Taboo, p.2
Taboo, page 2
Shame is a lie I tell myself, one I believe. That I am bad. That I am unworthy of love. That a thought or a behaviour or a belief or an action makes me fundamentally wrong. When we fail to challenge these beliefs, we submit to a rulebook written for us but not for our benefit.
Writing this book, I hope, will allow me to invalidate the lies I have believed about my body, my relationships and my work to date. I hope that you too identify the narratives you tell the world each and every day and begin rewriting them as needed. I want to explore what the world could be like for women if we didn’t feel smothered by the hand of patriarchy – if we were not so worn down by opposition that we became agreeable and began to believe in our own inferiority.
What I’m describing is exhausting: fighting the language and the shame and the undermining at every turn. A taboo is, in many ways, a failed connection. It is rejecting a bid for conversation because of discomfort. Every time you say how you feel, you are dismantling a stigma that’s working to dehumanise you. I’m inviting you instead to sit in discomfort and consider the small ways we, as women, have allowed ourselves to be shamed out of joy and honesty. Because we are the taboo. Our experience is what is being regulated. According to patriarchy, stating the problem makes you the problem. I have built a career from explaining to people how the media utilises language to distort our understanding of politics, law and power. But how has the language of womanhood, and the absence of it, defined and slowed the fight for equality?
X
I am exhausted by women’s secrecy around our bodily functions, yet I remain so ashamed of so many parts of myself. Knowing something intellectually does not equate to being emotionally able to process it. I still have an eating disorder. I remain uncomfortable talking about money and am still struggling to value myself outside work. I am tired of being called ‘antimen’ for telling women they deserve better than a boyfriend who cannot find the bread in the pantry or make a booking for a date but expects a blowjob every second day. I want to know why it’s acceptable that my uncle wished my partner luck and informed him I was ‘a big handful’ the first time they met. I will probe my grandfather for asking me if I’m having children, but not checking whether it’s in my brother’s plans. Pornography taught me how to scream, how to fake an orgasm but not how to ask for consent, use protection or experience pleasure. I feel more shame for responding ‘That’s not okay,’ at the dinner table than my family member does for saying women accusing men of rape just ‘regret’ sex the day after.
But we know it isn’t just men. Just as often it is women who have made me feel small. It is me who has beaten me down most. I wonder how many experiences of their own shame, silencing, objectification and belittling it takes for women to turn on each other. At what point did it become easier for some mothers and grandmothers and aunties and colleagues to decide, consciously or not, to help patriarchy flatten our womanhood, instead of leaning further into it? How would I feel about myself, my body and my brain if the world valued women? What would my life look like if the world was able to hold space for women’s experiences and worked to accommodate instead of control them?
The existence of taboos has allowed language to control us. Words are a powerful stimulus: they can increase our tolerance for discomfort or create a nuclear explosion at a house party. Taboos have silenced women’s experiences, stories and knowledge-sharing. This book explores some of the experiences I’ve had that I believed at the time were entirely my own. I have been terrified that they made me less of a woman, a failed feminist and alone in my body and mind. By sharing them, I rid them of the power to isolate me.
Is sex taboo? Because presidents have no trouble boasting about grabbing women by the pussy. Men are more than happy to discuss their body counts, to talk about fucking and nailing and banging and finishing. Taboo enters the chat when clitoral stimulation, strap-ons, scissoring, period sex and vibrators do.
Money, I’ll argue, isn’t actually taboo, either. When we say money is an ‘off-limits’ subject, we are not expecting male entrepreneurs to feel uncomfortable dishing their salaries, their investment portfolios or mansplaining how the economy works. Male wealth is allowed to be aspirational. Women should thrive in silence, because our ‘nice things’ are considered frivolous and unnecessary. We are not allowed to earn large amounts of money, which threatens men who believe they are meant to be the ‘breadwinners’. Nor are we to have money and be visibly wealthy, or to ask for more of it confidently in professional settings (that’s before we even touch on cascading taboos, like the experience of women negotiating child support with men).
Is religion taboo? Or is institutional child sexual abuse committed by male clergy a concealed epidemic? Are we uncomfortable with death? Or are we a patriarchal society lacking the emotional intelligence and mental-health infrastructure to help people communicate and process their grief?
These are just some of the conversations we rarely have, and which I believe we must approach now. And yes, a twenty-five-year-old writing a book about navigating modern womanhood sounds unexpected. But is it ridiculous that a young person would have things to say about a wellness culture that has tried to convince her she feels bad all the time because she has high cortisol levels, not because the world around her is burning? Is it absurd that a young woman who has amassed a following of more than 130,000 people would be confident enough to explore conversations around bodies, dating culture and the future of women’s labour? Could it be just a fantasy that people would want to buy a book whose author does not claim to have the answers but wants to provoke the questions we are not asking about motherhood, contraception, ‘having it all’ and female friendship? I have never had the solutions, but I have the stark naivety – scratch that – bravery to start the conversations no one feels ready to have.
