Good lord, a whole month - that's the longest I've gone for three years without updating this blog. It got to the stage where the guilt was festering away like a delicious and quite important sandwich that you know you lost somewhere around the house a few weeks ago and now can't find. So I thought I'd do a placeholder post to explain just what the fuck I've been doing with myself.
As some of you will have noticed, I now blog and write a column for the New Statesman, and this would be the point to update your blog-reading aggregators or other such internet robots. I no longer work for the Morning Star; instead I'm a freelance journalist, which means I'm terribly poor but can stay up reading as late as I like. I'm nonetheless incredibly busy, but this blog will update periodically with cross-posts from New Statesman and any posts that are too long, too strange or too sweary for the national press .
This arrangement will continue until such time as I say something really truly awful and am inevitably and summarily fired, at which point it's all go on Penny Red again, so don't delete this blog just yet!
In other news, in case anyone's wondering: I found a place to live, not a hugely nice place, but a place nonetheless, with walls and a ceiling and bizzarre arty lesbian housemates and enough space to recover from the emotional maelstrom of the summer. This currently puts me in a far better position than most of London, given that the Tories have just imposed a Final Solution on the urban poor.
It feels a little hypocritical to be so incensed with rage about what's happening to this country, the ruthless neoliberal revenge agenda being enacted on the lives and bodies of the vulnerable and the socially invisible, when I've had such a lucky escape this summer. I could have become more unwell and lost my job and my income. I could have remained homeless. I could have had to fall back on a welfare system that's about to be snatched away almost entirely. None of that happened, and it happened to a large number of people I know. I will never get over just how lucky I am; sometimes I feel my privilege sitting on my chest like a Fuseli painting, but that's a fucking poor excuse for lying down and exempting oneself from the struggle.
So I'm going to keep writing and keep on trying to anatomise the reasons behind this assault on human decency. I'm going to link into more activist groups and more local and global campaigns and try to understand how strategies of resistance might be imagined, dreamed of and realised. Because it's the only way we're ever going to stop the right. I'm going to carry on writing; I hope some of you will carry on reading.
Love, solidarity and squalor bombs. xx
Showing posts with label mental health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental health. Show all posts
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Friday, 25 June 2010
Public service announcement: another rare personal post.
ETA Saturday morning: I've edited out some of the melodrama but decided to keep this on the net, because it doesn't do to be ashamed of one's mental health. This is not cross-posted at New Statesman, for the obvious reason that it's much more personal than anything I normally put out here. I hope you'll take it in the spirit in which it is meant.
***
Six weeks ago, three things happened in short succession: I broke up with my beloved partner of three years, my entire friendship group left London at once, and, relatedly, I became homeless. Slap in the middle of that upheaval, I have somehow acquired a blog at New Statesman; I've been living out of a suitcase whilst commuting to my other job at Morning Star, and I've been trying to finish my small book, the deadlines for which and several other projects are oh, just whooshing into view. Unfortunately, all I really want to do at this precise moment in time is find secure accommodation, curl up in a bed of my own and eat ice cream in the dark until I feel better. It's hardly bloody Basra. In the grand scheme of things, I'm still rather a lucky person, really. But it's getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It's getting harder to stay angry. And that frightens me.
Writing, which at the moment I have to do at the rate of about 3,000 words per day, currently feels like dragging a large, wet rope out of my forehead, inch by torturous inch. My mental health has taken a turn for the worse. I'm struggling to care. I'm struggling to stay angry. That terrifies me more than anything.
There aren't many things that scare me. The centre-right have taken back my country and imposed dazzlingly punitive cuts to welfare and public services. Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world's only superpower. The planet is boiling; the rivers are drying up; the human race may very well be about to tear itself apart. None of that scares me one bit. Give me energy, a cause and a place to stand and I'll shout out against oppression until I'm old and broken and they cart me away. Put me in a room with my own depression and suddenly I'm small and scared enough that I'd rather accept despair than fight bigoty and injustice. That is scary. Compared to depression, Torygeddon and impending global climapocalypse are not at all frightening.
That's what clinical depression does, you see. It takes away your anger, piece by piece, along with every other drive and interest and emotion that ever mattered to you. It wraps you in a dry, stifling blanket of heavy despair and leaves you to shuffle about your daily business, swaddled against the joys of life, the frustrations, the pain. When terrible things happen - like a coalition government closing down your country piece by piece, slamming the door on the young, the poor, the sick, immigrants, women - you cease to really believe that anything can be done. You clam up, clamp down, try to conserve your energy for the monumental task of peeling yourself out of bed, washing your face, rolling a fag, things that were effortless yesterday but now feel like a bucket of iced panic is draining into your stomach when you contemplate them.
Fortunately, I've beaten this before, when the stakes were much higher, when I was younger and madder and battling an eating disorder too. I'm older and meaner now, and I know what to do. I might not be okay for a little while yet, but I'll be okay eventually. For now, I have to keep on battling these currents with all my tiny might.
So here's what you can do to help me. If you have time and energy in your own life, because clearly getting through the day is hard enough without some whiny feminist brat on the internet asking for your input, here's what you can do: send me your ideas. Send me your anger and truth, for the little space in time when I can't access my own.
Send me your rage, your issues, things that make you mad, things that make you want to run into the street and start a revolution. Send me tips, statistics, moments of hope and inspiration. Send me feminist news, socialist ideas, problematic pop culture, stories of suffering and resistance. If you're holding an event or a protest, tell me about it. Email me even just a few lines, to the usual address - laurie.penny@gmail.com. It doesn't matter what's making you angry or whether you think I'll agree or be interested - I want to hear it. I will read anything and everything I receive (I always do!) and respond when I have the spoons. Send me your anger and understand that if the internet is made for anything, it's made for times like this. Because god knows, we're not alone in this big bad hyperspace world, however much it feels like it sometimes
***
Six weeks ago, three things happened in short succession: I broke up with my beloved partner of three years, my entire friendship group left London at once, and, relatedly, I became homeless. Slap in the middle of that upheaval, I have somehow acquired a blog at New Statesman; I've been living out of a suitcase whilst commuting to my other job at Morning Star, and I've been trying to finish my small book, the deadlines for which and several other projects are oh, just whooshing into view. Unfortunately, all I really want to do at this precise moment in time is find secure accommodation, curl up in a bed of my own and eat ice cream in the dark until I feel better. It's hardly bloody Basra. In the grand scheme of things, I'm still rather a lucky person, really. But it's getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It's getting harder to stay angry. And that frightens me.
Writing, which at the moment I have to do at the rate of about 3,000 words per day, currently feels like dragging a large, wet rope out of my forehead, inch by torturous inch. My mental health has taken a turn for the worse. I'm struggling to care. I'm struggling to stay angry. That terrifies me more than anything.
There aren't many things that scare me. The centre-right have taken back my country and imposed dazzlingly punitive cuts to welfare and public services. Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world's only superpower. The planet is boiling; the rivers are drying up; the human race may very well be about to tear itself apart. None of that scares me one bit. Give me energy, a cause and a place to stand and I'll shout out against oppression until I'm old and broken and they cart me away. Put me in a room with my own depression and suddenly I'm small and scared enough that I'd rather accept despair than fight bigoty and injustice. That is scary. Compared to depression, Torygeddon and impending global climapocalypse are not at all frightening.
That's what clinical depression does, you see. It takes away your anger, piece by piece, along with every other drive and interest and emotion that ever mattered to you. It wraps you in a dry, stifling blanket of heavy despair and leaves you to shuffle about your daily business, swaddled against the joys of life, the frustrations, the pain. When terrible things happen - like a coalition government closing down your country piece by piece, slamming the door on the young, the poor, the sick, immigrants, women - you cease to really believe that anything can be done. You clam up, clamp down, try to conserve your energy for the monumental task of peeling yourself out of bed, washing your face, rolling a fag, things that were effortless yesterday but now feel like a bucket of iced panic is draining into your stomach when you contemplate them.
Fortunately, I've beaten this before, when the stakes were much higher, when I was younger and madder and battling an eating disorder too. I'm older and meaner now, and I know what to do. I might not be okay for a little while yet, but I'll be okay eventually. For now, I have to keep on battling these currents with all my tiny might.
So here's what you can do to help me. If you have time and energy in your own life, because clearly getting through the day is hard enough without some whiny feminist brat on the internet asking for your input, here's what you can do: send me your ideas. Send me your anger and truth, for the little space in time when I can't access my own.
Send me your rage, your issues, things that make you mad, things that make you want to run into the street and start a revolution. Send me tips, statistics, moments of hope and inspiration. Send me feminist news, socialist ideas, problematic pop culture, stories of suffering and resistance. If you're holding an event or a protest, tell me about it. Email me even just a few lines, to the usual address - laurie.penny@gmail.com. It doesn't matter what's making you angry or whether you think I'll agree or be interested - I want to hear it. I will read anything and everything I receive (I always do!) and respond when I have the spoons. Send me your anger and understand that if the internet is made for anything, it's made for times like this. Because god knows, we're not alone in this big bad hyperspace world, however much it feels like it sometimes
Friday, 11 December 2009
World on Fire: Sinking and Swimming
[written for Progress magazine]
After 12 years of Labour governance, Britain remains a largely pleasant and prosperous place to live – but not for everyone. The Young Foundation’s latest report, ‘Sinking or Swimming’, is a damning investigation into increasing levels of social deprivation and insecurity. The report exposes how, for many people, simply maintaining their material and emotional wellbeing is a lonely, near-Herculean feat.
Self-reported cases of anxiety and depression have almost doubled in 12 years, with 10-15% of the population feeling depressed or anxious most of the time. With one in four people experiencing a mental health difficulty at some point in their lifetime, policymakers are only now beginning to seriously examine the connections between social deprivation, poverty and mental health difficulty, rather than assuming that mental health difficulty is merely a sign of ‘weakness’, occurring in isolation from social factors.
