Unspeakable Things: 5+1 syytä rakastaa Laurie Pennyä
Minulla on uusi idoli: kolumnisti-kirjailija-feministi Laurie Penny. Penny on nuori, teräväkielinen ja tulistunut nainen, joka kirjoittaa seksismistä, sukupuolesta, internetistä, politiikasta, ja vallankumouksesta – siis sanalla sanoen juuri sellainen tyyppi, joka tahtoisin itse olla ja/tai jonka paras kaveri tahtoisin olla. Pennyn uusin teos, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution suunnilleen räjäytti pääni.
Olen jo reilun viikon ajan raapinut sitä räjäytettyä päätäni ja koettanut keksiä tapaa kirjoittaa kirjasta jonkinlaisella kattavalla ja tyhjentävällä tavalla, mutta taitavan sanankäyttäjän tekstin äärellä omat lauseet tuntuvat hetkittäin kuivuvan kokoon. Niinpä päätin, että en referoi Pennyn ajatuksia omalla kömpelömmällä kielelläni, vaan annan teille maistiaiset suoraan kirjan sivuilta.
1. Sukupuolesta:
“Gender is a straitjacket for the human soul.”
2. Sen Oikean konseptista:
“[T]he relatively recent cultural narrative of The One – the idea that everyone has a soulmate whom they are destined to love fro ever, and that your life will always be incomplete if you fail to meet, mate and move in with that person – that’s not just implausible, it’s cruel. It implies that those who do not find their One will somehow never be complete, that those who divorce, who live and raise children alone, or who find alternative arrangements for happiness, have somehow failed as human beings. To my mind, that’s a decidedly unromantic idea.”
3. Niinsanotuista miesoikeusaktivisteista:
“The great obstacle for women’s progress is not men’s hate, but their fear. The ’Men’s Rights Activists’ who organise to drown out and silence women on the Internet are usually fearful, lonely creatures who are desperare to speak about gender, but only able to do so as a way of shutting women down. That expression comes from a profoundly childish place, a posture which is as fascistic in its policing of gender roles as a playground bully, and which uses words like ’Feminazi’ with apparent seriousness. Because fighting for equality was what the Nazis were really known for.
It is as if by talking about the hurt women experience, often because we are women, we are somehow preventing men from speaking about the painful pressures of masculinity. Interestingly, for many men, the only time they do feel able to talk about their own suffering is when tey are trying to stop women talking about theirs. In every other context, men and boys are discouraged from talking about their pain. Thinking in a new way about sex, gender and power – call it feminism or ’masculism’ or whatever the hell you like as long as you do it – can help men to process that pain. But it’s far easier to just blame women.”
4. Maskuliinisuudesta ja miesten roolista:
”Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing ever human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression. For the first time, men and boys as a whole are starting to realise how profoundly messed up masculinity is – and to ask how they might make it different.
Masculinity matters to politics, and men matter to feminism. Their violence matters, and so does their fear – collective, articulated terror that, as society seems increasingly stacked against individual men, terror that they might lose even the scraps of privilege propping up their collapsing self-worth.”
5. Heteroseksistä, -romantiikasta ja ystävyydestä yli sukupuolirajojen
“Social heterosexuality has been allowed to remain a process of mutual dehumanisation. Hence the ongoing debate over whether men and women can ’really’ be friends with each other ’without sex getting in the way’. The truly telling part of this perennial non-controversy is nto just that it is entertained as a serious prospect, but that sexuality is assumed to destroy any possibility of friendship. Thus, any person who you might want to see naked is on fundamentally hostile territory, to be conquered rather than understood.”
+1. Feminismistä:
“I’m not here to tell you how to be a feminist, or whether you should be one at all. I call myself a feminist to fuck with people, and because it’s a great way to weed out the creeps in bars, but feminism isn’t an identity. Feminism is a process. Call yourself what you like. The important thing is what you fight for. Begin it now.”
Älkää edes väittäkö, ettettekö juuri rakastuneet tähän tyyppiin!
Minä olen kirjan luettuani hankkinut koko Pennyn aiemman tuotannon ja aion vakaasti myös antaa tämän kirjan joululahjaksi kaikille kavereilleni. (Ihan vain tiedoksenne, frendit.) Jos sinäkään et saa näin tiukasta setistä tarpeeksesi, kirjasta voi lukea lisää esimerkiksi tästä Bustlen jutusta, ja lisää Laurieta löytyy myös mm. Twitteristä sekä The Guardian- ja New Statesman -lehdistä.