The fightiness of this is its best aspect. I like the unapologetic demand to not be constrained by societal expectations, and the anger that women are still so often victims. It's pretty broad-brush on its portrayal of what men are like (awful in every way, even contradictory ways sometimes) and what women are like (an unstoppable force that will one day overthrow capitalism and bring about universal love and understanding), and a lot of what she thinks are societal stereotypes seem old fashioned even to me and I'm quite a bit older than her... but its a polemic not a piece of scholarship so that can be excused too.
I was less keen on the egotism of it: constantly wanting to drop in references to her own fantastically bohemian lifestyle, how she could easily attract any man if only she weren't so damn clever... That sort of stuff is all a bit tedious, but hey...

What really struck me, though, was how dated a lot of the language is. Although she's showing early signs of her current twitter persona, there are loads of sections in here that, if you took them out of context and tweeted them you'd get piled on: repeated use of the word "transexual" instead of "transgender", references to men and women as being defined by their anatomy, girls deliberately stifling their own puberty as being somehow non-ideal, even approvingly quoting Helen Lewis... And on and on. There's tons of stuff in here that was probably pretty cutting edge in 2014 but are only believed in now by middle aged feminists without blue hair. I'm here for it, actually. I look at it with a sort of rosy nostalgia for when things were less fucked than they are now.

This is a really searing and yet grounding approach to feminism that is so succinct in its points and easy to both understand and be challenged by that it’s hard to think anyone would finish this book unaffected, uninspired, or unequipped.

I love that Penny does not sugar coat things, does not hesitate to note the ways in which “progress” has failed to lead to tangible liberation for so many women, how neoliberalism remains the ever-imposing despot to that goal of liberation, and even how women themselves can hold each other back back when they fail to make room and consideration for queer, lower class, and racially marginalized individuals. I also love Penny’s insistence that we have the means, the technology and the knowledge to DO and BE better in society and that it is inexcusable that we are still massively controlling, oppressing, traumatizing, policing, and limiting such a huge swath of the population. I also love that men are included in this discussion, not only for their gender specific issues but with a call to be a part of a liberation project that will lead to a better future for them as well (as sometimes feminism can be seen as something done FOR women rather than a project that brings a whole society into a richer, more colourful and healthy future).

My main two hitches with this book were that I flinched a little every time she used the term “transsexual” (maybe was still in popular use at the time of this writing?) and the lack of much attention being given to the influence of race and culture in her perspectives on women’s struggles. She does mention that these factors compound the issues but there isn’t any particular extra focus how specifically these identities interact with womanhood, just that they do.

This was difficult to read, but definitely worth the struggle.

YES! Yes, this! I'm goi g to have to buy my own copy so I can mark it up and reread it!

"Sex isn't the problem. Sexism is the problem."

Incredible book. It reads like a blog post; sitting for 10 minutes on the subway and you're already 10 pages in. Beautifully written, never boring, and makes some points that you swear you thought of yourself but just haven't been able to put into words. This is what feminism needs to be about. Ditch your societal standards and get out there and argue your place in the world, and start with this book.

I'm having a hard time getting my thoughts down about this book. It was so... thought provoking, I was enlightened, I got depressed, I chuckled at her writing, I got perspective, I saw my own experiences, it was ugly, it was not a roadmap to beat sexism, it was reality, it blew my mind.

It was also like I was already familiar with most of what this book covers just in my day to day life, but it was the reasoning and explanations of what society expects and why that really opened my eyes. I had to take it paragraph by paragraph, often having to re-read to get the full weight of a statement or concept. Her passion rings through.

I will definitely be looking into her other works. Borrowed this one from the library, but it's looking like I want my own copy to revisit down the line.

In Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, Laurie Penny writes about today’s toxic patriarchal culture that creates fucked-up girls, lost boys, rape culture, sexism on the Internet, and problematic concepts of love. Referencing her experiences with eating disorders, the Occupy movement, the UK student protests, and online trolls, she presents an incisive, radical perspective on society today.

This book is broken up into five sections. “Fucked Up Girls” discusses the intense pressure girls feel to meet unattainable ideals — to be thin, perfect, chaste, and good — and the double standards surrounding those qualities. “Lost Boys” examines the way our culture harms men as well as women. Penny also takes a look at the roots of the discomfort individuals feel when men in general are accused of misogyny.

