Laurie Penny Quotes

Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.

Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression.

Let's clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.” ― Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power   ~Jennifer~

One sure test of social privilege is how much anger you get to express without the threat of expulsion, arrest, or social exclusion,

The British feminist Laurie Penny tweeted in July 2017, “Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you’d imagine.

The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything.

Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings.

Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.

Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.

The fact that ‘attention seeking’ is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale.

I believe that if anything can save us in this fraught and dazzling future, it is the rage of women and girls, of queers and freaks and sinners. I believe that the revolution will be feminist, and that when it comes it will be more intimate and more shocking than we have dared to imagine.

That's how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it's not your fault. Of course it isn't your fault. I'm sure you're lovely. That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to do something about it.

According to the current logic of online misogyny a woman’s right to self-expression is less important by far than a man’s right to punish her for that self-expression.

Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it's on fire.

The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.

It is no surprise that so many women and girls have what are delicately called 'control issues' around their bodies, from cutting and injuring their flesh to starving or stuffing themselves with food, compulsive exercise, or pathological, unhappy obsession over how we look and dress. Adolescence, for a woman, is the slow realisation that you are not considered as fully human as you hoped. You are a body first, and your body is not yours alone: whether or not you are attracted to men, men and boys will believe they have a claim on your body, and the state gets to decide what you're allowed to do with it afterwards.

Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.

Sometimes you have to decide between doing what you love and being loveable, and the decision is always painful.

„If all women on earth woke up tomorrow feeling truly positive and powerful in their bodies, the economies of the globe would collapse overnight.

Me, I believe in monogamy in much the same way as I believe in, say, cheese on toast. I'll eat it, but only for very special people, and not for every meal. There are other interesting and delicious toast options out there, and I support people's right to investigate those options without being punished.

Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.

Feminism, like wealth, does not trickle down, and while a small number of extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling, the cellar is filling up with water, and millions of women and girls and their children are crammed in there, looking up as the flood creeps around their ankles, closes around their knees, inches up to their necks.

Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good.

It is not elitist to look fascism in the face and reject it. It is not anti-democratic to carry on believing in a society where there is space for everyone. Fighting for tolerance, justice and dignity for women, queer people and people of colour is not frivolous or vain. Who decided that it was? Who decided that only those who place fear over faith in their fellow human beings are real, legitimate citizens whose voices matter? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know. Give me names.

There comes a time when you have to decide whether to change yourself to fit the story, or change the story itself. The decision gets a little easier if you understand that refusing to shape your life and personality to the contours of an unjust world is the best way to start creating a new one. There

We were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. […] We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren’t ‘real geeks’ because we were girls.

It was always somebody else’s apocalypse. Until it wasn’t.

There is a princess in all our heads: she must be destroyed.

Because if the women don't win, nobody wins. If queer people and marginalized people and freaks and outsiders cannot live free, freedom is an empty word.

Without the work that women do for free, every western economy would collapse within days.

If you’re a woman and somebody calls you ‘attention seeking’, that’s a sure way to tell you’ve made an impact.

Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile.

Work, beauty and romance, then marriage, mortgage and kids: that definition of total freedom has been allowed to conquer our imaginations, leaving no space for any other lives. But what if you want something else? Is that still allowed?

This is one of the reasons why women, and particularly young women, have adapted particularly well to the way in which social media and the capitalisation of the social realm requires everyone to apply the logic of branding to our own lives in order to gain followers. We have always been encouraged to understand femininity as a form of branding, albeit one burnt into our flesh at birth.

This, however, is OKCupid, the vast, weird pink-and-blue toned jungle of the id masquerading as a dating site, where rare birds of modern romance flutter amongst the night-terrors of human loneliness and despair and the suspicious skin irritants of late-night hook-uppery.

The sort of feminism that sells is the sort of feminism that can appeal to almost everybody while challenging nobody, feminism that soothes, that speaks for and to the middle class, aspirational feminism that speaks of shoes and shopping and sugar-free snacks and does not talk about poor women, queer women, ugly women, transsexual women, sex workers, single parents, or anybody else who fails to fit the mould.

Feminism is active. It's not something you are; it's something you do. It's what you fight for that matters. Feminism is not an identity but a movement, a way of living. And feminism isn't just about women - it's about liberating everyone from gender oppression, but since women are most oppressed by modern gender norms and laws, and since the movement has always been driven by women's politics, 'feminism' is an appropriate name.

