I identify a lot with Laurie Penny’s declaration, in a blog post from a while back, that “my writing… is the core of my being”, and appreciate her trenchant separation of “writing” from the supposedly feminine prerogative of “weav[ing]…stories out of our bodies”. It does raise the question, though, of what writing must be, if it can be both the core of someone’s being and separable from their daily bodily praxis, from what they do “just by living”. Writing is not just living. How is one to justify that conviction?

I think Penny is talking primarily about the focus of attention: what people see, what they are looking at, when they see something of yourself that you have made public. “I don’t want people who come to my blog to ‘come for the breasts’”, she says, even if “the breasts” are partly there to snare attention so that it can be drawn further in towards “the heart”. The body as a lure - as allure - is held out in a plea for further notice, an entreaty on behalf of something less tangible. There’s a kind of snub, a perhaps inevitable disappointment, when it’s taken to be “the point”, as if the heart were a useless accessory to an already complete commodity. “Objectification” is another name for this snub, this inattention to what really matters about a person.

It seems to me that both Laurie Penny and Katie West are concerned with bringing to light something of the “core” of who they are. The question that separates them, I think, is whether this “core” is continuous with one’s socially embedded and physically embodied selfhood, or something that only emerges through interruption. Does I write my flesh, or that which is “scored on my flesh”, that which marks me and separates me from my former self? Is “weaving” the most apt metaphor, or had one better speak of “inscription”?

It’s a strongly gendered question. The male body traditionally bears and displays its wounds - think of Coriolanus, scandalously refusing to publicise his scars. They are marks of action, signs of public engagement; a record of service. Something has happened to this body. Its story is the story of where it has been and what it has rubbed up against. The fingernails of the world have raked its back. By contrast, the airbrushing, soft-focusing and photoshopping of female bodies is a deliberate erasure of worldly contact, of experience. Fresh as a daisy is how you’re supposed to look, year after year, until you finally fall of the edge of the world and people start making vile comments about how wrinkled and haggard you are.

West asks, “Do women have to rebel against their own bodies, neglect their own bodies in order to be considered political?”, and I think one answer is that political rebellion does indeed engage a shift in priorities with respect to the body, which might very well look like “neglect” from the point of view of a culture that pays only a very specific sort of attention to the female body and its capabilities. We live, after all, in a society which is able to construe eating as neglect, as a lapse in the dietary discipline needed to maintain one’s body in its proper condition (this is called “letting yourself go”). Sometimes it is “political” to eat. The real object of rebellion here is not the body itself, but the interiorised social norms which dictate what kind of a concern my “own body” must be for me.