Behind this trend in policymaking – borne out by the government’s proposed mental health strategy, ‘New Horizons’ - is a profound sense of shock that rising material living standards have failed to make the people of Britain fitter, happier and more productive. In fact, as the report demonstrates, 60 years after the advent of the welfare state ‘psychological needs have become as pressing as material ones: the risk of loneliness and isolation; the risk of mental illness; the risk of being left behind.’
The Young Foundation report demonstrates that the psychological resilience of ordinary citizens, along with our ability to cope with setbacks and changes in our lives, is directly affected by our level of social, personal and financial stability, concluding that that ‘To deal with transitions, people need to have a stable home, an adequate income and supportive relationships’. Unfortunately, although Britain is a wealthy country, it is also a hugely unequal one, with a gap between rich and poor that has widened over the past decade.
Consequently, swathes of the population find it difficult to maintain this basic triumvirate of stability. Mark Brown, the editor of Britain’s mental health lifestyle magazine, One In Four, explains that ‘people need a regular income, a safe place to live and a supportive network of people to stay stable. It's like a stool: three legs, you're sitting pretty; two legs and you can keep yourself stable as long as nothing knocks you off balance; one leg and you're pretty much just holding on; no legs and you're on your arse and everyone else is looking down at you.’
Emma Mamo, policy and campaigns officer for Mind, agrees that ‘Poverty can cause and be caused by mental distress, and there are associations between lower levels of income, higher rates of unemployment and being on benefits, debt, poor housing and mental health problems. For example people with mental health problems are three times more likely to be in debt.’
Even before the extant financial crisis, various social groups were particularly at risk of experiencing mental health difficulties, or, as the report prefers to call them, ‘unmet psychological needs’: elderly people, school-leavers, the unemployed, and those making difficult life transitions such as coming out of prison or residential care, losing a loved one or starting a family. Today, with extra pressure on the Treasury to make cuts to frontline mental health services, the Young Foundation is not alone in expressing concern over the long-term future of Britain’s social and psychological wellbeing.
The Foundation’s recommendation that policymakers take a holistic approach to wellbeing and welfare provision is welcome indeed. In this period of social crisis and spending cuts, it is incumbent upon all of us to understand that investment in financial and social equality is also investment in mental health.
This government and whatever administration follows in 2010 must be made aware that investment in social justice, including a welfare state that allows claimants to live above the breadline, is essential to safeguarding the mental health of the nation. The needs of Britain’s most materially and emotionally vulnerable will not be met until investment in mental health services is enjoined with a commitment to improve the material and social stability of the poorest members of our society.
After 12 years of Labour governance, Britain remains a largely pleasant and prosperous place to live – but not for everyone. The Young Foundation’s latest report, ‘Sinking or Swimming’, is a damning investigation into increasing levels of social deprivation and insecurity. The report exposes how, for many people, simply maintaining their material and emotional wellbeing is a lonely, near-Herculean feat.
Self-reported cases of anxiety and depression have almost doubled in 12 years, with 10-15% of the population feeling depressed or anxious most of the time. With one in four people experiencing a mental health difficulty at some point in their lifetime, policymakers are only now beginning to seriously examine the connections between social deprivation, poverty and mental health difficulty, rather than assuming that mental health difficulty is merely a sign of ‘weakness’, occurring in isolation from social factors.
Behind this trend in policymaking – borne out by the government’s proposed mental health strategy, ‘New Horizons’ - is a profound sense of shock that rising material living standards have failed to make the people of Britain fitter, happier and more productive. In fact, as the report demonstrates, 60 years after the advent of the welfare state ‘psychological needs have become as pressing as material ones: the risk of loneliness and isolation; the risk of mental illness; the risk of being left behind.’
The Young Foundation report demonstrates that the psychological resilience of ordinary citizens, along with our ability to cope with setbacks and changes in our lives, is directly affected by our level of social, personal and financial stability, concluding that that ‘To deal with transitions, people need to have a stable home, an adequate income and supportive relationships’. Unfortunately, although Britain is a wealthy country, it is also a hugely unequal one, with a gap between rich and poor that has widened over the past decade.
Consequently, swathes of the population find it difficult to maintain this basic triumvirate of stability. Mark Brown, the editor of Britain’s mental health lifestyle magazine, One In Four, explains that ‘people need a regular income, a safe place to live and a supportive network of people to stay stable. It's like a stool: three legs, you're sitting pretty; two legs and you can keep yourself stable as long as nothing knocks you off balance; one leg and you're pretty much just holding on; no legs and you're on your arse and everyone else is looking down at you.’
Emma Mamo, policy and campaigns officer for Mind, agrees that ‘Poverty can cause and be caused by mental distress, and there are associations between lower levels of income, higher rates of unemployment and being on benefits, debt, poor housing and mental health problems. For example people with mental health problems are three times more likely to be in debt.’
Even before the extant financial crisis, various social groups were particularly at risk of experiencing mental health difficulties, or, as the report prefers to call them, ‘unmet psychological needs’: elderly people, school-leavers, the unemployed, and those making difficult life transitions such as coming out of prison or residential care, losing a loved one or starting a family. Today, with extra pressure on the Treasury to make cuts to frontline mental health services, the Young Foundation is not alone in expressing concern over the long-term future of Britain’s social and psychological wellbeing.
The Foundation’s recommendation that policymakers take a holistic approach to wellbeing and welfare provision is welcome indeed. In this period of social crisis and spending cuts, it is incumbent upon all of us to understand that investment in financial and social equality is also investment in mental health.
This government and whatever administration follows in 2010 must be made aware that investment in social justice, including a welfare state that allows claimants to live above the breadline, is essential to safeguarding the mental health of the nation. The needs of Britain’s most materially and emotionally vulnerable will not be met until investment in mental health services is enjoined with a commitment to improve the material and social stability of the poorest members of our society.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Stop hounding the Prime Mentalist!
So. Rumour has it [well, Guido has it] that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is taking a course of mood-stabilising anti-depressants. Several major blogs and broadsheet columnists of all stripes have gone public with the allegation that Gordon Brown is taking “heavy duty antidepressants known as MAOIs (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors)”. This rumour, along with what Guido reminds us are "the stories of rages, flying Nokias, smashed laser printers, tables kicked over and crying Downing Street secretaries subjected to foul-mouthed tirades", have led many in the national press to suggest or imply that Brown's leadership is inherently undermined by his alleged mental health difficulties, as well as by the medication he supposedly takes for those difficulties.We have no way of substantiating this rumor, but let's for a moment run with the assumption that Brown is taking anti-depressants. My response? Good. Great. If the Prime Minister of Britain is suffering from depression or some other mental health condition, which given the stresses of his current position seems highly likely, then I'm glad he's getting treatment for it. I'm glad he's man enough to admit that he might need help. Anti-depressants are used by millions of people in this country, although the stigma attached means that many of us don't talk about it, and in almost all cases barring those of people detained against their will in institutions, the process is both voluntary and helpful. It takes courage to go to the doctor and say that you have a problem, even if you're not a leading political figure who's constantly in the public eye. I only wish more politicians would follow his example - after all, it's not as if mental health difficulties in government are unheard of.
Some of the greatest leaders the Western world has ever seen had serious mental health difficulties. Winston Churchill was plagued by crippling depression, which he referred to as 'black dog' and treated with that much less effective anti-depressant, booze. Lincoln was also chronically depressed and anxious. The Time To Change campaign has hilighted these examples, along with other famous figures who had mental health difficulties, such as Florence Nightingale and Charles Darwin. Last year, a Mind investigation found that large numbers of politicians and staff were forced to hide mental health problems, with 19% of MPs, 17% of Peers and 45% of staff reporting personal experience of mental health difficulties. And in 2001, the Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik outed himself as a person with depression, and was subsequently elected for a second term.
So is the 'Prime Mentalist', as he has become known, a person who has mental health problems? It certainly seems likely . Would that fact, by definition, make him unfit to lead the country? Absolutely not. Not only have plenty of great statesmen and women had mental health problems, the experience of overcoming those problems and playing to one's strengths may even be an advantage in politics - as it is for many people who, like myself, battle mental ill health.
You need to be a bit mental to play the politics game, and if you aren't to begin with, you might be before long - 86% of MPs say that their jobs are stressful, and at a recent Depression Alliance event Laura Moffat MP bravely told guests that her own experience of depression was a direct result of her valuable and ongoing work in poltics. A symptom such as paranoia, believing everyone hates you and is talking about you behind your back, may well be a perfectly rational response to, say, being Gordon Brown. I'd wager that few politicians are entirely sane, especially not the successful ones - just take a glance at Tony Blair or David Cameron if you want to see what an obviously broken personality looks like. On the other hand, just for example, it's perfectly possible that Enoch Powell and his dimwitted BNP descendants are entirely sound of mind - stupid, prejudiced and evil, but sane.
One's mental health does not affect one's morals or one's ability to lead. To say that Gordon Brown is a mentalist may well be accurate, but it's also entirely beside the point. Gordon Brown is not a weak leader because of his mental health. If he is a weak leader, it is because he lacks the courage of his convictions, because he no longer has a convincing political narrative, because he is out of steam and out of ideas.
So let's challenge Brown for being a worn-out, uninspiring leader who we're all a bit sick of. Let's bring charges of cronyism, aggression, lack of charisma and lack of ideals. But don't let's for a moment suggest that his mental health - good or bad, medicated or unmedicated - has anything to do with it.
Monday, 27 July 2009
Media lies and the 'Me First' generation
Ooh, look. Here’s some probably-quite-new-fairly-meaningless statistics about youth, gender and mental health from which people with no knowledge of psychiatry and little conception of the complexities of mental health difficulties and young people’s lives can extrapolate almost anything they fancy. What fun. Let’s see how insensitively we can completely miss the point, shall we? That’s probably what I’d be thinking to myself were I an overpaid broadsheet grunt; as it is, I’m an angry blogger, and a youngish woman with mental health difficulties to boot, so all I can do is stand at the sidelines with my modicum of inside knowledge and carp at the immense cocking stupidity that’s been hashed out in the press over the past few days.
