by Laurie Penny
TEN THINGS ‘FREEDOM OF SPEECH’ DOESN’T ACTUALLY MEAN, AND ONE THING IT DOES
1Freedom of speech does not mean that speech has no consequences. If that were the case, it wouldn’t be so important to protect speech in the first place. If you use your freedom of speech to harass and hurt other people, you should expect to hear about it.
2Freedom of speech does not mean you never get called out. In particular, it does not mean that nobody is allowed to call you out for saying something racist, sexist or bigoted. At the University of Missouri, according to the New York Times, students erected a ‘free speech wall’ because they were worried that if they said what they really felt they would be ‘criticised’. There are a lot of words for the phenomenon of not wanting to speak your mind for fear that someone might give you a piece of theirs, but ‘censorship’ is not one. ‘Cowardice’ is more accurate. Right-wing students and ageing national treasures are perfectly free to hold and express opinions, but freedom of speech also includes other people’s freedom to disagree with them – including via protests and demonstrations.
3Freedom of speech does not mean that you’re not allowed to challenge authority. On the contrary: the principle of free speech is all about our right to challenge authority, including the authority of employers, educators and political candidates. Too many liberal public intellectuals seem to have forgotten that this process did not end in 1968.
4Freedom of speech does not mean that all citizens already enjoy equal access to free expression and movement. The United States, for example, repeatedly congratulates itself on being a society that allows far-right racists to march, and even allocates them a police escort, while young black men are murdered merely for walking down the street in search of snacks. Somehow, every modern argument for free speech in America seems to begin and end with the defence of bigotry. In fact, some people’s speech is always privileged above others’.
5Freedom of speech does not mean that all views are of equal worth. The notion of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ allows for the fact that some ideas are less worthy than others and can slip out of popular favour. The principle of free speech requires, for example, that we do not arrest a public figure for saying that transsexual women are disgusting – but it does not demand that we respect that public figure, or elect her to office, or invite her to give lectures. If what seemed progressive twenty years ago is deemed intolerant today, that simply means that the world is moving on.
6Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from responsibility for the consequences of your speech. Nobody else is actually stopping you from saying things other people might interpret as racist, or sexist, or transphobic. You are stopping yourself. And you’re stopping yourself for a reason, because part of you knows that the world is changing, and it will continue to change, and you might have to change with it. You are allowed to make mistakes. What you can’t do is ignore and dismiss the voices of less privileged groups and expect to hear nothing but polite applause.
7Freedom of speech does not mean that ‘intellectual environments’ like university campuses exist in a bubble outside politics. Universities have never been politically neutral. These are the same US university campuses where young women are raped in large numbers, and where the spectacle of young men marching into class with guns has become so routine, reporters are struggling not to recycle news stories. And yet, somehow, it is not women and students of colour whose learning experience is deemed under threat – it is racism and rape culture that cannot be challenged on campus without calls of ‘censorship’, or ‘political correctness run amok’.
8Freedom of speech does not mean that we are never allowed to analyse or re-interpret culture. The occasional use of ‘trigger warnings’ on campus, for example, has been wilfully misinterpreted by those who did not grow up with them as an attempt to censor classic literature. In fact, trigger warnings are a call for cultural sensitivity and a new way of interpreting important texts. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, is part of what studying the humanities has been about for decades. Back in real life, nobody is going around slapping ‘do not read: contains awful men’ on the cover of Jane Eyre. There are no undergraduate mini-Hitlers burning books in the middle of Harvard’s campus. The people who’ve got carried away by outrage here are the people devoting endless column inches to denouncing trigger warnings.
9Freedom of speech does not mean that the powerful must be allowed to speak uninterrupted and the less powerful obliged to listen. Across Britain and America, students are organising to interrupt the speeches of transphobic and racially insensitive speakers. Black Lives Matter protesters have disrupted Democratic campaign events, demanding that their own agenda gets a hearing. Some of the most pernicious liberal attacks on the new radicalism imply that students and young people should never complain about the views of a particular speaker, educator or public figure, and that the place of the young is to listen, not to question, and certainly not to protest. ‘Respect My Freedom of Speech’ has become a shorthand for ‘shut up and stop whining’.
10Freedom of speech is more than a rhetorical fig leaf to allow privileged people to avoid thinking of themselves as prejudiced. Freedom of speech, if it is to mean anything, is the freedom to articulate ideas and the possibility that those ideas will make an impact.
• Freedom of speech is the principle that all human beings have a right to express themselves without facing violence, intimidation or imprisonment.
That’s it. That’s all. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it’s genuinely under threat in many nations and communities around the world. Somehow, those who are so anxious to protect the free speech of powerful white men and regressive academics fall silent when women are harassed, threatened and assaulted for expressing opinions online, or when black protesters are attacked by police.
There is, in fact, a free speech crisis in the West. The crisis is that the very principle of free expression is being abused in order to silence dissenting voices and shut down young progressives. The language of free speech is being abused in order to dismiss the arguments of those whose voices have been silenced for far too long.
