Unspeakable Things
Laurie Penny
[Bloomsbury]
“Here’s what I want. I want mutiny. I want women and queers and everyone else who’s been worked over by gender and poverty and power… to stop waiting to be rewarded for good behaviour…” It’s these seditionary interludes which make Unspeakable Things so electrifying. Afforded the platform her daredevil prose deserves – Penny’s first book, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, was far shorter though no less powerful for it – this is part manifesto, part personal narrative, part critical exploration of the ways in which life leaves us short-changed. Though framed as an update to feminism, Penny’s us is an inclusive thing. Feminism is a process, she insists, not a private club requiring strained invitations to its allies. This book is for men too, for those ‘lost boys’ left disheartened by years of dogmatic manhood. It is for anyone who graduated to joblessness and despair, who was told to work for free ‘for the portfolio’. It is for, and about, anyone who has approached the online landscape of selfies, subtweets and slut-shaming with fear and morbid curiosity. Anyone is welcome to throw bricks in this riot.
Penny skilfully dissects the archetypes and memes through which contemporary gender is performed – the Manic Pixie Dream Girl gets a well-deserved skewering. She fearlessly mines her own life as context, giving accounts of her time in an eating disorder unit, and her confrontation with the ‘good guy’ who raped her, that are bloodcurdling in their clarity. Though it’s explicitly stated that ‘this is not a cheery instruction manual for how to negotiate modern patriarchy’, Unspeakable Things functions as a survival guide for anyone young and angry and confused. It strings together the dots which lead to misogyny. It gathers up the kneejerk lefty politics of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr and turns them into something coherent. Penny’s extraordinary cultural critique is hung on an examination of gender politics, but what the book thoroughly convinces you of is that ‘sex, lies and revolution’ are integral to human life.
Words: Róisín Kiberd