Let’s start with the earth-shivering ‘revelation’ that gets wheeled out every year or so: that feminism has failed to make women happier. It’s been standard Mail and Telegraph fodder for ages, but now the Graun have stepped in too, spinning Madeleine Bunting’s piece on how ‘consumerism’ is ‘damaging’ women for all it’s worth. Bunting’s moderate article is drawn from the more thumpingly derivative conclusions of smug pop-psychologist Oliver James, whose job is to travel around the world being surprised that people as rich as he is aren’t happy. He, too, is deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of young women, given that recent studies have shown that – shocker – some 15-year-old-girls aren’t very happy and also like a drink. He deplores the fact that “Victoria Beckham [is]consistently the girl they most want to be during this era”. Yes, that’s right. Because as far as Mr James is concerned, Victoria Beckham – 35 years old, world-famous model, fashion designer, businesswoman, former singer and mother to three children – is still nothing more than a “girl”.
James, like Bunting, is simply appalled that women and girls aren’t happy. After all, what more could we want? Haven’t we got the vote now, and the right to work almost as good jobs for almost as much money as men whilst still carrying out 80% of unpaid cleaning and caring duties? Haven’t we got the right to behave however the hell we like as long as we’re not old, or ugly, or overweight, or lesbians, or left wing, or non-white, or happily unmarried, or disabled, or poor? If we’re not all gurning beatifically now, surely that means that we were wrong all along? Shouldn’t we get back to the kitchen and find husbands to bear cookies and bake children for, if we’ll be happier that way?
If you hadn’t guessed, I find all this gawping media speculation about women’s mental health disgusting, if far from surprising: down the centuries, casting aspersions on our mental health has been the number one way to keep women in check and limit our choices, from lobotomies for ‘nymphomania’ in the 19th century, to forced hysterectomies for hospital inpatients in the 1970s, to today’s handwringing over the mental health of women who choose to have abortions, as if women weren’t mature enough to take that risk.
Our choices are pathologised and moralised and muddled together with the very sensitive, completely separate subject of mental health difficulty in ways that are achingly archaic and damaging. Not to mention demeaning, because as well as leaping to the assumption that ‘Women’s Liberation’ has actually achieved its aims, the attitude presumes that what women want – politically and personally – is to be ‘happy’. Who said we want to be happy? I thought we wanted to be free, to be fulfilled, to have the power to make our own choices and to lead our own lives, to be happy or miserable on our own terms. The suffragettes didn't fling themselves under the hooves of royal horses for 'happiness'. They had much more important things to fight for.
Ah well. At least the same sort of crass, derivative statistic-bending media hypocrisy isn't being applied to the mental health of young men as well this week. O hai, Anne Perkins.
New statistics from Childline show that the proportion of boys calling the helpline to seek support for abuse, bullying and other distressing situations has doubled, from one in five to one in three. Rather than something to be applauded - suggesting that the millions of hours poured in by teachers, care workers and child psychologists trying to make boys more comfortable with seeking help have not been wasted - Anne Perkins suggests that this is in fact a sign of the moral weakness of our generation, what she calls "the 'because I'm worth it' generation'" in her rather unfortunately titled article When self-love is out of control.
Perkins' analysis of what makes boys unhappy is no less sexist, patronising and hateful than James' summation of the "toxins" ruining the lives of the young girls whose periods, let's not forget, are according to Mr James dependent on how attentive their fathers are:
There is a long list of candidates: laddette culture, Wags as models…and a massive sense of relative deprivation – always feeling you deserve better than what you have got, be that your boyfriend, MP3 player or your body. This was the It Could Be You era, one stoked by the advent of reality television in which girls such as Jade Goody, who would never have had a chance in previous times, became rich and famous just for appearing on Big Brother.
It was James, Perkins and their ilk in the first place, gangs of privileged media pundits from older generations, who decided that we were the generation that ‘had it all’, rather than, say, the generation who were trying their damn hardest to remain human despite being saddled with the highest expectations and least support structures of any group of young people in living memory. Not that that’s news, of course. Every generation tries to embody in its young its worst fears for itself, and our narcissistic, materialistic, addicted, self-centred, phenomenally up-fucked parents’ generation pointing the finger at us and telling us we’re moral degenerates is hardly news.
In fact, we are one of the less socially mobile generations of the past century; the real ‘It Could Be You’ generation, the generation with the most genuine opportunities for kids from lower income families, is the generation now making these ridiculous pronouncements: Oliver James and Anne Perkins' generation. To recap:
1.We didn't signed up to the women's movement to get happy; we'd rather be miserable on our own terms than Oliver James' fantasy grinning bovine housewives
2.The mental health of women and girls cannot be morally measured, and to suggest otherwise is highly offensive
3.The mental health of men and boys has no cultural value: it is not a sign of weakness or even of increasing distress that more young men are seeking help. In fact, the Childline statistics are to be welcomed
4. Mental health is not a gender issue: your mental health is not related to, or a predicter of, how good a little boy or girl you are. External arbiters of gender are, in fact, something that implicates your mental health rather than the other way around. Mental health difficulty has no moral value, and it cannot be placed on a map of social or gender deviance: it's simply a problem that a lot of young people, as well as a lot of not-young people, are trying to deal with from day to day.
5. Columnists: take your jealous mitts out of your cloth ears and try, please, to understand that the generation you so readily dismiss as narcissistic and frivolous has problems of its own that you can't even begin to comprehend, mainly because so far you haven't bothered, unless you're Nick Cohen.
Here ends the lesson
Let’s start with the earth-shivering ‘revelation’ that gets wheeled out every year or so: that feminism has failed to make women happier. It’s been standard Mail and Telegraph fodder for ages, but now the Graun have stepped in too, spinning Madeleine Bunting’s piece on how ‘consumerism’ is ‘damaging’ women for all it’s worth. Bunting’s moderate article is drawn from the more thumpingly derivative conclusions of smug pop-psychologist Oliver James, whose job is to travel around the world being surprised that people as rich as he is aren’t happy. He, too, is deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of young women, given that recent studies have shown that – shocker – some 15-year-old-girls aren’t very happy and also like a drink. He deplores the fact that “Victoria Beckham [is]consistently the girl they most want to be during this era”. Yes, that’s right. Because as far as Mr James is concerned, Victoria Beckham – 35 years old, world-famous model, fashion designer, businesswoman, former singer and mother to three children – is still nothing more than a “girl”.
James, like Bunting, is simply appalled that women and girls aren’t happy. After all, what more could we want? Haven’t we got the vote now, and the right to work almost as good jobs for almost as much money as men whilst still carrying out 80% of unpaid cleaning and caring duties? Haven’t we got the right to behave however the hell we like as long as we’re not old, or ugly, or overweight, or lesbians, or left wing, or non-white, or happily unmarried, or disabled, or poor? If we’re not all gurning beatifically now, surely that means that we were wrong all along? Shouldn’t we get back to the kitchen and find husbands to bear cookies and bake children for, if we’ll be happier that way?
If you hadn’t guessed, I find all this gawping media speculation about women’s mental health disgusting, if far from surprising: down the centuries, casting aspersions on our mental health has been the number one way to keep women in check and limit our choices, from lobotomies for ‘nymphomania’ in the 19th century, to forced hysterectomies for hospital inpatients in the 1970s, to today’s handwringing over the mental health of women who choose to have abortions, as if women weren’t mature enough to take that risk.
Our choices are pathologised and moralised and muddled together with the very sensitive, completely separate subject of mental health difficulty in ways that are achingly archaic and damaging. Not to mention demeaning, because as well as leaping to the assumption that ‘Women’s Liberation’ has actually achieved its aims, the attitude presumes that what women want – politically and personally – is to be ‘happy’. Who said we want to be happy? I thought we wanted to be free, to be fulfilled, to have the power to make our own choices and to lead our own lives, to be happy or miserable on our own terms. The suffragettes didn't fling themselves under the hooves of royal horses for 'happiness'. They had much more important things to fight for.
Ah well. At least the same sort of crass, derivative statistic-bending media hypocrisy isn't being applied to the mental health of young men as well this week. O hai, Anne Perkins.
New statistics from Childline show that the proportion of boys calling the helpline to seek support for abuse, bullying and other distressing situations has doubled, from one in five to one in three. Rather than something to be applauded - suggesting that the millions of hours poured in by teachers, care workers and child psychologists trying to make boys more comfortable with seeking help have not been wasted - Anne Perkins suggests that this is in fact a sign of the moral weakness of our generation, what she calls "the 'because I'm worth it' generation'" in her rather unfortunately titled article When self-love is out of control.
Perkins' analysis of what makes boys unhappy is no less sexist, patronising and hateful than James' summation of the "toxins" ruining the lives of the young girls whose periods, let's not forget, are according to Mr James dependent on how attentive their fathers are:
There is a long list of candidates: laddette culture, Wags as models…and a massive sense of relative deprivation – always feeling you deserve better than what you have got, be that your boyfriend, MP3 player or your body. This was the It Could Be You era, one stoked by the advent of reality television in which girls such as Jade Goody, who would never have had a chance in previous times, became rich and famous just for appearing on Big Brother.
It was James, Perkins and their ilk in the first place, gangs of privileged media pundits from older generations, who decided that we were the generation that ‘had it all’, rather than, say, the generation who were trying their damn hardest to remain human despite being saddled with the highest expectations and least support structures of any group of young people in living memory. Not that that’s news, of course. Every generation tries to embody in its young its worst fears for itself, and our narcissistic, materialistic, addicted, self-centred, phenomenally up-fucked parents’ generation pointing the finger at us and telling us we’re moral degenerates is hardly news.