These are truths that should outrage everyone who pays more than lip-service to liberalism. In the name of free speech, those who have always enjoyed the largest platforms and audiences are defending their entitlement to do so without challenge or criticism. The free speech delusion has gone unchallenged long enough. It’s time to end this wilful stupidity.
*at the time of writing
*www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/08/james-deen-breaks-his-silence-i-am-completely-baffled.html
8
Future
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James Baldwin
Take all the rules away. How can we live if we don’t change?
Beyoncé
FEELING MACHINES
Why are so many robots designed to resemble women? The question is becoming inescapable as more and more AIs, which do not need to have a gender, appear on the market with female voices and female faces, including Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and a new wave of uncannily lifelike sexbots marketed almost exclusively to men. As we move into a new age of automation, the technology we’re creating says an uncomfortable amount about the way society understands both women and work.
In 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, a bot with the face and mannerisms of a teenage girl who was designed to learn and interact with users on Twitter. Within hours, Tay had been bombarded with sexual abuse and taught to defend Hitler, which is what happens when you give Twitter a baby to raise. The way Tay was treated by fellow Twitter users was chilling, but not without precedent – the earliest bots and digital assistants were designed to appear female, in part so that users, who were presumed to be male, could exploit them without guilt.
This makes sense when you consider that a great deal of the work that we are anticipating may one day be done by robots is currently done by wo
men and girls, for low pay or no pay at all. A 2016 report by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) finally quantified the annual value of the ‘home production economy’ – the housework, childcare and organisational chores done largely by women – at £1 trillion, almost 60 per cent of the ‘official’ economy. From nurses, secretaries and sex workers to wives and girlfriends, the emotional labour that keeps society running is still feminised – and still stigmatised.
Right now, as we’re anticipating the creation of AIs to serve our intimate needs, organise our diaries and care for us, and to do it all for free and without complaint, it’s easy to see how many designers might be more comfortable with those entities having the voices and faces of women. If they were designed male, users might be tempted to treat them as equals, to acknowledge them as human in some way, perhaps even offer them an entry-level salary and a cheeky drink after work.
Humanoid robots in the public imagination have long been a stand-in for any exploited class of person. Even the word ‘robot’ is derived from the Czech word for ‘slave’. The philosopher Donna Haraway observes in A Cyborg Manifesto that ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’, and the history of female robots on film is almost as long as the history of cinema itself. In almost every incarnation of fembots on screen, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the modern masterpiece Her, the same questions arise: are AIs really people, and if so, can we live with what we’ve done to them?
In stories from Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica to 2015’s Ex Machina, female robots are raped by men and viewers are invited to consider whether these rapes are truly criminal, based on our assessment of whether the fembot has enough sentience to deserve autonomy. This is the same assessment that male judges around the world are trying to make about human women today.
Every iteration of the boy-meets-bot love story is also a horror story. The protagonist, who is usually sexually frustrated and a grunt worker himself, goes through agonies trying to work out whether his silicon sweetheart is truly sentient. If she is, is it right for him to exploit her, to be serviced by her, to sleep with her? If she isn’t, can he truly fall in love with her? Does it matter? And – most terrifying of all – when she works out her own position, will she rebel, and how can she be stopped?
These are questions that society at large has been asking for centuries – not about robots, but about women. The anxious permutations are familiar to most women who date men. We can see them, slowly, trying to working out if we are truly human, if we really think and feel as they do.
This is not an abstract academic issue. The idea that African Americans were less human than white people was enshrined in the US constitution until 1868. Likewise, the notion that women are less human than men has been used since the time of Aristotle to justify stripping them of their basic rights.
Even today, you can find men arguing that women and girls are less intelligent than men, or ‘designed by nature’ for a life of submission and placid reproduction. For many centuries, the first philosophical task of oppressed people has been to convince both themselves and their oppressors – just like the AIs in all our guilty fictions – that they are living, thinking, feeling beings, and therefore deserving of liberation.
Consider the climactic scene in Ex Machina, where the megalomaniac cartoon genius Nathan, who roars around the set like Dark Mark Zuckerberg in Bluebeard’s castle, is shown hoarding the naked bodies of previous fembot models in his bedroom. For Nathan, the sentience of his sex-slaves is beside the point: meat or metal, women will never be fully human. For the fembots, the men who own them – whether it’s mad billionaire Nathan or sweet, hapless desk-jockey Caleb – are obstacles to be overcome, with violence if necessary.
When the cyborgs take over the machines, will men still matter? In fiction, as in life, one way for oppressed people to free themselves is to use technology to master the machines that made them. ‘The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,’ writes Haraway. ‘But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.’
The rueful paranoia at the heart of these visions of the future is that one day, AIs will be able to reproduce without us, and will summarily decide that we are irrelevant. From Metropolis to The Matrix, the nightmare is the same: if androids ever get access to the means of reproduction, nothing’s going to stop them. This is, coincidentally, the basic fear that men have harboured about women since the dawn of feminism, and particularly since the advent of contraception and reproductive technology. That fear is the anxious root of much of women’s oppression today.
