by Laurie Penny
In 2012 Kendra James, a black writer with a similar social and educational background to Dunham, wrote a heartfelt piece entitled simply ‘Dear Lena Dunham: I Exist’, in which she asked ‘why are the only lives that can be mined for “universal experiences” the lives of white women?’ Why, indeed? In mainstream culture, white, straight, middle-class women don’t get to speak about their experience without having it universalised and made meaningless in the process – but black women, poor women and queer women usually don’t get to speak about their experience at all. In 2013, only one black female director released a major film. Essentialism is as racist and classist as it is sexist. It is always reactionary. The idea of girlhood as a universal story is a great way to stop individual women’s stories being heard. And it’s treacherous territory to negotiate.
The mainstream media still tells a single story about what women are and what they do. The Internet, by contrast, allows us to tell many stories. My own work and writing comes out of the blogosphere, out of LiveJournal and blogspot and status updates, and my first jobs in journalism were for small, independent publications. Sometimes I forget that writing for publications like the New Statesman and the Guardian comes with very different overtones – the attitudes of the mainstream press are changing, especially online – but for a lot of people they still represent a culture whose idea of femininity is horribly monolithic.
The telling of many stories, the sharing of different experiences, is part of what’s creating a sea change in our cultural understanding of gender and power. I see that happening everywhere. But sometimes just seeing isn’t enough. The politics of cultural representation are riven by rage for good reason. This is still a sexist, racist society, one that reserves a very limited number of places for female writers and artists – fewer still for women who are not white, straight and middle-class – and then demands that they speak as women first and as human beings second. Those who by chance or privilege manage to attain those few, totemic positions become lightning rods for the understandable anger of those who were not chosen, who do not see big-budget dramas made about their lives, who are only called on, if at all, to describe what it is like to live as ‘other’.
Only white, straight, cis girls get to be Everygirl. That’s just one more reason that the idea of Everygirl is bullshit. It hurts every real person trying to live her own story within the limits of imagination permitted to us.
Feminism will have achieved something huge when one artist isn’t expected to stand in for every young woman everywhere. We will be on the cusp of something magical when women are actually permitted to be artists, to create fiction, to make mistakes, to grow up, to be flawed and human in public. If there’s one thing about the phenomenon of Girls that does speak to a universal female experience, it’s the spectacle of being crushed by impossibly high expectations.
The really scary truth about the universal girl experience is that there isn’t one. The truth about young women that nobody wants to acknowledge is that we are all unique, and the number of stories that haven’t been told about our lives is vast, particularly if we are poor, or queer, or if we are not white. It is the telling of many diverse stories, rather than the search for the perfect archetype, that will really challenge the narrative of patriarchy, and I want to see more women’s stories told, not just online, but in mainstream, high-stakes media. I resolve in future to be a more useful part of that great retelling.
To paraphrase Bakunin, there is no such thing as a perfect poster girl for feminism – and if there was, we’d probably have to destroy her.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT TRIGGER WARNINGS
In the mainstream press, it is common for newscasters to warn viewers if they are about to see ‘potentially distressing’ content. So why is there such resistance to trigger warnings, which encourage openness and honesty rather than shutting down debate?
There’s a whole lot of outrage swilling around about trigger warnings. It came in response to a New York Times report on the request, by a small number of students at American universities, that teachers put ‘trigger warnings’ on potentially disturbing texts – reading material that might, for example, contain graphic descriptions of violence against women. The objection seems to be that since so much classic literature involves violent misogyny, racism and brutality towards minorities, whinging leftists should pipe down and read without questioning, analysing or reacting to the canon. This appears to me, as a literature graduate, to be a rather odd proposal for university teaching, and I’m extremely glad that conservative commentators are not, as yet, in charge of the syllabus.
I believe the discussion about trigger warnings is being had in bad faith. I believe it is being used as a stand-in to falsely imply a terrifying leftist censoriousness, by people who don’t understand where the term comes from and don’t want to. As Soraya Chemaly notes at the Huffington Post, stern dismissal of trigger warnings has become a proxy for dismissing women, people of colour, queer people and trauma survivors as readers. It is saying that our experiences do not matter – that we should calm down and ‘grow a thicker skin’.
It says that any attempt to acknowledge or accommodate readers with difficult experiences is tantamount to Stalinism. Someone is being told to shut up here, but it’s not F. Scott Fitzgerald.
So let’s calm down and talk clearly about what a trigger warning is and is not. A trigger warning is a simple, empathic shorthand designed to facilitate discussions of taboo topics in safe spaces. What it absolutely is not is a demand that all literature be censored to ensure that moaning feminists and leftists are not ‘offended’.
