Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (16 page)

The idea of sex workers with agency, with real power over their working conditions and legal rights, upsets a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. For social conservatives, it’s a threat to family life and public morals; for misogynists, it gives women more power to formalise the means by which they have exploited men for years, dragging them by the dicks while they empty their wallets without fear of violent punishment or social shame: unthinkable. If a woman is to earn real money from sex she must also know that it’s the worst thing she can possibly do, that she’s a filthy slut not worthy of the rights other workers once demanded. And the last group campaigning against the legalisation of prostitution are feminists.

The feminist sex wars are far less exciting than they sound. They take place largely in draughty meeting rooms where people shout at each other until the buses stop running about whether prostitution is simply transactional rape.

Sex work isn’t stigmatised because it is dangerous, it is dangerous because it is stigmatised, and that social stigma, that system of punishing and excluding sex workers from the brightly lit world of good, pure women who would never actually cash in on the erotic capital that is supposed to be our only power, is still with us.

SINGLE MUMS AND SCAPEGOATS

Alongside sex workers, the most hated character in the shadow-play of modern sexual prejudice is the single mother.
²¹
The millions of women raising children without a co-parent are spoken of in the same terms as beggars and thieves: they are a drain on the state, the scourge of hard-working taxpayers who must forfeit the proceeds of ‘real’ work to pay for the maintenance of these ‘broken homes’. The charity Gingerbread estimates that nine in ten single parents are mothers;
²²
many of these mothers are not raising children alone by choice, but because their primary relationships have ended or broken down, and it is significant that single mothers often feel obliged to insist, before asking for the means of survival, that they did at least try to be good. They tried to be good wives, to keep a family together. Single fathers, by contrast, are lauded as heroes, gamely raising children without the help of the wicked women who have abandoned their natural role. 

In the single mother, contemporary slut-shaming and class prejudice find their perfect scapegoat. The term ‘fallen woman’ is now considered archaic, but the mythology persists: women bring shame on themselves by lapsing from the pedestal of perfect neoliberal womanhood, the walking CV in stilettos who juggles the husband, child and corporate job with effortless ease. 

Single mothers are not just sluts, they’re bad entrepreneurs, lazy workers, dissident subjects who have failed to supply the demands of capitalist patriarchy and now demand that the rest of us pay for it. In the United States, there is no male equivalent for the term ‘welfare queen’. Having a child alone and asking for support with raising that child – from her community, her family or the state – is considered uniquely selfish.

The logic of neoliberal gender politics insists that no woman is poor or struggling because of structural inequality, but because of her own choices. The single mother, like the prostitute, must have made bad choices, or shameful, dirty choices, that have left her destitute. She is unworthy of sympathy, much less assistance. She has failed to deploy her erotic capital wisely. Her child is a permanent reminder of those poor choices. The slut-shaming and social punishment of single mothers and their children gives the lie to modern ideas of sexual liberation – much less of reproductive freedom.

But it’s not just single mothers who are shamed for daring to spawn: motherhood itself is now tacitly considered a selfish, dirty choice, a species of reproductive incontinence. 

Girls who wish or are expected to attain social mobility are encouraged to delay childbearing. Campaigners against teenage pregnancy remind young women in no uncertain terms that having a child before they’ve staked out a metaphorical spot in the corner office will ‘ruin your life’ – one is never supposed to question why. Having children is something poor girls do, something foolish girls do: as evidence, we are reminded that poverty is a strong predictor of teenage pregnancy. Once you start breeding, it’s game over, girl. Unless you’re very rich or very lucky, your chances of a fulfilling life on its own terms just got suckered. And yet those of us who were raised female in or after the 1980s were told, in ominous tones, that we would one day ‘want kids’, in the manner in which you might be informed that you have a chronic illness which will one day leave you crippled.

The morality tale of our age is the poor mother with many children. These women are demonised as grossly fecund, perpetually pushing pramfuls of squalling brats down dingy estate streets. Their fertility and their poverty form a cage of disgrace that they might have escaped had they only kept their legs shut and their feet on the career ladder. Reality television shows across the West invite viewers to gawp at the gall of the underclass in continuing to breed.
²³

Motherhood may have been relegated to a species of reproductive deviance, but that is not to say that women are permitted to live as if their fertility is not fundamental to their being. On the contrary: women’s potential fertility is still given as an excuse for not hiring or promoting female employees whether or not they plan, or indeed are able, to have children. We can expect to be questioned, at any job interview, about whether we plan to have kids, thus costing the state or our bosses valuable money that might have been spent training and hiring a man. 

Fathers, of course, are nowhere in this equation. It is assumed that most men, given the choice, would want to escape the onerous duties of parenthood. Those who do take an active role in parenting are afforded secular sainthood although they cannot expect any practical support from their bosses or from the state in the form of paternity leave. The raising and production of the next generation – the means of reproduction – are still very much the domain of women, and they are resented for it.

The perfect worker maintains the appearance of sterility: she looks fuckable, but never actually fucks, much less reproduces, and God forbid she arrive at the front desk with baby food dried on her lapels. If she has responsibilities outside the ‘workplace’ she is expected to manage them in private. Raising and bearing children is not considered work – you don’t get paid for it, so how could it be?

Women are selfish if we have children and selfish if we don’t: we are expected to anticipate the stretching of our energies between our gross physical fecundity which will inevitably curtail our own chances and the demands of the workplace. We will be stretched, overtaxed and judged whatever we choose, and that’s just the way the world works. That’s just what the market demands. The anxieties that this produces are the perfect formula: panicked workers who are constantly juggling responsibilities do not tend to join unions or go on strikes, and they will generally accept whatever privations are foisted upon them, only too happy to please. The only mothers who are celebrated for the work they do are those who are somehow able to combine the labour of motherhood with ‘wealth creation’ – that is, with maintaining well-paid, ‘high-flying’ employment, typically in the financial sector.