In fact, we are one of the less socially mobile generations of the past century; the real ‘It Could Be You’ generation, the generation with the most genuine opportunities for kids from lower income families, is the generation now making these ridiculous pronouncements: Oliver James and Anne Perkins' generation. To recap:
1.We didn't signed up to the women's movement to get happy; we'd rather be miserable on our own terms than Oliver James' fantasy grinning bovine housewives
2.The mental health of women and girls cannot be morally measured, and to suggest otherwise is highly offensive
3.The mental health of men and boys has no cultural value: it is not a sign of weakness or even of increasing distress that more young men are seeking help. In fact, the Childline statistics are to be welcomed
4. Mental health is not a gender issue: your mental health is not related to, or a predicter of, how good a little boy or girl you are. External arbiters of gender are, in fact, something that implicates your mental health rather than the other way around. Mental health difficulty has no moral value, and it cannot be placed on a map of social or gender deviance: it's simply a problem that a lot of young people, as well as a lot of not-young people, are trying to deal with from day to day.
5. Columnists: take your jealous mitts out of your cloth ears and try, please, to understand that the generation you so readily dismiss as narcissistic and frivolous has problems of its own that you can't even begin to comprehend, mainly because so far you haven't bothered, unless you're Nick Cohen.
Here ends the lesson
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Perfect slaves?
There's been a rash of horrible articles recently, along with some great ones, about dieting, body image, self-harm and eating disorders. I can't look away from this stuff, especially not when I'm physically ill and my own body is just not behaving. Five years after I was hospitalised for anorexia as a 17-year-old, I still have to keep an eye on the way I'm eating: when my appetite goes, as it has now as a result of the deathflu, I can't just sip milkshakes and grumble like a normal overgrown student; instead, I have to battle it out between the little voice which wants to take the opportunity to avoid food for a few days, to lose some of that hated flab from my hips and tummy, and the other voice that doesn't trust me to eat properly on any day. On days like these, forcing a sandwich that I can't taste into my gland-swollen face, the whole tricky business of actually giving a damn about myself is hard enough already without being bombarded on all sides by images of thinnness, 'beauty' and trauma.I've written about this many times before. This article at The F Word in 2007 and this article for the Guardian in March this year explain just what depresses me so much about the constant saturation of news and comment about women's weight and body image in the information market over the past few years, particularly its pretence at 'concern' for our 'wellbeing'. Come off it. If mainstream media outlets really wanted us to feel better about ourselves they would commission fewer young female journalists to starve themselves as part of 'professional investigations into the mindset of thin'. Liz Jones' latest Daily Fail offering is as horrendous as it is heartbreaking, and makes me want to throw up in so many more ways than one.
I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies. And now I can't stop thinking, about femininity, perfectionism, and what it is to be young and a woman today.
Perfectionism just doesn't cover it. Most women I know who are around my age are, to some extent, perfectionists. Why would we not be? We're told from the word dot that perfection is the only thing we can and should expect from ourselves, and that if we don't have the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect hairdo, perfect exam results, a perfect job, a perfect boyfriend, perfect clothes, perfect friends and the perfect family - heaven forfend that we're gay, disAbled, tall, short, overweight, less than bright, non-white, poor or in any way average - then we've failed, utterly and totally failed, and we are worthless as human beings and as women. Furthermore, we are reminded at every stage that we are in constant competition with every other young man and woman in our peer group for a finite set of life's prizes. Perfectionism is no longer an infrequent personality trait: it is an universal standard for living.
Me, I'm susceptible. I'm frightened of failure; more frightened of personal and professional failure than I can possibly explain or even understand. Part of this is because I've already had, for my own twisted understanding of the term, to accept failure on a physical level: I chose to recover from anorexia, and to live, and in order to be functional I now need to eat. I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms and the beginnings of cellulite on my bottom; I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten. People tell me that's not failure: but look around. Look at the news; look at any magazine or billboard you care to glance at. Thin is part of our lexicon for modern living. I'm not, and will never again be, thin: I have failed as a person, on one level at least.
If you think that's stupid, you're right. If you think that that's a trivial and appalling thing for someone as clever and as lucky as me to waste time worrying about, then you're right. But I'm not unusual in being subsceptible to perfectionism and control-freakery: I just happen, in the past, to have been dangerously more successful at it than most. Actually, this is something that most young women understand. The will to push yourself and the impetus to damage yourself are very close cousins, and they are deeply, politically enmeshed in the culture we have created for ourselves.
Poor Liz Jones. What's so upsetting is that she knows perfectly well what her own illness means, for her and for so many other women, anorexic, bulimic, dieting or merely obsessing over the size of their thighs like good little consumers:
Making us think about what we ate today and what we will eat tomorrow is a great way of ensuring women don’t have the energy to succeed. We don’t need ‘gender pay audits’ – to be announced tomorrow in the Equalities Bill – to find out why on earth women are paid less than men. (Liz Jones, Daily Mail, April 2009)
Young women today are brought up knowing exactly how much they stand to lose every second of every day; we are raised in panic and competition; no wonder we attempt to violently and cruelly control our messy selves, to inch ourselves into small, safe worlds of pain.
Yes, it's fucking political. I'm sorry, but it's fucking political, and it IS relevant, and it is urgent. I'm not just talking here about girls like me who are crazy enough to take the hurt and the horror right the way down. I'm talking about everyone: we all, to some extent, have to fight the urge to hurt ourselves, to work ourselves into the ground, to force ourselves towards perfection. Right now I've been an invalid for almost three days and I'm practically clawing at my bedroom walls with worry at the work I haven't done, the bits of my house I haven't cleaned, the inches I might be putting on that seem somehow to symbolise all the rest of it, all of that awful wanting, needing, longing. How sweet it would be to never be hungry again: never to have to hunger for life, for love, for achievement, for happiness, for the hundred little daily human longings that are too brief and too quickly grieved to even be named.
My whole life, all I've ever wanted has been for someone to tell me that I'm fine just the way I am. By the time people started saying it, it was already much too late: and besides, didn't every advert, every exam score, every magazine and tv show and book and film and friend and teacher prove them wrong? Nothing about us, as young women, is 'fine just the way it is'. Nothing about us can just be let be, to grow naturally and imperfectly into its whole self.
I make tea obsessively and drink it compulsively. Along with the cigarettes, it's the one little addiction I allow myself: imperfection, creeping in round the edges, staining my teeth, soiling my health and reminding me how gloriously unfinished and fragile and wild we are as humans. Perfection as anathema is awfully hard to hang onto, especially for women. I might still be a little feverish. But I'm trying my hardest to reject perfection. Not just to accept that I can't have it: to actively reject it, to refuse it, to stand and say that I will not serve. I refuse to serve a vanishing feminine mythos that keeps us all, one way or another, in chains. So I will: I will refuse to serve. Ask me how many calories there are in a mars bar and you can bet your life I'll pretend not to know.
I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies. And now I can't stop thinking, about femininity, perfectionism, and what it is to be young and a woman today.
Perfectionism just doesn't cover it. Most women I know who are around my age are, to some extent, perfectionists. Why would we not be? We're told from the word dot that perfection is the only thing we can and should expect from ourselves, and that if we don't have the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect hairdo, perfect exam results, a perfect job, a perfect boyfriend, perfect clothes, perfect friends and the perfect family - heaven forfend that we're gay, disAbled, tall, short, overweight, less than bright, non-white, poor or in any way average - then we've failed, utterly and totally failed, and we are worthless as human beings and as women. Furthermore, we are reminded at every stage that we are in constant competition with every other young man and woman in our peer group for a finite set of life's prizes. Perfectionism is no longer an infrequent personality trait: it is an universal standard for living.
Me, I'm susceptible. I'm frightened of failure; more frightened of personal and professional failure than I can possibly explain or even understand. Part of this is because I've already had, for my own twisted understanding of the term, to accept failure on a physical level: I chose to recover from anorexia, and to live, and in order to be functional I now need to eat. I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms and the beginnings of cellulite on my bottom; I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten. People tell me that's not failure: but look around. Look at the news; look at any magazine or billboard you care to glance at. Thin is part of our lexicon for modern living. I'm not, and will never again be, thin: I have failed as a person, on one level at least.
If you think that's stupid, you're right. If you think that that's a trivial and appalling thing for someone as clever and as lucky as me to waste time worrying about, then you're right. But I'm not unusual in being subsceptible to perfectionism and control-freakery: I just happen, in the past, to have been dangerously more successful at it than most. Actually, this is something that most young women understand. The will to push yourself and the impetus to damage yourself are very close cousins, and they are deeply, politically enmeshed in the culture we have created for ourselves.
Poor Liz Jones. What's so upsetting is that she knows perfectly well what her own illness means, for her and for so many other women, anorexic, bulimic, dieting or merely obsessing over the size of their thighs like good little consumers:
Making us think about what we ate today and what we will eat tomorrow is a great way of ensuring women don’t have the energy to succeed. We don’t need ‘gender pay audits’ – to be announced tomorrow in the Equalities Bill – to find out why on earth women are paid less than men. (Liz Jones, Daily Mail, April 2009)
Young women today are brought up knowing exactly how much they stand to lose every second of every day; we are raised in panic and competition; no wonder we attempt to violently and cruelly control our messy selves, to inch ourselves into small, safe worlds of pain.
Yes, it's fucking political. I'm sorry, but it's fucking political, and it IS relevant, and it is urgent. I'm not just talking here about girls like me who are crazy enough to take the hurt and the horror right the way down. I'm talking about everyone: we all, to some extent, have to fight the urge to hurt ourselves, to work ourselves into the ground, to force ourselves towards perfection. Right now I've been an invalid for almost three days and I'm practically clawing at my bedroom walls with worry at the work I haven't done, the bits of my house I haven't cleaned, the inches I might be putting on that seem somehow to symbolise all the rest of it, all of that awful wanting, needing, longing. How sweet it would be to never be hungry again: never to have to hunger for life, for love, for achievement, for happiness, for the hundred little daily human longings that are too brief and too quickly grieved to even be named.
