Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (7 page)

There are treatments for everything wrong with you: for your body that thickens and ages, your sex organs that leak and bleed and show outside your body, your heart that tires and cries out in fear. We can preserve you as the perfect girl, the perfect consumer, the perfect worker, all surface with a few subtle slits for easy penetration. Ageing can and must be fought with creams and pills and injections and knives; all evidence of your body having been lived in can be starved or burnt away.

The perfect girl is a blank slate, with just enough personality to make her interesting enough to take to bed. Personality, for the perfect girl as imagined by male writers and employers and lovers generations since, is an accessory, not a fact of agency. Personality for the perfect girl is a well-chosen accessory, worn discreetly to emphasise her most appealing features.

The perfect girl has little interest in the wider world. She has no interiority either, except the minimum necessary to hold a man’s interest between chance meeting and the bedroom floor. She is neither an internal nor an external creature; instead, the perfect girl is all surface. The surface is all that matters. 

Of course, nobody is really a perfect girl. 

Seventeen and curled like a comma under that hospital bed, like an unfinished sentence, stuttering. The freakish hall light that never gets turned off casts a cage-shadow on the snot-coloured carpet. I shake. I am coming off everything. I still refuse to eat, but my resistance is wearing away. I am coming down from the precipice where it was all clear and precise and lined with the promise of death like the school blazer hanging off my skeleton. This morning I told a doctor trying to force me to gulp down a disgusting protein drink that I didn’t want it, and she asked me, what do you want?

The answer snags in my teeth like a sob – I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything. I don’t want food water air attention a new world order. I don’t want fifty years of never being enough, doing enough, working enough. I don’t even want you to leave me alone to die. Stay there and watch if you fucking want, I don’t care. 

I don’t want anything. I whisper it into my hands, and then louder, over and over, for hours, until the long-suffering night-nurse, who is used to this sort of crazy shit, finally comes in and tells me to shut up and go to sleep. She appreciates that I don’t want anything, but she wants a quiet night, please.

I am something of an anomaly on the ward. I arrived with close-cropped hair, soaked in hair dye and Riot Grrl Rock, dressed as a boy, obviously queer. It’s only later that I will learn that between a quarter and a half of young people hospitalised with eating disorders are gay or genderqueer. The young women who meet me here look like broken dress-up dolls, all of us poured from the same weird, emaciated mould, barely able to stand upright, the same violent cut marks scored like barcodes in the secret places on our skin.

There’s Ballerina Barbie, starved too small for adult leotards, huddling in the corner; there’s Babydoll Barbie and Hip-Hop Barbie and Cheerleader Barbie and even Devout Muslim Barbie, who turns up a week after I do in full hijab, which she throws off as soon as her parents leave to spend the rest of her inpatient stay chain-smoking on the front steps in a hot-pink tracksuit. Me, I suppose I’d be Punk-Dyke Barbie, 2004’s least popular Barbie, and my MO is mistrust. The other girls on the ward look like every kind of girl I’d grown up afraid of. I expect every one of them to pour orange juice in my backpack when I’m not looking. It’s bad enough being on a locked ward, but now I have to be locked up with a bunch of frivolous fashion kids? Clearly, these girls have starved themselves to the point of collapse simply because they want to look pretty; I, meanwhile, have perfectly rational, intellectual reasons for doing exactly the same. We will never be friends. We have nothing in common.

This point of view lasts almost exactly eighteen hours, until the first scheduled late-night feeding time, when we all huddle together on cheap hospital sofas trying to push two puny biscuits into our faces, feeling boiled in our skin. I stare at the television and will myself not to cry. And Cheerleader Barbie, who is ten years older than me and has her own story, shunts close and puts a bony arm around my shoulders.

‘It’s all right,’ she tells me. ‘You can do it.’

I allow myself to be held. I pick up the biscuit. And something changes.

