TMI confessions Friday: I hate Laurie Penny
I do. I don’t normally hate things because I did a degree in war and found that generally, hate leads to genocide but in the least threatening way possible after that frontload, I really hate Laurie Penny. I’m not proud of myself. It’s 90% me and at least 7% people recommending her articles to me. Of the 90%, most is a sobbing inability to articulate myself politically anymore and an intense and lingering feeling of academic and moral failure. But… I have feelings. And I’m allowed to have them. Even if they’re unreasonable. Especially because they’re unreasonable, on the internet.
Some of it’s totemic. Laurie Penny is …fancy. I am also a little bit fancy these days but the days of …not-fanciness are not so long ago as to have slipped entirely from my mind. I don’t think that Laurie Penny has ever had to eat Morrison’s Value pasta and Morrison’s Value marmalade for breakfast before going off to her minimum wage job at a place that’s withholding her wages and is run by a sadist of the non-sexy variety. It’s probably unfortunate that the first article I read by her was a deeply misguided attempt to indict a piece of legislature that would require slum landlords to apply for planning permission before cramming a house full of bedsits. From my subterranean bedsit in Shepherds Bush, listening to the bent-tailed rats gambolling in the sewer beneath my window, eating the fourth bowl of marmalade and pasta of the day, I found it rather hard to believe that legislature that might mean my cash-only, threatening landlord had to treat me and the other 25 people living in what was originally a three-bedroom terrace like something approaching human beings, who were recorded (at least, our tenancies were) somewhere official and limited the number of these exploitative holes that could be created, putting pressure on councils to actually fucking do something about housing, rather than letting it be absorbed by quasi-legal sublets and scared, poverty-stricken tenants unable to reinforce their position (my ‘contract’ for my room had been a carbon-paper receipt written in pencil) was an aggressive move against young people. The thing that went through my brain was ‘yeah, if you call your dad he can stop it all,’ which wasn’t very kind but eating pasta and marmalade for a week gives you quite a lot of digestive trouble.
I sort of took the recession like a jackhammer to the face. I applied for 5,000 jobs over four years and was so desperate for work by 2010 I had to meekly accept an assignment as an £8.50 an hour temp at a public protection unit, dealing directly with some of the most officially dangerous sexual predators and violent criminals in London, two weeks after a jolly twelve hours locked in a secure forensics unit reporting being assaulted. This wasn’t really how I’d imagined things going, as a passionate teenage radical.
I wrote a lot when I was a student; it led to me getting some award nominations for Young Music Critic of the [X] and working for the BBC. I was a writer, I had a degree in International Relations, I studied the shit Laurie Penny sloganised and yet she had the New Statesman column. It wasn’t fair, to my stress-warped and pride-amputated brain of the time and a little bit of me that’s rather immature still thinks it’s not. I was into radical politics before it was cool to be into radical politics, dammit.
Which is where the part of it that is pure, bile-brined, embarassing-sobbing-occasionally jealousy comes in; Laurie is 25, which is the same age as me. I spent my teen years going totally fucking bananas and getting ostracised by my family in order to go and study International Relations at Aberystwyth. As it turned out, this wasn’t the best route to revolution but I’d certainly passed several tests of pain with regards to commitment to the cause. I spent the next three years studying genocide and sitting in seminars and lectures where I was often the only woman, developing a fierce and borderline-violent hatred of girls doing English BAs who would complain that all politicians were men. “Fuck this,’ I would mentally rail, ‘Dr Susan Powers, author of A Problem From Hell: America In The Age of Genocide is a woman. Professor Jenny Edkins, leading expert in Poststructuralism, is a woman. Professor Milja Kurki is a queer woman who’s an expert in critical theory. That’s not an exhaustive list, that’s what’s in my fucking bag and or seminar list today. You fucks sit there going ‘there’s no female experts in Economics/Politics’ because you cannot be bothered to fucking study them.”
Which wasn’t particularly fair of me and certainly not anything the academics above would endorse but it was hard not to react by violently screaming ‘NO, YOU TEACH YOUR GRAN TO SUCK EGGS’ at people when they suggested I could get into Laurie Penny. Especially when I lived in the aforementioned bedsit (the second of several) in Shepherds Bush, too miserable and poor to be able to write or indeed, afford the internet. I was plunging into a deep, dark long two years of the soul, at the end of a decade of mental bloodletting and I was so furious with myself it actually gave me a very small amount of re-motivation to get furious at her instead.
Some of it is just that I don’t want a totemic media representation of people my age at all and if I must have it, I don’t want it to be her. I’m a great big complicated, angry adult and I don’t romanticise my own youth nor the fucking terrible experiences of those younger than me. Or indeed older than me. I especially don’t do it just because of their gender. I never elected anyone as the gratuitously representative 25-year-old in Britain and I wish the media would stop pretending that somehow we all did just because lots of people in their 40s found her student protest riot reportage quite saucy.
The thing I hate most about Laurie Penny is in fact, nothing to do with her, obviously. It’s hating being misrepresented- I’m tough and angry but I also go to work and think being kind to people is an important form of activism. I don’t really give a shit about nice white lady problems (problematising books, even if they’re misogynist; problematically oppressive) and worry a lot about old people. The next 25-year-old may well have totally different views and radically different experiences and it’s so BORING that the media insist on picking up a “sample” of today’s yoof and announcing to the rest of us that this is, definitively, what we are about.
It’s all very well giving Laurie Penny a voice, to be Laurie Penny. That’s fine. I just don’t want to be told it’s my mouth speaking or receive scandalised reactions to the fact I disagree when obviously, as a feral urban youth with a lipring I must be bang into that to every letter. I want to be stroppy, dammit- I demand my right to throw all of my semi-youthful toys out of the pram at every opportunity and scream it’s not FAIR and how no one understands me.
And then I feel bad about myself. And that’s why I hate Laurie Penny.