My whole life, all I've ever wanted has been for someone to tell me that I'm fine just the way I am. By the time people started saying it, it was already much too late: and besides, didn't every advert, every exam score, every magazine and tv show and book and film and friend and teacher prove them wrong? Nothing about us, as young women, is 'fine just the way it is'. Nothing about us can just be let be, to grow naturally and imperfectly into its whole self.
I make tea obsessively and drink it compulsively. Along with the cigarettes, it's the one little addiction I allow myself: imperfection, creeping in round the edges, staining my teeth, soiling my health and reminding me how gloriously unfinished and fragile and wild we are as humans. Perfection as anathema is awfully hard to hang onto, especially for women. I might still be a little feverish. But I'm trying my hardest to reject perfection. Not just to accept that I can't have it: to actively reject it, to refuse it, to stand and say that I will not serve. I refuse to serve a vanishing feminine mythos that keeps us all, one way or another, in chains. So I will: I will refuse to serve. Ask me how many calories there are in a mars bar and you can bet your life I'll pretend not to know.
Monday, 6 April 2009
You look lovely when you smile...
I am so, so crashingly bored and depressed by the endless, endless fucking G20 coverage of the Many Dresses of Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni. Not just because it doesn't matter, but because, in a perverted way, it does: it's a way of saying to the entire world, this is what women are for. They're here to stand behind their men and be well dressed, and quiet, and smile, and look beautiful. It doesn't matter how accomplished Cherie Blair happened to be - she's less stylish than Sarah Brown (or, according to the odious Rowan Pelling, less ladylike), so she is worth less. Compare the coverage of Michelle Obama's fantastic speech to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Language College to the coverage of the choice of coat she happened to wear that day. Seriously, just google 'Michelle Obama G20' and have a look at the first 10 hits. For weeks, we've had it rubbed in until it bleeds that even the most politically aware women in the world are there to be scrutinised, first and foremost, on their looks.For days, I’ve wanted to talk about women, and anger, and the way we present. But I haven’t. I’ve written furtively, in notebooks and when I’m too tired to see the screen, because a great deal of me is frightened that, given everything that’s going on, feminism isn’t important anymore. Women aren’t important anymore – men, and the decisions they make, and the violence they may or may not commit, are important. The death of Ian Tomlinson, possibly at police hands, is important. What Barack Obama thinks today is important.
But every time I try to write about these things in a detatched way, I keep coming back to women’s anger. The proactive rage of the feminist groups who organised the weekend vigil for Tomlinson. The bloodied young women on the frontline of the demos, throwing themselves at the cops in a world which still tells women to sit down and shut up. The middle-aged women marching for the first time in their lives because they don’t want their child benefits cut. The young paramedic who bravely posted about being targeted by police on Wednesday. These are our politics too, and this is our anger too, and we need to be able to own it and express it fully if we are to reshape the world the way we know it needs to be.
There's a problem there, though, isn't there? Women aren't supposed to be angry.
There are lots of things we are supposed to be. We're supposed to be beautiful, and good, and helpful, and selfless, and loving. We're allowed to express devotion, and fear, and exhaustion, and hurt, and love, and even desire, as long as it's desire for cock and lipstick and shiny things, and not contraception, equal pay or social justice.
The world can cope with angry young men, but angry young women are anachronism to a stable society. In film and literature, angry, passionate men are heroes, soldiers, maverick detectives, rebels, leaders, artists; angry, passionate young women are, invariably the villains, and almost always end up destroying themselves or being destroyed, like O-Ren Ishii, like Joss Whedon's Faith, like Catherine Tramell, like every evil queen and wicked witch in every storybook ever written. Angry, accomplished women are frightening, especially if they are powerful. The only way society knows how to cope with angry women is to stereotype them as deranged, ridiculous and, worst of all, ugly - just as it did last month when feminist comrades across London gathered to protest against the Miss Uni 2009 beauty pageant.
David Crepaz-Keay of the Mental Health Foundation told me last week that 'women expressing anger are seen as displaying deviant behaviour - both within and outside the psychiatric arena.' Exploring this theme, Seaneen Molloy of Mentally Interesting, incidentally one of the most inspiring young writers out there, has a fantastic piece this week about the pathology of expressiong emotion - 'It's Alright To Be Angry'.
You need to read that post, and when you've read it, remember that it really wasn't so very long ago that women expressing too much anger, desire or other strength of feeling were imprisoned as lunatics, beaten and tortured in the name of healing and subjected to forcible electroconvulsive treatment. Remember that even now, women are far more likely to be given diagnoses of stigmatised conditions such as Borderline Personality Disorder, conditions in which the sufferer is deemed 'excessively quarrelsome' (DSMV criteria).
I'm often told of my writing, as I have been told my whole life, you're too angry. Why are you so angry? Chill out! Put on some make up on and give us a smile. You look lovely when you smile.
I have now been working in politics and in journalism for just over a year, and it cuts very deep to know that for every editor who's noticed that I can string a sentence together, for every person higher up the chain who has encouraged me, there have been two who have hired me because...because I look lovely when I smile. Because I've got a cute, petite little figure, because I'm curvy but not too curvy, because I'm small and shy, because I've got sparkly eyes and a pretty face. My appearance was the most important thing about me when I was an acne-plastered, train-track-toothed teenager, and it's still the most important thing about me now that I'm easier on the eye, whatever I wear, wherever I go. And don't think for a second that that's me being coy. Given the choice, I'm glad that, whatever I think of my looks, other people find me reasonably pretty, but I'd frankly rather it didn't matter at all. I'm sick of it mattering so fucking much that I'm pretty. This is the reason I periodically do a Britney and shave my head: hey presto! Underneath all these curves, behind this made-up face, I'm actually a person, and I'll still be one when I'm fifty! Who'da thunk?
Another still small voice of rage and reason inspiring me this week is Julia Indelicate, one-half of The Indelicates – a band introduced to me by a squealing fanboy with the words ‘you’ll like her. She’s angry’. Julia wrote ‘Our Daughters Will Never be Free’, a version of which you can hear playing on the link – it’s the best feminist pop song I’ve ever heard, and it drips with sarcasm and bile. This week, Julia writes for Indieoma about how for female musicians, as for so many of us, what we look like is more important than what we do - and how women, too, betray their creative, emotional and intellectual selfhood for a squashed-down image of acceptable femininity:
Talent in women is still for the most part a reference to harmonic and aesthetically appealing vocals and/ or rough edged vocals conjoined in brand with a sexy demeanour, and this is, for the most part, what most successful women in music do: Have a lovely pair of Talents......Men have always fucked women over. But to play the same game: to betray feminism by admitting defeat and retreating into vain variations on the ubiquitous sex and beauty aesthetic is traitorous and despicable. For this reason I find myself wishing I was male. To be able to have as standard a history of writing, to not have to be outside of it, and to not have to be aware of the femaleness of my performance would be an incredible relief.
I think we are often afraid, as women, of our own anger, our own intellect, our own personal and political potential. We are afraid that if we express any of it, we won't be liked and accepted and, unfortunately, we learn to internalise that fear just at the age when being liked and accepted is what we want most in the world.
That fear is founded on fact. What we have learned is both true and self-perpetuating, exemplified by the G20 coverage: the world's most high profile women are portrayed as beautiful and good, rather than intellectual and impassioned; they are judged on their style, not their substance. Young girls grow up knowing that passion, emotion, intellect and politics are not what they are for. They're there to look good and be helpful, to sit down and shut up. And
even if we try to fight it, we know that wherever we're likely to end up we can expect to be judged on our looks, our clothes and how well we play the game long before we open our mouths.
Except when we write.
I write because I'm not ashamed of my anger, because I want to own my anger; I write because I want people to be looking at my words, not at my tits. I write because it's the only thing that I'm good at that involves giving of myself, rather than selling myself. I want the right to be judged on what I say, and on what I feel, and on how decently I behave, rather than how I cute I look and how sweet I am. That might not seem like much for a lot of people reading this, but for women right down the centuries, that power - the power to be yourself in text - has meant the whole world.
I write because when I'm behind a keyboard, it doesn't matter if I'm smiling, or if I've done my hair, or if I'm sitting here wearing a dustbin, covered in shit and eating fistfuls of pilchards from a jar. I write because it's a way of taking power back. So I'm going to echo Julia: maybe I do look lovely when I smile. Maybe Carla Bruni and Michelle Obama are absolutely fabulous in couture coats. But that's not, that's never been the issue. Up and down the country, across the G20 nations, women are angry - and when we own our anger, when we can finally stand up and unashamedly live with and from our rage, when we finally realise that whatever they say, what we do is always more important than what we look like, then the whole world's gonna tremble.
Saturday, 14 March 2009
Britney and the Bedlamites: for Red Pepper
I've just got back from an internet activists' conference, which was all kinds of shiny. I shouted at Anonymous, who both looked and talked like rapists in their oh-so-scary masks, when they tried to explain me why they had a policy of using the term 'cumdumpster' to describe women. 'It's offensive. So it's funny. It's funny because it's offensive, yeah?'Dear pointless cigar-smoking prick: you're an idiot. You ain't Rorsharch and if you were I'd still be laughing at you, not with you. Grow up, show us your bloody face and learn that bullying and activism do not equate.
Anyway. The following article was written for Red Pepper, but got elbowed out of the current issue. It's still going to be a great issue, and you should all buy it, but here, for your special Saturday night pleasure, a Penny Red exclusive: Britney and the Bedlamites.
********
The lunacy and redemption of Britney Jean Spears is a contemporary hagiography. The former teen pop sensation's appearance at the 2009 MTV awards, apparently sober, well-groomed and grinning like the waxwork which Mme Tussauds created to commemorate the event, signalled a return not only to health, but to virtue. Once again, Britney looks like all little girls are encouraged to grow up to look: pretty, compliant, obediently performative - the first signals of good mental health for women in and out of the public eye. The fact that the singer's very real and very chronic mental health problems cannot be cured with a decent spray-tan and hilights is irrelevant to the international celebrity press: in the eyes of the public, Britney Spears has been redeemed.
