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

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,