“There is feminism and there is fucking,” she wrote, and “straight feminists, like gay men and lesbians, have everything to gain from asserting our non-coercive desire to fuck if, when, how and as we choose”. I first read her when I was a young doctoral student and found her Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure (1994) the most wonderfully readable account of feminism and sexuality I’d encountered. Segal’s brand of feminism has never been strait-laced and it’s all the more impactful for that. Her uncompromising socialist feminism has been the keystone of her many very important books since the 1970s, but it would be foolish to consign her to some facile category such as “second-wave feminism” when her work is more relevant now than ever and has both an accessibility and depth that we’d be ill-advised to ignore. Segal’s one of those “roll your sleeves up” feminists who’s been there, fought for it and refused to buy the sweatshop T-shirt.
And then I read a book by someone as measured and informed as Lynne Segal and the world begins to make sense again. When the broadband signal drops out, when Netflix cancels a favourite show or when I get a “Sorry, you were out” card in lieu of the £30 scented candle that I’d ordered, I’m as guilty of histrionic overreaction as the next woman. And yet those of us who live in the Global North can so easily neglect to count those secular blessings. In the era of Google Maps and round-the-clock news, there’s less of an excuse than ever for insular complacency. Happy little plump white girls in the industrial Midlands were being forced to think about a world beyond their own happiness.
These early lessons in privilege were crass but well intentioned. I never did understand why my own misery at the prospect of Spam fritters and limp runner beans should increase the unhappiness of my African counterparts, but somewhere along the way I must have believed it, for miserable mouthful after ghastly mouthful I did my bit to sort out world hunger. Teachers regularly wielded the blunt rhetorical instrument of relative happiness: in kindergarten they exhorted my friends and me to think of “all the hungry little boys and girls in Africa” who would love the chance to eat this bone-dry Arctic Roll/granular, reconstituted mashed potato/bright orange fish fillets of indeterminate smoky origin. As a child of the 1970s, I was raised to count my secular blessings.
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