Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism
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Laurie Penny hones her every phrase to a razor's edge. She is absolutely surgical in her anatomising of a mad world. MEAT MARKET is the kind of cut you learn from. (Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, RED)
About the Author
Laurie Penny is a 23-year old journalist, blogger, feminist activist and reprobate from London with a deep loathing for unexamined orthodoxies. She writes the popular blog Penny Red http://pennyred.blogspot.com and lives in London UK.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
By DFG
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a good first-time publication by a new young feminist writer. It could have been much better if she waited to publish it until she had fleshed out (no pun intended) some of her ideas. As it stands, it really reads like a series of unconnected essays which she has tried, not entirely successfully, to link together under a unifying theme of "female flesh under capitalism". She simply hasn't connected all the dots here and at some points you get the sense of a half-finished book.
Her discussion of sex work is particularly frustrating in its underdevelopment. Like many Marx-influenced feminists, she is clearly uncomfortable with the principle of women selling sexual services but believes that those who do so must be decriminalised and protected under labour law. Unfortunately, that's about the extent of her analysis, and there is nothing new in it. The shallowness of her approach to the subject is exemplified by her treatment of those sex workers at the higher end of the scale, whom she first dismisses as bourgeois and irrelevant to the majority of "prostituted women" (a phrase that always makes me cringe, with its agency-denial - which, in another chapter, she is anxious to reject!) and then tries to suggest that even they are, ultimately, victims of capitalism too (after all, why else would a PhD student go into sex work?) In fact, an increasing amount of research shows that the Belle du Jours are not as exceptional in the sex industry as Penny suggests, and many of them in fact see their work as a means of reasserting control over their bodies and their sexuality - but there is no room for this idea in Penny's simplistic analysis, nor indeed for any consideration of the variety of reasons men seek the services of sex workers (some of which would quite starkly contradict her portrayal of prostitution as merely the extreme end of the market for female flesh).
She also gives the wrong impression that abolitionist feminists tend to agree with sex worker activists on the proper legal approach to sex work. Most abolitionists support the Swedish model of decriminalising the seller and criminalising the buyer, while sex worker activists strongly oppose this model because it has proved extremely dangerous to sex workers. In Canada, abolitionist feminists have given court testimony in defence of laws that have the effect of criminalising sex workers.
However, my frustration at this section of the book is largely compensated for by the important chapter on trans women, which sets out clearly and succinctly why the transphobic attitudes of radical feminists like Julie Bindel and Janice Raymond must be rejected. This is an issue that I suspect few cis women have given much thought to and its importance will become apparent in the very near future as the struggle for trans rights becomes more prominent. For this chapter alone I am giving the book four stars, even though overall I think it merits only three.
In general, the fundamentals of her analysis are sound, and she has some really excellent ideas that are more than worth sharing with the world. Hopefully, for the next book, she'll spend a little more time thinking them through before publishing.
Her discussion of sex work is particularly frustrating in its underdevelopment. Like many Marx-influenced feminists, she is clearly uncomfortable with the principle of women selling sexual services but believes that those who do so must be decriminalised and protected under labour law. Unfortunately, that's about the extent of her analysis, and there is nothing new in it. The shallowness of her approach to the subject is exemplified by her treatment of those sex workers at the higher end of the scale, whom she first dismisses as bourgeois and irrelevant to the majority of "prostituted women" (a phrase that always makes me cringe, with its agency-denial - which, in another chapter, she is anxious to reject!) and then tries to suggest that even they are, ultimately, victims of capitalism too (after all, why else would a PhD student go into sex work?) In fact, an increasing amount of research shows that the Belle du Jours are not as exceptional in the sex industry as Penny suggests, and many of them in fact see their work as a means of reasserting control over their bodies and their sexuality - but there is no room for this idea in Penny's simplistic analysis, nor indeed for any consideration of the variety of reasons men seek the services of sex workers (some of which would quite starkly contradict her portrayal of prostitution as merely the extreme end of the market for female flesh).
She also gives the wrong impression that abolitionist feminists tend to agree with sex worker activists on the proper legal approach to sex work. Most abolitionists support the Swedish model of decriminalising the seller and criminalising the buyer, while sex worker activists strongly oppose this model because it has proved extremely dangerous to sex workers. In Canada, abolitionist feminists have given court testimony in defence of laws that have the effect of criminalising sex workers.
However, my frustration at this section of the book is largely compensated for by the important chapter on trans women, which sets out clearly and succinctly why the transphobic attitudes of radical feminists like Julie Bindel and Janice Raymond must be rejected. This is an issue that I suspect few cis women have given much thought to and its importance will become apparent in the very near future as the struggle for trans rights becomes more prominent. For this chapter alone I am giving the book four stars, even though overall I think it merits only three.
In general, the fundamentals of her analysis are sound, and she has some really excellent ideas that are more than worth sharing with the world. Hopefully, for the next book, she'll spend a little more time thinking them through before publishing.
