Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Laurie Penny's "dissection of modern feminism" is a rollercoaster of a book, taking in poverty and prejudice, rioting and mutiny, slut-shaming and cybersexism. Forget Sex and the City, Penny doesn't give a damn about the politics of waxing or how small your pants are. She's more interested in analysing the battles we face around gender under late capitalism. It's a brave decision in the current climate where much of the so-called fourth-wave feminist writing is more akin to standup – jaunty, sweary, empowering – but lacking analysis of how the demands of the market shape and police our desires.
Of course these days we're spoilt for choice about how to navigate the pressures of contemporary womanhood – from Caitlin Moran's bestselling memoir/feminist polemic, How to Be a Woman (and now her new novel, How to Build a Girl) to recent books by the Vagenda girls, the Guardian's Hadley Freeman (Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies) and Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. But Penny isn't writing a sparky to-do list. "As a handbook for happiness in a fucked-up world, this book cannot be trusted," she observes darkly in the introduction. While Moran fills stadiums with excitable teenage girls on her book tours, Her constituency, she says, is the underclass – gay and transgender people, goths, sex workers, rioters, anarchists – arguably the people with the most to lose from the neoliberalist agenda. And, with targets such as "the sterile, the sexist and the crashingly heteronormative", she doesn't just want to build a girl, she wants to dismantle binary gender codes.
Laurie Penny is ridiculously precocious. Still only 27, she's a contributing editor for the News Statesman; her blogpost Penny Red was nominated for a George Orwell award. In the past, she's documented her battle with anorexia, her time as a burlesque dancer, her rape at 19 by a "well respected" older man. In a world where women don't get enough space, she claims that to be called attention-seeking is a source of pride.
Important as these posts from the frontline are, you can't help wondering if feminism has to be first person. Do women always have to pimp their personal lives to get noticed? To be fair, in Unspeakable Things, Penny uses her own raw experience as a jumping-off point for a wider analysis of eating disorders and self-harm, rape culture and sexual violence. Or what she calls "the intimate territory of unrest".
At times, the book is one long roar of pain. Biology can be a "catastrophe" for women. We have ended up as objects of desire rather than "desiring beings". Work has been re-purposed as women's liberation but so often it traps us, as exhausted drones, in a "gilded fairytale cage". Penny is very good on the people at the margins – single mothers, the low paid, the overweight – and rightly outraged that the white career woman's burden (not enough shoes!) takes precedence in so much media coverage. As an old-school (third-wave) feminist, I might have liked more homage paid to the original Angry Birds (Greer, Dworkin, Millett). No one voice invented – or copyrighted – feminism.
But, as Penny demonstrates, in a great, defining chapter on the internet, we are dealing with a new world order. The Twitter backlash, in which prominent women have been threatened with violence and rape, is dismaying for those who originally saw the internet as the great force to liberate us from gender. But it remains a space for women and girls and queer people "to speak to each other without limits, across borders, sharing stories and changing our reality". Penny is also frank about the joys of cybersex.
Though she teeters towards Pseuds Corner at times, and you can feel assaulted by the prose, this book is funny and cheeky ( "You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen, it's where the knives are kept") and refreshingly generous.
Liz Hoggard is co-author of Dangerous Women: The Guide to Modern Life (Orion)
