Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism by Laurie Penny Page B

We need to confront our own hypocrisy and find equable, less exploitative solutions to the dichotomy of domestic dysfunction, before more harm is done.
     
Marginalised bodies, marginalised work
    Every nation relies for its very survival on its female citizens failing, day after day, year after year, generation after generation, to refuse to drudge for no reward. This should, in theory, give women great power, simply by the threat of refusing, one day, to serve.
     
    Female power of refusal is the single most scary, most horrifying, most insistently phobic thing facing any society, ever. Women could, in theory, refuse to cook and clean and care and keep society running. Women could refuse to fit themselves out in conformity with the patriarchal proclivity not just for staid, acceptable sex, but for social order. Women could refuse that vital work, the bearing of children and the raising of future generations, all of which are keyed in to the domestic gender war. Simply by doing nothing at all, women could bring every Western society to its knees tomorrow. That single fact is intolerably terrifying: women must be stopped at all costs from having that basic human right, the right to say no, the right to lay down our tools and pull on our skirts and say, stop. No more. I will not serve.
     
    The very easiest way to deny someone the basic human right of refusal is to deny their personhood and potential. And the easiest way to deny someone their personhood and potential, in contemporary society as in 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