Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

any ancient slaveowning culture, is not to pay them.
     
    We could refuse to serve, of course. But anyone who has internalised even a solitary crumb of the post-industrial gender fetish knows that a woman’s power of refusal is circumscribed on every level. In the flesh trade of modern production, women’s labour hours, like our bodies, are common property. We all know that when a woman says no, she really means yes.
     

Conclusion
     
    The neoliberal repugnance for women’s bodies must be understood as a fundamental part of the strategies of work and capital that sustain global production. Individual women’s anxiety about keeping our own bodies under control is part of the same structure of oppression under whose auspices cultural, physical and sexual violence is done to the bodies of low-status women, poor women, migrant workers, transsexual women, sex workers and every other person living and working at the coalface of the so-called gender war.
     
    The recent revival in feminist sentiment across the West has so far failed to produce an adequate sense of political totality whereby a program for resistance to oppression might be developed. Such resistance is possible, but it will involve a sustained and serious attack on the social basis for control of women’s bodies: on work, on domestic labour, on political power and intimacy. This is not a small task, nor one that can be accomplished purely on the basis of individual sexual and physical empowerment.
     
    We cannot fuck our way to freedom. Sexuality alone, and heterosexuality in particular, is never enough to destabilise complex architectures of money and power. Without political agitation, sex can always be co-opted, calcifying gender revolution into another weary parade of saleable binary stereotypes.
     
    We cannot shop our way to freedom. Even if we eventually manage to buy enough shoes, enough makeup and enough confidence-boosting surgical butchery to justify our place in the labour exchange of female beauty, we will find ourselves marginalised by the very process of physical transformation that promised to liberate us.
     
    And we cannot fight the system on our own. Learning not to despise our own flesh is a political statement, and learning to eat and love and nurture ourselves a vital process for any woman wishing to engage positively with the world of power – but however hard we try to love our bodies, it won’t make us free. The personal is political, but as far as feminism is concerned, the political need not always collapse into the personal.
     
    Popular culture’s insistence on feminine erotic capital is a strategic part of the subsumption of women’s labour, and the solution is collective as well as individual. For women, the personal is political precisely because our bodies are a collective site of material production; it follows that if we want to re-enfranchise ourselves, we must collectively refuse to submit to capitalist body orthodoxy. There is nothing more terrifying to a society built on female purchasing power and unpaid labour than the notion that women might refuse to join the sell. Patriarchal capitalism can put up with a great deal of women’s chatter as long as we refrain from saying the one word nobody wants to hear from women: the word ‘no’.
     
    Contemporary pseudo-feminism is all about the power of yes. Yes, we want shoes, orgasms and menial office work. Yes, we want chocolate, snuggles and straight hair. Yes, we will do all the dirty little jobs nobody else wants to do, yes, we will mop and sweep and photocopy and do the shopping and plan the meals and organise the parties and wipe up all the shit and the dirt and grin and strip and perform and straighten our backs and smile and say yes, again yes, we will do it all. Yes, we will buy, more than anything we will buy what you tell us we need to buy to be acceptable. Yes, the word of submission, the word of coercion and capitulation. Yes, we will fuck you in gorgeous lingerie and yes, we will make you dinner afterwards. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
     
    Body orthodoxy is the base code for this language of coercion, fooling women into the belief that by aligning ourselves within the narrow coffin of acceptable female physicality, by taming our bodies, purchasing the commoditised signs of western femininity and performing our sexuality in the most frigid and alienated of ways, we can lead happy, fulfilling lives. This is manifestly a lie. We can tell that this is a lie,