Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (18 page)

We have been sold a single idea of what sexual freedom is, and it still looks a great deal like serving a restricted menu of male fantasy, sliced and packaged for uncomplicated consumption. In this grim meat-packing-factory of identikit heterosexuality, female flesh and female desire are treated as scarce natural resources. Like any other scarce natural resource, they are there to be mined and exploited. Pleasure is stripped, commodified and sold back to us. We are not allowed to own our own desire. We are not permitted to feel in charge of our own bodies. 

The relaxation of moral standards in the age of contraception and antibiotics has not ended the enclosure of female sexuality. It has not returned the common ground of pleasure, adventure and desire to human beings of every gender. It has merely built a theme-park on the common ground and invited straight men weary from the indignities to buy a ticket and come and play. 

There are still those of us who want something different. There are more and more of us who can envision a future where sex and pleasure are truly free, where sexuality is more than a packagable commodity or a vector for violence, where women and queer people do not have to choose between desiring sex and desiring our own subjugation. For now, that future is the stuff of heady fantasy – but fantasy, at least, is still free.

4

Cybersexism

Information wants nothing. People want to be free.

Cory Doctorow

There are no girls on the Internet.

4chan

‘This is for everyone.’ The Internet is a godless place, but that’s as close to an in-the-beginning-was-the-word as it gets. The phrase was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in time for the London Olympics Opening ceremony, but the principle that the Internet should be socially, economically and politically free, and that anyone anywhere should be able to use it to build new interactive platforms, extend the frontiers of human knowledge or just surf dating forums for cute redheads is basically sound. This is for everyone. Or at least, it was supposed to be.

There was a time, not so long ago, when nerds, theorists and hackers, the first real colonisers of cyberspace, believed that the Internet would liberate us from gender. Science-fiction writers imagined a near future just on the edge of imagination where people’s physical bodies would become immaterial as we travelled beyond space and distance and made friends and connections and business deals all over the planet in the space of a split second. Why would it matter, in this brave new networked world, what sort of body you had? And if your body didn’t matter, why would it matter if you were a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, or something else entirely?

1998. I’m twelve years old and I’ve started hanging out in the type of chat forums where everyone will pretend to believe you’re a forty-five-year-old history teacher called George. At the same time, the other half of the Internet seems intent on pretending that they are thirteen-year-old schoolgirls from the south coast of England. Amid growing moral panic about paedophiles and teen sluts preying on one another in the murky, unpoliced backwaters of MySpace, I feel something a little akin to freedom. Here, my body, with all of its weight and anxiety, its blood and grease and embarrassing eruptions, is not important; only my words are important. I don’t want to be just a girl, because I already knew from experience that girls weren’t understood. I want to be what web theorist Donna Haraway calls a cyborg: ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism . . . I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.’
¹

At the turn of the twenty-first century my tits were coming in and I wasn’t at all impressed with the messy biopolitics of approaching adolescence. 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, and it seemed like a place where all of the bullshit, the boys and dress codes and harassment and the way grown-up guys were starting to look at me, didn’t matter. It was a place where I could be my ‘real’ self, rather than the self imposed upon me by the ravening maw of girl-world that wanted to swallow me up. It turned out, though, as more and more of our daily lives migrated online, that it did matter if you were a boy or a girl on the Internet. It mattered a very great deal.

Users of the sprawling 4chan forum – a vast, anarchic, nameless playground of the id inhabited mainly but not exclusively by angry young men, which spawned the Anonymous activist network as well as half the stupid cat memes you used to giggle at at work – declared early on that there were ‘no girls on the Internet’. That idea sounded like sweet freedom for a lot of us, but it turned out to be a threat.

‘In ye olden tymes of 1987, the rhetoric was that we would change genders they way we change underwear,’ says Clay Shirky, media theorist and author of
Here Comes Everybody
, ‘[but] a lot of it assumed that everyone would be happy passing as people like me – white, straight, male, middle class and at least culturally Christian.’
²
Shirky calls this ‘the gender closet’ – ‘people like me saying to people like you, “you can be treated just like a regular normal person and not like a woman at all, as long as we don’t know you’re a woman.’”
³

It turned out that the Internet wasn’t for everyone. Not really. Not yet. It was for boys, and if you weren’t one, you had to pretend to be, or you’d be dismissed. ‘I’m fine with people deciding individually that they don’t want to identify as female on the Internet – in the same way I’m fine with people deciding not to wear a short skirt if they feel afraid or uncomfortable – but no one should tell you to do that, and imply that if you don’t comply you are somehow the one at fault,’ says journalist Helen Lewis, who was among the first to speak out against online misogyny in the mainstream press.
⁴
She says that such advice translates to ‘duck, so that the shits abuse someone else’.

I’m seventeen and I’m not allowed on the Internet and it feels like being gagged and blindfolded. During the nine months I spent in a women’s ward for the mentally interesting, the Internet was deemed a bad influence, possibly the worst influence, on young girls trying to become healthy, well-behaved women: all that porn, all that trash, all those poisonous pictures of very thin models shared on ‘pro-ana’ sites where we had encouraged each other to starve down to ecstatic skeletons before we were hospitalised.

The Internet was bad for us. It could only ever be bad for us. So were books and magazines, although television and clothing catalogues were allowed. We needed to be ‘contained’. That was the word they used: ‘contained’. This was precisely the sort of thinking that I’d tried to get away from by getting sick in the first place, but I wanted to be given a clean certificate of health so I could get out of that terrible place and get on with my life. And so I did what girls have always done in desperate situations, in order to survive when the body is contained. I wrote.

