by Laurie Penny
I’m twenty-nine years old. It is possible that my biological clock is ticking, but I don’t know, because I can’t hear it over the racket of propaganda from the media, the movies, friends and relatives, all of it exhorting me and every other woman of so-called ‘childbearing age’ to settle down and make babies before it’s too late.
Actually, I’d love to have a child someday. But in this unequal world, my circumstances seem to be aligning so that what I would have to sacrifice in order to make that happen is more than I’m able or willing to give. That’s not an admission of weakness. It’s a statement of priorities of the kind that women and girls are encouraged not to make in public. Instead, we are supposed to hoard up our guilt in private – whatever it is we eventually choose. If we put our careers first, we’re selfish. If we devote ourselves to children and care work, we’re lazy, or we’re spoiled. If we try to juggle both at once, we’re unable to give either our full attention. The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women’s shame, so whatever we choose, the important thing is that we blame ourselves. That way, we don’t blame the system.
Little boys don’t get sold this nonsense. They’re not encouraged to worry about how they’ll balance their roles as husbands and fathers with paid work. Family life, for men, is not supposed to involve a surrendering of the self, as it is for women. Young men rarely worry about how they will achieve a ‘work–life’ balance, nor does the ‘life’ aspect of that equation translate to ‘partnership and childcare’. Not for men.
It’s not that I don’t respect the choice to devote yourself to raising children. On the contrary – I can’t stand the overplayed phobia of maternity that has become fashionable among parts of the young left, the sneering at ‘mummy clothes’ and avoidance of ‘nappy valley’. The more of my friends and colleagues have children, the more I respect the enormity of the project, the tremendous efforts and risks involved. Childcare is vital, demanding work, work that we urgently need to stop devaluing – and we can only do that when we start giving women and girls real alternatives.
More than anything, Slaughter’s book is a missed opportunity. The radical truth at the core of her story is that even a woman with all of her privilege – a lucrative, prestigious career, a loving, supportive husband and a boss who happened to be Hillary Clinton – even she could not make it work. She could not ‘have it all’. The obvious conclusion ought to be that the ‘work–life balance’ is a lie of leviathan proportions. Instead, Slaughter falls back on a type of magical thinking, at once tragic and predictable: we can achieve ‘work–life balance’ if we just work harder.
There was, until quite recently, a powerful movement within women’s liberation to acknowledge enforced ‘reproductive labour’ – childcare, housework and caring for husbands and elderly relatives – as a source of women’s oppression. There was a demand, in Judith Butler’s words, not just for equal work for equal pay, ‘but for equal work itself’. It is not these words that spring to mind, however, so much as the mantra of Bartleby the Scrivener, the stubborn clerk in Herman Melville’s famous story of workplace dissent. Whenever he is asked to perform a routine task, Bartleby replies: ‘I would prefer not to.’
At a time when womanhood is still presumed to involve endless, exhausting work, it strikes me that the young women of the twenty-first century need to rediscover our inner Bartleby. Every page of Unfinished Business makes me think: I would prefer not to. Spend eighteen years raddled with guilt and exhaustion, trying to fulfil all the expectations of paid work and motherhood at once? I would prefer not to. I’ve got things to do. I still haven’t finished season five of Battlestar Galactica! I still haven’t been rascally drunk in a Moscow gay bar! I’ve got books to read! Adventures to have! And sure, I could do some of that while balancing a baby on one knee and a briefcase on the other . . . but I would prefer not to.
The truth about ‘work–life balance’ is that it doesn’t exist. It never has existed, and unless we radically rethink our attitude to work and care, it never will. There it is. That’s the truth nobody wants to acknowledge. You can’t ‘have it all’, not even if you’re in the lucky minority who can afford to pay someone else to take care of your kids, so stop trying and stop blaming yourself. There. Now we’ve got that sorted out, it’s time to think about other options.
This is still an unequal world. But women are freer than we’ve ever been to build independent lives, to refuse to be bullied or shamed into lives we did not choose. We can’t ‘have it all’ when the system is broken. It’s time and beyond time for women to start asking what else we want – starting, perhaps, with a fairer deal.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST BE SINGLE
Mid-February is the most frigid time of year, so it’s always seemed apt that this is when people choose to hold the highest holy day of the cult of coupledom.
If you’re reading this, there’s a not insignificant chance that you are one or several of the following: a) young, b) female, c) single or d) nauseated by the sheer volume of saccharine romantic propaganda sloshing around the public sphere at this particular time of year. But none of us live outside culture, and feeling frustrated on Valentine’s Day doesn’t make you stupid or duped or a mindless drone for the greetings-card industry.
With that in mind, it’s time, as the Americans say, for some real talk.