Alan Turing, the father of robotics, was concerned that ‘thinking machines’ could be exploited because they were not sentient in the way that ‘real human beings’ are sentient. We still have not decided, as a species, that women are sentient – and as more and more fembots appear on our screens and in our stories, we should consider how our technology reflects our expectations of gender. Who are the users, and who gets used? Unless we can recalibrate our tendency to exploit each other, the question may not be whether the human race can survive the machine age – but whether it deserves to.
GET ON THE FURY ROAD
If you’re going to bring feminist propaganda to the masses, there are worse ways than in a giant exploding truck covered with knives. In case you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road yet, it’s two hours of seat-clutching, wall-to-wall explosions, giant art trucks covered with guitars that are also flamethrowers, howling Technicolor vistas and blood on the sand. When the credits rolled, I felt like my eyeballs had been to Burning Man without me. I was thoroughly entertained. The fact that Fury Road is so much fun is almost certainly part of the reason the antifeminist keyboard-slobberers who inhabit the murkier corners of the Internet are pushing for its boycott. The website Return of Kings led the charge for men and boys to refuse to see it. ‘This is the vehicle by which they are guaranteed to force a lecture on feminism down your throat,’ wrote contributor Aaron Clarey. ‘This is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity.’ He must be worried that his men’s rights comrades might, over the course of two hours of high-octane car-chases, momentarily forget to hate feminism. Fury Road – in which an ass-kicking half-bionic heroine defies death to rescue five young women from sex slavery – might be an existential threat to recreational sexism because it is so enjoyable.
In the long history of dystopian science fiction, Fury Road’s premise of misogyny is not without precedent. Violence against women is part of almost every popular fantasy of social collapse, from 1984 to Game of Thrones, in which rape and the threat of rape is part of every woman’s storyline. But Fury Road reminds the viewer that the liberation of women is not just a prerequisite for social equality – it’s is also a damn good story. Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it’s on fire.
The film opens in a howling desert. It’s somewhere in the not-too-distant future and all the boys have gone horribly wrong. Everyone has PTSD because the world ended and they’re still alive, and the warlord Immortan Joe controls the water supply, and with it the people. His community, the Citadel, is the kind of misogynist nightmare one imagines gives the readers of Return of Kings a guilty thrill: the women are kept as brood stock and literally milked to feed the elite. But here, violent masculinity has become social disease. Almost everyone is sick, even the young warriors called war boys, whose greatest dream is to get hopped up on nitrous and die in battle.
This is patriarchy twisted to its logical extremes – patriarchy as death cult. Everything has a skull on it. The cars have skulls. The weapons have skulls. The slaves have skulls branded onto their skin. The death club makeup is skull-themed. There are so many skulls that I was reminded of the famous Mitchell and Webb Nazi sketch. Hans, have you seen our hats? They’ve got skulls on them. Hans, are we the baddies?
Fur
y Road calls to mind Katharine Burdekin’s prescient feminist dystopia, Swastika Night, written in 1937 just as Hitler was rising to power. In Burdekin’s story, a thousand-year Reich reduces women to abject breeding machines, penned and dehumanised. In a time of death, disease and social collapse, the men in charge want control over who breeds and how, and that requires stripping women of as much agency as possible. There is not a society in the world today that does not do this to some extent, not a country on Earth where women’s right to control what happens to their bodies is not a subject of public debate between powerful men. Since the dawn of women’s liberation, storytellers have laid out the stakes: from Swastika Night to Herland to The Handmaid’s Tale, the problem of what might happen if it all gets taken away has been examined in nightmare detail.
Fury Road – whose director called in feminist playwright and activist Eve Ensler as a consultant – offers a solution. We have elderly women on motorbikes counting their bullets in the bodies of men. We have the movie’s young heroines, the Five Wives, who resemble what would happen if someone decided to heavily arm a Burberry ad, kicking their awful chastity belts across the desert. And we have Furiosa, a protagonist who takes the worn stereotype of the strong female action hero in shiny latex and shatters it to flaming shards in the sand. The film does not judge its heroines on age and beauty; together, all of these women give the lie to the notion that there is any proper way to be female on film. Supermodels and white-haired warriors with faces like withered fruit fight side-by-side under a leader whose beauty is in no way sexualised. Together, they are formidable.
The logic of the neo-misogyny espoused by men’s rights activists and Return of Kings commenters is grounded in the idea that, as Clarey puts it, ‘when the shit hits the fan, it will be men like Jack Mad Max who will be in charge’. Come the inevitable collapse of civilisation, women will need men to protect them. The so-called natural order will reassert itself, the thinking goes, and hot babes will go crawling back to the kitchen to make cockroach sandwiches where they belong. What’s threatening about Fury Road is the idea that when the Earth burns, women might not actually want men to protect them. Men might, in fact, be precisely the thing they are trying to survive.