by Laurie Penny
Men are not being advised to avoid impregnating women, because the idea of a state placing restrictions on men’s sexual behaviour, however violent or reckless, is simply outside the framework of political possibility. It is supposed to be women’s responsibility to control whether they get pregnant – but in Brazil and El Salvador, which are among the countries where zika is most rampant, women often don’t get to make any serious choice in that most intimate of matters. Because of endemic rape and sexual violence, combined with some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, women are routinely forced to give birth against their will.
El Salvador is not the only country that locks up women for having miscarriages. The spread of regressive ‘personhood’ laws across the United States has led to many women being threatened with jail for manslaughter when they miscarry – even as attacks on abortion rights make it harder than ever for American women to choose when and how they become pregnant, especially if they are poor.
Imagine that you have a friend in her early twenties whose partner gave her a helpful list of what she should and should not eat, drink and otherwise insert into various highly personal orifices, just in case she happened to get pregnant. Imagine that this partner backed his suggestions up with the threat of physical force. Imagine that he routinely reminded your friend that her potential to create life was more important than the life she was living, denied her access to medical care and threatened to lock her up if she miscarried. You would be telling your friend to get the hell out of that abusive relationship. You would be calling around the local shelters to find her an emergency refuge. But there is no refuge for a woman when the basic apparatus of power in her country is abusive. When society puts social control above women’s autonomy, there is nowhere for them to escape.
PAYING THE PRICE
Donald Trump thinks women should be punished for abortion. At least, he did for a few hours, answering the question put to him by a journalist with all the shifty-eyed, stammering self-confidence of a man trying to work out how many abortions he might have paid for in the past. Then, after an appropriate period of public consternation, the Republican frontrunner backtracked, repeating the current party line that only people performing abortions should face jail time.
We’ve come to expect this. Trump wears hypocrisy as proudly as he wears his shocking hairdo. He doesn’t just flip-flop: he cartwheels and scissors like a teenage Russian gymnast, twisting into ridiculous knots of logic according to the public mood with a forward momentum that defies ridicule and demands applause. This time, he changed his tune because the American pro-life movement, whose votes he needs, jumped to dissociate themselves from Trump’s temporary platform shift. Pro-life organisations were quick to insist that they aren’t about punishing women, just about protecting life.
Or are they?
Since the question of punishment is on the table, let’s be very clear. If you believe that abortion should be banned except in cases of rape and incest, you are not ‘pro-life’. You are anti-woman.
The ‘illegal with exceptions’ line is a standard part of conservative, anti-abortion platforms across the US and elsewhere, and it’s jaw-dropping in its hypocrisy. After all, if you truly believe a foetus is an autonomous living being, why does it magically stop being one just because its mother failed to consent to intercourse? Does Jesus swoop down on a cloud of conservative hot air and make the ethical dilemma disappear with a bit of wizardly hand-waving? Or do you, fundamentally, just believe that women should suffer for having sex?
Imagine it. Imagine thinking that forcing a person to carry a growing foetus in her body for nine months and then push it out of her vagina while her muscles rip and her pelvis cracks is in any way humane. Imagine the level of self-deception it takes to think this and then turn around and claim you care about women. Perhaps you do, but you’re remarkably laid back about watching them suffer for their sins. It’s the species of loving Christian care you’d expect from the Spanish Inquisition.
The ‘pro-life’ movement, which should properly be called the ‘forced birth’ movement, is in fact entirely about punishing women for their sexuality. It’s about punishing them legally, morally, spiritually and physically. That’s what it has always been about, in every cultural and religious costume it has adopted over the past two centuries and more. The movement is stuffed with people who believe that sex is dirty and women who have it willingly should pay the price, ideally by being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. If not, then by means of trans-vaginal ultrasounds, pointless enforced waiting periods, targeted domestic and professional harassment and the real threat of jail if anything goes wrong. It’s about hurting women who have the gall to believe that they get to decide what happens to their bodies. Trump just had the grotesque decency to say it out loud for a hot minute.
That’s what Donald Trump is for. Donald Trump is a bloviating freakshow of the id whose job it is to articulate the ugliest parts of the modern psyche with enough pomp and gumption that it sounds like truth. We watch and cheer for the same reason that we watch shows about serial killers, so we can marinate in the horrified, pseudo-erotic certainty that however bad we are, in the secret places of our hearts, we’re not that bad. Sure, we might think about these things, but we wouldn’t actually do them.
But some truths are still too awkward to speak in public – even when they form the ideological basis of an entire conservative movement.
What does Donald Trump think about abortion? He thinks whatever you think about it, in the crabbed and hateful secret part of your soul that just wants those sluts to suffer. But Trump said it, so we don’t have to. The monster isn’t you. But this time the monster bit too close to the bone. The pro-life movement isn’t ready to own its misogyny in the way that the Republican base is ready to own its racism and xenophobia, so Trump needed to be shut up, and fast. So much for free speech.
