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”.
