Read Online Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny - Free Book Online
Authors: Laurie Penny
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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
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
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