6
Backlash
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.
Bette Davis
ON NERD ENTITLEMENT
White male nerds need to recognise that other people had traumatic upbringings, too – and that’s different from structural oppression.
In 2015 MIT professor Scott Aaronson wrote a heartfelt post about nerd trauma and male privilege. It was part of a larger discussion about sexism in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, and its essence is simple. Aaronson’s position on feminism is supportive, but he can’t get entirely behind it because of his experiences growing up, which he details with painful honesty. He describes how mathematics was an escape, for him, from the misery of growing up in a culture of toxic masculinity and extreme isolation – a misery that drove him to depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. The key quote is this:
Much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my ‘male privilege’ – my privilege! – is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience . . . I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me ‘privileged’ – that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes – is completely alien to your way of seeing things. I spent my formative years – basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s – feeling not ‘entitled’, not ‘privileged’, but terrified.
I know them feels, Scott.
As a child and a teenager, I was shy, and nerdy, and had crippling anxiety. I was very clever and desperate for a boyfriend or, failing that, a fuck. I would have done anything for one of the boys I fancied to see me not as a sad little boffin freak but as a desirable creature, just for a second. I hated myself and had suicidal thoughts. I was extremely lonely, and felt ugly and unlovable. Eventually I developed severe anorexia and nearly di
ed.
Like Aaronson, I was terrified of making my desires known – to anyone. I was not aware of any of my (substantial) privilege for one second; I was in hell, for goodness’ sake, and fourteen to boot. Unlike Aaronson, I was also female, so when I tried to pull myself out of that hell into a life of the mind, I found sexism standing in my way. I am still punished every day by men who believe that I do not deserve my work as a writer and scholar. Some escape it’s turned out to be.
I do not intend for a moment to minimise Aaronson’s suffering. Having been a lonely, anxious, horny young person who hated herself and was bullied I can categorically say that it is an awful place to be. I have seen responses to nerd anti-feminism along the lines of ‘being bullied at school doesn’t make you oppressed’. Maybe it’s not a vector of oppression in the same way, but it’s not nothing. It burns. It takes a long time to heal. Feminism, however, is not to blame for making life hell for ‘shy, nerdy men’. Patriarchy is to blame for that. It is a real shame that Aaronson picked up Andrea Dworkin rather than any of the many feminist theorists and writers who manage to combine raw rage with refusal to resort to sexual shame as an instructive tool. Weaponised shame – male, female or other – has no place in any feminism I subscribe to. Ironically, Aaronson actually writes a lot like Dworkin – he writes from pain felt and relived and wrenched from the intimate core of himself, and because of that his writing is powerfully honest, but also flawed. The thing is that the after-effects of trauma tend to hang around long after the stimulus is past.
And this, for me, is the root and tragedy of both nerd entitlement and the disaster of heterosexuality.
What fascinates me about Aaronson’s piece, in which there was such raw, honest suffering, was that there was not one mention of women in any respect other than how they might relieve him from his pain by taking pity, or educating him differently.
And Aaronson is not a misogynist. Aaronson is obviously a compassionate, well-meaning and highly intelligent man – I don’t doubt that I’ll meet him someday as he’s a mentor to several people I respect and lives in the city I live in, and when that happens, I’ll tell him I think so.
Nonetheless, he makes a sudden leap, and it’s a leap that comes right from the gut, from an honest place of trauma and post-rationalisation, from that teenage misery to a universal story of why nerdy men are in fact among the least privileged men out there, and why holding those men to account for the lack of representation of women in STEM areas – in the most important fields of both human development and social mobility right now, the places where power is being created and cemented – is somehow unfair. Nerds are not like the ‘neanderthals’, the real abusers of women. They should get a break.
I have a profound political belief that we all deserve a break. Take one now, for five seconds, because this is going to get heavier. Breathe. Are you done?
Okay, let’s do this.
These are curious times. Gender and privilege and power and technology are changing and changing each other. We’ve also had a major and specific reversal of social fortunes in the past thirty years. Two generations of boys who grew up at the lower end of the violent hierarchy of toxic masculinity – the losers, the nerds, the ones who were afraid of being creeps – have reached adulthood and found the polarity reversed.
Suddenly they’re the ones with the power and the social status. Science is a way that shy, nerdy men pull themselves out of the horror of their teenage years. That is true. That is so. But shy, nerdy women have to try to pull themselves out of that same horror into a world that hates, fears and resents them because they are women, and to a certain otherwise very intelligent sub-set of nerdy men, the category ‘woman’ is defined primarily as ‘person who might or might not deny me sex, love and affection’.