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose. Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic - but it’s a risk you have to take.

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever.

Fake tiaras and fashion handbooks play into the collective fantasy that one day, if you are beautiful and good enough, you too can marry the inbred great-great-grandchild of some bloodless aristocrat whose distant relations were better at murdering huge numbers of peasants than some other bloodless aristocrat.

every groundswell of idealism has salesmen scampering in its wake.

It was an awful reminder of how much business interests have taken over medicine. Especially with private equity trying to eke out every last penny of compensation

The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women’s shame.

It is important that everyone understands how sexism affects women and thereby impacts on all human beings. Women are subject to stricter rules of behaviour: how to act, what to say, what to want. What to wear, what to eat, where to shop, how to behave at work, when not to text him back, when to fuck, how to fuck, what colour to put in your hair when he leaves you.

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.

Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn't mean that those stories can't be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter.

Love’ is one of those words, like ‘Freedom’, ‘Security’ and ‘Democracy’, that has been captured and tortured until it gives in to its polar opposite. Love is supposed to be the one thing you can’t kill. And maybe that’s true, if you come at it with a gun in your fist. But there are other things you can do to undermine the power of human passion. You can rip it away from kids and redeliver it processed and packaged in pink and blue cans for somebody else’s profit, like powdered milk you pay for with your heart’s blood. You can mangle it into a mode of production. You can use it to isolate people in antagonistic pairs and let them blame each other for the structural lack of sweetness in the world. You can privatise passion, annex affection. You can create the appearance of scarcity where there ought to be abundance. You can make the search for simple connection into a miserable, exhausting ritual that demands rigid gender conformity and represses the human spirit. And that’s how you kill love.

I’m sure that Trump wants to sit in a shiny chair in the Oval Office and have people tell him all day that he’s the most powerful and impressive man in the world, and I’m just as sure that he doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual business of government.

Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I’ve had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant. Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don’t mind saying that they scare me a little.

We’re encouraged to feel sympathetic only towards the people who have traditionally held power in society – men, white people, straight people, the upper classes – for graciously giving away a tiny bit of their privilege, scraps of opportunity for the rest of us to share. We’re told that equality on paper, equality in a court of law, is enough in a society whose laws have always been applied unfairly and pursued unequally. Most of all we’re told that this is enough. There can be no better world than the one we’re living in now. We learn that equality, social opportunity and personal and sexual freedom are luxuries that society can’t afford. But it’s not true. Liberty cannot be crafted in a court of law alone. This isn’t the sexual revolution we were told was over and done with. This isn’t where feminism finished. This is where it starts. 

It has been noted that many of the soi-disant ‘disruptive’ products being marketed as game changers by Silicon Valley startup kids are things that women thought of years ago. Food substitutes like Soylent and Huel are pushed as the future of nutrition while women have been consuming exactly the same stuff for years as weight-loss shakes and meal replacements. People were using metal implants to prevent pregnancy and artificial hormones to adjust their gendered appearance decades before ‘body hackers’ started jamming magnets in their fingertips and calling themselves cyborgs.

Mum was pregnant, then there was Sharron. [...] I wanted to keep him away from her - but for the wrong reasons. In my head he was mine, he was my special person but, of course, as I was getting older, his interest in me was waning anyway. I don't know whether it was because he had lost interest in me, or because the abuse elsewhere was so horrific, particularly without him in my life to make things seem better but, whatever the reason, I soon moved from wanted him to leave Sharron alone for my sake, to wanting him to leave her alone for the right reasons. She was tiny, just a toddler, and the thought of him touching her or abusing her horrified me. I started trying to attract his attention whenever he looked at her. I'd dance, I'd sing, I'd sit on his lap. I'd do a hundred things that were completely out of character - anything, anything to avoid seeing that look in his eye when he glanced at the baby. I knew that he was planing to do to her what he had done to me. I tried to get in the way, I tried to get him to play with me, but once Sharron was about three, the penny finally dropped. I had always thought he wasn't in the same category as the others; they weren't nice, and he always was. But as she began to replace me, it made me face up to things. What Uncle Andrew did wasn't right. [...] Even though I loved my uncle, and craved his attention, the thought of him coming into my bed was starting to repulse me. sharron slept in my bed, too, by then, and I wanted that to continue because I wanted to protect her. Of course, there were plenty of times when I wasn't there. I was still being taken away to be abused. I was at school; Sharon was often left unprotected. Something must have been happening because she started wetting the bed almost every night. This was a sign that even I couldn't turn away from. Sharon was being abused. I was sure of it. But I wouldn't stand for it, not for much longer. p209-2010

This is what consent culture means. It means expecting more — demanding more. It means treating one another as complex human beings with agency and desire, not just once, but continually. It means adjusting our ideas of dating and sexuality beyond the process of prying a grudging “yes” out of another human being. Ideally you want them to say it again, and again, and mean it every time. Not just because it’s hotter that way, although it absolutely is; consent doesn’t have to be sexy to be centrally important. But because when you get down to it, sexuality should not be about arguing over what you can get away with and still call consensual.

Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl. That girl doesn’t get to have the kind of adventures you really ought to be having in your teens and twenties. It’s not that her dreams and plans don’t matter, but they always matter slightly less than the boy’s, because that’s what boys are taught to expect—that their girlfriend is there to play a supporting role in their life.

What we don’t say is: of course not all men hate women. But culture hates women, and men who grow up in a sexist culture have a tendency to do and say sexist things, often without meaning to. We aren’t judging you for who you are, but that doesn’t mean we’re not asking you to change your behaviour. What you feel about women in your heart is of less immediate importance than how you treat them on a daily basis. You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world and still benefit from sexism, still hesitate to speak up when you see women hurt and discriminated against. That’s how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it’s not your fault. Of course it isn’t your fault. I’m sure you’re lovely. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to do something about it.

Fourth-wave feminists are trying to get ‘All men are trash’ or just ‘Men are trash’ trending on social media. One of those who whipped this along is the British fourth-wave feminist writer Laurie Penny, author of various blog compilation books, including the charmingly titled Bitch Doctrine (2017). In February 2018 Penny could be found on Twitter saying, ‘“Men are trash” is a phrase I adore because it implies waste.

I do not wish to waste any more of my one precious life than is strictly necessary debunking the crypto-Darwinian pseudoscience that all women really want is to be held down and humped thoroughly until they stop lying about the pay gap and start making Christian babies.

The Internet became part of my life early enough to be the coolest thing ever and late enough that I have memories of Geocities before it became a howling desert rolling with tumbleweed and pixels that don’t have the decency to decay,

In this nominally freer and more equal world, most women end up doing more work, for less reward, and feeling pressured to conform more closely to gender norms. 

The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public

Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire. There

Worrying about not having enough is still coded masculine, although poverty is still, overwhelmingly, a feminine experience.12

The comments section is now alive and chewing at the heart of Western democracy.

Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable – for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only women had done the one thing they had spent their own formative years being shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.

We’ve come to expect this. Trump wears hypocrisy as proudly as he wears his shocking hairdo.

Donald Trump is a bloviating freakshow of the id whose job it is to articulate the ugliest parts of the modern psyche with enough pomp and gumption that it sounds like truth.

Pretty girls get used to being treated like the enemy by other women. They are not the enemy. If you grow up weird-looking, it’s easy to think of them as such. I used to be terrified of those to whom girlhood seemed to come naturally, the gorgeous, graceful creatures who flocked around the back of the school bus, flirting and texting. It took me years to understand that pretty privilege comes with its own set of problems. That pretty girls, too, have to put up with harassment and violence, with the constant pressure to pare down your flesh and desires, and with the feeling of being judged and dismissed.

But no amount of lipstick is ever going to make patriarchy comfortable with the words coming out of your mouth, if you’ve an ounce of courage, or ambition, or anger.

Being a good girl, a perfect girl, can kill you fast, or it can kill you slow, flattening everything precious inside you, the best dreams of your one life, into drab homogeneity. At seventeen I decided to make a stab at a different kind of life, and it was scary, and too much, and it still is, but so is staying at home with a painted-on smile. I see women making that choice every day, in their teens and twenties and sixties and seventies, and in this brave new world where empowerment means expensive shoes and the choice to bend over for your boss, it’s the only choice that really matters. Those who make it get called selfish bitches, freaks and sluts and cunts and whores, and sometimes we get called rebels and degenerates and troublemakers, and sometimes we are known to the police. We’re the ones who laugh too loud and talk too much and reach too high and work for ourselves and see a new world just out of reach, at the edge of language, struggling to be spoken. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.

