Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (27 page)

It ends like this: he yells at me and I leave him and I call her and cry and she tells me it’s going to be okay. In cafés after work I ball up my fists, distracted, email her with everyday existential crises in the hope they’re not fucking each other, left out, my legs crossed, missing his touch, missing her touch. Then he’s sick of us both, and so we go out like we have before, eyeliner and cigarettes and bus passes on our way to corrupt young minds and stir the strange clutch of numbness in our chests, the place where the heart muscles don’t seem to move. We are a tag team, an unstoppable perversion: we drag strange little hipsters into strange beds, turn them on to roll-ups and feminism. It’s true love, not the way they tell it in stories, but it’s still true.

Older now, months older, falling leaves and sleet and 7 a.m. on what has just ceased to be the night bus home through Angel, grey light creeping in under the curtain of a heady night and pushing its ice-cold fingers under the skin, unshowered and sleepless, sticky with sweat. I’m in the suicide seat, on the top deck at the front with the city rushing by underneath. My phone still has a couple of bars of charge, and I take it out to text one of the boys I left sleeping on the floor of a squat already miles behind me, miles away. 

Checking in to my work emails, replying to my editor with fingers stiff from cold, I hollow out a little home under my heart for the shame which just isn’t coming. Instead, I’m storing up this memory for future use.

Love™ is not true love, in the sense that many other kinds of love are also true. I have spent more time than I care to contemplate in my nimble years in the company of polyamorists, queer non-monogamists and the sort of people who prefer labels like ‘love anarchists’, which tends to mean that they have a zine collection and don’t shave, which in its own way is wonderful. I have been in and witnessed enough non-monogamous relationships to know that different ways of organising love are not just possible, but essential – and they are also not the answer. 

It’s not that I don’t believe in romantic love, in Love™. It patently exists. People shape their lives to stories, and sometimes it works. There are those out there for whom only the girl they knew in sixth-form French or the boy they met in the back of the squelchy indie disco will ever do, and no other relationship can possibly compare. I know couples like that, and I’m happy for them. 

But the relatively recent cultural narrative of The One – the idea that everyone has a soulmate whom they are destined to love for ever, and that your life will always be incomplete if you fail to meet, mate and move in with that person – that’s not just implausible, it’s cruel. It implies that those who do not find their One will somehow never be complete, that those who divorce, who live and raise children alone, or who find alternative arrangements for happiness, have somehow failed as human beings. To my mind, that’s a decidedly unromantic idea.

The gap between passionate, everlasting, all-consuming romance and meaningless rutting remains relatively unexplored by the publishing and film industries but, to paraphrase John Lennon, a great many people live in that gap. In real life, there is a superabundance of romance, friendship, partnership, sex and adventure to be had, and the truly terrible thing about shop-bought love in pretty packages is that it makes it seem that human feeling is a scarce resource. Which is just another reason why neoliberalism ruins everything.

In real life, human love is not a scarce resource. I don’t mean to advocate casual sex, housing collectives and late nights drinking bad vodka with bisexual activists as alternatives that necessarily work for everyone, though they’ve always done so for me. The point is that the three Ms – marriage, mortgage and monogamy – do not work for everyone, either, and there’s no reason why they should.

The people for whom Love™ works – and I really feel as if saying this might get me shot with heart-tipped Tasers by the love police – are in the minority. Now that we are not obliged to choose between celibate loneliness and yoking ourselves for ever to a person we may grow to despise, most people’s lives contain many important relationships, and sometimes those relationships fade or fizzle out. That may not fit in with the dominant ideology – that monogamous marriage is the only possible healthy way to live, love and distribute welfare benefits – but it’s a more accurate map of the human heart, which is not a cartoon symbol, but a complicated tangle of meat and blood.

The generation currently reaching adulthood in Europe and America is the first generation whose parents are as likely to have been divorced as they are to have been married or cohabiting.
¹⁴
Being raised by a married couple is no longer the norm.
¹⁵
 No wonder increasing numbers of young people are exploring other options – polyamory, open relationships, extended circles of chosen family and fuckbuddies – and doing so in a way that’s fundamentally different to the free love experiments of the past. It’s as much about ethics as it is about drug-addled fuckfests though these are pleasant in their proper place.

Me, I believe in monogamy in much the same way as I believe in, say, cheese on toast. I’ll eat it, but only for very special people, and not for every meal. There are other interesting and delicious toast options out there, and I support people’s right to investigate those options without being punished.

Non-monogamy is not the same as fucking around, and neither of those things are essential to freedom in love. The idea of ‘free love’ has become bastardised by post-hippy clichés, by the enduring image of 1960s counterculture chauvinists with open shirts and flowers in their hair trying to wheedle women into bed without worrying about commitment. That’s not what free love means. Free love is love that is not co-opted or coerced, love that is not mutually oppressive, love that is not another word for work, duty and conformity.

If we want love to be free, and if we want women to be free, we have to refuse to define ourselves by romantic love, by Love™, or lack of it. The power of the neoliberal notion of romantic love is such that it is almost a century since feminists routinely questioned its omnipotence, but today’s growing girls of every age might do well to recall the words of Alexandra Kollontai:

I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power. 

