by Laurie Penny
The question of whether sex workers can meaningfully give consent can be asked of any worker in any industry, unless he or she is independently wealthy. The choice between sex work and starvation is not a perfectly free choice – but neither is the choice between street cleaning and starvation, or waitressing and penury. Of course, every worker in this precarious economy is obliged to pretend that they want nothing more than to pick up rubbish or pour lattes for exhausted office workers or whatever it is that pays the bills. It is not enough to show up and do a job: we must perform existential subservience to the work society every day.
In the weary, decades-long ‘feminist sex wars’, the definitional choice apparently on offer is between a radically conservative vision of commercial sexuality – that any transaction involving sex must be not only immoral and harmful, but uniquely so – and a version of sex work in which we must think of the profession as ‘empowering’ precisely because neoliberal orthodoxy holds that all work is empowering and life-affirming.
That binary often can leave sex workers feeling as if they are unable to complain about their working conditions if they want to argue for more rights. Most sex workers I have known and interviewed, of every class and background, just want to be able to earn a living without being hassled, hurt or bullied by the state. They want the basic protections that other workers enjoy on the job – protection from abuse, from wage theft, from extortion and coercion.
A false binary is often drawn between warring camps of ‘sex-positive’ and ‘sex-negative’ feminism. Personally, I’m neither sex-positive nor sex-negative: I’m sex-critical and work-negative.
Take Steinem’s concern that if ‘sex work’ becomes the accepted terminology, states might require people to do it in order to access welfare services. Of course, this is a monstrous idea – but it assumes a laid-back attitude to states forcing people to do other work they have not chosen in order to access benefits. When did that become normal? Why is it only horrifying and degrading when the work up for discussion is sexual labour?
I support the abolition of sex work – but only in so far as I support the abolition of work in general, where ‘work’ is understood as ‘the economic and moral obligation to sell your labour to survive’. I don’t believe that forcing people to spend most of their lives doing work that demeans, sickens and exhausts them for the privilege of having a dry place to sleep and food to lift to their lips is a ‘morally neutral act’.
As more and more jobs are automated away and still more become underpaid and insecure, the left is rediscovering anti-work politics: a politics that demands not just the right to ‘better’ work, but the right, if conditions allow, to work less. This, too, is a feminist issue.
Understood through the lens of anti-work politics, the legalisation of sex work is about harm reduction within a system that is always already oppressive. It’s the beginning, rather than the end, of a conversation about what it is moral to oblige human beings to do with the labour of their bodies and the finite time they have to spend on Earth.
Sex work should be legal as part of the process by which we come to understand that the work-society itself is harmful. The liberal feminist insistence on the uniquely exploitative character of sex work obscures the exploitative character of all waged and precarious labour – but it doesn’t have to.
Perhaps if we start truly listening to sex workers, as Amnesty has done, we can slow down at that painful, problematic place, and speak about exploitation more honestly – not just within the sex industry, but within every industry.
LOVE, UNLIMITED
Polyamory, if you believe the newspapers, is the hot new lifestyle option for affectless hipsters with alarming haircuts, or a sex cult, or both. A wave of trend articles and documentaries has thrown new light on the practice, also known as ‘ethical non-monogamy’ – a technical term for any arrangement in which you’re allowed to date and snuggle and sleep with whomever you want, as long as everyone involved is happy. Responses to this idea range from parental concern to outright panic. Sleeping around is all well and good, but do we have to talk about it? Have we no shame? What’s wrong, after all, with good old-fashioned adultery?
Having been polyamorous for almost a decade, I spend a good deal of time explaining what it all means. When I told my magazine editor that I wanted to write about polyamory, she adjusted her monocle, puffed on her pipe and said, ‘In my day, young lady, we just called it shagging around.’ So I consider it my duty to her and the rest of the unenlightened to explain what it is that’s different about how the kids are doing it these days.
The short answer is: it’s not the shagging around that’s new. There’s nothing new about shagging around. I hear that it has been popular since at least 1963. What’s new is talking about it like grown-ups. It’s the conversations. It’s the texts with your girlfriend’s boyfriend about what to get her for her birthday. It’s sharing your Google Calendars to make sure nobody feels neglected.
The Daily Mail would have you believe that polyamory is all wild orgies full of rainbow-haired hedonists rhythmically thrusting aside common decency and battering sexual continence into submission with suspicious bits of rubber. And there’s some truth to that. But far more of my polyamorous life involves making tea and talking sensibly about boundaries, safe sex and whose turn it is to do the washing-up.
Over the past ten years, I have been a ‘single poly’ with no main partner; I have been in three-person relationships; I have had open relationships and dated people in open marriages. The best parts of those experiences have overwhelmingly been clothed ones.
