Whatever happened to privacy? Let’s stop selling ourselves
n my mid-twenties, I had a dating column in a London newspaper. My brief was to share with about a million Monday night commuters insights garnered from my romps in the capital’s romantic jungle. In those innocent days, before social media had taken off, sharing such details – the more intimate the better, I was told – felt extremely subversive and, as I later came to realise, very compromising. Although I was more prudish than my orgasm-describing peers (dating columns had suddenly flourished and there were a quite a few of us), I still dished up pretty frank accounts of my dates.
But with each kiss or fumble recounted to millions of strangers, I felt a bit of me wither up and die. It took me a while to realise that proffering intimate details was a form of self-sale, and once I saw this clearly, I vowed to never again share things like that again in public. In short, I had discovered not just the virtue of privacy but the intense psychological need for a zone of personal inviolability – especially where the body is concerned.
I still refuse to dish prurient dirt on my body for strangers – on social media, on air, in these pages.
But this has become an evermore lonely position.
Back in my dating column days, I had no idea what the soon-to-crest wave of social media would do to our sense of what is public and what private. I didn’t realise that sharing details of one’s one-night stands or sloppy snogs would soon be child’s play. But since then we’ve rewritten the script completely, violently wiping away the line between shareable and private, and turning the most intimate bodily details into the front line of most major battles (thanks, #metoo!).
Naturally, the eternally gripping female body is the star of this revelatory culture. We’ve long been familiar with the details of Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy, the Duchess of Cambridge’s morning sickness and Mariah Carey’s fertility troubles. But last week, Girls creator Lena Dunham’s harrowing tale of endometrios endometriosis leading to her decision to have a total hysterectomy – removal of the cervix and uterus – took the biscuit.
Make no mistake. Endometriosis is a gruesome, hugely intrusiv intrusive disorde disorder that afflicts an estimat estimated 176mill 176million women worldwi worldwide. To even defin define it is to conjure up
Iworlds of agony, misery and, for the prudish, squirminess: it’s when rogue womb tissue grows in other places, such as the abdomen, ovaries, bladder and bowel. The tissue still behaves like womb tissue, so it bleeds, period-style, every month and can cause such severe pain that women frequently pass out from it. Surgery, often multiple operations, is required to remove it, but it can be difficult to do so entirely.
Clearly, any improvement in understanding and treatment of endometriosis can only be strenuously sought and applauded.
But why does Ms Dunham feel so compelled to volunteer the grim and intimate details of her own titanic trial? Why is it assumed that in order to effect change, one must sacrifice not just one’s deeply personal experience, but details of one’s anatomy, too, on a giant, voyeuristic and hungry public altar?
Dunham’s essay in Vogue, where she recounts the hysterectomy and the saga leading up to it, is funny and gripping. Many will also call it “brave”, the word generally used these days to describe those willing to spill all about shocking medical experiences. But as I read about the “the 40-plus vaginal ultrasounds where [Dunham is] forced to stare at the black emptiness of my uterus” and listen to doctors exclaim about “those egg follicles” of hers, I feel bad for her – not just because of her ordeal, but because I can’t see how she can feel like a normal human being anymore. Her body is ours now.
But Dunham’s account is only the symptom of a sea change. Look at how her hysterectomy was reported in one newspaper.
With a clinical assurance normally reserved for the GP surgery, the reporter was able to tell (thanks to Dunham’s own openness) how, after several hospital admissions, “[Dunham] thought it was all over last April, when she announced she was free of endometriosis after surgery to separate her ovaries from her rectal wall”.
Must an actress’s rectal wall surgery be served up for public consumption so that medicine will take endometriosis seriously?
Perhaps so. But if that’s the case, then shouldn’t we be focusing on that terrifying fact rather than the gory minutia of yet another famous woman’s bodily battles? Or have we given up on change through the proper channels – the law, the courts, scientific innovation and medical advancement – entirely?
Story after story of personal horror, medical or otherwise, broadcast to millions, suggests we have.
All the more urgent, then, to claw back a sense of the private, the personal and the off-limits – and fast. Or else we’ll have nothing left to fight with but the ghoulish details of our poor, long-suffering bodies. Of course, it would be nice if there were more female literary heavyweights in the world – like it’d be great to have more women CEOs, world leaders and Nobel Prize-winning scientists. But I’m not sure that quotas are the way to get there.
Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani-British author, disagrees, having challenged the book industry to publish only female authors in 2018, the centenary of our gaining the vote. Just one publisher – And Other Stories, Sheffield-based publishers of Deborah Levy’s Booker Prizeshortlisted Swimming Home (2012) – took Ms Shamsie up on the clearly barmy idea.
No doubt Ms Shamsie, who predicted women dominating book shop windows, festival line-ups, blogs and reviews, meant well. But her suggestion is just a bit insulting. Women have long been brilliant writers across all registers, from the pulp to the literary. We do not need affirmative action in publishing to gain the respect we merit when it comes to authorship.
I can’t help but wonder what George Eliot, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton would have made of this suggestion.
And more recent blockbusters like Zadie Smith show clearly that women can be perfectly prominent literary stars on their own merit.
Afew weeks ago, I wrote excitedly about a new monthly event called Comedy Unleashed, which swore to be both funny and irreverent by flying in the face of progressive consensus and political correctness. Its slogan is: “If it’s funny, it’s funny.” Which, the organisers assured us, would include pro-Trump jokes – almost unheard of in Lefty comedy circles.
But on Tuesday, the opening night in Bethnal Green, east London, was curiously bereft of political shock. The only striking thing was the strong pro-Brexit contingent in the audience. “Who here voted Brexit?” asked Dominic Frisby, the debonair MC, and the packed room went up in boisterous affirmation. But that was as “unleashed” as it got.
Some acts were a refreshing change from what passes for comedy at the BBC. Andy Doyle, a Brexit-voting Lefty, thoughtfully unpicked his fallouts with furious Remain friends, and Geoff Norcott, a Tory comic, imagined a Labour Party conference where a bouncer asks for ID; the punter pulls out his driver’s licence and is reprimanded that ID means “identity, mate!” Straight white men are sent packing.
But for a pack of comedians meant to have been truly “unleashed”, this was tame stuff. There was no mining of the new obsession with colonial guilt, angry trans rights activism and, above all, #metoo. I’d have thought a clever female comedian (and there were two, Karen Hobbs and Isa Bonachera) could have done a funny bit about actually wanting men to touch her up. In the end, the only truly “offensive” offering came from Scott Capurro, the American stand-up, but his act was painful rather than clever.
All of which suggests to me that the process of un-muzzling is going to take more than the odd comedy night. Self-censorship has gone deep; the terror of causing offence, even among comedians, has evidently become a second skin. Of course, having to tell your comics to lighten up is very far from being a laughing matter.
I refuse to dish prurient dirt on my body to strangers