I began to write compulsively in paper notebooks, because computers and smartphones were forbidden. I wrote late into the night and just for myself in a messy, spidery hand that I never showed to anyone, because it was purely mine. Years later when I saw
Girl, Interrupted
, the film of Susanna Kaysen’s account of being treated in a women’s mental hospital in the 1960s, I was startled that the protagonist does the same, writing frantically in longhand like the pen was a shovel digging her out of the shallow grave of social mores where she’d been buried alive. I wonder if this is why many women write, because it allows us to breathe.

Writing was always freedom for me. I’m aware that that’s the sort of observation that belongs in my personal journal, which is why I kept them. By the time I was certified sane enough to walk the streets I had filled twenty volumes, and I continued to do so in the mad years that followed, years of homeless, precarious teenage dicking about and hanging on to a college place with my fingernails while I wrote, learned to be human, wrote, learned to take care of myself, and wrote. And then, sometime after my nineteenth birthday, I discovered LiveJournal, and everything changed.

It was my housemate, who I’d met in a cabaret audition, who turned me on to it. Specifically, she told me that this vast website full of teenage fan fiction, nerdy sub-groups and threaded comments of excitable strangers discussing politics and philosophy and the best place to get coffee in cities we’d never even heard of was where she spent most of her time, and that if I ever wanted to talk to her, despite her being in the next room, I was going to have to join, and post. And so I picked a username out of a hat, this being the year before Facebook, when one’s online handle was still a pseudonymous statement of identity, and started writing little blog entries. And that’s how I learned to write in public, in a way far more immediate, far more enticing and personal, than the blank, limited audience of the college newspaper could ever be.

I wrote to survive, but I learned how to be a writer online, and so did millions of other women all over the world. And not just how to write, but how to speak and listen, how to understand my own experience and raise my voice. I educated myself online. Grew up online. And on blogs and journals and, later, in the pages of digital magazines, I discovered that I wasn’t the only pissed-off girl out there. The Internet made misogyny routine and sexual bullying easy, but first it did something else. It gave women, girls and queer people space to speak to each other without limits, across borders, sharing stories and changing our reality.

The fact that so many women were spending so much time talking to one another online without oversight or policing was part of what led to the feminist revival of the mid-2000s. Suddenly, those of us who had nursed our rage in private realised that we were not alone: there were many thousands of others, all over the world, who felt that there was work still to be done. Young women. Women of colour. Older women. Weird women. Queer women. Mothers. Transgender people of every denomination. To be in such a lightly policed space, to be able to make connections, voice opinions and acquire information without fear of punishment continues empowering when mainstream culture still punishes women who speak up except explicitly to claim victimhood.This is the story of how the net became a universe of infinite possibilities which women are often excluded from building or influencing. You can open your browser and stare into an exhilarating terrain of information exchange and creativity and silly film clips in which women and girls still know, as we know offline, that to participate fully is to risk violence and sexual harassment. The Internet is not monolithic. There are many Internets, and some of them have facilitated new conversations and communities dedicated to raising awareness of women’s liberation, gender issues, and there is still so much more to do. But we have a brave new world that looks far too much like the cruel old world. It doesn’t have to be that way. Women, girls and everyone who believes that the future of human society should include women and girls as active agents are conspiring to reclaim the Internet for all of us.

CEILING PATRIARCHY IS WATCHING YOU OPERATE

The biggest thing we now learn about sex from the Internet is this: it happens in front of a camera. Welcome to the world of your tits on screen the next day. At nineteen years old, I was one of the first users of Facebook in its first few weeks of viral expansion in Europe, and that means I was among the first cohort to experience the cultural phenomenon of frantic next-day detagging. The lesson you learn, the lesson you have to learn, is that you are always potentially being watched and you must adjust your behaviour accordingly.

Nineteen and getting my picture taken. A warm October night in the front room of a student house where we still hadn’t understood the potential pitfalls of prancing around in our pants girls-gone-wild style, snogging and fumbling and demanding pictures to prove it, like any kids excited by mutual attention: look at us kissing. Look at us touching. Pictures or it didn’t happen. The next day I find myself tagged on my new profile kissing a female friend, pressed underneath her, hair and sweat and sideboob, giggling at something just off-camera. I detag, but for some reason I leave it up, mistaking the profile archive for the online equivalent of a personal photo album, as so many of us did in the early days. That was before we understood that giving anyone a picture of your breasts, whether a lover or a listed corporation, gives them power over you; before we learned that we had to take care and cover up in cyberspace just like we do in meatspace, in the nominally ‘real’ world.

Four years later, I’m in a conference hall with sensible shoes and a glass of juice, chatting nervously to an editor who has just given me a job as a political blogger, the magazine’s youngest by far. I have won prizes and irritated politicians; suddenly everyone wants to talk to me. Including a bored-looking man in an overstuffed Marks and Spencer’s suit, one of the jaundiced breed of lifelong political wonks who begin to look middle-aged at around twenty-two and spend the next thirty years gradually expanding on a diet of other people’s principles. He asks if he can speak to me alone.

The wonk tells me that a gossip site has pictures of me, and unless I’m nice to him, unless I ‘handle the situation’, he’s going to use them. Pictures of me at college with my boobs out, kissing another girl – shock, horror, same-sex snogging! Do I remember the picture? I do now. Yes. Well, I’d better watch out, because there are a lot of people who think I ought to be taken down a peg.