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

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