Over the weeks and months of confinement, these girls will become my greatest friends. I will learn at seventeen what it takes some people decades to accept: that pretty girls who play to patriarchy and ugly girls who never got asked to a school dance suffer just the same. That the same trick is being played on all of us. There’s no way to play the perfect-girl game and win. I know that. We all know that. And with that knowledge comes anger. Anger that we tried to starve down and burn off and bleed out.

Cindy cuts like any girl who has been hurt by the people who were supposed to love her. Because she acts out, because she slashes her arms in the corridor and screams, because she steals make-up and jewellery from the shops and vomits after mealtimes, the nurses and doctors don’t quite believe her when she tells us that her dad molested her. That she doesn’t want to be left alone with him if he comes to visit. That her mother and teachers knew it was going on and did nothing. She is an angry Asian girl with an accent: she ought to respect her parents, she’s clearly crazy and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Drugs and therapy might help her; nobody talks about justice.

Cutting calms Cindy down and upsets everyone else, which to my mind is an improvement on silently suffocating in her pain and rage, although I’d rather she didn’t break my CDs to do it. I’d rather she didn’t do it at all. I’d rather she didn’t need to. I’d rather take Cindy in my arms and rock her until she forgets every bad thing that has ever been done to her.

Half the girls in the ward are cutters, which is why sharp cutlery and smashable crockery are kept out of reach. The body must be punished, and locked up indoors, this is the last, best way to do so. There are words that can’t be spoken, and get scored into the skin. You think I’m all right, but I’m not. When you grow up to find yourself trapped in a body that seems to invite violence, a body that seems to be all you’re good for, a body that is suddenly and forever the most important thing about you, there is a grim logic to the attempt to cut your way out of it. To discipline it and bring it under your control. The body that hurts, and hungers, and ceaselessly wants things. The body that betrays you.

Being a good girl can kill you. In her ‘Letters to L’, M. Sandovsky writes that ‘The problem for women is not just uncovering what is political in the personal and personal in the political. It is finding a way to live inside of a contradiction.’
¹⁷
We grew up being told that the world was ours for the taking as long as we worked hard, flashed a bit of tit and kept smiling. We realised we were being lied to only just in time for some of us to catch ourselves before we slipped away.

You reach a point where you have to decide what you will sacrifice to survive. It was years ago now, and enough has happened to me since that I’ve forgotten when it was that I decided to give living a shot, just as an experiment, to see if I could. Maybe it was after the long, howling night of not wanting everything, levering myself out from under the bed, blinking in the hall lights, shuffling to the small medical kitchen to eat toast for the first time without fighting. I just remember the crisp, buttery bread, and the fear that if I let my hunger loose I’d never stop eating, I’d eat and eat until I was the size of a monster truck and keep eating until I’d swallowed the world. A young girl’s hunger is a fearful thing.

Or maybe it was months later, leaving hospital for the first time in a new dress and lipstick I’d put on to convince the ward nurse that I was finally a healthy girl, ready to live a healthy life, painting on an expression the way women learn to do when we have to convince the world we’re happy. Waving bye-bye to the friends I’d made there from the window of a taxi taking me hell-knows-where, though not home. I knew only that I would not be going home ever again. I was going to get out of this place and continue my education, I would travel the world and get drunk in strange bars and fuck a lot of boys and kiss a lot of girls, I would live in Berlin and New York and cross oceans at night with only a satchel, a passport and a laptop. I would dance all night in bare feet and read a lot of books, and some day I’d write books, too.

Being a good girl, a perfect girl, can kill you fast, or it can kill you slow, flattening everything precious inside you, the best dreams of your one life, into drab homogeneity. At seventeen I decided to make a stab at a different kind of life, and it was scary, and too much, and it still is, but so is staying at home with a painted-on smile. I see women making that choice every day, in their teens and twenties and sixties and seventies, and in this brave new world where empowerment means expensive shoes and the choice to bend over for your boss, it’s the only choice that really matters. Those who make it get called selfish bitches, freaks and sluts and cunts and whores, and sometimes we get called rebels and degenerates and troublemakers, and sometimes we are known to the police. We’re the ones who laugh too loud and talk too much and reach too high and work for ourselves and see a new world just out of reach, at the edge of language, struggling to be spoken. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.

