Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

because most women in the West are still tired, unfulfilled and unhappy. However much we shop, screw, starve, sweat and apply make-up to conceal the marks of weariness and unhappiness, however perfectly we submit, the astronomically vast majority of women will never win within the rules of the system as it stands. The capitalist vision of female physical perfection is a shallow grave of frigid signs and brutal rules, signifying only sterility and death. If we want to live, we need to remember the language of resistance.
     
    Only by remembering how to say ‘no’ will the women of the 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. ‘No’ is the most powerful word in a woman’s dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders and, quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good.
     
    If we want to be free, the women of the 21st century need to stop playing the game. We need to end our weary efforts to believe that our bodies are acceptable and begin to know, with a clear and brilliant certainty, that our persons are powerful.
     

References
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6. Elliott, C. and Schaffauser, T., “Sex Workers Are Not Criminals”, The Guardian, 8 March 2010
     
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9. Roberts, R., Sanders, T., Smith, D. and Myers, E. Participation in Sex Work: Students' Views. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 10(2), 145-156, 2010
     
10. Tucker, T., The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live, Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2006
     
11. Ryan, T., “Roots of Masculinity” in Metcalf, A. and Humphries, M. (eds.), The Sexuality of Men, Pluto, 1985
     
12. Raymond, J., The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, Teachers' College Press, 1979
     
13. Bindel, J., “The Operation That Can Ruin Your Life”, Standpoint, November 2009
     
14. Anders, C., “Mama Cash: Buying and Selling Genders” in Schalit, J. (ed). The Anti-Capitalism Reader: Imagining a Geography of Opposition, Akashic, 2002
     
15.  http://glbt.dc.gov/DC/GLBT/About+GLBT/Publications/ Biased+Crime+Report+Updated+Feb+2010
     
16. Serano, J., Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Seal Pres, 2007
     
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Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the
public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces -
both physical and cultural – are now either derelict or colonized
by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides,
cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of
multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers
that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive
stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by
the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a