I do not feel equipped to talk about the decision to become a parent, and I have no clue what going through menopause is like. I am not pretending to know, but there’s a reason I do not. While our conversational capacity around women’s health and reproductive experiences has grown significantly, patriarchy still does not want us to access this information at an early age, if ever. Many women continue to suffer in silence, to minimise their pain and to seek information only once they are in the throes of pregnancy, menopause, infertility, polycystic ovary syndrome and more. Women’s health is not an area of proactive education, but of post-diagnosis confusion and obsession.
As a generation Z woman, the world often tells me what I am before I am able to define it myself. It is a tale as old as time. Radical. Different. Unappreciative. Too woke. Subversive. These words splinter us from other women not only through the Murdoch media, but in conversations I’ve had with millennial, generation X and baby boomer people in my life. In all likelihood, the women reading this who are not part of my demographic will have made assumptions and applied stereotypes to us, as we have to them. The headlines and social media trends categorising me and my fellow gen Zs are designed to ostracise and alienate us from the experiences of those before, to ensure the waves of feminism never feel capable of crashing together to shore. While my experiences are innately my own, I hope to offer perspectives that have the energy and the potential to branch into new territory of questions, privileges and niches that still remain somewhat uncharted, a future that has been supported by the women who came before us.
You may not agree with me, but I’ll try my best to show you how I’ve ended up on the path I currently walk. If you wince at my age, if you cringe at my thought processes and judgements with the insight of being further into your life than me – I understand. But I want to ask why things had to be so hard for you. I want to ask on behalf of my generation how we ensure that does not continue. Sometimes, naivety is a key ingredient of change. My lack of understanding says: that does not make sense. It shouldn’t have been that way for you, and I do not want it to be that way for me. I shouldn’t have to ‘tolerate’ or ‘endure’ sex with my partner. I do not need to spend in excess of $50,000 on a wedding to ‘legitimise’ my relationship. Why is having children the default? And are we capable of talking openly and honestly about the roads we regret not taking?
I hope this book is one giant fucking problem for men, for patriarchy and for the continued existence of taboos. I want you to be more difficult, more inconvenient and more uncomfortable than before you read it. I want you to challenge the status quo and break the uncomfortable silence you’ve been sitting in. In a review of Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar feminist film, Barbie, Dr Simon Longstaff narrows in on the central message of the film that so many missed:
How many of us consciously embrace our humanity – and all of the implications of doing so? How many of us wonder about what it takes to become fully human? Gerwig implies that far fewer of us do so than we might hope … Instead, too many of us live the life of the dolls – no matter what world we live in. We are content to exist within the confines of a box; to not think or feel too deeply, to not have our lives become more complicated as when happens when the rules and conventions – the morality – of the crowd is called into question by our own wondering.
In this book I’m not shaming women or hating men: I’m asking you to explore what could exist if we fight to step outside of the box’s confines. I do not want to be prescriptive: I want to invite wonder.
It is taboo for women to say we do not want to have casual sex. It is taboo to enjoy casual sex without strings or emotions. It is taboo to exist in your body comfortably, without positive or negative feelings about it. It is taboo to choose something for yourself without consulting, seeking advice from or considering others. It is taboo to succeed. To choose not to have children. To not want to get blind drunk every Saturday night because you’d prefer to lie on the couch with a warm drink and your favourite socks on. To ask for more. To like yourself and not question it. It is taboo to want to talk about your experience of being a woman.
These are the conversations we’ve missed.
1
Body
What I Would Tell My Fifteen-Year-Old Self About Her Body
Do not go on the pill just to manage acne: it is going to do damage in the process of clearing your skin.
You are memorable because of your height. It intimidates exactly the kind of man you want to intimidate. Stop hunching. You are unforgettable.
Pee after sex straight away, every single time.
You will look back on photos from six months ago and think you were ‘so much prettier then’. You will do this every six months for all of eternity if you do not start believing that you are beautiful as you are now.
Preventative botox isn’t a thing, so stop opening your wallet to an industry that hates you.
If a doctor isn’t listening to you, go to another one.
Do not focus on making physical changes to yourself: focus on your mental health to help you embrace your physical self as it is.
Do not focus on how your body looks during sex: focus on how your body feels during sex.
Track your menstrual cycle: it helps make sense of EVERYTHING.
Do not put soap inside your vagina: it cleans itself.
You queef in specific sex positions and it is really funny, not disgusting.
Pain during sex isn’t normal. I wish we’d spoken to a health professional much earlier than we did.
Stop straightening your hair so much: it is damaging, and it is not you.
You have generalised anxiety disorder which isn’t diagnosed for another six years, though you thought you were just a stressed and efficient parentified eldest child who placed her value in productivity. Talk to someone about this earlier.
