In her first book, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, journalist and activist Laurie Penny argues that the commodification, sexual objectification and degradation of women’s bodies, is key to maintaining advanced capitalist societies.  If women said ‘No’ – no to pornification, no to dieting and eating disorders, and no to doing all the housework – late capitalist-patriarchal societies would collapse.  The latent power of organized women is aching to be tapped into.

In the first part of the interview, we discussed Penny’s views on sexualisation.  In this second part we look at the other issues in the book - eating disorders, transphobia and domestic labour.

In terms of class and food, 24% of women in the UK are obese, and there’s a correlation between low socio-economic status and obesity for women (and not for men).  How would that fit into your analysis that women are encouraged to take up less space?

I very much see, not just from a theoretical point of view, but from a clinical point of view, overeating and binge eating disorders as part of the same set of neuroses as eating disorders.  There’s no real psychological difference between an anorexic, somebody who is bulimic and somebody who overeats.  The same matrix of shame and self-loathing around food is in place.  Overeating is a different response to that.  It often comes out of periods of denying yourself food.  The important thing to say about binge eating disorder or an overeating disorder is that it’s not about self-indulgence and it’s not about wanting to be large and powerful and taking up more space.  It’s also about shame.

Not everyone who is morbidly obese or in any way obese has an eating disorder, that has to be stressed very, very clearly.  Just as not everyone who is underweight has an eating disorder.  People and women with eating disorders are of all shapes and sizes.  But the idea that women are encouraged to take up less space cuts across classes and across body shapes.  A woman who is a size 24 will be encouraged to take up less space even if she manages to drop down to a size 10.  It’s not about combating the disease of obesity, it’s not about combating overweight in society, it’s about something entirely different. 

I think that’s the key thing in that if you’re talking about obesity and you’re talking about eating disorders, the focus is always not on how healthy people are, not on how mentally robust people are, or how happy people are, the focus is on what size they are and how they look; and isn’t it disgusting that all these working class people are overweight and they’re so large they take up so much space.  Little Britain and League of Gentlemen would be two good examples of how this is used, because in all the horrible pastiches of working class women, they’re all overweight.  The men playing them have got padding on, the fact that they’re fat is considered part of that horrible drag act and a reason to mock working class women.

Isn’t an important part of the class analysis that people don’t have access to healthy food because to feed a whole family on a low budget you can’t buy fresh fruit and vegetables?  It’s about health as well, it’s not just about getting these women to take up less space.  It’s unjust that they don’t have access to a healthy lifestyle in the way middle class people would.

Of course I think that would be very different if you were talking to somebody from the NHS about what needs to be done to combat obesity amongst people who are living on lower incomes than if you were talking to, say a Daily Telegraph blogger about why they think that working class women are so fat.  Not everybody who has this stereotype in their heads thinks that the problem is that these women aren’t healthy, I think a lot of people think the problem is that these women are there at all. 

You argue there’s a problem with transphobia in the feminist movement, why do you think that is?

When I wrote this book a year ago and when I wrote the blog post that lead to that chapter a year and a half ago, there were huge debates taking place across the blogosphere about whether transsexual women should be allowed into women only spaces, whether transsexual people should be allowed on the reclaim the night march.  It seemed to me that this was needless, stupid infighting and was entirely misunderstanding the nature of gender. 

The arguments being made by people like Sheila Jeffreys, Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer was that there’s no such thing as transsexual women because transsexuality is a delusion whereby men think that they’re women because they want to enact certain stereotypes or live in a way that’s more appropriate to a woman’s social role and therefore they have to change their genitals, they have to change their gender in order to be allowed to perform this role.  That fits very neatly into a theory of how gender roles and stereotypes work.  Unfortunately it’s completely wrong.  Being a transsexual person is about, as I understand it - I’m not trying to speak for or on behalf of transsexual women here, I’m not transsexual - is simply about feeling that your gender is not the same as the gender of the body that you were born with.  And that is as challenging to gender roles as anything else.  The attacks on transgender people are often about the performance of gender roles and the idea that people are changing their genitals because they have to perform these gender roles, but usually it’s the other way round, people feel that they will not be accepted as their felt-gender, as the gender they are, if they don’t perform these gender roles.  You often find this coded into the medical establishment.  I wrote in the book that I have a friend whose doctor refused to see her and refused to give her hormones on one occasion because she turned up to an interview wearing trousers, so she wasn’t showing her commitment to being a woman. 

I think this demonstrates something very fundamental about the nature of women in society that if all that femininity is, is something you can buy off a shelf, and if you have to live in this horrific consumer sexually-performative universe in order to prove to people that you are a woman, then many women who are transsexual are just doing what other women are pressured into doing, being forced to prove their gender by buying stuff and performing a certain role, but people who are transsexual are not the only women whose femininity is attacked, all women experience it.  You see it whenever a feminist is called unfeminine, whenever a woman in a position of power is attacked for not being sexy enough.  An attack on someone’s gender capital, it’s important to underline, is not just something that just transwomen experience.

