“This is a story about the choice between feminism and fascism. It’s a story about sex and power and trauma and resistance and persistence.” So begins journalist and activist Laurie Penny’s ninth book in almost as many years, all of which have turned around the author’s recurrent concerns: gender, sex, work and power in the 21st century. As a result, this latest book of essays pulls on topics Penny has already written about in their many books, articles and columns.
We live in a political economy of patriarchy, which underwrites the other key power structures – capitalism and white supremacy – that perpetuate injustice. The world is mired in a crisis of care, while sex and gender affect everyone and everything.
Penny has been writing about this since the beginning of their career about a decade ago. So have the myriad theorists the author draws on for this broad-based yet hefty publication, thinkers such as Arlie Hochschild, Nancy Fraser, Selma James and the Wages for Housework movement, all of whom have discussed these issues for many decades.
It is wearying to think that these discussions still need to be held. It is wearying to read, in Penny’s chapter titled The Home Front, how little the dial has moved on the value (none) placed by bourgeois societies on the reproductive work done (still mostly by women) in the home since Hochschild wrote The Second Shift in 1989.
It is wearying, too, to read, in the chapter Labours of Love, of how young women still feel obliged to turn themselves inside out to excuse poor male behaviour, to shrink themselves in the world so they will not be targeted as mad, bad, difficult or hysterical, something Gloria Steinem, now in her 80s, already told us half a century ago.
Steinem also told us the truth would set us free, but first it would piss us off. According to Penny’s treatise, a lot of people are very pissed off today, many of them straight white men who fear a loss of power and status in the world, and who are turning to nationalism and violent extremism as a result. Their anger is being met by that of women, girls, queer people and minorities, who are rejecting the status quo, refusing to be intimidated, who are coming together to talk about sexual violence and structural abuses of power.
“Something wet and angry is fighting its way out of the dark,” writes Penny, “and it has claws.” This observation provides the fundamental impetus for Penny’s book, and it is probably this, too, that shifts the conversation forward.
Penny is a polemicist and the book’s chapters are a call to arms – to bring into existence ways of life that are “not based on competition, coercion and dominance but on consent, community and pleasure”. But the work is as much about shining a spotlight on the changes that are already happening, and encouraging them, despite the backlash, despite the fear.
It’s easy to see why Penny works with words. Despite their astonishing prolificity, they write fluently, descriptively. The book covers a lot of ground (too much, to this reader’s mind), from sexual violence and consent, to “choice”, feminism’s unhelpful embrace of the capitalist economic system, to the insane beauty standards to which women are held. Nonetheless, Penny has the capacity to distil complex arguments into easily processed phrases.
The work relies on frequent anecdotes, including many of Penny’s own personal experiences of an eating disorder, of toxic relationships, of online hatred. But they have also done the research, and a groundwork of reading and statistics underpins all of their observations, making it harder to dismiss, as no doubt plenty will do.
I’ve seen Steinem speak in person. Her tone is steely yet somehow mollifying. Penny appears less interested in such an approach, and there were times I wondered who they expected as their readers.
My younger self applauds the essays that give women in their 20s and 30s permission to feel angry, misused and in pain. My current self cheers at Penny’s articulation of the heterosexual nuclear family as one that reproduces structures of power that are often of little benefit to women and children. But I can imagine other (male?) readers emerging from the work defensive and indifferent, fuelled by Penny’s urgent, unashamedly incandescent, writing voice.
Should that matter? After all, why should Penny be asked to do the work of making white men feel comfortable in the hope they might shake some crumbs of equality the way of women and minorities? That work has long been done. It’s time for something different.
“Right now,” writes Penny, “refusing to forgive and forget is essential work.”