It isn’t normal to feel like you are going to get in trouble all the time: your nervous system is in overdrive.
Clean your belly button, babe.
Your sister is watching you so be careful how you talk about yourself.
Unfortunately, exercise, routine, sleep and good nutrition do make you feel your best.
You drink to escape yourself and to feel comfortable having sex. It will always make you feel worse.
Do not spend a mortgage on a skincare routine, but wear sunscreen every day.
Taboo 1:
Beauty, Body Image and the Pursuit of Eternal Youth
I am the right amount of pretty, thin and privileged to be tolerated. I think about this a lot as someone in a public-facing job. Much of my success is due to the fact that I am white, tall and educated. My future success closely depends on my ability to ensure I am the right balance of funny and intelligent, attractive but not too attractive. I am safe as the ‘girl next door’. Not wealthy, but also not living in poverty, which invites a distinct kind of judgement and stereotyping. Be likeable. Be thin, but don’t flaunt it. Be pretty, just enough. As a young woman existing on the internet, my choice of what not to post is more important than what I do share. I make conscious choices every time I post to ensure I am more often barefaced and pimply than made over and styled. For the first year or two of Cheek, this was simply accidental. It was and is my authentic approach. But as my following, and the scrutiny that comes with that, has grown, so has my strategy and calculation regarding how I appear, when I disappear and why. Sometimes, it’s plain exhaustion. Mostly, it’s to manage oversaturation, so I don’t become annoying or unlikable. If I look hot or try hard to look pretty, am I perceived as detaching from the mission I actively fight for? I am purposeful with how I dress, because I know what accompanies the social branding of being sexualised.
Do I care about all of this too much? Yes, of course, and that’s patriarchal in nature. But if I don’t consider the responsibility I hold, it may also be the thing that isolates the people who once connected with me. Existing as a woman, and particularly as a feminist woman, is precarious. This is my experience, but I believe it is also how we have been trained to perform by social media. Every person with an Instagram account feels compelled to present their personality, their appearance, their body, their decisions, their views and their lifestyle in a way that has a positive impact on those who follow them. Whether those followers actually value the poster’s opinion or are even current friends is a moot point. Consciously or not, we understand social media as a tool for self-expression and representation. In Elle Hunt’s piece ‘Everyone’s so intolerant online. Am I right to stay silent?’ she discusses Africa Brooke’s book, The Third Perspective.
In The Third Perspective, Brooke sets out how our innate desire to belong to ‘the in-group’ combines with the structural design of online platforms to perpetuate pile-ons. They are dehumanising by nature, leading you to think of yourself as an ‘employee of Instagram’, obliged to contribute your thoughts, opinions and anger – and to manage others you see as letting the side down. Opting out altogether is not always possible, with people increasingly obliged to maintain digital presences for their work and relationships.
Every person’s social media presence is a subconscious marketing exercise. With every post, every like, every comment, every share and every caption we are curating a persona of ourselves that feels safe to share. We cultivate likeability. We carefully consider how we announce pregnancies, engagements, birthday parties and property purchases, and even the order of images in a carousel post to achieve the perfect balance of relatable and aspirational. When I see these highly constructed posts, I hear the echo of our own moral perfectionism: ‘I am successful by the metrics others have set for me.’ How we choose to highlight achievement, beauty and lifestyle is a measure of our algorithms; our social circles have the power to define what we feel is worthy of promotion. For some people, the commodity of grid space is more important than the actual feeling of the milestone itself. We are less concerned with showing our actual travel experience than with proving to others that we are fashionable, aesthetic and cultured. Appearances are more important than our actual lives. We want to be seen as thin, pretty and happy – whether we actually are the last part or not is beside the point. We care less about being seen, and more about being understood as the person we aspire to be. Thin, informed, fun, privileged – but just the right amount. We want to be pretty and comfortable. We want to be liked more than we want to be understood.
This isn’t just a factor in our algorithms; we know pretty privilege impacts our lifelong earnings and success within workplaces, social circles and beyond. Astrid Hopfensitz, a professor in organisational behaviour at EM Lyon Business School, confirmed this in her piece for The Conversation, ‘“Pretty privilege”: attractive people considered more trustworthy, research confirms’. Hopfensitz describes the economic advantage gained by meeting social beauty standards thus:
Numerous studies have shown that attractive individuals benefit from a beauty bonus and earn higher salaries on average. Certain high-paying professions are built around beauty (such as show business) but what is more surprising is that for almost any kind of employment, beauty can lead to a positive halo effect. Beautiful individuals are consistently expected to be more intelligent and thought to be better leaders, which influences career trajectories and opportunities.
It is thought individuals perceived as beautiful are also more likely to benefit from people’s trust, which makes it easier for them to get promoted or to strike business deals. The idea is that individuals who look better are thought to be healthier or/and to have had more positive social interactions in their past, which might influence their trustworthiness.
