Meat Market by Laurie Penny

Author:Laurie Penny
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84694-521-2
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Feminine advice-manuals from Cosmopolitan to the 12th-century nuns’ handbook Ancrene Wisse have encouraged self-denial as a watchword and guiding principle, apart from in certain explicit avenues such as, variously, the January sales or the love of Jesus. Women are still expected quite literally to deny themselves: to erase their personhood and throw over the wants of the body and the hunger of the soul for transformation. The adventure of being fully human, however, cannot be achieved simultaneously with the denial of the self – and it is this denial of female selfhood, this denial of the dirt and ooze of female power, that feminists of all genders and stripes must resist if we are to root out the deepest lines of misogynist resistance in our societies.

Society cannot grow and develop if it continues to insist that one half of its citizens spend their energies physically and psychologically shrinking themselves. But reclaiming the flesh is about radical surrender to female power, and this will be as hard for many women, grown used to denying and paring down their bodies and their selves, as it will be for the men who must make room for those bodies and those selves. This strategy goes far beyond individual women leaning to love their bodies. Empowerment is about far more than physical self-confidence, whatever the cosmetic surgery industry may claim.

Perhaps the cruellest of all tricks played on women by contemporary consumerism is the tendency over the past five years for popular culture to appropriate women’s anxiety over taking up social space in order to sell them circumscribed solutions. Even as dieting is sold as the ultimate way for women to positively transform their lives, TV programmes like Britain’s How to Look Good Naked prey on those same fear by suggesting that all women really need to feel free from the tyrannies of body fascism is a really great bra and the chance to stand on a stage and be judged approvingly by men. When I began to eat again and started to approach a healthy weight, I was bombarded with compliments. The few friends I hadn’t managed to alienate through years of self-starvation rushed to reassure me that I was more attractive as a size eight than I had been as a size zero. I went to bed with men who told me that they loved my curves, thinking that this was what I wanted to hear. I tried desperately hard to love my curves, too – but the real breakthrough came when I stopped defining myself merely by my dress size. Once I started to believe that my worth as a person had nothing to do with how my body looked to other people, I began to give myself permission to take up the space I needed and claim the power I craved.

Fear of female flesh is fear of female power, and reclaiming women’s bodies must go hand in hand with reclaiming women’s power. This cannot be achieved simply by purchasing expensive body lotion.

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