. . . As great as was my love for my husband, immediately it transgressed a certain limit in relation to my feminine proneness to make sacrifice, rebellion flared in me anew. I had to go away, I had to break with the man of my choice, otherwise I would have exposed myself to the danger of losing my selfhood.
¹⁶

FELLOW PRISONERS

Love has meant conformity for so long that we have forgotten that it also means defiance. Passion and compassion. Eros and philos. Seditious drinks and breathless texts and the sound of your heart hammering through your ribs at three in the morning. Aren’t they what we clutch to ourselves when everything else falls away? 

Some days, all I write is love letters. To friends and partners and boys I fucked once in a badly lit hotel in a strange city and have never seen again. I write love letters in ten-word Twitter messages and twenty-page emails. I write them in real time, one-handed, frantic, making up stories for men hundreds of miles away, putting down memories for girls I will hold in my heart for ever. The more weary I become of romance as commodity, the more love letters I send.

I began to really pay attention to the art of writing love letters when I first started sending handwritten mail to friends in prison. Then I received a letter of my own, telling me to read the essay ‘Fellow Prisoners’ by John Berger. Berger writes that:

The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners. Cells have walls that touch across the world.

[…] Liberty is slowly being found not outside but in the depths of the prison.
¹⁷

If we are all fellow prisoners, every word we write is a prison letter, a missive to a soul in an adjacent cell, who may be a stranger or the best lover I ever knew. Keep your head high, and they won’t win.

We get to choose what passions to censor, what sort of conformity we are prepared to conform. They can take a great deal from us, but not this. Money and hegemony and the disaster of neoliberal heterosexuality may have brought us to a point where it is nearly impossible for men and women and everyone else to love each other honestly, but it is only nearly impossible. It’s not too late.

Women and girls in particular must summon the courage to devote the best efforts of our lives to something other than Love
^TM
. The idea that we have no control over who we love and what we do about it is one of the most disempowering things girls are ever told. Loneliness is a fearful thing. But a life lived grasping for another person to make you whole is just as fearful. If you see yourself as incomplete without a partner to be your ‘other half’, you will always be lonely, even in a partnership. It took me twenty-seven years to truly understand that just because you would give up every dream you ever had to see one special person smile doesn’t mean you should. 

I have been In Love
^TM
. I have fallen hard and fast for people with whom I shared something precious and unspeakable that went far beyond sex. I crossed continents, kicked in jobs and boarded trains in the middle of the night with all my hopes and some spare pairs of pants packed in a trundle-bag to be with those people. I pared down the awkward, ugly parts of my personality because I thought it might please them. I even felt, for brief moments, like the shining girl I knew I was supposed to be. I felt beautiful and special and treasured and I did my very best to make the other person feel that way too. It was fantastic. But after a while, it was also stifling.

Being In Love is great, but it’s not the greatest happiness I have ever known. If I’m honest, I prefer plotting revolution with my friends. Every time I have been in that kind of love, I have ended up running, packing up my things and leaving notes real or imaginary and moving on, because I was sick of being a love object. And in that running, what I found was that outside fairy tales, love happens all the time.

Love is not a scarce resource. Love is not a prize to be won and jealously hoarded. Love is not a productive field, a sphere of work. Human love may have been colonised and appropriated by the demands of labour and capital, but it can be retaken. In 1910, the philosopher Emma Goldman wrote: 

Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love . . . Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.
¹⁸

Beyond Happily Ever After, outside the single story of how life, work and partnership ought to be, love has always been free. When the fairy tale ends, the pages are still turning in the long, hard saga of human love, and there is always another story left to tell.

Afterword

People wanted me to sum up this book, to tie it up neatly with a set of answers. What programme, what policy would make life under neoliberalism less demeaning for women, queer people and their allies? At the Occupy protests, during the spring uprisings around the world, we were asked again and again what our demands were, so that they could be dismissed. Our first demand was not to be forced to engage on those terms. We did not want to be invited on to their panel shows or to the bottom of their ballot boxes. We refused the politics of the soundbite. We knew there were no easy answers.

Revolution begins in the human imagination. They can come for us with clubs and dogs but as long as we continue to dream of different ways to live, different ways to love and fight and grow old together, they will not win. There is power in the communities built by exiles and outcasts. There is power in the societies of broken kids growing up to change the world, and when it comes down to it we are all broken kids, fucked-up girls and lost boys just waiting to be found. We find each other in the unwatched spaces, the secret places, for as long as they last. We have the tools to build a better world in the wreck of the old one.

Feminism is one of those tools. Gender oppression is part of a structure of social control grinding us all down, keeping us docile, making sure that men and women everywhere question power as little as possible.

If we want to escape the straitjacket of gender under neoliberalism, we must stop trying so hard to hold ourselves and others up to impossible standards, standards we didn’t set ourselves. We have to resist the schooled inner voice telling us to be good girls, tough boys, perfect women, strong men. If we are to realise a greater collective humanity, we must learn to see one another as human beings first.

The raw humanity of others is the unspeakable truth every mechanism of modern sexism is designed to disguise. If we have the courage to claim it, a change in consciousness is coming that will bring sexual and social revolution, that will free us to live and love more fully, and it will be as exactly as terrifying as it sounds.