It is as if by talking about the hurt women experience, often because we are women, we are somehow preventing men from speaking about the painful pressures of masculinity. Interestingly, for many men, the only time they do feel able to talk about their own suffering is when they are trying to stop women talking about theirs. In every other context, men and boys are discouraged from talking about their pain. Thinking in a new way about sex, gender and power – call it feminism or ‘masculism’ or whatever the hell you like as long as you do it – can help men to process that pain. But it’s far easier just to blame women.

When beauty becomes mandatory, it ceases to be about fun, about play. Dressing up, playing with gender roles, doing your braids badly in the mirror, and eating half your mother’s lipstick in an attempt to get it on your face – do you remember when that used to be fun? And do you remember when the fun stopped? Like any game, the woman game stops being fun when you start playing to win, especially if you’ve got no choice: win or be ridiculed, win or become invisible, dismissed, disturbed.

Saying that ‘all men are implicated in a culture of sexism’ – all men, not just some men – may sound like an accusation. In fact, it’s a challenge. You, individual man, with your individual dreams and desires, did not ask to be born into a world where being a boy gave you social and sexual advantages over girls. You don’t want to live in a world where women get raped and then told they provoked it in a court of law, where women’s work is poorly paid or unpaid, where we are called sluts and whores for demanding simple sexual equality. You did not choose any of this. What you do get to choose, right now, is what happens next. You can choose, as a man, to help create a fairer world for women, and for men, too. You can choose to challenge misogyny and sexual violence wherever you see them. You can choose to take risks and spend energy supporting women, promoting women, treating the women in your life as true equals. You can choose to stand up and say no, and every day more men and boys are making that choice. The question is – will you be one of them?

Being a girl, being That Girl, is easy if you’re white and averagely pretty. There’s no trick to it. You don’t even have to totally excise the parts of your personality that don’t fit, the parts that are smart and difficult and loud and angry and ambitious and masculine and mature. You just dial those parts down until they become background noise, dial them down and down until the male ear can’t pick up their frequency and pretty soon you won’t even be able to hear them inside your own head. Tune them out and swallow them down like the hot meals you can’t eat any more because That Girl must stay slim and fragile if she wants to be beautiful and loved. And you do want to be beautiful and loved.

Over the weeks and months of confinement, these girls will become my greatest friends. I will learn at seventeen what it takes some people decades to accept: that pretty girls who play to patriarchy and ugly girls who never got asked to a school dance suffer just the same. That the same trick is being played on all of us. There’s no way to play the perfect-girl game and win. I know that. We all know that. And with that knowledge comes anger. Anger that we tried to starve down and burn off and bleed out.

The perfect girl has little interest in the wider world. She has no interiority either, except the minimum necessary to hold a man’s interest between chance meeting and the bedroom floor. She is neither an internal nor an external creature; instead, the perfect girl is all surface. The surface is all that matters. Of course, nobody is really a perfect girl.

It’s a myth that pleases the powerful. Women have all this equality and opportunity now, but we can’t handle it. Maybe we weren’t meant to have it in the first place.

This is a feminist book. It is not a cheery instruction manual for how to negotiate modern patriarchy, with a sassy wink and a thumbs-up. It is not a charming, comforting book about sex and shopping and shoes. I am unable to write any such thing. I cannot force a smile for you. As a handbook for happiness in a fucked-up world, this book cannot be trusted.

Men want objects; women are objects. Men’s first desire is to have enough things and do enough things; women simply want to be enough. Men want; women are wanted.

It’s hard growing up; it’s easier to grow sideways, to veer off from becoming a person and just be a girl instead. After all, it’s what your family want. They want you to be pretty and pleasing and no trouble at all. It’s not because they hate you and want to keep you down, but because they want what’s best for you, and objective observation of the world suggests that girls who are ugly and troublesome tend to have problems, or become problems, and nobody wants you to be a problem.

The lost boys, and the young people determined not to be found because they’re worried about what you might find. You can’t save them with your love, no matter how much of it you have. You can wring out your heart on the floor in front of them but it won’t ever be enough to float them off to a better world. And I know you would, if you could. That’s what love means, at least when you’re young and broke and don’t know better.

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.

This is not a fairy tale. This is a story about how sex and money and power put fences around our fantasies. This is a story about how gender polices our dreams. Throughout human history, the most important political battles have been fought on the territory of the imagination, and what stories we allow ourselves to tell depend on what we can imagine.

