by Laurie Penny
Even supposedly empowering stories of singleness, from Sex and the City to Kate Bolick’s recent book Spinster, seem to end with the protagonist finding her soulmate just when she’s given up hope. That’s not where my story ends. I’m enjoying the novelty of not being single, but it’s bloody hard work.
Any dedicated love relationship is hard work, even when you’re big and ugly and lucky enough to be able to negotiate your own boundaries and insist on your independence. It’s work I only just manage to find time in the day for. It’s work I definitely would not have had time for two or three years ago, when I was completely absorbed with churning out three books at once while simultaneously trying to become a better human being. And it’s work I’d advise most young women not to be bothered with, in the knowledge that their human value is not and never will be contingent on being someone’s girlfriend.
It’s just not worth it.
We have to get on with saving the world, after all, and we can’t do it one man at a time.
FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE
Susan B. Anthony never married. The suffragist, abolitionist and civil rights campaigner foresaw in 1877 that ‘in women’s transition from the position of subject to sovereign, there must needs be an era of self-sustained, self-supported homes’, leading, ‘inevitably, to an epoch of single women’. Seven generations later, we may have finally arrived. More women are living alone or without a partner than ever before, and the question on the table once again is not how to have a better marriage, but whether to have one at all.
Two recent books by American journalists have blown air on the dying coals of the long-sidelined debate over marriage, partnership, the sheer amount of work involved in the whole business, and whether it’s worth it for women who value their personal autonomy over the vanishing amount of security offered by coupledom. Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies draws attention to the growing power of uncoupled women in the United States, and the threat this poses to the socio-economic status quo. Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love, meanwhile, focuses on the fact that for many women, what has been called love and phrased as destiny is in fact work – hard work, endless work, organisational and domestic and emotional work without boundary and reward – and much more optional than society would have us believe. ‘Single female life is not prescription,’ Traister writes, ‘but its opposite: liberation.’
These books could not have arrived on my doorstep at a better time. I had been struggling to find language for my growing anxiety over the fact that, at almost thirty, I still have no desire to settle down and form a traditional family. I’ve been waiting, as open-mindedly as possible, for a sudden neo-Darwinian impulse to pair up and reproduce. And yet here I am, and it hasn’t happened. Despite no small amount of social pressure, I am happy as I am.
I am quite content with the fact that my work, my politics, my community and my books are just as important to me as anyone I happen to be dating. I love babies, but not enough to make the work, the pain, the worry and the lost opportunities involved worth it for me – not right now, and maybe not ever. I live in a commune, I date multiple people, and I’m focused on my career. I’d always assumed, because I’d always been told, that this was a phase I was going through. Reading these two books has helped me be honest about the fact that marriage and babies have always been way down my list of priorities, and they’re close to being nudged right off. There’s too much else I want to do. I’ve made the same choice that men my age have been able to make for centuries without being scolded by society, or even having to think about it too much – and in and of itself, that’s not radical. The possibility of millions of women making the same decision, en masse, however, is an entirely more threatening prospect.
As women writers around the world open up, for the first time in generations, about the regrets they have nursed in private over marriage and motherhood, the work involved in both is finally becoming visible. The key phrase here is ‘emotional labour’. Emotional labour, Weigel reminds us, is not just the cleaning and the cooking and the wiping of snotty noses, but the organisation of households and relationships, the planning of marriage and fertility, the attention paid to birthdays and anniversaries, the soothing of stress, the remembering of food allergies – all the work, in short, that goes into keeping human beings happy on an intimate level. Someone has to do it, and the burden has fallen on women to such an extent that it has been naturalised, made invisible by the assumption that women and girls are just built to take care of all this stuff, if not by God then by nature, with a great deal of pseudo-scientific hand-waving over the specifics. The idea that we might not be, and that we might furthermore be fed up of doing so thanklessly and for free, is profoundly threatening to the smooth running of society as we know it.
It is more than possible for those who perform emotional and domestic labour to be alienated from the products of that labour, especially when so little recompense is on offer. Emotional and domestic labour is work, and women have been putting up with terrible working conditions for far too long.
I knew that the discussion of emotional labour had gone mainstream when I saw it plastered across the front cover of a women’s glossy not generally known as a radical feminist recruiting tract. ‘Who does the work in your relationship?’ asks Psychologies, alongside a picture of Beyoncé, who recently dropped an album demanding that her husband do better ‘or you’re gonna lose your wife’ alongside coded threats to bring down the government. Bey has come a long way from ‘put a ring on it’, and so have the rest of us.
‘The revolution,’ Traister declares, ‘is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women . . . down a single highway towards early heterosexual marriage and motherhood.’ The reframing of marriage and partnership not just as work, but as optional work, raises real questions for women and girls thinking about ‘settling down’. Is it worth it? Is signing up for what might turn out, even if you’re lucky, to be a lifetime of domestic management too high a price to pay for limited reward? Do you actually want to spend years taking care of children and a partner when it’s hard enough taking care of yourself? Not so long ago, marriage was most women’s only option if they wanted financial security, children who would be considered legitimate, social status and semi-regular sex. Our foremothers fought for the right to all of those things outside the confines of partnership, and today the benefits of marriage and monogamy are increasingly outweighed by the costs.
