This was in Glosswitch’s newsletter - The OK Karen - this week. I hope it’s ok to share, I just thought it was fantastic and others would appreciate it.
“Anorexics,” Hilary Mantel once wrote, “are always, you feel, politely losing the game”:
“The ideal body is attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a CEO, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated six-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out.”
This is from a piece published in 2004. The world hasn’t, I think, got any easier since then. The only difference comes in the variety of ways to lose. These, at least, are always changing.
Retire to a convent, become a starving saint, cut yourself, purge yourself, disappear. So many ways to renounce the female body, and now, a quick, streamlined one: just say you’re not female at all, and that you never were.
There are people who will accept your declaration, because there always are. People who will claim to believe you are religiously inspired, or that you are mad, special, anything but terrified and in flight. They won’t really, truly believe you aren’t female; as if access to maleness, or even the no man’s land of not-femaleness, could be an achievement that easy to unlock. If push comes to shove, they will know where to place you, but for now they will respect the effort you’ve made. If you’re willing to suffer, give up a little more than the others – a little more flesh, a little more freedom, membership to an entire political class – they will not probe any further. Even if there is nothing more feminine than such an act of renunciation – nothing more passive, more kind, more fucking polite, than rejecting femaleness itself on the basis that it offends – those who stand to benefit most are hardly going to protest.
I am tired of watching women fall like dominoes into a polite, undemanding not-womanhood. There could not be a way of losing that is more gender conforming, more inoffensive, more pitiful. The world – perhaps the entertainment world, in which you’ve been exploited since you were a child, or maybe the social justice world, where you’re surrounded by males who demand your “kindness” while berating you for your privilege at every turn – has wrung you out. You know that the things that have been done to you are done to women, to girls. So you say you’re not one of them. Like cutting off the breasts that were groped, starving the away the thighs that were pried apart, sticking a razor into the flesh that you were told made you less than a person. If people do these things to girls, well, then. Just don’t be one.
I can’t even get annoyed at what this says about how you view other women and girls around you. What is it you think they identify with? What treatment do you believe suits them, but not you? What social position should they occupy, but not you? Where does this complete absence of empathy and imagination come from? From trauma, I think, hence there being no point in me raging at it. After all, I also know that it won’t heal anything. It just means the next Daily Mail report on your complex history of abuse will use pronouns which make the balance of power unclear.
I do feel anger at the men who pat themselves on the back for their open-mindedness and generosity while watching this happen. We have young women emerging into a world where, it has been reported again and again, the expectation that women endure abuse during sex has been normalised, lesbianism is treated as a porn category, rape is virtually decriminalised, and reporting rape likened to being a privileged bitch who “calls the manager”. Rather than fight the perception that femaleness, the state of being a complex human with a rich inner life, your own desires, interests and boundaries, is in fact reducible to the “barest essentials” of “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank blank eyes”, for many the preferred option is flight. Either that, or passive acceptance, which women and girls are taught is kind and progressive, whereas staking a claim to anything for yourself – your own body, your own words – is mean.
Men can blithely elide the distinction between flight from and flight to, between responses based on trauma and those on desire, as though power means nothing and all that matters is whether one is correctly categorised as abuse fodder or not. Who wants to talk about trauma, anyway? You’d have to do something about it. Doing something about it might impact your (not very inclusive, not very generous, not very progressive at all) porn supply.
But for women, the phrase “politely losing” seems so apt to me. All these announcements are so very ladylike. “Here, take this word, I don’t need it. Have the politics, too.” Nothing more boorishly masculine than being the person who accepts such an offering as though it has always been your birthright. And nothing more gender non-conforming than being the woman who won’t play along, who refuses to bow to a world for which there is no pleasing. Who knows that any sacrifice won’t matter anyhow, that there’s nothing more unfeminine than femaleness and that this is what’s hated. Who carries on all the same.