There’s something profoundly millennial about polyamory, something quintessentially bound up with my fearful, frustrated, over-examined generation, with our swollen sense of consequence, our need to balance instant gratification with the impulse to do good in a world gone mad. We want the sexual adventure and the free love that our parents, at least in theory, got to enjoy, but we also have a greater understanding of what could go wrong. We want fun and freedom, but we also want a good mark on the test. We want to do the right thing.
All of this makes polyamory sound a bit nerdy, a bit swotty – and it is. I find myself bewildered when online trend pieces going for titillation clicks present polyamory as gruesomely hip or freakishly fashionable. Polyamory is a great many things, but it is not cool. Talking honestly about feelings will never be cool. Spending time discussing interpersonal boundaries and setting realistic expectations wasn’t cool in the 1970s, and it isn’t cool now. It is, however, necessary.
There is so little that makes ethical sense in the lives of young and youngish people today. If there is an economic type that is over-represented among the poly people I have encountered, it is members of the precariat: what Paul Mason memorably called the middle-class ‘graduate with no future’. Even the limited social and economic certainties that our parents grew up with are unavailable to us. We are told, especially if we are women, that the answer to loneliness and frustration is to find that one, ideal partner who will fulfil all our emotional, financial, domestic and sexual needs. We are told this even though we know full well that it doesn’t work out for a lot of people. Almost half of all marriages end in divorce.
Paradoxically, as the moral grip of religious patriarchy has loosened its hold in the West, the doctrine of monogamous romance has become ever more entrenched. Marriage was once understood as a practical, domestic arrangement that involved a certain amount of self-denial. Now your life partner is also supposed to answer your every intimate and practical need, from orgasms to organising the school run.
Polyamory is a response to the understanding that, for a great many of us, that ideal is impractical, if not an active source of unhappiness. People have all sorts of needs at different times in their lives – for love, companionship, care and intimacy, sexual adventure and self-expression – and expecting one person to be able to meet them all is not just unrealistic, it’s unreasonable. Women in particular, who often end up doing
the bulk of the emotional labour in traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships, don’t have the energy to be anyone’s everything.
I don’t expect anyone to be everything to me. I want my freedom, and I want to be ethical, and I also want care and affection and pleasure in my life. I guess I’m greedy. I guess I’m a woman who wants to have it all. It’s just that my version of ‘having it all’ is a little different from the picture of marriage, mortgage and monogamy to which I was raised to aspire.
Not all polyamorous relationships work out – and nor do all conventional relationships. We’re making it up as we go along. It would be helpful to be able to do that without also having to deal with prejudice and suspicion.
It’s easy to see where the suspicion comes from. The idea of desire without bounds or limits is threatening. It is a threat to a social order that exerts control by putting fences around our fantasies and making it wicked to want anything unsanctioned. It is a threat to a society that has developed around the idea of mandatory heterosexual partnership as a way to organise households. It is threatening because it is utopian in a culture whose imagination is dystopian, because it is about pleasure and abundance in a culture that imposes scarcity and self-denial. Freedom is often frightening – and polyamory is about balancing freedom with mutual care. In this atomised society, that’s still a radical idea.
3
Culture
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
CHANGE THE STORY, CHANGE THE WORLD
I saw Star Wars the week it was released, like everyone else, and yes, it was madly entertaining, and no, it wasn’t perfect, and if I want to see a film that’s deeply iconoclastic and challenges all my cultural preconceptions I will see something that isn’t Star Wars. The part that had my heart in my teeth, though, wasn’t the part I’m not supposed to tell you about. It came a little bit later. It was when Rey, the techie scavenger girl, picks up the lightsaber to fight the bad guy as an equal.
And the music swells. The same old theme and a new kind of hero on a new kind of journey. The same old story made stunning in its sudden familiarity for every girl who ever dreamed of being more than a princess. Rey picks up her weapon, and everything changes.
In a box-office-pulverising film whose gorgeous effects and point-perfect pacing leave their fingerprints on the back of your eyeballs for days, it says something that the most dazzling feature of all is the female protagonist and her love interest (possibly). Stories about outliers and unexpected heroes have always been around – the difference is that being a woman, a person of colour, a queer person, or some shocking combination of the three does not make you an outlier in quite the same way any more.
We’re allowed stories now that aren’t just ‘look what she did, despite what she is’. Our heroism is no longer quite so unexpected. And that’s as thrilling as it is threatening to those who are used to a single story about white boys winning the day.
The way we tell stories is changing. The change is creeping slow and political as hell. Just look at the diverse stories we’ve had this year, none of them perfect, all of them groundbreaking in the simplest and most shocking of ways.
