The reader waits in vain
Rachel Cooke reviews Laurie Penny’s new “feminist” book:
If the tone of this book is almost comically relentless – if Penny, whose pronouns are they/them, says something once, they say it 54 times – it’s also oddly reminiscent of a superannuated self-help manual, its assumptions seemingly based mostly on the experiences of its author and their friends, a focus group to whom every possible Bad Thing has happened at least once (so handy).
…
For the reader, especially the reader who has never read a book or a newspaper, never watched any television or seen a film, Penny has all sorts of revelations.
Ouch! That does sound so exactly like LP – forever pointing out the obvious as if she’d only just noticed it.
But don’t be disheartened. Penny has good news, too. Like them, we may eventually be able to overcome our addiction to “predators with pretty eyes and a vacancy for a secret side-piece”. We may even wind up loving ourselves instead of just waiting around “for a man” to find us lovable (for someone who identifies as gender-queer, and who therefore has some trouble with the word woman, which does not reflect her “lived experience”, Penny uses “man” with an abandon that is quite dizzying).
Well you see men don’t have cis privilege, so it’s fine to talk about them, but women oppress trans women just by existing, so they have to be deleted from the discourse at all times.
Most crucially of all, something is now – out in the world, I mean – fighting to break out, as if from a shell: something “wet and angry”, with “claws”. By this, I think Penny is referring to the ongoing activism that was stirred by #MeToo, but I suppose it is possible – I’m troubled by the word “wet” – that I’ve got this entirely wrong.
If only Laurie Penny could write as well as Rachel Cooke.
(For a second I thought “But she would still be Laurie Penny,” but then I realized no, she wouldn’t. You have to be able to think well in order to write well, and a Laurie Penny who could think well would be a very different Laurie Penny indeed.)
But the reader waits in vain for Penny to offer solutions to the injustice she describes, for serious analysis of any kind. The best they can do is to suggest that affordable childcare might be of help. No shit, Sherlock.
The chapter devoted to sex work is utterly enraging, and not only because Penny clearly knows so little about it (where are the interviews, the statistics, the thoughts of experts in this field?). Having painstakingly explained that many women enjoy sex – that they do not, contrary to the old myths, only endure it, the better to keep their men happy – Penny then accuses those women, feminists and others, who are critical of the sex industry of, yes, a sort of twisted envy, because why should some women get paid for what others have to do for free? I’m afraid I clutched my own pearls (inherited, I should say, from a grandmother who left school at 13) at this point.
Having spent half of my life hoping for feminism’s revival – for it to be, if not fashionable, then proudly worn and meaningfully directed – it is lowering beyond words to see a serious publisher describe this ill-edited, ill-considered drivel as a manifesto for the cause. This isn’t feminism. This is a swizz.
But if it identifies as feminism…?
Funny how these dreaded GC feminists write so much better than their counterparts in the “include men in feminism” faux feminism.
I’ve read a couple of reviews of this book that have mentioned Penny’s sexy weekend in Berlin. Boasting about your sex life is absolutely mortifying and functions as a huge neon sign saying “I’m concerned about or dissatisfied with the amount or quality of the sex I’m having”, but the way she has apparently approached it is also an illustration of a delusion that seems to be very common, specifically the idea that people you don’t like must be unhappy.
I used to attend a meditation class run by a Buddhist nun who spent a portion of each session expounding the idea that being bad was bad for you, and that there operation of karma would work mysteriously but irresistibly to make the wicked miserable. For evidence of this we were invited to recollect occasions on which we’d felt guilty for doing something immoral. The problem which immediately presents itself is that I feel bad about violating my own ethical norms, not those of others, and they will similarly be indifferent to mine. I’m sure bin Laden had regrets about things he’d done, but I’m certain he was proud of 9/11.
Penny seems to be directing this wish for a just universe into the view that her enemies, the pearl clutchers and crypto fascists she derides, are incapable of fully appreciating pleasure, that for them sex is grey, turgid and mechanical. It’s an oddly childlike view, that bad things happen to bad people. You may as well assert that conservatives can’t really enjoy food because support for flat rate tax impares their palette. Psychologically satisfying to imagine, but without any mooring point on reality at all.
It’s very easy to find variations – the rich are unhappy, bullies have no real friends, people I disagree with politically have no sense of humour
Djolaman, that’s one thing I’ve found consistent, and irritating. The idea that all people who do bad things will be alone and miserable, like Ebenezer Scrooge, is so pervasive it has become dangerous. I was reading a book one time where the man writing goes to interview a ruthless head of business. He is shocked…absolutely shocked…to find out this guy has a wife and kids, and that there is a young man working for him that he has taken in and given an education and just in general cared for. So…the writer decides not that ruthless people can be decent or even loved in domestic settings. No, he decides the ruthless businessman cannot in fact be ruthless, because he has people that love him.
When we think like that, it endangers our ability to recognize those that endanger us. Reading about mass shooters and serial rapists should have dissuaded people out of that view long ago, with all the “but he was such a nice boy!” and “nobody saw it coming!”. But instead, we dig deeper. Someone must have done something to hurt him. Well, maybe. But maybe not. And because we need someone who hurt him, we turn to the victim, or in the case of incels, the vast mass of women who aren’t having sex with them.