Anti-Valentine’s rants are almost as clichéd as the hearts-and-flowers parade. I have too much respect for you to subject you to yet another list of reasons to enjoy being single, or things to do while you wait for your soulmate to arrive. In practice, these mostly seem to involve wearing pyjamas, applying face-masks and modelling for stock photos. But Valentine’s Day marks a point in the calendar when people start asking the Internet for love advice, so here’s mine.
I think that it’s usually better for women to be single. Particularly young women. Particularly straight young women. Not just ‘all right’, not just ‘bearable’ – actively better.
I have spent most of my twenties single, sometimes by choice, and sometimes because I was dating men and unable to locate one of those who didn’t try to hold me back or squash me down. I spent quite a lot of time being sad about that, even though my life was full of friends, fulfilling work, interesting lovers and overseas adventures. Looking back, though, staying single was probably the best decision I made, in terms of my career, my dedication to my work and activism, and the lessons I learned about how to care for myself and other people.
It’s not that I didn’t get upset and frustrated. There were times when I badly wanted a partner, and for much of that time, I felt like I had to choose between having one and being my best self. That self, the self that was dedicated to writing, travelling and politics, that had many outside interests and more intense friendships, was not something men seemed to value or desire – at least not in that way. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t also have gigantic, awkward flaws that make me largely unbearable to be with – just that boys rarely stuck around long enough to find that out. Plenty of them were perfectly happy to sleep with me, but after a little while, when I became a real person to them, when it became more than just sex, they turned mean or walked away.
That was hard. There were weeks when I walked around like I’d been kicked in the chest, wishing like hell that I had the ability to be someone else, someone more stereotypically lovable. With hindsight, though, I’m glad that I’ve never been willing or able to narrow my horizons for a man. It didn’t turn out to be half as scary, or a fraction as lonely, as I’d been told. And, you know, I had a bunch of fun and got a buggerload of writing done.
I’m not single right now. It’s sad that I felt I had to wait until that was the case before writing an essay like this. Part of me, I suspect, wanted to justify myself, to prove to you that I could gain the love of a man-shaped human, and thereby be an acceptable female. I wanted to wait and see if I felt the same way from the other side of five years without a primary partner. It turns out that I do.
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You see, I don’t believe that my relationship constitutes a happy ending. I don’t want a happy ending. I don’t want an ending at all, particularly not while I’m still in my goddamn twenties – I want a long life full of work and adventure. I absolutely don’t see partnership as the end of that adventure. And I still believe that being single is the right choice for a great many young women.
Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl.
That girl doesn’t get to have the kind of adventures you really ought to be having in your teens and twenties. It’s not that her dreams and plans don’t matter, but they tend to matter slightly less than the boy’s, because that’s what boys are taught to expect: that their girlfriend is there to play a supporting role in their life.
You see them everywhere – exhausted young women pouring all their spare energy into organising, encouraging and taking care of young men who resent them for doing it but resent them even harder when they don’t. You see them cringing for every crumb of affection before someone cracks and it all goes wrong and the grim cycle starts again. You can fritter away the whole of your youth that way. I know women who have.
What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of things that are much worse than being single under modern patriarchy. The feminists of the late twentieth century were often single by choice, and they’re mocked for it now by those who like to forget that they had good reason for it. It was better to be alone than to make the sort of grim bargains marriage or partnership required and still requires of heterosexual people who happened to be female.
It just wasn’t worth it. Sometimes it still isn’t worth it. For those of us who mostly or exclusively date the so-called ‘opposite’ gender, romantic love really can be a battlefield. It’s where politics play out intimately and, often, painfully. We’re not supposed to acknowledge that love is political. But how can it be otherwise? How can it be anything but political, when relationships with men are so often where women experience gendered violence, where differences in pay and privilege hit home, where we do all the work of caring and cleaning and soothing and placating that patriarchy expects us to do endlessly and for free?
Buried under the avalanche of hearts and flowers is an uncomfortable fact: romantic partnership is, and always has been, on one level, an economic arrangement. The economics may have changed in recent decades, as many women have gained more financial independence, but it’s still about the money. It’s about who does the domestic labour, the emotional labour, the work of healing the walking wounded of late capitalism. It’s about organising people into isolated, efficient, self-reproducing units and making them feel bad when it either fails to happen or fails to bring them happiness.
Today, whatever else we are, women are still taught that we have failed if we are not loved by men. I’ve lost count of the men who seem to believe that the trump card they hold in any debate is ‘but you’re unattractive’. ‘But I wouldn’t date you.’ How we feel about them doesn’t matter. Young women are meant to prioritise men’s romantic approval, and young men often struggle to imagine a world in which we might have other priorities.
The trouble is that in order to win that approval, we are supposed to lessen our power in every other aspect of life. We are supposed to downplay our intelligence, to worry if we have more financial or professional success than our partner. We can be creative and ambitious, but never more so than the men in our lives, lest we threaten them. And there are so few men that are worth making that sort of sacrifice for.