(And you ask me, where were those girls when you were growing up? And I answer: we were terrified, just like you, and ashamed, just like you, and waiting for someone to take pity on our lonely abject pubescence, hungry to be touched. But you did not see us there. We were told repeatedly, we ugly, shy nerdy girls, that we were not even worthy of the category ‘woman’. It wasn’t just that we were too shy to approach anyone, although we were; it was that we knew if we did we’d be called crazy. And if we actually got the sex we craved? because some boys who were too proud to be seen with us in public were happy to fuck us in private and brag about it later . . . then we would be sluts, even more pitiable and abject. Aaronson was taught to fear being a creep and an objectifier if he asked; I was taught to fear being a whore or a loser if I answered, never mind asked myself. Sex isn’t an achievement for a young girl. It’s something we’re supposed to embody so other people can consume us, and if we fail at that, what are we even for?)
The notion that there are lots of horny teenage girls out there who are unable for all sorts of reasons to get laid remains a genuine surprise to many of my most intelligent male friends, but trust me, we were out there. We’re still out there, and if one of you is reading this, honey, you are a worthwhile person, and it gets better. Or at least, you get stronger.
To all the shy, nerdy boys out there: your suffering was and is real. I really fucking hope that it got better, or at least is getting better. At the same time, I want you to understand that that very real suffering does not cancel out male privilege, or make it somehow all right. Privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer, which, I know, totally blows.
Women generally don’t get to think of men as less than human, not because we’re inherently better people, not because our magical feminine energy makes us more empathetic, but because patriarchy doesn’t let us. We’re really not allowed to just not consider men’s feelings, or to suppose for an instant that a man’s main or only relevance to us might be his prospects as a sexual partner. That’s just not the way this culture expects us to think about men. Men get to be whole people at all times. Women get to be objects, or symbols, or alluring aliens whose responses you have to game to ‘get’ what you want.
This is why we have Silicon Valley Sexism. This is why we have Pick-Up Artists. This is why we have Rape Culture.
Scott, imagine what it’s like to have all the problems you had and then putting up with structural misogyny on top of that.
Or how about a triple whammy: you have to go through your entire school years again but this time you’re a lonely nerd who also faces sexism and racism. This is why Silicon Valley is fucked up. Because it’s built and run by some of the most privileged people in the world who are convinced that they are among the least. People whose received trauma makes them disinclined to listen to pleas from people whose trauma was compounded by structural oppression. People who don’t want to hear that there is anyone more oppressed than them, who definitely don’t want to hear that maybe women and people of colour had to go through the hell of nerd puberty as well, because they haven’t recovered from their own appalling nerdolescence. People who definitely don’t want to hear that, smart as they are, there might be basic things about society that they haven’t understood, because they have been prevented from understanding by the very forces that caused them such pain as children.
Heterosexuality is fucked up right now because while we’ve taken steps towards respecting women as autonomous agents, we can’t quite let the old rules go. We have an expectation, a craving for a sexual freedom for which our rhetoric, our rituals and our sexual socialisation have not prepared us. And unfortunately for men, they have largely been socialised – yes, even the feminist-identified ones – to see women as less than fully human. Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable – for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only women had done the one thing they had spent their own formative years being shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.
This, incidentally, is why we’re not living in a s
exual utopia of freedom and enthusiastic consent yet, despite having had the technological capacity to create such a utopia for at least sixty years. Men are shamed for not having sex; women are shamed for having it. Men are punished and made to feel bad for their desires, made to resent and fear women for having denied them the sex they crave and the intimacy they’re not allowed to get elsewhere; meanwhile, women are punished and made to feel bad for their perfectly normal desires and taught to resist all advances. Eventually, a significant minority of men learn that they can ‘get’ what they want by means of violence and manipulation, and a significant minority of women give in, because violence and manipulation can be rather effective. (Note: accepting the advances of an awful man does not make these people bad women who are conspiring to ‘make life hell for shy nerds’. I’ve heard that sort of thing come out of the mouths of my feminist-identified male nerd friends far too often.)
And so we arrive at an impasse: men must demand sex and women must refuse, except not too much because then we’re evil friendzoning bitches. The impasse continues until one or both parties grows up enough or plucks up the courage to state their desires honestly and openly, without pressure or resentment, respecting the consent and agency of one another.
This usually doesn’t happen. What usually happens instead is that people’s sexuality and self-esteem get twisted into resentment of the (usually opposite) gender; they start to see that gender as less than human, particularly if they are men and learn at every stage of their informal and formal education that women are just worth less, have always been worth less, are not as smart, not as good, not as humanly human as men. Aaronson goes on to comment that this ‘death-spiral’ is a product of the times. I agree. ‘In a different social context – for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl – I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine,’ he writes. Scott, my great-grandparents also lived in a shtetl. I understand that you sometimes feel you might have been better adapted to that sort of life, when dating and marriage were organised to make things easy for clever young men. On the same shtetl, however, I would have been married at a young age to a man who would have been the legal owner of my body, my property and the children I would have been expected to have; I would never have been allowed to be a scholar. I would have worked in the fields as well as the home to support my husband in his more cerebral pursuits, and with my small weedy nerdy frame, I would probably have died young from exhaustion or in childbirth.