You say that women should stop doing domestic labour.  But what do you say to women who claim to enjoy it?

I think any kind of work can be enjoyable and I don’t think all women should stop doing domestic labour, unless you’re claiming there should be some kind of coordinated strike, in which case someone cleaning their own house could be seen as an act of scabbing and I couldn’t condone it, but until we reach the point where we have a coordinated strike of domestic labour, I don’t think it’s a terrible sin against feminism for somebody to enjoy doing the washing-up.  Domestic labour is very, very important and I’m not trying to argue in the chapter that domestic labour is awful, it’s horrible, nobody should have to do it.  I would like to see a world where housework and childcare and “undervalued” women’s work are seen as equally important and fulfilling and valuable as work that’s traditionally men’s work, but what I object to is a culture whereby women are morally obliged to do this work for no pay and no social reward.

But surely doing the housework is never going to be as fulfilling as say being a great artist or a doctor, so it’s not so much the sense that…

Do you think so?

Do you think cleaning the bathroom is as fulfilling…

Well maybe not cleaning the bathroom, but I think the idea that raising a family will never be as important or as valuable to society as being a surgeon is something that needs unpacking.  If you’re a surgeon you save lives, if you’re a fulltime single parent, for example, you create lives, you create a human being.  The work of a surgeon ultimately is going into the ground as much as the work of a single parent.  So I don’t know that saying one is more fulfilling than the other necessarily holds true.  But I think a reason why a lot of women find it unfulfilling is the fact that it is unpaid, that it’s undervalued, that it’s expected that it’s just something that you do because you’re a good person or because you’re trying to be a good mother, and because it’s very lonely work.  Women don’t talk about it.  Women are isolated within their own homes doing this work.

I definitely agree that raising a family is a fulfilling thing to do and is undervalued…

For some people.

Yes for some people, but the domestic chores - keeping a house clean and doing the cooking and cleaning - I think it would be hard to argue that that’s as fulfilling as other pursuits because of the repetitive nature of it, because it never ends.  There’s always another meal to make, there’s always another room to clean, and as much as it might be satisfying to see a nice clean kitchen, within a day or two it’s a mess again.

I think it’s a question of social reward.  Something I didn’t mention in the book is how “women’s work” is seen as very low social value and people who do it are of very low social status.  You talk about “dinner ladies” or “household cleaners” or people who make clothes, the majority of whom are women.  But the people who are at the very top level, the people doing these jobs, all the celebrity chefs, most of them are men, all of the celebrity fashion designers, most of them are men, and so it definitely works both ways.  If a job is generally done by men, the more men do it, the higher social status it is, but also at the higher end of any activity you’ll get more men doing it and more men being rewarded for doing it. 

But if you do want to make the argument that it’s fulfilling, one thing you did say in the book, you critiqued the bourgeois middle-class women who do little classes in cooking or cup-cake making.  If you think on the one hand that that can be fulfilling, why then critique them for doing that?

Oh it can be fulfilling.  I was just trying to respond to your question.  What I am trying to argue in the book and I think the more important argument to make is that, for a lot of people housework is shit and raising kids is not fun.  I think the raising kids aspect of it is even more important because some people are happy to come out and say “oh god I hate doing chores”.  Women are very wary of saying “oh god I hate doing the school run, I hate taking the kids to the doctors”.  Childcare in particular is seen as something women have to do and they are bad people if they complain about doing it.  They’re bad people for complaining about having to keep their house clean. And the idea of that kind of work being not work you should do for free and not work you should be obliged to do at all if you don’t want to is terribly transgressive, but I think that it’s something that’s very, very deeply felt.

Keeping a house clean and keeping a family fed and clean and having good clothes is a fulltime job.  It’s not seen as labour, it’s not valued as labour and if it is valued as labour that is deeply threatening to current forms of capital because, taken to its logical extent, it requires an extra let’s say 30 million people in this country alone to be paid a wage, which is a huge demand.  It requires people to find, I saw an estimate that the value in the UK was about 63/64 billion a year of women’s unpaid labour.  Taken to its logical extent the argument requires us to find that money within the economy to pay those women and I don’t see that happening without a big fight.

Getting back to the middle class girls that make cupcakes, is the problem with that that they’re mocking the fact that it’s actual labour, that working class women have to do.  What is the problem?

Partly but it’s also the horrible sense that it’s all ironic now and that feminism is fixed and somehow that we can all be having tongues firmly in cheek and making our little cupcakes and it’s all fine, and it’s kind of this weird retro domesticity and it’s not in any way regressive, but feminism is all fixed and we’re the freest we can possibly be, and that’s why I find it offensive.  Because there are some women who do have to cook everyday and it’s not a luxury or a hobby for them, it’s just a practical necessity of life, putting food on the table.  Treating little baking classes as ironic retro sexism, wearing frilly aprons and 50s circle skirts and baking little cakes… I don’t think we’re yet in a place where that is at all ironic.