‘In patriarchal culture,’ as bell hooks observes in All About Love: New Visions, ‘men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands.’ Even the very best and sweetest of men have too often been raised with the expectation that once a woman is in their lives romantically, they will no longer have to do most of the basic chores involved in taking care of themselves.
When I’ve spoken critically about this monolithic ideal of romantic love in the past, most of the pushback I’ve received has been from men, some of it violent, and no wonder. Men usually have far more to gain from this sort of traditional arrangement. Men are allowed to think of romantic love as a feeling, an experience, a gift that they expect to be given as a reward for being their awesome selves. That sounds like a great deal to me. I wouldn’t want that challenged.
Women, by contrast, learn from an early age that love is work. That in order to be loved, we will need to work hard, and if we want to stay loved we will need to work harder. We take care of people, soothe hurt feelings, organise chaotic lives and care for men who never learned to care for themselves, regardless of whether or not we’re constitutionally suited for such work. We do this because we are told that if we don’t, we will die alone and nobody will find us until an army of cats has eaten all the skin off our faces.
Little boys are told they should ‘get’ girlfriends, but they are not encouraged to seriously consider their future roles as boyfriends and husbands. Coupledom, for men, is not supposed to involve a surrendering of the self, as it is for women.
Young men do not worry about how they will achieve a ‘work–life balance’, nor does the ‘life’ aspect of that equation translate to ‘partnership and childcare’. When commentators speak of women’s ‘work–life balance’, they’re not talking about how much time a woman will have, at the end of the day, to work on her memoirs, or travel the world, or spend time with her friends. ‘Life’, for women, is envisioned as a long trajectory towards marriage. ‘Life’, for men, is meant to be bigger than that.
No wonder single girls are stigmatised, expected at every turn to explain their life choices. No wonder spinsterhood is supposed to be the worst fate that can befall a woman. ‘Spinster’ is still an insult, whereas young men get to be fun-loving bachelors, players and studs. There would be serious social consequences if we collectively refused to do the emotional management that being a wife or girlfriend usually involves – so it’s important that we’re bullied into it, made to feel like we’re unworthy and unlovable unless we’re somebody’s girl. Today, we’re even expected to deliver the girlfriend experience in the workplace, as ‘affective labour’ – the daily slog of keeping people happy – becomes a necessary part of the low-waged, customer-facing, service-level jobs in which women and girls are over-represented.
That’s an ideological reason to be single. Now here’s a practical one. The truth is that most men in their teens and twenties have not yet learned to treat women like human beings, and some never do. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s how this culture trains them to behave, and in spite of it all, there are a few decent, kind and progressive young men out there who are looking for truly equal partnerships with women.
The trouble is that there aren’t enough of them for all the brilliant, beautiful, fiercely compassionate women and girls out there who could really do with someone like that in their lives. Those men are like unicorns. If you meet one, that’s great. You might think you’ve met one already – I’ve often thought so – but evidence and experience suggest that a great many unicorns are, in fact, just horses with unconvincing horns. If you don’t manage to catch a real unicorn, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Either way, you should have a plan B.
Not everyone has that choice. Many young women are already parents or carers. The global movement against welfare affects women more than any other group, since women do the majority of caring labour, forcing them back into dependence on partners, primarily men, unless they are privately wealthy.
Austerity and anti-welfarism are an attack on women’s independence under capitalism. This is why agitating for
economic change, such as the institution of a guaranteed minimum income, should be one of feminism’s core projects.
In the meantime, however, we have to organise where we are. That’s why it’s so critical that women with the ability to do so – particularly women and girls at the beginning of their adult lives – prioritise their financial and emotional independence, including from men.
Rejecting that sort of partnership doesn’t mean rejecting the whole notion of love. On the contrary: it means demanding more of love. I’m a gigantic squishy romantic at heart. It’s just that I think compulsory heterosexual monogamy is the least romantic idea since standardised testing, and I don’t see why our best ideals of love and lust and passion and dedication need to be boxed into it.
The worst thing about traditional romantic love is that it’s supposed to be the end of the story – if you’re a girl. The music swells, the curtain drops as you fall into his arms, and then you’re done. You get to drift off into a life of quiet bliss and baby-making. Isn’t that what every girl really wants?
It is not, nor should it be. There are many different routes to a life of love and adventure and personally, I don’t intend to travel down any one of them in the sidecar. So we need to start telling stories about singleness – and coupled independence – that are about more than manicures and frantic day-drinking. We need to start remembering all of the women down the centuries who chose to remain unpartnered so that they could make art and change history without a man hanging around expecting dinner and a smile. We need to start remembering that the modern equivalents of these women are all around us, and little girls need not be terrified of becoming them.
More than half of women over eighteen are unmarried. More than half of marriages end in divorce. It is well past time to abandon the idea that a single woman has failed in life.