Having children does not just interrupt work: it is anti-work. Women, because motherhood is still assumed to be in their nature, are inherently anti-work, and must atone for it by toiling harder and longer, in less secure and less well-paid positions than those employees who might not, at any point, drop a baby. Our sexual bodies are still the source of original sin, except the transgression is not now against religious morality, but against the market. 

THE MEANS OF REPRODUCTION

It’s not big and it’s not clever and I shouldn’t do it because it’s a cheap shot. But here I am again, on a street corner in Dublin, flirting with a pro-lifer. He’s twenty-one and a committed Catholic and his name is Dennis and he’s trying to explain to me why abortion is sinful, and there’s a rising flush in his face as I ask him if he’s got any comment on what the hell a girl is supposed to do when contraception fails, as it sometimes does.

‘There’s obvious steps she can take to not have a child,’ he tells me.

Like what?

‘Well, for example, abstinence,’ says Dennis.

Can he tell me more? I draw my tongue across my teeth and do that thing you can do with a heavy backpack where you shift it around your shoulders so it momentarily pushes your tits up and forward. Dennis starts to blush despite the cold. ‘Purity before marriage,’ he explains.

Really, Dennis, I’m fascinated – tell me all about purity before marriage.

Around the corner, young women with pamphlets calling for abortion to be legalised are being sworn at in the street. It’s a freezing January day, and they only have each other. One of them tells me that she had to travel to England, where abortion is still legal, taking a flight alone and paying money she could ill afford to have a procedure that would see her thrown out of the house and shamed at work if she identified herself. Over the past five decades 150,000 Irish women and girls have done the same, and most have never spoken of it.
²⁴
I fight the desire to put away the recorder and give her a hug, or all my strength, or a world that doesn’t hate women. Instead, I give her some chocolate from my pocket. It is madly insufficient.

In Ireland, abortion is illegal. In many parts of the nominally developed world, including a great many American states, safe, legal termination of pregnancy is either outlawed or functionally illegal,
²⁵
the centre of a matrix of rage and shame directed at desperate, anonymous women who cannot speak out for fear of violent reprisals.

If a woman didn’t want to have sex, though, abortion suddenly becomes okay. Most states and nations with laws restricting abortion to the point of a ban make exceptions for rape and incest.
²⁶
Any qualms about the feelings of the nugget of cells forming in the uterus are instantly, magically less important than a woman’s autonomy if she was raped or subjected to incest, because a woman who really, truly didn’t want to have sex is a good woman and shouldn’t be punished for it, whereas bad women who consent to sex, who might even actually enjoy it, deserve to suffer the consequences.

The backlash against abortion access and contraceptive availability is a sexist backlash, rooted in fear of female autonomy and hatred of women’s sexuality. It is phrased, of course, as concern for women. Almost every effort to control women’s sexuality is, on the understanding that sex is bad for us and we’re essentially vapid, thoughtless creatures who cannot be trusted with control over our own bodies.

The religious and conservative right, especially in the United States and in majority Catholic countries, continues to claim that abortion and contraception are sinful,
²⁷
to which the obvious retort is that God also created smallpox, polio and erectile dysfunction, but that hasn’t stopped medical science from helping us lead longer and more exciting lives without them. Increasingly, however, we are told that pregnancy termination and birth control are somehow psychologically damaging to women – that we can’t cope with all this freedom, that the maternal impulse rebels, that abortion is so psychologically damaging that women should be forbidden access to it.
²⁸
Being at the mercy of one’s biology, however, being forced to give birth to a child against one’s will and raise it in poverty or give it away – these things are deemed psychologically healthy. The wealthy men and religious zealots who still largely make the laws that control women’s access to reproductive healthcare will never need abortions, but as men, they are clearly best placed to decide what’s good for women in nominally democratic countries.

It is stunning, however, how fast this language of concern mutates into slut-shaming and gross misogyny. In America, women who admit in public to using contraception, like law student Sandra Fluke, who spoke up in favour of hormonal birth control at an all-male senate hearing in 2012, are called sluts and harpies, ugly whores. Liberals, meanwhile, still lack the guts to make a case for why women should be permitted full adult sexual agency to the greatest extent that modern technology allows. Instead, they echo the language of conservatives to the effect that abortions are universally tragic and the reason we need contraception is to protect good women – mothers, especially mothers concerned for the well-being of existing children, or women with chronic hormonal illnesses – not to indulge bad women who merely want the kind of sexual autonomy men have always enjoyed.

The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s was supposed to be about liberating women from the privations of biology; so far, it has ended up being about releasing men from the responsibilities of domesticity. Setting society free from the imperative to marry and raise children with one’s legally bonded life partner is, of course, a net gain for everyone – but something deeper has been lost. This is why, for the past twenty years, mainstream feminist conversation has been dominated by debate over whether a woman can have ‘it all’ – where ‘it all’ means taking care of her husband, children and boss at once. The question of why she should ever want to has never been adequately explained.

Sexual inequality is the fundamental basis of gender inequality, the biological logic by which one sex is kept subservient, to some degree, to the other. Even when women do not wish or are physically unable to conceive and carry children, they are obliged to submit to a social schedule set out to control the agency of those who are. The principle that sex is without consequences for men but dangerous for women because it is associated with the risk of pregnancy is a difficult principle for some people to let go of. It is women’s job to resist men’s advances for as long as possible and then to carry the burden of those advances; women should have sex done to us, never take control of it ourselves. There is no reason why this should be the case.