the most important. This is no accident.

Love and fucking are the field on which gender gets personal. Where stereotypes are cast in craving and formed in bitterness on every side. The more I talk to people about love and work and gender and sex and power, the more it comes down to passion and loss, which in turn come down to the stories we tell ourselves and how they map on to our experience of real human beings trying to fit our messy, meaty hearts into the anatomically inaccurate totem of romance. And yet love, romantic love, is the one thing we’re not supposed to question. Why not?

When we talk about love conquering all, when we speak, in that glazed, cultish way, of love’s healing power, of its capacity to sweep away reason and save us from our cramped and depressing selves, we are not talking about love in its broadest sense. We are not referring to the actual practice of caring for a person and being cherished in return, or of giving of oneself for another, whether that be a friend, a family member, a lover or a stranger. The undirectional love lip-synched by pop starlets and garlanded in gaudy red misrepresentations of vital anatomy is not that love. 

The notion of romance that we are all encouraged to go searching for is something different. It is something smaller and more specific. It is love as ritual and as product, love as an erotic object rather than a practice, love whose highest ideal is still heterosexual, monogamous romance leading eventually to lasting marriage. This sort of love is valued above every other, even though it is now a minority practice, and even though the many millions who are living happily in such partnerships find the reality far more complex than is considered proper to discuss.