Two years earlier, Spears had shaved her head in an LA hairdressers’, and tabloids across the world screeched that the singer had lost her mind. The event catalysed a burgeoning fetish for feminine neurosis in Western pop culture, a fetish which seems to have achieved its squalid climax in the public ‘healing’ of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and their ilk. Open any magazine, turn on any tv station, and the message remains the same: women who are successful, or who don’t know their place, will go mad, and will require healing.
It's nothing new for women to be labelled insane if they display behaviour that diverges from received feminine norms of submissiveness, sexual and social discretion, purity and humility, and in today’s culture the trend is no different: bad-boy rockers are cool, racy ‘troublemakers’, whereas bad-girl rockers are ‘troubled’, and need to be saved from themselves. Self-destruction has always been part of rock and roll, but when it comes to male artists, their suffering is invariably portrayed as far less important than their genius, or even as an unfortunate, necessary part of it. Think of Jim Morrison. Think of Hendrix. Think of Kurt Cobain. Think of Heath Ledger, who has just got his very-much deserved posthumous Oscar for that screwy-beautiful performance in Dark Knight.
But the double standard kicks in when we remember Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Britney, Amy and Kerry for their illness more than their art. All of these women suffered or suffer from bipolar disorder (manic depression) – a very real medical problem which affects about 1% of the adult population, and a significant percentage of creative, dynamic and high-achieving people - but it is women in the public eye who are defined, ane morally judged, on the basis of their mental health.
Female artists, with or without emotional problems, are treated not as suffering geniuses but as silly little girls who aren’t bright enough or mature enough to take care of themselves. On the pages of newspapers and magazines and websites across the country, women’s minds and especially women’s bodies are poked, prodded, pinched and squeezed like livestock at a cattle market, their flesh weighed and labelled and stretched on the slab of media scrutiny – and now it’s claimed to be for their own good. A pound lost or gained from the backside of a A-list artist is taken as evidence of impending breakdown, and whatever successes they may or may not attain is deemed futile if the papers declare that they are cracking under the stress, binge-artists, secret alcoholics or, worst of all, ‘starving for attention’.
The fantasy is seductive. In a Western world that still fosters a deep suspicion of successful women, the myth of feminine neurosis gives armchair misogynists of both sexes a happy explanation for the fact that unprecedented numbers of women are reaching the top of their game in the media and the arts. It’s reassuring to be reminded that women are fragile and flawed. It’s reassuring to be reminded that girls are deranged, deviant creatures who can’t cope with pressure. But we’ve seen all this before.
In the 19th century, women were deemed highly susceptible to becoming mentally ill, as they were seen to lack the mental fortitude of men; contemporary medical theory spoke of the uterus as a sponge that wandered around the body, sucking out the juices of reason, leading to ‘hysteria’. If they dared to enjoy sex they were deemed ‘nymphomaniac’, a disease treatable by solitary confinement, leeches and clitorectomy; if they were lesbians or chose to remain unmarried, they were ‘frigid’. The risk of insanity greatly increased if any woman attempted to better herself through education, work or too many activities. Many women, especially in the upper- and upper-middle classes, learned to suppress emotions for fear of being labelled as mad and sent to an asylum or confined to their rooms, a phenomenon vividly recounted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.
In today’s supposedly progressive culture, women are still threatened with the spectre of being deemed insane if their behaviour deviates from socially circumscribed norms. On the cover of every magazine, young women are reminded of what happens if we let go of self-control: we will become fat and powerless and unloved, grotesque, overconsuming, stumbling out of taxis way past our bedtimes, flashing our knickerless crotches at unsuspecting paparazzi and returning home to grind what’s left of modern morals into a fine powder and stuff it up our disintegrating post-feminist nostrils. But the spectre of young women’s imagined loss of control both as mental illness and as cipher for social degeneration is a long established and tediously familiar one, echoing Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ paintings of the 18th century. As early as 1712, the Spectator made explicit links between a number of ‘addictive’ substances and their dangerous effects on the female mind, warning its ‘fair Readers to be in a particular manner careful how they meddle with Chocolate, Novels and the like Inflamers; which I look upon as very dangerous to be made use of during this Carnival of Nature’.
Fast-forward three hundred years and success, emancipation or simple pleasure still gravely endangers the mental health of Britain’s female icons, out on the lash and the combined pill, vomiting helplessly into the gutters of modern decency as the distinction between mental illness and plain misbehaving becomes ever more irrelevant to the feminine equation.
Britney Spears’ very public breakdown in 2007-8 was a crucial flashpoint. Preened for stardom since babyhood, young Ms Spears spent a lifetime being pumped up, dolled up, sexed up and shoved onto every waiting stage: her first relationships and developing body were devoured by press attention, but despite the pressure and public scrutiny she somehow managed to produce four very fine studio albums, all of which were chart-toppers. When she finally began to show the strain, the outcry was instantaneous and horrific. The singer, who was a Rolling Stone cover girl at sixteen, began to be regularly caught out by the papparazi in the ultimate act of extreme insanity for a woman in the public eye: the consumption of a hamburger and fries. Eventually, Spears recreated with a borrowed buzz-cutter an act that has for centuries represented the supreme rejection of social feminisation, and hence the supreme demonstration of ‘insanity’. Plastic Britney dolls had been available since the singer turned seventeen; before long you could pick up bald ‘Britney Shears’ dollies, complete with tortured plastic grimaces and miniature straight-jackets.
This isn't the fourteenth century, and mental health is not a moral judgement. Britney's bipolar disorder is an ongoing medical condition - it isn't a moral lapse that can be purged as long as the sinner confesses the error of her ways to enough celebrity magazines and vows never to eat chips again. To imply otherwise is to do an extreme injustice to the millions of people across the world who are touched by mental ill health, as well as to slide into lazy misogyny: the idea that the mentally unwell and women in the public eye can be 'redeemed' with the right haircut and the right lighting is an insult on both fronts.
Women, including those of us with mental health difficulties, are socially and morally whole human beings, who do not require redeeming. What we require is respect; and we're coming to claim it. Squeal all the papers might, they cannot stop a new generation of female artists, singers, musicians, models, actors, writers and photographers hammering on the doors of privilege. These women want it all - fame, family, creative and personal fulfilment and oodles of cash - even if they have to get it whilst managing a mental health condition, as one in four of us do. Despite the bar of acceptable behaviour being set far higher for females in the arts and the media, despite flocks of paparazzi picking over their bodies like carrion birds after a battle, despite their every artistic, social and sexual transgression being seized on as evidence of blind insanity, the inheritors of 21st century pop culture are coming up punching, in control of their lives, their minds and their message, even if the message isn’t what patriarchal society had in mind.
(image by Withiel)
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I hope you enjoyed that, my dears. Now, I'm going out to a sweaty goth club to drink cider and black and swish around like a fool. Y'all have a good one.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Mental illness: the last great taboo?
For days, now, I’ve been trying to put down in words what I feel about the Christine Laird case, the civil case currently about to create a legal precedent for suing one’s employees if they dare not to reveal that they have a history of mental ill health. I work in mental health, and what I’ve been hearing everywhere is – well, this is a complicated case. Well, if it becomes legally plausible to demand that people declare their mental health history on job applications, hopefully that’ll encourage more people to come out of the closet rather than persuading more of us to lie. Well, maybe she wasn’t doing a very good job anyway.And I am here to say: I have absolutely no interest in what sort of job Christine Laird was doing. She’s not being sued for doing her job badly, she’s being sued for being a closeted mentalist, something that, in this culture, she had every reason to be. The simple fact is that, faced with a very real prejudice against people with past or present mental health difficulty in the workplace – faced with a situation in which only 40% of employers will even consider employing someone with a mental health difficulty, and only 24% of people with chronic mental health conditions are in work – most of us lie.
I’ve lied. I’ve lied on most of the couple of hundred job and internship applications I’ve filled out in the past year, and I’ve not been invited to interview with any of those where I’ve been honest, not even when I was working in another capacity for the company at the time. If Christine Laird had been hiding the fact that she had a heart condition in order to get a job she was qualified for, would she be being sued now? Doubtful. Current disability laws do not protect workers like Christine Laird who choose to hide mental health conditions for fear of facing prejudice. This means, in my not-so-humble-this-evening, that current disability laws are a steaming crock.
Do I think that being a mentalist is something to be proud of? Of itself, no; I’m no more proud to have mental health problems than I am proud to be short, or that I have straight hair, or a high IQ, or that I’m white. These are inalienable things about me, borne of nature and of nurture. In the same way, in any sane society, being gay shouldn’t have to be something to be ‘proud of’ – but the fact is that living life honestly and successfully as a person of non-heterosexual orientation in this 21st-century world is still a challenge, and one that every queer person who is honest about their sexuality should justly respect themselves for. In just the same way, people struggling with the daily challenges of mental health difficulty should be able to feel proud of themselves for doing so, rather than think of themselves as the state and their families too often characterise them – as dangerous criminals.
The threat of further legal sanctions against the mentally ill frightens and angers me. Ten times I’ve started this post, my fingers hovering above the keys over the phrase ‘I’m not proud to have mental health difficulties’. And I can’t do it.
Because I am proud.
I’m sorry, mum. I’m sorry, dad. I know that in begging me to hide my condition you only want what’s best for me. I know that the way I was born has caused you a great deal of grief, and for that I’m sad and I’m sorry, but I’m not ashamed. In fact, I’m proud as anything to be sitting here today, alive and thriving and dealing both with my mental health problems and the stigma that they have won me, as I ever was when I got my degree, or when I was awarded the top mark in GCSE English in the UK. It’s been a long, hard road, and I’m sad and I’m sorry, but I’m not ashamed.