Study after study has shown that it is men, not women, who benefit most from marriage and long-term partnership. Men who marry are, on the whole, healthier and happier than single men. Married women, by contrast, were no better off than their single counterparts. Men who divorced are twice as likely to want to get married again, whereas women more often wanted out of the whole business. This might explain why it is women, not men, who must be steered and conditioned towards partnership from childhood.
It is little girls, and not little boys, who are taught to prepare for marriage, to imagine their future roles as wives and mothers, to fear being ‘left on the shelf’. ‘Bachelor’ is a term of respect, but ‘spinster’ is a term of abuse, and it is women, not men, to whom the propaganda of romance is directed. From Hollywood to reality television to the comment desks of broadsheets, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, no matter what resources she may possess, must be in want of a man.
Or must she? I had always scorned Jane Austen, whose most famous aphorism I just bastardised, until I found myself on a train last year with nothing to read but Emma. I realised something I’d never considered as a literature student: that Austen’s famous novels of shrubbery romance in stately homes and claustrophobic marriage plotting make a lot more sense once you realise that all her protagonists are profoundly depressed and economically desperate. The reason that her middle-class heroines are so singularly fixated on marriage is that they have no meaningful alternatives: without a suitable mate, the
y face poverty, shame and social isolation. They are not romances. They are horror stories. I was hooked, and ploughed through the entire collection in three weeks.
Jane Austen’s books are still read and re-imagined as silly, frivolous stories for and about silly, frivolous women, but there are desperate stakes on the table. Austen, who never married herself, writes about women living in cages built by men, trying to survive as best they can, which is precisely what makes the stories so exciting and, to me at least, so frightening. Women’s real fears and concerns about marriage and cohabitation have always been dismissed in exactly the same way, as trivial issues unworthy of consideration in the public sphere. But there are vital, visceral matters of work and power at play – and that’s still true today, in a world where most women, thankfully, have a few more options than we did in the 1810s.
Today, single women have more power and presence than ever before; but there’s still a price to pay for choosing not to pair up. It’s not just about the stress of steering a life in unnavigated waters and unlearning decades of conditioning that lodges the notion that life without a partner leads to misery in the malleable parts of our hearts. It’s also about the money. Over half of Americans earning minimum wage or below are single women, and single mothers are five times as likely to live in poverty as married ones. This has been taken as proof that marriage is better for women, when it should, in fact, be a sign that society must do more, and better, to support women’s choices as men have been supported for centuries.
If women reject marriage and partnership en masse, the economic and social functioning of modern society will be shaken to its core. It has already been shaken. Capitalism has managed to incorporate the mass entrance of women into the traditionally male workplace by depressing wages, but the question of how households will be formed and children raised is still unsolved. Public anxiety over the low fertility rate among middle-class white women is matched only by the modern hysteria about working-class, black and migrant women having ‘too many’ babies – the attempts by neoconservatives to bully, threaten and cajole wealthy white women back to the kitchen and nursery are as much about racist panic as they are about reinstituting a social order that only ever worked for men. ‘Single women are taking up space in a world that was not built for them,’ Traister concludes. ‘If we are to flourish, we must make room for free women, must adjust our economic and social systems, the ones that are built around the presumption that no woman really counts unless she is married.’ Traister is relaxed about the prospect of single women asking that the support a husband might once have provided be publicly available. ‘In looking to the government to support their ambitions, choices and independence through better policy,’ she writes, ‘single women are asserting themselves as citizens in ways that American men have for generations.’ The same is true across the world: the liberation of women from mandatory domestic and emotional labour is a prospect of freedom that previous generations could only have imagined, and we owe it to them to take it seriously.
With all these options available, what about those who still choose marriage or partnership? They can couple up in the knowledge that their choices are made freely. When partnership ceases to be mandatory, it only becomes more special. Not long ago, one of my partners got married. I went to his stag night as part of the groom’s party. I’m happy for him, and for his fiancée, whose permission I got before mentioning her in this piece. I love weddings. I love watching people I’m fond of build a future together, however they choose to organise it, and I also love getting dressed up and drunk on cheap champagne with their mad relatives. There’s not a lot I’d rather do than be a wedding guest for a weekend; it’s just that I also happen to believe in dismantling the social and economic institutions of marriage and family.
