all, than the body and the idea of the body?
Meat Market does not waste time apologising for feminism or explaining why feminism remains a vital strand of thinking almost a century after women began to enfranchise themselves in the battle for the vote. Other books, essays and activist groups have already begun this work in the past five years, charting the emergence of a new generation of feminist agitators across the Western world and beyond. In a spirit of respectful enquiry, Meat Market devotes space to examining some of the analytical stumbling blocks of contemporary feminist thought, including a certain poverty of materialist analysis that stifles action and closes down debate. In particular, the questions of sex work and of the status of transsexual women within the movement are raised in the hope that feminism will soon be able to move towards a greater understanding of political totality and of the practical bases of women’s oppression.
Meat Market is not a complete survey, nor one that exists in a vacuum. This book is a part of the new feminist movement, and it is indebted to the writing of bell hooks, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Nina Power and Naomi Wolf. Nobody has written about the marginalisation of Western women’s bodies more powerfully than Wolf, whose lyrical description of the “iron maiden”of body and beauty fascism imposed upon women across the world suffers only from a hesitancy to relate the tyranny of beauty and bodily control to wider issues of labour, power and work, and to question the material basis of the idea of western femininity.
It is not enough to locate women’s physical oppression in the sexual body, as many feminist thinkers have done. Sexual suppression, repression and oppression still occur, but they are only some of the strategies by which women’s bodies are culturally policed as sites of potential rebellion. By the late 20th century, the partial dislocation of reproduction and labour from sexual intercourse following the widespread acceptance of contraceptive methods in most parts of the West had meant that post-Fordist capitalist control of women’s gendered labour needed to be extended beyond the sexual and into the substantive, the nutritive and the semiotic architecture of gender and physicality itself.
Late capitalism quite literally brands the bodies of women. It sears its seal painfully into our flesh, cauterising growth and sterilising dissent. Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.
From the moment we become old enough to want to own ourselves, the corporate cast of womanhood is stamped into our subconscious, burnt into our brains, reminding us that we are cattle, that we are chattel, that we must strive for conformity, that we can never be free. Not everything begins with sex, but this book does.
1
An Anatomy of Modern Frigidity
Sex sells. That’s our justification for everything. The sex industry has become every industry
Ariel Levy
The sexual bodies of women are out of control. Look around: teenagers who should be drinking lashings of ginger beer and going on picnics are wearing thongs and listening to Lily Allen. Children delinquently rummage in each other’s pornographic pencil cases. Even babies are now born with the Playboy Bunny image tattooed onto their eyeballs. Their fault, the little tarts, for daring to look at the future.
Following the publication of Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs in 2006, Western society finally arrived at the conclusion that the type of sexuality sold to young women in the 21st century might well be neither positive nor empowering. ‘Raunch culture’, as the mileu of lads’ mags, go-go dancing and Girls Gone Wild has come to be known, is unquestionably a strategy of control.
Meat Market does not waste time apologising for feminism or explaining why feminism remains a vital strand of thinking almost a century after women began to enfranchise themselves in the battle for the vote. Other books, essays and activist groups have already begun this work in the past five years, charting the emergence of a new generation of feminist agitators across the Western world and beyond. In a spirit of respectful enquiry, Meat Market devotes space to examining some of the analytical stumbling blocks of contemporary feminist thought, including a certain poverty of materialist analysis that stifles action and closes down debate. In particular, the questions of sex work and of the status of transsexual women within the movement are raised in the hope that feminism will soon be able to move towards a greater understanding of political totality and of the practical bases of women’s oppression.
Meat Market is not a complete survey, nor one that exists in a vacuum. This book is a part of the new feminist movement, and it is indebted to the writing of bell hooks, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Nina Power and Naomi Wolf. Nobody has written about the marginalisation of Western women’s bodies more powerfully than Wolf, whose lyrical description of the “iron maiden”of body and beauty fascism imposed upon women across the world suffers only from a hesitancy to relate the tyranny of beauty and bodily control to wider issues of labour, power and work, and to question the material basis of the idea of western femininity.
It is not enough to locate women’s physical oppression in the sexual body, as many feminist thinkers have done. Sexual suppression, repression and oppression still occur, but they are only some of the strategies by which women’s bodies are culturally policed as sites of potential rebellion. By the late 20th century, the partial dislocation of reproduction and labour from sexual intercourse following the widespread acceptance of contraceptive methods in most parts of the West had meant that post-Fordist capitalist control of women’s gendered labour needed to be extended beyond the sexual and into the substantive, the nutritive and the semiotic architecture of gender and physicality itself.
Late capitalism quite literally brands the bodies of women. It sears its seal painfully into our flesh, cauterising growth and sterilising dissent. Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.
From the moment we become old enough to want to own ourselves, the corporate cast of womanhood is stamped into our subconscious, burnt into our brains, reminding us that we are cattle, that we are chattel, that we must strive for conformity, that we can never be free. Not everything begins with sex, but this book does.
1
An Anatomy of Modern Frigidity
Sex sells. That’s our justification for everything. The sex industry has become every industry
Ariel Levy
The sexual bodies of women are out of control. Look around: teenagers who should be drinking lashings of ginger beer and going on picnics are wearing thongs and listening to Lily Allen. Children delinquently rummage in each other’s pornographic pencil cases. Even babies are now born with the Playboy Bunny image tattooed onto their eyeballs. Their fault, the little tarts, for daring to look at the future.
Following the publication of Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs in 2006, Western society finally arrived at the conclusion that the type of sexuality sold to young women in the 21st century might well be neither positive nor empowering. ‘Raunch culture’, as the mileu of lads’ mags, go-go dancing and Girls Gone Wild has come to be known, is unquestionably a strategy of control.
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