It’s Jessica Jones and Kimmy Schmidt. It’s Steven Universe. It’s Orange Is the New Black and How To Get Away With Murder. It’s black Hermione and female Ghostbusters. It’s Transparent and Welcome To Night Vale. It’s Gamergate and the Hugo Awards. It’s Mad Max. It’s Star Wars. Diversity shouldn’t be exciting by now, but it is. And of course, the backlash is on.
People who are quite happy to suspend disbelief in superpowers, summoning spells, dragons, aliens, planet-destroying starbases and Mark Hamill’s acting abilities somehow find the idea of, for example, a black Hermione a bit too much and react with death threats and hate-mobs. This week, when the Internet learned that a black woman had been cast in a new play billed as the ‘next instalment’ in the Harry Potter series, author J. K. Rowling reacted perfectly, reminding fans: ‘Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione.’
Was Rowling imagining a black girl when she sat down to write that book in the mid-1990s? Probably not. But she knows, like the best storytellers, that books are hands held out to lonely children of every age, and not all those lonely children are white boys, and those stories change lives in ways even their authors cannot guess. So it matters. It matters that the ‘brightest witch of her generation’, the bookish heroine of a generation’s definitive fairy tale, doesn’t have to be white every time.
Let’s not get carried away here. These stories and retellings are still exceptions. Women are still paid less, respected less and promoted less at almost every level of every creative industry. For every Jessica Jones there’s a Daredevil, whose female characters exist solely to get rescued, provide the protagonists with some pneumatic exposition, or both. For every Orphan Black there’s Mr Robot and Narcos and you know, sometimes I wonder if perhaps I watch too much television. The point is that what we have right now isn’t equality yet. It’s nothing like equality. But it’s still enough to enrage the old guard because when you’ve been used to privilege, equality feels like prejudice.
The rage that white men have been expressing, loudly, violently, over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to one race or one gender, the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page – that rage is petty. It is aware of its own pettiness. Like a screaming toddler denied a sweet, it becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that after all, it’s only a story.
Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair, to establish power and destroy it, to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving when it’d be so much easier to give in. Only the constituent ingredients of every human society since the Stone Age.
Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world.
The people who are upset that the faces of fiction are changing are right to worry. It’s a fundamental challenge to a worldview that’s been too comfortable for too long. The part of our cultural imagination that places white Western men at the centre of every story is the same part that legitimises racism and sexism. The part of our collective mythos that encourages every girl and brown boy to identify and empathise with white male heroes is the same part that reacts with rage when white boys are asked to imagine themselves in anyone else’s shoes.
The problem – as River Song puts it – is that ‘men will believe any story they’re hero of’, and until recently that’s all they’ve been asked to do. The original Star Wars was famously based on Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’, the ‘monomyth’ that was supposed to run through every important legend from the beginning of time. But it turned out that women had no place in that monomyth, which has formed the basis of lazy storytelling for two or three generations: Campbell reportedly told his students that ‘women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realise that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.’
Which is narratologist for ‘get back to the kitchen’ and arrant bullshit besides. It’s not enough to be a destination, a prop in someone else’s story. Now women and other cultural outsiders are kicking back and demanding a multiplicity of myths. Stories in which there are new heroes making new journeys. This isn’t just good news for steely eyed social justice warriors like me. It also means that the easily bored among us might not have to si
t through the same dull story structure as imagined by some dude in the 1970s until we die.
What does it mean to be a white cis boy reading these books and watching these new shows? The same thing it has meant for everyone else to watch every other show that’s ever been made. It means identifying with people who don’t look like you, talk like you or fuck like you. It’s a challenge, and it’s as radical and useful for white cis boys as it is for the rest of us – because stories are mirrors, but they are also windows.
They let you see yourself transfigured, but they also let you live lives you haven’t had the chance to imagine, as many other lives as there are stories yet to be told, without once leaving your chair.
This isn’t just about ‘role models’. Readers who are female, queer or of colour have been allowed role models before. What we haven’t been allowed is to see our experience reflected, to see our lives mirrored and magnified and made magical by culture. We haven’t been allowed to see ourselves as anything other than the exception. If we made it into the story, we were standing alone, and we were constantly reminded how miraculous it was that we had saved the day even though we were just a woman. Or just a black kid. Or just – or just, whatever it was that made us less than those boys who were just born to be heroes.
The people who get angry that Hermione is black, that Rey is a woman, that Furiosa is more of a hero than Mad Max, I understand their anger. Anyone who has ever felt shut out of a story by virtue of their sex or skin colour has felt that anger. Imagine that anger multiplied a hundredfold, imagine feeling it every time you read or watched or heard or played through a story. Imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment and, finally, mute acceptance that people like you were never going to get to be the hero, not really.
Then imagine that suddenly starting to change. Imagine letting out a breath you’d held between your teeth so long you’d forgotten the taste of air.