And if I could ever be honest in a job interview, here’s what I’d tell them. I’m the best candidate you’ll see today, not just because of my creativity or my academic record, but because the challenges I face daily have made me a stronger, better person. I learned more about the world and how to live in it over the 9 months I spent as a psychiatric inpatient than I did in the three years of university that followed. I know about waiting, and frustration, and I know what it’s like to have your dreams ripped away from you and to have to build them again and build them better. In order to make full use of my talents, you may well have to adjust your prejudices as well as your working practices. You may have to allow me time to deal with my condition; you may have to trust me to work to the best of my ability without the marker of 9-5 attendance or constant insufferable smiliness, but you’ll know that every bit of work you’ll get out of it will be my best, because I have something to prove.
I look at the amazing young people I’ve befriended over the last few years, and I see how powerful and beautiful they are, how they constantly support and buoy one another up, despite the fact that in many cases their families and employers don’t or won’t understand what their lives are really like. I look at these young men and women, and I remember the ones we lost too young, and I want more for us than this – more for us than a life begging for treatment that isn’t provided and understanding that isn’t forthcoming and quarter that isn’t given. I look at these beautiful young people, and I worry for their futures. I know that people just like us, people with mental health problems, are today’s disenfranchised, making up 72% of the prison population and a large percentage of the homeless and unemployed. I know that we are barred from holding parliamentary office, shunned by employers and stereotyped by the media. If I have a child, the chances are that with my genetics that child will grow up facing some of the same difficulties that I face. I want my children to have the same opportunities and life chances as anyone else.
No, I will not just buck up. I won’t ‘just buck up’, because I can’t. I’m not a crook, or a scrounger, or lazy; in fact, the nature of my disorder means that I’m far more likely to push myself too hard and work myself into a crash. But I’m sick of being told to just get on with things and be a normal person, because I know that that’s not an option for me and mine, not within definitions of ‘normal’ as they currently stand. I won't buck up, and I won't shut up, because it’s those definitions that need to change, not me – I’m proud to say that I make changes every day to secure my own mental health and continue as a functioning person, and pretending that it’s otherwise is unhelpful, it’s massively unhelpful to me and it’s unhelpful to society. I want to live a long, successful life, and when I’m in my fifties and sixties I want to be saying to the young men and women entering my industry: I did this with a mental health problem, and because of that, for you, it’ll be a little bit easier.
Our laws, our employment structure and our attitudes to mental ill health need to change, and they need to change now. We can no longer afford to keep the millions of citizens with mental health difficulties largely disenfranchised, disaffected, poorly treated and out of useful work adapted to their needs. We can’t afford it morally, and these days we certainly can’t afford it financially. I’m not satisfied with the welfare reform bill being quietly swept under the table; I’m not satisfied with Employment and Support Allowance, with Personal Care Budgets. I will not be satisfied until people with mental health difficulties have the same rights to live and love and work and receive care as people whose needs are different.
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Mental health and welfare: a stamping manifesto
The tendency not to want to believe in mental illness festers across the Western world, and particularly in Britain, the nation that gave us Shakespeare, concentration camps and the stiff upper lip. From the friends and families of sufferers to the upper echelons of government, the suspicion that mental health difficulties are forms of weakness – simple personality flaws that could be eradicated if more of these mentalists would jolly well buck up – informs policy and influences behaviour. We need to look this institutional prejudice in the face and call it what it is: outdated, destructive and desperately unhelpful.Over the past few months, I have interviewed a great many people suffering from mental health difficulties in the course of my work for the Independent and for One in Four magazine, and none of them are feeling optimistic about the New Year. All of them fear being forced back into work that they will not be able to cope with even if they find it; they fear government interference with benefits that they rely on for survival, and they are disappointed at the lack of positive changes the much-touted Welfare Reform Bill has brought.
In the face of what appear to be across-the-board rises in cases of serious depression, anxiety and other debilitating disorders, the response of our government in boom times has been to quietly shunt the sick onto a government poverty package and tell us to be grateful. However, as incapacity levels continue to rise, the DWP’s new Work to Welfare policy threatens to shunt us just as quickly back to the jobcentre, telling us that we’re scroungers who were actually making it up all along. This comes just as the little glut of crap menial jobs available before the stock market crash has disappeared. Nice timing, Purnell.
Many of the 40% of Britain’s 2 million IB claimants who are unable to work due to mental health difficulties already have a few problems with paranoia. But, as the noted social theorist Kurt Cobain observed, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not after you. Because when any major political party talks about moving people off Incapacity Benefit, when they talk about instituting a system of interviews to ‘weed out’ benefit ‘scroungers’, we know that they’re talking about the mentally ill – those whose disabilities and challenges are most difficult to see and to quantify, often the poorest and most vulnerable members of society who have since Thatcher’s day been the first in the firing like when budget cuts needed to be made. I am, indeed, talking about Care in the Community, the policy decision also known as 'chuck the nutter in the gutter'.
Yes, there are more people receiving IB now than there were a generation ago. No, this does not mean that all of the extra people are skivers who’d rather sit around watching Trisha and drinking milkshakes. The sweeping social change that has transformed society in the past fifty years has led to an increase in the numbers of those deemed unable to work due to mental illness for many reasons. Not only has society become more treacherous and unpredictable and the working world more stressful (especially in stonkingly pro-market, anti-worker countries which exempt themselves from working time directives) but more men and women are expected to hold down full-time jobs which are increasingly focused in the service, information and fourth-sector industries, meaning that it’s more important for these employees to be entirely mentally and emotionally on the ball. Simply put: as the labour market is changing and becoming more mentally and physically stressful, the mentally ill, whose care has been successively eroded by government after neoliberal government, are being left out in the cold.
Mental illness is perhaps the subtlest and most frightening of all forms of social difference, because of its invisibility, because of the difficulty in quantifying it, and because it is not a binary condition: you’re not either mad or sane, there’s a whole spectrum involved. But the hatred and fear that the mentally ill face on a daily basis, the lack of understanding shown to them by the welfare state and criminal justice system, and the fact that they are perpetually the first targets of punitive budget cuts, adds up to a sum of institutional bias which belongs in a previous century.
Just look at Mind's recent report on mental illness within parliament itself. Twenty-seven percent of MPs, Peers and their staff have personal experience of mental health difficulty, and one in three said work-based stigma and the expectation of a hostile reaction from the media and public prevented them from being open about mental health issues. This is a problem that touches everyone, and it isn't going to go away if we collectively stick our fingers in our ears and sing a little song.
Employment law is another area where the Disability Discrimination Act has so far failed to translate into action when it comes to the mentally ill. The argument goes something like this: it’s more risky and more costly for company x to hire person y if they suffer from a mental illness – after all, how is company x to know that that employee y won’t fall behind on their work, start slicing themselves up by the water-cooler or march into the office one day spraying slugs of hot lead death into co-workers and clients? Simple ignorance is the first obstacle to greater understanding here: in fact, the mentally ill are statistically less likely to perpetrate violent crime, and far more likely to become victims of it. But a subtler prejudice against minorities is inherent to the hypercapitalist machine – because yes, it is technically less costly for a firm to hire an individual who is entirely mentally well. By the same logic, it is also better business sense to hire someone who is neither physically disabled nor a female of childbearing age. Yes, these people represent a financial risk to the company; no, this doesn’t mean that discrimination is a logical and acceptable consequence of that risk.
What happens when companies are allowed to set their own hiring policies purely on the basis of business sense is that a large amount of the nation’s talent remains untapped, and swathes of people who need to be in work more than almost anybody become dependent on the state. Individuals suffer, and the entire economic community suffers. Anti-discrimination legislation and hiring standards are not only essential for the advancement of true equality; they advance free nations both spirituality and economically.
The market, by itself, cannot deliver health, happiness and universal suffrage by treating people as commodity inputs. This is why, especially in a period of social transition like this one when our ideals and our economic and technological mores so often clash, government intervention is one of the only logical temporary solutions.
It is not enough for the
It is also not enough just to whinge about current policy without suggesting viable alternatives. We’re not just holding jobs and having dinner: the point of progressive debate is to work out how to create the better world that we want our descendants to inherit. So, what would a world with fewer stigmas against the mentally ill look like?
It would be a world in which employers and businesses recognise that mental disability, like physical disability, does make it more of a challenge for an employee to carry out a job of work – and that those challenges can be surmounted with understanding and reasonable adjustments Fifty years ago, the idea of having ramps on public transport, in offices and public buildings in order to help the physically disabled participate in normal life would have sounded preposterous and wildly costly – now it is more or less accepted that the physically disabled have just as much drive to work and live as the rest of us, and should be aided in that goal. The same attitude needs to be applied across the board.
It would be a world in which flexible and part-time working is not only available but a respected and well-taken up practice required of all employers, in order to help the mentally disabled, the physically incapacitated and those with caring duties, including parents, to stay in appropriate work. It would be a world in which part-time work is supported by government benefits, allowing the hundreds of thousands of people with mental health difficulties who cannot cope with full-time work to participate more fully in the economic and cultural life of the nation.
It would be a world in which the many laudable grants, higher education places, work schemes and training projects set aside specifically for the physically disabled and other minorities are matched by similar schemes for the mentally and emotionally disadvantaged.
Last but not least, it would be a world in which, for as long as necessary, large businesses were obliged to take on a set quota of people with mental health difficulties – say one in eight, helping to reflect the one in four citizens who will experience mental health difficulty at some point in their life.
This is about socialism, but it isn’t just about socialism. It’s about creating a world that is fairer and more efficient, carrying every citizen with it. If the government really wants to leave no one behind – if it wants to move more of the mentally ill into rewarding, taxpaying work, rather than simply pare more fat from the already scrawny welfare state – we need to dare to dream of a society in which everyone can participate.
******
And with that, I'm going to go and excercise another of my dysfunctional coping mechanisms and have a little cigarette. I'd offer, but you wouldn't want one. It's fucking menthol *cackles*.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Gender fucked: what does 'healthy womanhood' look like?
