12/09/2017 Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny review | Books | The Guardian

Unspeakable Things: Sex, Liesand Revolution by Laurie Penny

review
Despite the contradictions and generalisations, when Penny is right, she's very right

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12/09/2017 Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny review | Books | The Guardian

Real intimacy and insight Laurie Penny. Photograph: Russell G Sneddon/Writer Picture

Gaby Hinsliff
Wednesday 9 July 2014 07.30BST

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12/09/2017 Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny review | Books | The Guardian

L
ove her or loathe her, you probably already have an opinion on Laurie Penny. She's the kind of writer who attracts them: sometimes
enraging, sometimes enchanting, often both at once. But she is never easy to shrug o.

I rst read her work four years ago, as a judge on the Orwell prize for political blogging. We shortlisted her because then as now
she wrote like a dream: she had such a raw, bright, urgent voice and she was telling such dierent stories to everyone else. Like Caitlin
Moran, another compulsive and essentially self-taught writer, she went to places others didn't and brought back things they had missed.
And yes, her reporting was inextricably entwined with her activism. But for years, middle-aged male columnists of distinction have been
privately advising the senior politicians of their day while simultaneously writing about them: odd how it's young women who get
accused of being emotionally overinvolved with their subjects. If it all got a bit overwrought sometimes, well she was still very young.
What unsettled me more was the unusually literary edge to her reportage. She is a dazzling writer, but so dazzling that you wonder if
sometimes the words race rather ahead of the facts.

Unspeakable Things is billed as an account of love and sex in a time of austerity, an attempt to bring together two of Penny's familiar
themes: gender politics and a post-crash politics of protest. Her argument seems to be that capitalism invariably creates losers, young men
who lack economic clout and thus the status to which they feel entitled; and that capitalist society defends itself against their rage and
disappointment by somehow deecting it on to women, suggesting it's because of emasculating, uppity women that these men haven't
got what they want. Or as she puts it, "neoliberalism may have set up vast swaths of people to fail, but the real problem cannot be a crisis
of capitalism so it must be a crisis of gender".

Given this, plus her rightly scathing dismissal of writers who only ever write about their own middle-class professional lives for an
audience of other middle-class professionals, one is led to expect something well beyond the anecdotal here; more exploration, perhaps,
of those missing working-class voices. As she says, poorer women are the shamefully neglected aspect of a feminist debate more
interested in seats on the board than life on the shopoor, yet "feminism, like wealth, does not trickle down. And while a small number of
extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling, the cellar is lling up with water."

But after all that, she opens the book with an account of her own eating disorder, followed by a section on the struggles of young men
based on her former atmate. Penny writes about both with intimacy and insight, the smack of real knowledge. But you do wonder what
happened to the women in the cellar, and the determination to transcend the writer's own experience. Her economic theories feel rather
hastily bolted on to the beautifully told personal experiences; the dots do not quite join to form a bigger picture. In the afterword she
notes that "people wanted me to sum up this book, to tie it up neatly with a set of answers". But she refuses; where there are loose ends,
she leaves them hanging.

Why? One reason might be that this is Penny's fth book in about four years, alongside a prodigious blogging and speaking and journalistic
output, and it's a rare talent that can sustain being spread so thinly. There is something uncannily familiar about a hefty nine-page chunk
of the nal chapter, devoted to the Hollywood lm trope of the kooky, sensitive Manic Pixie Dream Girl: a quick check reveals it's lifted,
virtually word for word, from a recent piece she wrote for the New Statesman. It is a great piece, which is why I remembered it. But

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reprinting it here, with nothing more than an easily overlooked reference in the copyright blurb to parts of the book being "excerpted and
extended" from published work, seems frankly to be pushing her luck. The fourth chapter, "Cybersexism", also rings a bell for a reason: it
was rst published as an ebook last year. And so on. It's fair enough for readers just discovering her, but diehard fans will have a sense of
deja lu. Halfway through, I began to wonder if it isn't time Penny took her themes social change, love and loss, coming of age and
turned them into a properly literary novel, rather than exploring them again in non-ction.

Yet for all her contradictions and irritatingly sweeping generalisations, when she's right she is very right. She provides a clear yet
empathetic explanation for why the Occupy protesters signally failed to come up with a better idea than capitalism: those she met were
often "homeless, jobless and multiply damaged", boarding the bus to protests because they had nowhere else to sleep. Barely surviving
their own lives, they were incapable of reinventing everyone else's. Lecturing them from a great height on their lack of intellectual rigour
seems somehow an inadequate response from a society that has failed to oer them any answers either.

It's also a joy to hear about the ways the internet has reinvented sex, from someone who isn't a horried middle-aged parent of teenagers
but can see advantages as well as disadvantages. She's right, too, that while the internet has given misogynists a loudhailer it has also
given young women a means to speak and organise, and may even have done them a useful service. "The power to watch men back is
something the web aords women, but men haven't quite realised that yet," she writes. What some angry men thought and said only to
each other is now out there in plain sight. You nd yourself nodding too many times to ignore it: when she explores the media's obsession
with "fucked up white girls, beautiful broken dollies, unable to cope with the freedom and the opportunities they've inherited". Or when
she describes eating disorders as anger projected inwards, "what happens when youthful rebellion cannibalises itself". Or when she
suggests that misogyny may come with the digital territory because the web was built by geeks, and deep within geek culture is a memory
of not getting the girl; a sense that women are something craved but resented. It's an interesting context in which to view the allegations
of sexual harassment and juvenile, no-girls-in-the-treehouse culture now dogging some of the biggest digital companies.

And above all, she's right when she says that for all the furore about online misogyny it isn't threats of violence that keep women down
but the fear of being unloved; the age-old fear that men don't want outspoken, dicult women. "Deep down, I know if I choose not to play
the good-girl game, I might not get as many kisses as I want. And that's so much more terrifying," she writes. Women don't edit
themselves, starve themselves and worry endlessly about getting it right because they're stupid but because they "fear loss of love".
Unspeakable Things may not be very much more than the sum of its parts; but it's a hell of a set of parts.

To order Unspeakable Things for 9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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