In the section “Anticlimax,” Penny writes about the double standards surrounding sex today, when we teach women how to avoid being raped rather than teaching men not to rape. “Cybersexism” deals with — you guessed it — sexism on the Internet. Penny examines the ways men try to silence women online and the ways women are starting to fight back. The final section, “Love and Lies,” deals with our society’s problematic obsession with a particular brand of romantic love, which tells girls that they must look and act a certain way in order to find The One — and that she is not complete until she finds him.

This book caught me a bit off-guard with its radical tone. While I agree with much of what Penny says about the way our patriarchal society controls women, I often thought to myself, “surely things aren’t THAT bad.” I felt a bit doubtful when she refers to gender as a “straightjacket for the human soul” and when she cites society’s assumption “that most men, given the choice, would want to escape the onerous duties of parenthood.”

Despite personally taking a less radical stance than Penny does, I am glad to have read this book. It pushed me outside my comfort zone, which is an excellent place to go. Unspeakable Things is a thought-provoking book that deepened my awareness and understanding of a lot of issues facing both women and men today. I would definitely recommend this to readers who are interested in a more radical take on gender politics.

Read the full review on Books Speak Volumes.

“You can’t win. If you choose to devote less of your time to grooming as a political statement, you’re a ‘hairy bra-burning feminist’ and nobody has any obligation to listen to anything you have to say, but if you embrace conventional beauty standards, or appear to enjoy them for their own sake, you are presumed to be a shallow and manipulative slut.” OK... (1) How about you stop using grooming habits as a means of making a political statement and just do whatever the hell you like? Making your appearance a political statement invites (instructs) people to pay attention to it (even more than they normally would) and indicates that it’s something that really matters. How is it not obvious how counterproductive that is?! The whole point being made is that women’s appearances matter too much. (2) I’m pretty sure that no one has ever noticed that I shave my legs and thought “wow, what a shallow manipulative slut”.

So, yeah… ugh. The part that I managed to get through sounds like a diary written by a 20-something who just finished a women’s studies course and needs to get some shit off her chest. She uses outrage and an angry-as-hell revolutionary tone as a tool but doesn’t offer any more than the outrage itself. I suspect pieces of this showed up at some open-mic poetry nights, so I started reading it in a slam-poetry cadence to try to find some humor, but I still threw it down in disgust after the intro. I tried it again, but only made it to p. 50. There was no one nearby for me to yell to about it at the time, so I’ve got some thoughts below. The TLDR: this book is written for teenage girls who are just realizing that things are kind of fucked up (Oooh, she says ‘fuck’! How anti-establishment!) and need validation for their irritation. The most disappointing thing is that the issues are legitimate, but she makes herself dismissible with the approach she takes. For example, one of her main goals is to be more inclusive than traditional feminism has been, but she seems to speak to a young, middle-class, mostly-white audience. For most readers: if you’re interested enough in feminism to even check out this title (or if you thought “Sex, Lies, and Revolution” might be about something else), you are probably already familiar with her main points, and you can move along. I’ve quit this one and will spend my time on Bad Feminist and The Birth of the Pill instead. But first… let me explain why the first 50 pages of this one were so annoying.

This is a 20-something white British woman who uses “neoliberalism colonisation” to mean brainwashing by a capitalist society, without showing a hint of irony or understanding that she’s a white Britain talking about colonization. She’s allowed to use the word, of course. But by about the 3rd mention I really wondered if she understood the history and baggage of the word. It feels too soon.

One of her goals is to widen the fold; as she notes, traditional feminism excluded women of color, lesbians, bisexuals, non-identifiers, trans women, sex workers, and probably more. The feminism we’ve been left with is primarily for middle- and upper-class white women and the focus tends to be on how many women are in the board room rather than on issues like getting birth control options to poor women. (Both seem pretty important.) p. 21 “The social revolution that’s been choking and stumbling down a gauntlet of a century and more, the feminist fight back, the sexual re-scripting, the tearing up of old norms of race and class and gender, it has to start again, with all this time, not just the rich white kids who needed it least.” Great idea! But the people who have been excluded seem unlikely to be her main audience; it seems like her main audience is the rich white kids. In general, it just sounds like she’s screaming at the choir or she's whitesplaining. There is a caveat though: I’m white, so maybe I’m not a good judge. Maybe some people who are not white, gay, and/or trans would feel like she is speaking to them. Also, if she’s only speaking to the rich white kids, maybe it’s because they need this shit explained to them. But it seems like she’s calling for a gender mutiny from a Kardashian-soaked crowd. I doubt her anger is enough to achieve that. Finally, in the part I got through, she doesn’t address the need for grassroots work in the excluded communities (which should be welcomed with open arms from the traditional group). Instead it feels a bit like she’s advocating a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign by a group of wannabe liberators. Maybe she gets to that stuff later on.

