I’ve never watched the film Love Actually all the way through and don’t suppose I ever will. Most of what I know I learned from Lindy West’s brilliantly silly, utterly furious Jezebel piece from 2013: ‘I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You’.
In addition to eviscerating what sounds like a truly terrible film (“This entire movie is just straight white men acting upon women they think they ‘deserve.’ This entire movie is just men doing things”), West’s piece is a classic example of early 2010s blog feminism. This was an exciting moment for feminism – unless you were a radical feminist with a serious theory of patriarchy and a healthy scepticism for REVOLUTION VIA ALL CAPS. But I wasn’t, so I rather enjoyed it for a bit. In March 2012, when my eldest children were small, I started my own ‘feminist mummy blog’ and joined Twitter, where I shared my rants with like-minded angry women. Fun times!
My now-defunct blog was called Glosswatch, on the basis that many of my targets were glossy magazines (this is also why my twitter/X handle is Glosswitch. Look, it seemed a good idea at the time). In my defence, many very successful sites – the aforementioned Jezebel, Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet’s the Vagenda – were also taking aim at mainstream popular culture: Blurred Lines, Beach Ready Body ads, ‘woman laughing while eating salad’ stock photos. Yes, it all seemed pretty obvious, but that didn’t make it any less fun, or less impressive when – as in West’s case – the critique combined humour and rage in just the right measures.
The feminist argument made in many of the articles arising from this period tended to be the same. This cultural item claims to be selling women romance / empowerment / self-expression / sexual liberation, but look! This is bollocks! It’s actually telling you to be thinner / more compliant / more sexually subservient AND thinking you’re too stupid to notice! Fuck that! It was a very satisfying argument to make, partly because it was so clearly correct, but also because it was relatively safe. It wasn’t like attacking hardcore porn or the sex trade or anything else that might appeal to the nice, ‘progressive’ man with whom you shared a desk, a seminar or a friendship group. If you took this feminism to its logical conclusion, you would end up attacking these things, too, but many of its proponents didn’t. This became a problem – both for those of us who did start to say the quiet part out loud, and for those who set about trying to make hating on Page Three ideologically consistent with defending gang rape videos in order not to ‘kink shame’.
Where is blog feminism now? It is one thing – and a good thing – to attack the appropriation of feminist narratives of liberation in order to tell women what to do. But what if you end up constructing a ‘feminist’ narrative which is so inconsistent – so incoherent – it makes the work of appropriation entirely unnecessary? What if you end up doing the work of the appropriator all by yourself?
I thought this when reading West’s recent interview on her relationship with her husband and his girlfriend, a relationship to which she has adapted not least due to the deployment of certain ‘progressive’ dictums (hating on polyamory is conservative, and maybe even a bit racist! No one else should make assumptions about your agency!). These remind me of very tricks women’s glossies have always used (it’s not a diet, it’s a detox! It’s not a coercive relationship, it’s a fluid, queer polycule!).
The thing is, you know what’s being done to you. You’re not stupid. You might still go on a diet and tell yourself it’s a detox because you can’t will a world in which you’re not judged for your body size into existence and calling it a diet feels more humiliating, but still – you know. You might find it less painful to insist your desire just happens to match that of your cheating partner than to be alone, but still – you know. I understand how these things happen. But is it the job of feminism – or a writer who claims to hold feminist views – to endorse self-deception? Are we even allowed to call it that now?
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In Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman, Tabitha Kenlon includes women’s magazines and self-help guides as modern-day iterations of conduct manuals, books which, from the fourteenth century onwards “provided printed details about what the ideal woman should and should not do”. As with fairy tales, the kind of stories and examples they offer can be read as straightforwardly sexist – “they always state quite plainly that their purpose is to tell women what to do” – but they also serve a practical function. They tell women and girls about the world as it is, and how they need to shape themselves to fit in it, not comfortably, but as comfortably as possible. The lesson is not in liberation, but in adaptation – how to live as successfully as possible within the current confines. If you push it further, it becomes how to convince yourself that even if you were totally free, you would choose your situation all over again. It’s your nature, or your desire, or your sheer good fortune just to be the kind of woman who wants what a woman in your position is meant to want. Like realising you want nothing better than to live the tradwife dream. Or falling in love with the woman your husband is already shagging anyways.
In the aftermath of second-wave feminism, glossy magazines switched their messaging without changing many of the underlying expectations made of their readers. It is true that some of the causes championed by the glossies were feminist – reproductive rights, workplace equality, an end to (some) sexual harassment And it would have been unrealistic to expect them to come right out and say “bad luck, ladies! You won on the equal pay bit – at least in a superficial, in principle if not in practice way – but lost out when it comes to tackling hardcore porn and female body ideals! Here are some tips to help you adapt to the misery!” Instead they worked hard at telling readers that, in the name of empowerment and choice, they were finally being ‘allowed’ to want all the crap that was coming their way regardless.
Early blog feminism excelled at pointing out what a total swizz this was. Yet something similar happened within that same feminism. If Glamour and Cosmopolitan repackaged diet and beauty industry misogyny as wellness and self-expression, then blog feminism – particularly the US version – repackaged male sexual entitlement as sexual freedom and gender non-conformity. It provided cover for ‘progressive’ misogyny by creating narratives to facilitate adaptation. The thought-terminating clichés that came for this feminism – sex work is work, trans women are women – essentially boil down to “male desire must be prioritised at all times”. But it is possible to misrepresent them as messages about the rejection of gender norms. Even if the tiniest moment’s thought would reveal this as nonsensical, the point isn’t to make women ask questions. It’s to offer them a way to justify not doing so.
West insists that it is a coincidence that she, too, fell in love with the woman her husband started sleeping with behind her back. It is not impossible, I guess. Maybe it’s coincidence that it looks so much like the language of liberation being used to justify the age-old process of female adaptation to male desire. Good job you wanted it anyways! Good job male demands – the demands of the males you like, anyways, the males on your ‘side’ – can always be accommodated as long as their female counterparts are willing to educate themselves!
It’s always possible to tell yourself you wanted it. It’s possible when it comes to the very worst things, things even worse than having a shit husband. What I don’t think is possible, though, is a world in which female desire is fully realised without ever treading on the toes of male desire. ‘Conservatism’ and ‘gender norms’ are not the only things standing in the way of a male sexual utopia. There’s also the fact that female desires, when fully respected, don’t magically shape themselves to accommodate male ones. They exist in their own right.
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If Lindy West’s current situation had been depicted in Love Actually, what would she have written about it? Or would the West who wrote Adult Braces even be able to write a similar article today? Who is Lindy West to know what the silent women of Love Actually want? “IT NEVER FUCKING MATTERS WHAT WOMEN SAY,” writes West. Well, MAYBE THEY DON’T WANT IT TO MATTER. Who are you to say they’re not happy with things just the way they are?
“Women’s obedience,” writes Kenlon with regard to old-style conduct manuals, “is prized more highly than men’s decency.” But as long as we don’t view it as obedience, that’s okay.
Who are we to question anything at all?
I was just thinking in the aftermath of the Lindy West story how many of the "blog feminists" of the time (Amanda Marcotte, etc.) were neatly kneecapped in any effectiveness they may have had by trans activism and the "feminism is for everyone" thing.