2

Lost Boys

Patriarchal masculinity estranges men from their selfhood.

bell hooks,
All About Love

Some of my best friends are straight white men. It’s not their fault. They didn’t ask for that particular privilege, because that’s not how privilege works, and now they don’t know what to do with it except pretend it isn’t there. But if we want to understand gender, power and desire, we must talk about men.

Where is the power today’s young men were promised? Over five years of financial catastrophe and youth unemployment, I have watched countless young men, some of them very close to me, quietly drowning. The recession hasn’t been Disneyland for young women either, but we have proved, in some ways, more emotionally robust. Fewer of us were raised to expect dignified work or financial security as an identity-forming part of our futures, and most of us were trained to accommodate exploitation on and off the job, which is exactly what today’s employers are looking for. 

Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression. For the first time, men and boys as a whole are starting to realise how profoundly messed up masculinity is – and to ask how they might make it different.

Masculinity matters to politics, and men matter to feminism. Their violence matters, and so does their fear – collective, articulated terror that, as society seems increasingly stacked against individual men, terror that they might lose even the scraps of privilege propping up their collapsing self-worth. How should men and boys behave, when male privilege doesn’t necessarily mean power?

Rock and roll can’t save you any more. I learn that first coming home from the shops one day in 2009, when I nearly step on the wreckage of a blue guitar, its guts spilt on the hall carpet in a tangle of wire and shattered wood. The blue guitar is destroyed, utterly beyond repair, its back broken, its tongue ripped out. The air tastes of weed smoke and sadness.

In the kitchen, my best friend is bleeding from his face. 

I put my bags down and the kettle on, because that’s what you do at times like this. My best friend sits quite still on the one kitchen chair that still has all four legs and dabs at his face with a bit of soggy toilet paper, and tea is hot and sweet and good for shock. Another bad day at the Jobcentre.

‘He smashed up his guitar with his head,’ says our housemate, when he goes into the bathroom. ‘He came home from that interview and then he started headbutting it and screaming that he was no good for anything.’

We’ve been friends for years, since the first time we met in the hall at college, before the crash, before all the bullshit, back when we were nineteen and going to save the world with art. Just bookish bullied middle-class suburban kids who wanted to stay up late writing and getting into trouble. We scraped through our degrees and scarfed down our days like cheap cornershop wine, intoxicating in its guilty predictability. Four good summers. 

And then college was over and the recession hit and the music got darker and angrier and failed to pay the rent. And the only interview an arts graduate with no family money for an internship could get was for a job as an interviewer at the Jobcentre, and the future was opening up like a great dark mouth.

Too many nights in the emergency room. Not enough money to go to the pub. It turns out that love wasn’t enough, and working hard wasn’t enough, and rock and roll can’t save you. Maybe it could, once. Those days disappeared with punk and welfare. 

We fill in the forms begging the council for money to buy food, money that only comes after a month of toast on Turnpike Lane, and write angry political lyrics and upload them to the band site, and it does no good. This Machine Does Not Kill Fascists. We personally tested this by playing loud Nick Cave covers all night to upset the member of the British National Party who lived down the road, and he appeared to remain in rude health. 

And then one day, the music just stopped.

More than anything I wanted to save my best friend from despair and inspire him to great works. I did a horrible job of it, and I ended up hurting and exhausting us both in the process. These days, when I see friends, lovers and partners of sad, lost young men doing it anyway, and I want to shake them hard by the shoulders and shout that you can’t save them. At least not like that. 

Life gets a lot simpler when you realise you can’t save them. The lost boys, and the young people determined not to be found because they’re worried about what you might find. You can’t save them with your love, no matter how much of it you have. You can wring out your heart on the floor in front of them but it won’t ever be enough to float them off to a better world. And I know you would, if you could. That’s what love means, at least when you’re young and broke and don’t know better.