Yes, there’s a real belief among many people that sex offenders must resemble Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. At the thinner end of the wedge people often seem to regard themselves as such asute judges of character that they can read off someone’s entire moral character from the briefest interaction or from a single anecdote. There’s a manicheanism to a lot of people’s assessments of others. The refusal of many Michael Jackson fans to accept that he might be predatory seems rooted in the idea that that couldn’t be true of someone who was a great entertainer.
The converse is that anything connected to a person widely recognised as being evil must be condemned. Hitler’s early artistic studies are very rarely mentioned without the speaker also emphasising that he had no talent as a painter. That may be true but it’s generally irrelevant to what’s being said, it’s just that there seems to be a sense that if you were to say that you thought a sketch of a tree he’d done in the 20’s was pretty good you’d be saying you also thought nazism was pretty good.
As usuall the pop psychology is doing us a great disservice here. E.g. lots of people still seem to think they can tell a liar by looking in their eyes. In reality of course every liar knows that most of us don’t trust people who avoid eye contact, so the first thing clever liars learn to do is to put on a sincere face, look you straight in the eyes and lie their asses off (e.g. the “one time” Michael Corleone allows his wife to ask him about his business). One of the most common explanations people give for how they could fall for a con is “He didn’t seem like a con artist”, which immediately raises the question (cf. Wittgenstein) “what would he seem like if he did seem like a con artist?” Hint: the “con” in “con artist” stands for “confidence”.
We see something similar with women (To hell with the false balance crap! We all know the problem doesn’t cut equally both ways) who are seduced by psychopaths. It’s tempting to think of psychopaths as people with cruel faces who look like Christopher Lee, only talk about their own wants and needs, and display a callous indifference (say “I don’t give a shit”, shrug their shoulders etc.) to the suffering of others. But of course when you’re approached by a psychopath it’s hardly ever like that. Indeed, a better rule of thumb is “Gupta’s Law of Creative Anomalies” from the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” He is going to come across as the answer to all your hopes and prayers, present a sensitive, caring face, make you feel more understood than you’ve ever felt in your life. Finally someone who sees the “real” you and isn’t turned off by what he sees! He may show you a vulnerable side and tell you a sad story about how he’s been hurt once in the past and has had a problem opening himself up to others ever since, but he senses that with you it’s different etc. etc. In such a manner he is going to continue pushing all the right buttons and saying all the right things, so when the relationship does start taking a nasty turn, you have been so carefully groomed and conditioned that you think “It can’t be him, it has to be me! I’m just being too selfish and insensitive to meet his very modest and reasonable needs and demands, and if I just try harder to please him, love him unconditionally, and cater to his every wish, the relationship will go back to the way it was in the beginning, and he will go back to being the good loving person I know he really is”. Some even continue to think this way until they are found shot, or stabbed, or strangled to death.
And, once again, we see the same thing with people who are taken in by cult leaders. To borrow another movie reference, Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now! is probably the most famous cult leader in popular fiction, and when someone in the protagonist’s (who has been sent to assassinate Kurtz before de does any more damage) Crew dares to suggest that Kurtz has gone crazy, one of the cult members retort “If you were here… if you could have heard the man speak just two days ago… God! You dare to call him crazy?”. So, once again, how would he have spoken if he were crazy? If you think about it, having a conscience or experiencing emotions like guilt, shame, embarrassment, or remorse, are kind of impediments in social situations. They make us clumsier, more awkward, less convincing. A psychopath has none of these impediments. A psychopath is good at exactly one thing, namely producing all the right facial expressions, saying all the right things and pushing all the right buttons to convince you he’s not a psychopath.
Like the psychopath in (spoiler alert) the third season of Unforgotten. Brilliantly written and acted. He came across as dry and detached on the surface with a surprising warmth and empathy underneath. Until the bone-chilling final interview. He was always the same guy, always the same low-key presentation of self, but once the detectives made it clear they had the evidence he dryly calmly detachedly confessed to horrors.
Speaking of eyes: even clever people are dumb about eyes. “You can see it in his eyes” is a stubbornly popular thing to say. You can’t though – eyeballs reveal nothing except reaction to light. It’s the face, including muscles around the eyes.
My understanding (from reading about “witness psychology”) is that the most reliable indicators (statistically speaking) of whether or not someone is lying, comes from the actual verbal content itself. E.g. when people are telling the truth, they are more likely to remember things that are not directly relevant to the case. They are also more likely to remember things in non-chronological order and are more often uncertain about details. They also tend to adopt a more personal perspective, use the first person and talk about their own subjective interpretation of/reaction to an event. By comparison the statements of liars tend to come across as more “formulaic”, less rich in detail, less personal, more emotionally detached etc. The books I have read are careful to stress, however, that even these differences are statistical in nature and don’t allow us to make any confident claims in individual cases. Even professional secret service agents are only able to identify liars with about 70 % accuracy whereas lay people hardly do better than random guessing.