Laurie Penny

The feminist revolution and the digital revolution have grown up together, and are both incomplete. They pose fundamental, frightening questions about the nature and organisation of human society that are deeply scary to those in power, and in both cases, the backlash is on.

I began to write compulsively, in paper notebooks, because computers and smartphones were forbidden. I wrote late into the night and just for myself in a messy, spidery hand that I never showed to anyone, because it was purely mine. Years later when I saw the film Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s account of being treated in a women’s mental hospital in the 1960s, I was startled that the protagonist does the same, writing frantically in longhand like the pen is a shovel digging her out of the shallow grave of social mores where she’s been buried alive. I wonder if this is why many women write, because it allows us to breathe.

Perhaps one reason that women writers and technologists have, so far, the calmest and most comprehensive understanding of what surveillance technology really does to the human condition is that women grow up being watched. We grow up learning that someone is always looking at us and checking for misbehaviour, checking that our skirts are long enough, our thighs tight enough, our grades good enough, our voices soft enough. Whether or not anyone is actually watching and checking at any particular moment is less important than the fact that they might be, and if a lapse is observed the penalties will be dire.

That sense that someone’s peering over your shoulder, watching everything you do and say and think and choose? That feeling of being observed? It’s not a new facet of life in the 21st century. It’s what it feels like for a girl.

What’s it like to date, fuck and fall in love when half your social interactions are online? A rash of textbooks and self-help manuals written in a rush of moral panic by contemporary pop psychologists would suggest that it is uniformly abject and exploitative, particularly for young women.

Online and in real life (IRL), sex and gender still inhabit two separate worlds. One is a sanitised, sterilised, buttoned-down world of ‘professional’ conduct where we edit our extracurricular activities for the benefit of our employers and panic over our children being exposed to an accidentally flashed nipple. The other is a rabbit hole of hardcore heterosexual fucking that relies on its guilty, semi-legal status to disguise the fact that a depressing amount of its content is boring at best and violently misogynist at worst. It’s a curious, schizophrenic splitting of sexuality from surface in a culture that is supposed to be all surface. Sex, as ever, isn’t the problem. People’s inability to deal with sex in a way that is not violent, guilty and contemptuous of women and girls is the problem.

Asking for it. By daring to be visibly female in public life, we’re asking to be abused and harassed and frightened, and so is any person with the temerity to express herself whilst in possession of a pair of tits.

The fact that ‘attention seeking’ is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale. From the moment we can speak, young women are ordered not to do so.

Some people claim that the fight back against cybersexism is itself ‘censorship’. Some website owners claim that promoting and publicising sadistic misogyny is merely respecting the ‘freedom of speech’ of anyone with a lonely hard-on for sick rape fantasies. That sort of whinging isn’t just disingenuous, it’s terrifically offensive to anyone with any idea of what online censorship actually looks like.

I am used to writing for an audience that is responsive and engaged, to listening to constructive criticism and acknowledging it where it’s appropriate. There’s a world of difference, however, between the right to reply and the right to abuse, threaten and silence.