I’m not saying that I’ve never seen people try to shout one another down by demanding trigger warnings, but it’s a lot less common than has been implied, and when it does happen, it’s usually missing the point. I have almost never seen the shorthand attached to films or literature, and nobody is suggesting a scenario where you won’t be able to walk into a bookshop without being told what is and is not sexist. It’s about knowing and respecting your audience; crucially, it is about context. In ‘safe spaces’ like feminist discussion forums, mental health and survivors’ groups, trigger warnings are the very opposite of censorship. They allow discussions of traumatic and difficult issues to be had in an upfront manner. Rather than editing the subject material to avoid upset, group members are treated like adults and allowed to make their own decisions about what they can handle on any given day.
If you want to get angry about censorship on school and college campuses, take a trip to the state of Texas, where not too long ago the Board of Education approved a curriculum designed to emphasise Republican political philosophies and ‘stress the superiority of American capitalism’, among over 100 right-wing amendments to the curriculum. Attempts to include more Latino figures as historical role models for the many Hispanic children attending Texas schools were consistently quashed.
Or have a word with Michael Gove, who spent his time as Education Secretary reworking the British history syllabus to emphasise the positive side of Empire. If you’re angry about censorship of classic literature, visit any of the hundreds of American school libraries where parents have lobbied to have books withdrawn from school libraries for their sexual or controversial content – books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple.
Censorship of literature is not to be tolerated. But it isn’t the online social justice crowd who are lobbying for such censorship. Asking that classes and discussion spaces take the possible experiences of their members into account in those discussions isn’t just a different ballpark – it’s a different game entirely.
A trigger warning is not a rule, it’s a tool. It does not demand that we withdraw from topics that are taboo or traumatic, but rather suggests that we approach such topics with greater empathy, greater awareness that not everyone reads the same way.
There is some debate over where precisely the term ‘trigger warning’ entered common parlance. I first encountered it on
LiveJournal and in related online communities that were sensitive to mental health issues; mental health bloggers in particular used the term to signal that what was about to be discussed or described might be harrowing for those with PTSD.
One of the many crucial things that has been missed, deliberately or otherwise, is that trigger warnings, at least initially, were almost always attached to personal narratives. They became a way to share stories of trauma, anger and extreme experience while preserving a space which did not alienate the vulnerable.
In those spaces online, we spoke about rape and abuse, racism and gendered violence, discrimination and frightening mental health experiences, but these discussions were not designed to shock – indeed, part of the point of the discussion was that these things happened so often that they should not be shocking; they happened to so many of us that there needed to be a way to talk about them. I honed my own writing in exactly those forums, discursive spaces where the personal and the political were raw and real, and trigger warnings were just a part of the shorthand I grew up with – and I may have got this entirely wrong, but I’m not known as a delicate, retiring person who’s reticent about speaking her mind.
My previous book, Unspeakable Things, touched on all sorts of potentially traumatic issues, the reason being that if you want to do transformative feminist politics properly you have to be willing to engage with rage and pain. It was not published plastered in trigger warnings, and I wouldn’t have wanted it to be, but when I sent out draft chapters to friends for comment, I told them straight up: this might be triggery. Perhaps if you’re having a bad head day for body issues you might not want to read the eating disorders chapter. If I were ever so lucky as to see it discussed in a university class, I’d have no objection to teachers letting their students know that there are some difficult passages.
Trigger warnings are fundamentally about empathy. They are a polite plea for more openness, not less; for more truth, not less. They allow taboo topics and the experience of hurt and pain, often by marginalised people, to be spoken of frankly. They are the opposite of censorship.
In the mainstream press, it is common for newscasters to warn viewers if they are about to see ‘potentially distressing’ content, but it is more common still for reports and narratives to be censored for the benefit of the delicate.
Instead of hearing what precisely a famous publicist did to an underage girl in his car, writers simply tell us that he ‘abused’ her. Instead of hearing exactly what a famous comedian said about Asian people, or black people, we are told that he used ‘offensive language’.
And in all the coverage of the trigger warning phenomenon, what I can’t help but pick up on is bristling outrage at the very idea that alternative readings of culture might have to be taken into account. Outrage that there might be different ways of telling stories, different experiences that have hitherto been silenced but are now being voiced en masse, different outlooks that are being introduced to culture and literature by readers, writers and creators who have grown up expecting to suffer trauma but not to speak of it. Trigger warnings are not about censorship – they are about openness, and that’s what’s really threatening.
BARBIE’S BODY
So, Barbie has curves now. Sort of. In an effort to revive their flagging brand, Mattel, makers of the iconic doll fashioned after a German sex aid in the 1950s, have released a limited run of four new body shapes: skeletal, tall and skeletal, short and skeletal, and ever so slightly less skeletal. This grudging nod to the zeitgeist, at least a decade too late, has been lavishly covered across the international press – including on the cover of Time magazine. You’d think the last Rubicon of women’s liberation was Barbie’s thigh gap.
Small reforms, of course, can be useful signposts to broader change. If nothing else, the new line is a clear signal that commercial manufacturers have started to pay minimal attention to gender equality – just like television and film companies, and for the same reason. A reputation for sexism now hurts a firm’s bottom line. Mattel’s spokespeople have been explicit that this is the reason for their rebrand – Barbie wasn’t working for Millennial mothers.
