Sexual Revolution by Laurie Penny: 'a voice of blazing fury'

Bloomsbury

Review by Vicky Allan

Lately, there has been a lot of outrage in the world of football over behaviour towards women. Most potent, here in Scotland, has been a wave of public fury following Raith Rovers’ decision to sign David Goodwillie, a striker who was found in a landmark civil case to have raped a woman. Raith Rovers superfan Val McDermid withdrew as shirt sponsor, board members resigned, the women’s team severed its ties.

At the same time, horror was triggered across social media, as images and audio were shared, posted by Manchester United player Mason Greenwood’s girlfriend, blood trickling from her lip, declaring: “To everyone who wants to know what Mason Greenwood actually does to me.” Greenwood, who was bailed following his arrest on suspicion of raping, assaulting and threatening a woman, has not been charged and the claims are under police investigation. Meanwhile his team has suspended him, Nike has put a pause on its sponsorship deal and Manchester United fans burnt Mason Greenwood shirts and tried to flog the striker’s memorabilia online.

All this was happening as I read Laurie Penny’s Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism And The Feminist Fightback, and I kept thinking of the book as I watched the news unfold. It’s a measure of the power of this examination of how sexual violence fits into the wider context of a patriarchal capitalism in which women are seen chiefly as bodies to be owned, used and controlled, that I couldn’t help but read these events through its prism.

The book is an overwhelming read, partly because this is a voice of blazing fury. These are the clear, ferocious words of a Millennial and resolutely intersectional feminist. Penny, who identifies by the pronoun “they” and self-describes as queer, puts a lot of themself to the book too, including their own experience of toxic relationships, eating disorder and rape by a much older man. But they also do this within “a story about the choice between feminism and fascism”, particularly the white supremacist fascism of the United States.

Often, the sheer horror of what the book was documenting made me feel hopeless. But there were glimmerings of hope, and some of what was happening in recent weeks in football enhanced that feeling.

A key theme in Penny’s book is the reminder that male violence against women is about more than individuals. Right now, in the news. we are following the stories of individuals – of David Goodwillie and Mason Greenwood – and often talking about the impact on these footballers’ lives. But the resounding response to David Goodwillie’s signing by Raith Rovers, is also part of a process of societal attitude-change, one that even after years of MeToo and decades of the feminist fight, still seems merely to inch along.

Teammates of Mason Greenwood at Manchester United, we learn, have been divided in their attitude, with some unfollowing him on Instagram and others condemning the way he has been “osctracised”. That word “ostracise” stood out for me, because Penny includes a key section on this as a method for producing behavioural change, when the legal system seems to be failing.

One of Penny’s arguments is that “creating real social and professional consequences for abusers and predators is the only thing that will bring about the change we need”.

“Ostracism is brutal,” they write. “It is often employed by groups who, for whatever reason, have found the laws of their culture and community inadequate to the task of tackling bad behaviour.”

It seems like a description of the reasons for, rather than an argument for, community justice and ostracising those who commit male sexual violence. Given the miscarriages of justice that occur within our legal system, community justice such as this seems a perilous route to take. But at the same time, I take Penny’s point. When a legal system seems to be failing, other options are often sought. When other routes don’t lead to change, this is what we’re left with.

Penny’s analysis of the different attitudes towards the youth and potential of girls and boys, of young women and young men, is acute. “A 21-year-old White boy,” Penny writes, “is still halfway a child in the world's eyes and deserves tolerance and the benefit of the doubt; a 21-year-old girl had better not make any mistakes, because she'll pay for every one of them down the decades.”

David Goodwillie, now 32, was 21 years old when he raped Denise Clair. Penny’s comment brings to mind how Goodwillie has in fact been playing for the past few years for Clyde, and how the team’s chairman Norris Innes defended signing him, saying, at the time, that they were “seeking to help someone when others want to punish him … there is no positive purpose or societal gain whatsoever to wish ill on him and allow his talents to stagnate and waste”.

What Penny does particularly well is connect up the dots of the many issues impacting on the lives of women and link them through to the attitudes of a patriarchal, racist and capitalist society founded on “male ownership of women’s bodies”. The author has a powerful turn of phrase. "When you ask a community to deal with its abusers, you ask it to deal with its own hypocrisy and complicity,” they write. “That's a deeply uncomfortable thing to ask.”

But for all its potent addressing of issues of race, the book could have reached further if it had extended its range of voices to include more from mothers, more from other generations of feminists, more even from the men it appears to be trying to address.

Sexual Revolution’s cover carries a quote from political commentator Paul Mason, describing the book as “a searing critique of male dominance, violence and supremacy … that guides us towards solutions that involve a hitherto discounted possibility: that men might change”. That quote made me feel I would like to offer it to my teenage football-loving son to read, and I will do. But I felt the attempt to reach out to men was swamped by Penny’s absolutely justified and righteous anger – and why wouldn’t it be? – and was left with a sense that taking the feminist fightback out into the world of men remains the unsolved challenge.

Nevertheless, the book contains many powerful and blistering arguments, including the reminder that what we are tackling is not just one sexual violence case but a whole culture. In that context, the reactions we’ve seen to Goodwillie’s signing bring me optimism – even as Penny’s Sexual Revolution provides an analysis of the scale of the problem and how far we have yet to go.