Expecting real equality for women in the workplace is ‘unnatural’ – nature wants women to clock out of public life when and if they have kids, and if they don’t want to have kids, they must be unnatural. Women who are ambitious and independent are unnatural. Women who actively express sexual desire are unnatural. Women refusing to make themselves pretty and pleasing for men are unnatural. Women who demand respect and security while not being beautiful and young are unnatural. Abortion is unnatural. Contraception is unnatural. Pleasure for its own sake is unnatural. Unnatural, in short, covers a lot of the fun stuff.

Girls don’t get to rebel in quite the same way that boys do. There’s simply too much at stake. We know that we will not be indulged if we flame out, we have been taught to turn our anger inwards, to turn our rage inwards, to hurt ourselves rather than hurting others. According to the stereotype: where rebellious young men hurt other people, out-of-control young women hurt themselves, compulsively, dangerously. Eating disorders and self-harm, bingeing and purging and starving and cutting and burning, it all becomes a silent rhetoric of female distress. If you didn’t grow up doing it yourself, you almost certainly knew someone who did. We experience this trauma on our bodies. It is a physical thing. It fucking hurts.

When feminists say ‘patriarchy hurts men too’, this is what we really mean. Patriarchy is painful, and violent, and hard for men to opt out of, and bound up with the economic and class system of capitalism. I’ve found that when I speak to men about gender and violence, the word ‘patriarchy’ is one of the hardest for them to bear.

Sexism should be uncomfortable. It is painful and enraging to be on the receiving end of misogynist attacks, and it is also painful to watch them happen and to know that you’re implicated, even though you never chose to be. You’re supposed to react when you’re told that a group you are a member of is actively fucking over other human beings, in the same way that you’re supposed to react when a doctor hammers your knee to test your nerves. If it doesn’t hurt, something is horribly wrong.

Asking questions is the authority of the young, and it’s the first thing girls are told not to do. Don’t put your hand up in class, or the boys will shout you down. Don’t talk back to your teachers, to your parents, to the police. Asking questions is dangerous.

Women will not return to sexual and political subjection without a fight to the death. But some people are still unaccountably angry that that sweeping social change was ever thought of, and have hung screaming on to our ankles every step of the long, slow trudge to gender equality. We are not there yet.

We still aren’t happy, not women, not men, and some people will tell you that’s because of feminism, and some will say that it’s in spite of feminism. I’d argue that it’s because the fight against capitalist patriarchy has barely begun, but what we know for sure is that there’s something about gender roles, man and woman, boy and girl, that makes people desperately unhappy. We know this because gender is still the main language we use to discuss existential crises.

Feminism is a social revolution, and a sexual revolution, and feminism is in no way content with a missionary position. It is about work, and about love, and about how one depends very much on the other. Feminism is about asking questions, and carrying on asking them even when the questions get uncomfortable.

A pretty young woman is a paradox: at once a figure of desire and disgust. Hers is the power that all women are supposed to want, the only power we’re really allowed to have, the power to please and to play up to male sexual attention – and so it is vital that her power be put in its place. Anyone succeeding at the pretty girl game, however briefly, has to face the suspicion and hostility of other women as well as the worshipful contempt of men. She is assumed to be without consequence, to be intellectually void, to exist only for the pleasure of others; at best, she is a muse, a fascinating enigma. She is permitted hidden depths as long as they stay that way – hidden.

This generation is lousy with lost boys, and loving one of them means hollowing yourself out to make a space for them to crawl inside. So you do that, because that’s what girls are supposed to do, and because it’s so good to be needed. Just for a little while. Just until your boyfriend gets a job and your best friend stops trying to kill himself. I learned the truth at twenty-two: you can’t save the world one man at a time. Watching these young men growing up into a very different world from the one they were promised, my first reaction has always been sympathy. It’s surprisingly easy to sympathise.

Girls are better at pleasing other people and plastering on the pretty grin even when we’re screaming inside. That’s what being a girl is.

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?

At seventy-one, when I met her, she was small and delicate and dangerous, like a cupcake full of razors.

UNSPEAKABLE THINGS Sex, Lies and Revolution By Laurie Penny 267 pp. Bloomsbury. $16.

I watched the young naive middle-class women and men of the twenty-first century learn the true nature of the world they live in. I watched all this happening, and I believe there is hope. I believe that if anything can save us in this fraught and dazzling future, it is the rage of women and girls, of queers and freaks and sinners. I believe that the revolution will be feminist, and that when it comes it will be more intimate and more shocking than we have dared to imagine.

Meanwhile: consider that time is a weapon.

Money and justice are all about whose lies are the strongest. But