I believe in all of that not despite my squishy, tender heart, but because of it. I’m a romantic. I think love needs to be freed from the confines of the traditional, monogamous, nuclear family – and so do women. I think wrapping up the most intimate, exhausting aspects of human labour in a saccharine slip of hearts and flowers, calling it love and expecting women to do it thanklessly and for free is a profoundly unromantic idea. In the real world, love is perhaps the one truly infinite, renewable resource we have – and it’s beyond time that we had more options. I want more options for myself, and I want them for all of us, not just as a feminist, but as a romantic, too, because it’s the only chance we have of one day, at last, meeting and mating as true equals.
The personal, however, remains political. Women refusing the traditional demands of love and marriage is not just a lifestyle issue, it’s a labour issue. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that, realising how terrible their working conditions are and have always been, women everywhere are simply going on strike, and it is a strike the like of which society has barely contemplated. It is distributed and dispersed, and the picket lines begin at the door of every household and the threshold of every human heart. Like any labour strike, it requires the raising of consciousness and a certain amount of solidarity between strikers, and it is not without costs. But this is how freedom is won.
LET’S NOT ABOLISH SEX WORK; LET’S ABOLISH ALL WORK.
Is sex work ‘a job like any other’ – and is that a good thing? On 26 May 2016 Amnesty International officially adopted a policy recommending the decriminalisation of sex work around the world as the best way to reduce violence in the industry and safeguard both workers and those who are trafficked into prostitution.
‘Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses including rape, violence, extortion and discrimination,’ said Tawanda Mutasah, Amnesty International’s senior director for law and policy. ‘Our policy outlines how governments must do more to protect sex workers from violations and abuse.
‘We want laws to be refocused on making sex workers’ lives safer and improving the relationship they have with the police while addressing the very real issue of exploitation,’ said Mutasah, emphasising the organisation’s policy that forced labour, child sexual exploitation and human trafficking are human rights abuses which, under international law, must be criminalised in every country. ‘We want governments to make sure no one is coerced to sell sex, or is unable to leave sex work if they choose to.’
The proposal from the world’s best-known human rights organisation has caused uproar, particularly from some feminist campaigners who believe that decriminalisation will ‘legitimise’ an industry that is uniquely harmful to women and girls.
As sex workers around the world rally for better working conditions and legal protections, more and more countries are adopting versions of the ‘Nordic Model’ – attempting to crack down on sex work by criminalising the buyers of commercial sex, most of whom are men. Amnesty, along with many sex workers’ rights organisations, claims that the ‘Nordic Model’ in fact forces the industry underground and does little to protect sex workers from discrimination and abuse.
The battle lines have been drawn, and the ‘feminist sex wars’ of the 1980s are under way again. Gloria Steinem, who opposes Amnesty’s move, is one of many campaigners who believe the very phrase ‘sex work’ is damaging. ‘“Sex work” may have been invented in the US in all goodwill, but it has been a dangerous phrase – even allowing home governments to withhold unemployment and other help from those who refuse it,’ Steinem wrote on Facebook in 2015. ‘Obviously, we are free to call ourselves anything we wish, but in describing others, anything that requires body invasion – whether prostitution, organ transplant, or gestational surrogacy – must not be compelled.’ She wanted the UN to replace the phrase ‘sex work’ with ‘prostituted women, children, or people’.
The debate over sex work is the only place where you can find modern liberals seriously discussing whether work itself is an unequivocal social good. The phrase ‘sex work’ is essential precisely because it makes that question visible. Take the open letter recently published by former prostitute ‘Rae’, now a commit
ted member of the abolitionist camp, in which she concludes: ‘Having to manifest sexual activity due to desperation is not consent. Utilising a poor woman for intimate gratification – with the sole knowledge that you are only being engaged with because she needs the money – is not a neutral, amoral act.’
I agree with this absolutely. The question of whether a person desperate for cash can meaningfully consent to work is vital. And that’s precisely why the term ‘sex work’ is essential. It makes it clear that the problem is not sex, but work itself, carried out within a culture of patriarchal violence that demeans workers in general and women in particular.
To describe sex work as ‘a job like any other job’ is only a positive reframing if you consider a ‘job’ to be a good thing by definition. In the real world, people do all sorts of horrible things they’d rather not do, out of desperation, for cash and survival. People do things that they find boring, or disgusting, or soul-crushing, because they cannot meaningfully make any other choice. We are encouraged not to think about this too hard, but to accept these conditions as simply ‘the way of the world’.
The feminist philosopher Kathi Weeks calls this universal depoliticisation of work ‘the work society’: an ideology under whose terms it is taken as a given that work of any kind is liberating, healthy and ‘empowering’. This is why the ‘work’ aspect of ‘sex work’ causes problems for conservatives and radical feminists alike. ‘Oppression or profession?’ is the question posed by a subtitle on Emily Bazelon’s excellent feature on the issue for the New York Times. But why can’t selling sex be both?
Liberal feminists have tried to square this circle by insisting that sex work is not ‘a job like any other’, equating all sold sex, in Steinem’s words, with ‘commercial rape’ – and obscuring any possibility of agitating within the industry for better workers’ rights.