Starting posts with ‘when I was in a mental institution’ is really something I try to avoid. Penny Red is not my personal headspace blog, and it’s not all about Me and My Mental Illness. [If you like that sort of thing, like me, then you should do what I do and read Seaneen Molloy’s fantastic site, mentally interesting.] Penny Red is about politics, and gender, and activism, and poetry, and feminism and freak power. But the personal is political, and sometimes, mental illness is about those things, too.When I was in a mental institution, a lot of otherwise well-meaning medical professionals conspired to screw up my gender identity pretty much permanently, for the best of reasons (they wanted to help me get better) and the worst (they believed that conforming to received ideas of ‘feminine’ behaviour was the best way for me to demonstrate a new, mentally healthy outlook). They were wrong. I am incredibly grateful for the inpatient treatment I received, which probably saved my life, but my political and personal feminism took a massive battering, and that’s less than entirely forgivable.
Give them their due, they tried. When I turned up, with my seventeen-year-old crew-cut, wild eyes and baggy hoodies, looking like the small scrawny one out of the Jonas Brothers and suffering from anxiety, depression BDD, self-harm and severe anorexia nervosa, their first assumption was that any young woman who wanted to look like a twelve-year-old boy must simply be a Secret Gay.
I am not a Secret Gay. I am an unsecret bisexual - about a 2 on the Kinsey Scale – I consider myself gender-weird and trans-curious, I enjoy wearing drag and I love, love, love the cock. I just love cock, I always have, I always will. I also find women attractive, but that’s not the whole story – in fact, that’s one of the few things in my life that I’ve felt uncomplicatedly comfortable with. My psychiatrist and some of the nurses tried to convince me otherwise, that if I could just come out of the closet I would magically start eating, stop having panic attacks, my family would accept me and all would be well.
Believe it or not, this represents a positive step for the psychiatric profession. They were prepared, within certain rigid limits, to accept non-heteronormativity as an alternative model for good mental health. At no point did anybody (apart from some of the other inmates) suggest to me that if I were a secret gay that would mean that I was somehow a pervert. And that would not have been the case a decade or so ago. It just so happened that they got it horribly wrong.
After months of my stolid defiance, they gave up and tried a different tactic. If I wasn’t Gay, it followed that I must therefore be Straight. If I was Straight, the only healthy option was for me to Accept My Womanhood. A lot of the received wisdom about anorexia is that it’s a method that young women turn to to escape the stresses of modern femininity. Anorexia, the logic goes, removes you from this struggle altogether because when you stop eating, when you cut down from 600 to 400 to 200 calories per day, your periods stop, your curves disappear and you return to an artificial pre-pubescent state. And young women behave like this because they’re scared and angry about the roles that they are being forced into.
Really? Do you think so? Well, gosh, I don’t see any way in which growing up female and Western in the 21st century could possibly be something to want to avoid. They must be mad, those girls.
Well, yes, we were mad. We were completely and utterly bonkers, mental, loopy, batshit insane – but there was a reason. Instead of analysing why we might be unwilling to go through the process of self-subsumation that represents the western journey into ‘womanhood’, the doctors prescribed a strict programme of feminisation for me. I was told in no uncertain terms to grow out my hair, throw away my old baggy black clothes, start wearing skirts, pretty shoes and make-up, sit with my knees together and be less ballsy and confrontational. The other women on my ward, with nothing to do all day, were only too happy to dress me up like a tiny mannequin, teaching me to paint my face and nails and lending me foofy dresses until I was allowed off the ward to buy my own.
Pretty soon, as a day patient, I was getting regular compliments from leery men on the tube about my nice pink low-cut tops and nice tights and nice impression of absolute submission. This represented progress, my doctors told me. Wolf-whistles were something I should be proud of. I was nearly at my target weight: the attention of men in public places, wanted or unwanted, was proof that I was nearly ready to return to normal society as a ‘proper grown-up lady’.
And the worst thing is that I believed it. Desperate and distressed, I was ready to accept that what the doctors told me was true – note that accepting and submitting to the doctor’s rules, however seemingly illogical, is officially an important part of the ‘journey to recovery’ for many psychiatric inpatients, at least in the all-female wards I’ve had the good fortune to visit. I got down on my knees, and I swallowed it all. I lost my feminism. I believed that in order to be truly well, I would have to behave like a ‘proper’ woman: no more demos, no more trousers, no more going out with short hair and no make-up, a boyfriend as soon as possible and certainly no bisexuality. Being a ‘proper’ woman meant fitting yourself out for sexual and physical attention, and that was all there was to it.
It took me years. Years and years of relapse after relapse to even countenance the notion that the part I was acting wasn’t truly myself. Years to get up the courage to cut my hair short again and stop wearing mini-skirts. I listened to ‘normal’ music (whatever was on Radio 1) instead of the shouty punk-rock, riot grrl and folk that I truly love. I stopped reading almost entirely, which was a pain seeing as I was studying literature at the time. I’m still not there yet. I still find it difficult to leave the house without make-up on, and not just because I have low self-esteem, but because a part of me still believes that ‘healthy’ women should look ‘pretty’ at all times. I still try to dress in ways that flatter my body; five years on, I still spend far too much time, money and mental energy ‘fussing’ over my appearance. I’m still nervous to truly express my politics in person, when I’m not with my friends or writing online. I still think I’m too fat, and have to stop myself reading the diet supplements in trashy magazines.
Conforming to feminine norms doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t make you a healthy person. Facebook has allowed me to make contact again with some of the hollowed-out husks of desperate, beautiful women I met in hospital, and most of them have now relapsed. Most are too thin, smiling desperately out of fragile, oddly-angled bodies wrapped in clothes they can’t afford and polished for hours with make-up they don’t need. In pictures, their boyfriends and parents hold them like precious ornaments that might snap if they cling on too tight. If that’s real womanhood, I don’t want any of it.
But conformity is safe. No matter how much time and effort you put in to making yourself acceptable and well-behaved, never doubt that it’s the easy option. I never feel more alive, or more free, than days like today when I stamp into work in big boots, a baggy black hoodie covered with slogans, a bobble hat and no make-up. But it takes courage. Courage to step outside the cosy cage of automatic approval and be your own, real person, without rules.
I respect those few, fabulous women for whom living without conforming to stereotypes seems to come effortlessly. Those angels who stride down the streets of London and Birmingham and Brighton apologising to no-one, fizzing with life and snug in their own skins. One day, I’d like to be one of them, and until that day I’m reading all the feminism I can get my hands on and meeting all the inspiring women
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Catastrophe Princesses and other mythical beasts..
Today, Tanya Gold in the Guardian has an interesting take on why so many young women are boozing, shagging around and otherwise checking into rehab wired on cocaine and existential terror: apparently it's celebrity magazines driving us, like so many jimmy-choo'ed lemmings, over the edge of sanity.
In this article, as has been smeared over the covers of every Metro and Reveal for the past twelve months, Britney Spears, Amy 'Wino' Winehouse and other Catastrophe Princesses are wheeled or stretchered out for our scrutiny, evidence of a 'burgeoning trend..of mental illness' amongst young women in the West.
Ms Gold is a high-acheiving woman from a 'nice' family, neither of which preclude her from being shockingly unhappy - I should know, I'm one too. Yes, Gold is in the process of kicking the booze: well done her. So all this sanctimonous twaddle about celebrity culture and size (ugh) zero can't just be an attempt to cash in on a personal sob-story by jumping on the celebrity bandwagon - can it?
Of course not. It's simple, really. The pressure of being a woman in a culture that demands more of you than you can possibly give, the impulse to lash out against the imperfect self, all of this could be solved if we simply switched off the telly and stopped buying Cosmo. After all, girls are so fragile and impressionable that their brittle little brains will break under more than a small amount of pressure to look like Victoria Beckham. Tanya Gold's article plays into the dominant celebrity fantasy of the zeitgeist: that women - especially successful women, and especially beautiful, successful young women - are not strong enough to cope with the pressures of modern living without having their heads confiscated and their children shaved and being stretchered off to Rehab like poor Britney Spears.
In some respects, of course, Gold may have a point. There have been many afternoons, in that black and bile-encrusted teatime of the soul, when I've come to on the carpet, my DMs full of vomit, with an HIV-positive transsexual schoolgirl from southend mopping up the bloodstains on my arms and legs with a copy of The Complete Nietzsche, when I've thought to myself, 'why can't I be more like Cheryl Cole?'
And yes, there have been times, practising Kuburi rope bondage on a rooftop in Haringay with otherwise well-behaved undergraduates from respectable homes, snorting Ketamine off the shrivelled genitals of today's misspent youth and screaming my latest psychotic break to the sky whilst listening to the music of My Chemical Romance, that I've wept for the latest puffball dress or bikini waxing treatment....
There have been nights, getting my nipples pierced by illegal immigrants in Soho, five fags clamped between my teeth, tripping my tits off on a ground-up-and-snorted copy of Heat magazine, that I've wished that I had the figure of Geri Halliwell or the address book of Jade Goody....
And often I've staggered home from binge-drinking in terrible pubs with my pinko commie bisexual friends, mainlining raspberry flirtinis and gang-raping local members of the landed middle-classes with copies of The Socialist Worker, only to bleed my expensively educated brains away in front of Big Brother 18: Stripper Slaughter Nightmare, and on waking to find the words 'what went wrong?' tattoed into my forearms with a blunt stanley knife, I've wondered...what went wrong?
Tell me something I don't know, Tanya, and tell it to me without anodine celebrity name-dropping. Tell me what it's like to be a young (or not so young) woman growing up in a world that wants too much of you.
We are infinitely more fucked up than you realise, and infinitely more in control than the trim-taglined world of 'grown-up' journalism can understand or countenance. We are not catastrophe princesses, fragile and beautiful, living in towers of stacked magazines and slimming guides, waiting to be rescued. You do us a disservice by reducing us to our drinking habits, our eating disorders, and any crushes on Russell Brand we may or may not entertain.
Young women in the West are not as delicate and broken as, perhaps, you would have us be. We may be in the gutter, but we're not just looking at the stars and longing for escape: we're wiping our lips and coming up punching.
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