She’s upset about gender norms, which is completely reasonable. But it’s not reasonable to suggest that gender norms are solely a social construct. I agree that they are fucked up in a lot of ways, and specifically in a lot of ways that are due to social constructs, but gender norms are a biopsychosocial thing. You can’t eliminate the bio and psycho parts just because it suites your argument.

“The young women of today know far better than their slightly older sisters who came of age in the listless 1990s how much work is still to be done, and how unglamorous it is.” Excuse me? Where the hell did all that inclusivity go? How is pitting generations against each other helpful? How about a sense of history? Honestly, she sounds like a teenager telling her parents that she knows more about the world than they do because things have changed since they were kids; she sounds like a fucking brat.

p. 13 “Gender is a straightjacket for the human soul.” Oookaaay. (I have a friend who used to have button on her bag that said “gender is a sex toy.” Isn’t that a better take?)

p. 28 She implies that young women (and some men) who don’t meet their norms are being diagnosed with adjustment disorder. Adjustment disorder was, by definition, a temporary thing, but this diagnosis doesn’t exist anymore. Although inaccurate diagnoses still happen too often, young women deemed strange are not being thrown into mental institutions in droves; we actually have made progress in both gender norms and mental health since the Victorian era.

p.39 With respect to anorexia and disordered eating: “The reason young women and increasing numbers of young men behave like this, the logic goes, is because they’re scared and angry about the gender roles that they are being forced into. The notion that they might have damn good reasons for being scared and angry has not yet occurred to the psychiatric profession.” Where is she exactly, the 1950s? There’s a ton of research on gender, race, ethnicity, identity, sexuality, and class and how it influences various mental health issues like disordered eating. She hasn’t looked at any of that apparently.

On being institutionalized for an eating disorder: “In that place, if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by the rules.” Yes, it’s a mental health institution. They do have rules for behavior, since behavior is what they are trying to fix. Not all the rules in all institutions are great, but c’mon. “You had to smile and eat your meals.” Yep. That’s recovery for an eating disorder, learning how to eat normally. “You had to be a good girl. That meant no more trousers, no more going out with short hair and no make-up, finding a boyfriend as soon as possible, and learning to style your hair and do your eyeliner. It meant buying different dresses for different occasions, fitting yourself out to have men look at you with lust, learning manners, learning to dip your head and say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘No cake for me, I’ve been naughty this week’.” Was she in the worst eating disorder clinic in the world?? It’s just really unlikely that she’d end up in a place (in the 90s or 00s) that pushed an uber-traditional idea of femininity (on people with distorted body images!), and even less likely to be in a place that encourages people to decline cake when the whole point is to get people to accept that it’s OK to eat cake (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7fLaOFEmL4, for example). All of which is to say, either she really did end up in a very bad place or she’s exaggerating a tad.

Regarding the beauty myth (i.e., if you’re beautiful everything will be ok) she says, “It turns out they lied to us. The magazines lied to us, the movies lied to us, our mothers lied.” *gasp* The magazines lied?! Seriously, her audience must be in cults that worship the patriarchy to need this much explanation and hand holding.

p. 49 “It’s what your boyfriend wants. He has not been raised to expect a relationship with a real human being, but a sidekick, a helpmeet, a wank-fantasy made only-just-flesh.” DUDE. What kind of men is she hanging around? Bro-dawg frat boys? MMA fighting fan clubs? Sure, these guys exist. But when we are not pointing and laughing at them, they should be thoroughly ignored.

Laurie Penny has produced five chapters on current issues in feminism, that are otherwise only loosely connected. She writes well, but the material is familiar, albeit interspersed with anecdotes from her arrival in New York City to participating in the Occupy London protests. My main quibble: her tendency to use run-on sentences, that transform as they go along, so that by the time you arrive at the verb, the subject is long-forgotten. And, as I say, though this is no fault of either writer, it was a bit like a reissue of [b:The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women And Men Today|7445096|The Equality Illusion The Truth About Women And Men Today|Kat Banyard|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348495865s/7445096.jpg|9463560], updated with new material for an international audience. Those concerns aside, it was a persuasive guide to feminism today.