Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny

Author:Laurie Penny [Penny, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781620406892
Amazon: 1620406896
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2014-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

4

Cybersexism

Information wants nothing. People want to be free.

Cory Doctorow

There are no girls on the Internet.

4chan

‘This is for everyone.’ The Internet is a godless place, but that’s as close to an in-the-beginning-was-the-word as it gets. The phrase was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in time for the London Olympics Opening ceremony, but the principle that the Internet should be socially, economically and politically free, and that anyone anywhere should be able to use it to build new interactive platforms, extend the frontiers of human knowledge or just surf dating forums for cute redheads is basically sound. This is for everyone. Or at least, it was supposed to be.

There was a time, not so long ago, when nerds, theorists and hackers, the first real colonisers of cyberspace, believed that the Internet would liberate us from gender. Science-fiction writers imagined a near future just on the edge of imagination where people’s physical bodies would become immaterial as we travelled beyond space and distance and made friends and connections and business deals all over the planet in the space of a split second. Why would it matter, in this brave new networked world, what sort of body you had? And if your body didn’t matter, why would it matter if you were a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, or something else entirely?

1998. I’m twelve years old and I’ve started hanging out in the type of chat forums where everyone will pretend to believe you’re a forty-five-year-old history teacher called George. At the same time, the other half of the Internet seems intent on pretending that they are thirteen-year-old schoolgirls from the south coast of England. Amid growing moral panic about paedophiles and teen sluts preying on one another in the murky, unpoliced backwaters of MySpace, I feel something a little akin to freedom. Here, my body, with all of its weight and anxiety, its blood and grease and embarrassing eruptions, is not important; only my words are important. I don’t want to be just a girl, because I already knew from experience that girls weren’t understood. I want to be what web theorist Donna Haraway calls a cyborg: ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism . . . I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.’1

At the turn of the twenty-first century my tits were coming in and I wasn’t at all impressed with the messy biopolitics of approaching adolescence. The Internet became part of my life early enough to be the coolest thing ever and late enough that I have memories of Geocities before it became a howling desert rolling with tumbleweed and pixels that don’t have the decency to decay, and it seemed like a place where all of the bullshit, the boys

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