BOOK REVIEW: Meat Market

Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism - Laurie Penny

Reviewer: Catherine Scott

In ‘Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism’, feminist and socialist writer Laurie Penny analyses how capitalist society has co-opted women’s sexuality, their bodies and their labour for its own ends. Penny’s first target for criticism is the hypocritical social demand that women appear perpetually sexually available, yet never actually control or own their sexuality. In the sexual ‘meat market’, women are told to use their ‘erotic capital’ or remain invisible. Any attempt to challenge “the erotic orthodoxy of the advertising and porn industries is seen as somehow ‘anti-fun’”.  For Penny, the problem is a failure to distinguish between genuine human sexuality and “the illusion of sex, an airbrushed vision” sold to us by the media. Taking on porn, Playboy, and burlesque, Penny deftly examines the contradictions inherent in a society where women are encouraged to ‘sell’ the notion of sexual availability at every turn, but where women who actually sell sex for a living are shamed and stigmatised. And herein lies the Marxist issue – women live in a society that demands we all participate in ‘sex work’ to some extent, be it taking a pole dancing class, getting Botox, or sexually servicing a stranger for money, yet that same society is “terrified of the notion of women gaining real control over the proceeds of that labour”. Nowhere, says Penny, is the alienation of the worker from the benefits of their labour, so clearly displayed, as on the flesh of the female body.

Penny continues this analysis by looking at how society’s disdain for female flesh manifests itself in deadly eating disorders, as women are persuaded “to slim down [and] take up less space”. There are certainly echoes of Susie Orbach  in Penny’s proposal that eating disorders function as a “deadly psychological stand-in for the kind of...freedoms we have not yet achieved”. Whilst being careful to avoid simplifying the role of the media in encouraging eating disorders, Penny does make an interesting point that media campaigns to ‘raise awareness’ about eating disorders often seem to glamorise the sufferers rather than portray them as a cautionary tale. Penny is not afraid to highlight just how low the media will go in its contradictory attitudes towards female flesh, pointing out that when a malnourished model dies from her anorexia, the story “conveniently...cries out to be illustrated with ogle-worthy shots of stick-thin, half-naked teenagers.” 

Penny takes the brave step of discussing her own eating disorder in this chapter, whilst acknowledging the difficulty of bringing a personal account into her book “without making myself sound attention-seeking”.  Her account is short on self-pity and long on the horrific, unglamorous reality of attempting to starve oneself to death. Penny’s concluding message is that female hunger is a powerful force that should, indeed must be, celebrated for feminism to triumph in a culture that demands we “take up as little space as possible.” Always keeping one eye on the broader political landscape, she also emphasises the need for women to remember that “empowerment is about far more than physical self-confidence, whatever the cosmetic surgery industry may claim”.

Penny’s next chapter addresses the hostility directed towards transsexuals from certain feminists who view them as a gross ‘parody’ of what it means to be female. Penny identifies the flaw in this thinking, pointing out that “when it comes to re-enforcing damaging stereotypes... trans men and women are no guiltier than cis men and women”.  As Monique Wittig once wrote, the very fact that femininity is artificially constructed means that no one is truly ‘born a woman’. Or as Penny puts it, “all people wishing to express a female identity must [first] grapple with the brutal dictats of the beauty, diet, advertising and fashion industries in order to ‘pass as female’”. Therefore feminists should be supportive of any woman, trans- or cisgender, who struggle with the demands made on them by a society which sets the parameters of ‘the feminine’ between impossibly narrow goalposts. Penny reminds us that, “Feminism calls for gender revolution, and gender revolution needs the trans movement.”

Penny’s last chapter, ‘Dirty Work’, is where her feminism and Marxist thought most obviously collide. Pre-empting attempts to paint women as ‘naturally’ designed for domestic labour, Penny reveals that the housewife is actually a relatively new concept. This is borne out by the fascinating statistic that in 1737 over 98% of married women worked outside the home, whereas by 1911 over 90% were housewives. What, Penny asks, went so wrong? In a word, capitalism. Women’s unpaid labour was needed to support an industrial society, so “history was neatly rewritten to ensure the acceptance of housework as woman’s divinely decreed role”. If you’ve ever sat seething whilst some man cites ‘the hunter-gatherer’ hypothesis as justification for women’s domestic imprisonment, you can blame Darwin, says Penny, whose ideas were used to replace “the old Judeo-Christian excuses for female domesticity”. In her scathing attack on the feminization of domestic labour, Penny also looks at the role of men, mothers, and paid cleaners in managing, exacerbating or denying the problem of “the sponge and the loo brush”. 

For a short book, this is a packed and ambitious tome which wastes no words and goes straight for the jugular of modern sexism. In the face of so many attempts to constrict feminism into a branded, inoffensive, media-friendly package, Penny’s unashamedly political – yet also deeply personal – writing is a refreshing boost. Yet one does not need to be a paid-up socialist to understand the basic sense in her arguments – that women’s bodies, sexuality and labour have been hijacked for profit – nor to appreciate the vital need “to remember the language of resistance”.