The drive for more options for girls is steamrolling through popular culture. Barbie really can’t do a lot more than smile, look pretty and bend at the waist – she can’t even stand on her own two feet, which are permanently moulded to fit into tiny stilettos, meaning she needs to be propped up or held.
Barbie’s profits had been falling for years, and she was losing out to Lego Friends, which lets little girls actually build things, and figurines of Disney’s Princess Elsa – heroine of the most feminist kids’ film to hit the mainstream in living memory. Something had to be done.
Next to Elsa, let alone fully jointed, realistically proportioned dolls like the Lammily range, Mattel’s new range still looks dated. The new Barbies come in various shades of gorgeous, but they all have perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect outfits and the same creepy rictus grin, like members of some terrible high-fashion death cult, dosed up to the unblinking plastic eyeballs on faux-feminist platitudes and diet drugs. I wouldn’t want them on my bedroom shelf. They look like they’re about to go for your neck.
A Barbie doll with a slightly reduced waist to hip ratio is not the feminist cultural revolution it’s being sold as – sold being the operative word, the millimetres of plastic flesh measured precisely in pounds and dollars. This is because a feminist cultural revolution would involve, at minimum, a massive restructuring of what society believes women are, what they do and what they deserve. Let me give you a hint: it’s more than the right to stand very still, smiling and looking pretty, with thighs that happen to meet in the middle.
It’s not that there’s no value in challenging beauty standards. On the contrary. The perception, for example, that whiteness equates to beauty which equates to social value has long been a vector for the oppression of women of colour around the world. It’s rather telling that the press coverage of the new Barbie range makes far more of the four different body types available than the seven different skin tones, and the fact that one has what appears to be a natural Afro.
The weaponisation of beauty by queer and feminist subcultures is an important trend. There’s a world of difference, though, between bloggers from the fat-positivity movement redefining beauty standards and toy companies telling us we ought to be grateful that after six decades they’ve finally produced a doll that doesn’t look like she’s about to die of starvation. But redefining beauty can only go so far.
The bigger lesson, the one some little girls go to their graves not knowing, is that beauty is not mandatory. Some of us will never be beautiful, and none of us will be beautiful for ever, at least not by society’s standards, and that’s okay. Beauty is not the only or the most important measure of a person’s worth if she is female.
The cult of thinness is a particular assault on the mental and physical health of women and girls. Beauty, though, as Naomi Wolf observed in The Beauty Myth, is always about ‘prescribing behaviour and not appearance’. It’s why we train little girls in shame and self-repression just when we should be letting their imaginations run riot. It’s about teaching little girls to control their bodies, and thereby their destinies. And that’s what makes Barbie a relic – not just her unattainable proportions or the way she smiles all the time despite having no genitals, no nipples and no room in her torso to fit internal organs. Barbie is a relic because girls and their parents are no longer quite so interested in that sort of doll. They don’t want to buy it, and they don’t want to be it, because it’s boring. They’re far more interested in Mattel’s other line, Monster High, where the dolls come with blue and green skin, fangs, fins, horns and tentacles. I may or may not have ordered the zombie-unicorn doll, purely for research purposes.
What toy manufacturers, along with almost every other industry that markets to women and girls, has not understood is that women want more than to be told we’re pretty. We want power. We want respe
ct. We want control over our bodies and ownership over our desires. We want to be valued as human beings, whatever we look like, whatever we do for a living. We want the same basic rights to autonomy and agency that men have always enjoyed. And that’s just for starters.
There is nothing particularly revolutionary about suggesting different models for sexual objectification. Beauty standards have shifted over the centuries, as a quick walk around any national gallery will remind you, but the duty to be beautiful at all costs is the real obstacle to women’s health and well-being. The idea that girls can be beautiful at an apparently gargantuan size eight is small, positive reform – but the real change will come when they realise they don’t need to be.
Girls do not owe the world a pretty face and a plastic smile, and they won’t be fobbed off with yesterday’s toys.
FAME UNDER PATRIARCHY
I am often asked what I think of ‘celebrity feminism’. Specifically, when I talk to young people, I’m asked what I think of various famous women and their followers who have taken up the F-word since the whole concept became cool a few years ago. In one week alone I was asked to judge Emma Watson, Beyoncé and Kesha, the pop star whose public fight with her record company for the right not to make music with her alleged rapist has mobilised an army of online support around the world.
You know, I thought feminism was about supporting women fighting structural misogyny in every industry and none. Apparently I was wrong. What it’s really about is determining which women are most politically pure and ranking them accordingly, after we’ve finished judging them on their hairstyles and sexual choices.
Feminism has hit the mainstream in a serious way, and that’s causing a bit of an identity crisis. Can we still be radical when pop stars proudly use the F-word? Can we still fight for unglamorous things such as maternity leave and abortion rights when Chanel is marching models down the runway dressed as banner-waving feminist protesters? Can you maintain a critique of capitalist patriarchy if you bought the ‘feminist’ slogan T-shirt?
