Class. That’s the word they skip. Every panel, every thread, every long-read that claims to speak for all women and then spends three thousand words on the psychic cost of unpaid emotional labour without once mentioning who actually does the labour when the heating’s off and the kids need feeding and the shift starts at six. Listen babes I have sat in rooms full of feminists who can quote Audre Lorde from memory and still look at me like I’ve wandered in from the wrong postcode the second my Essex comes out thicker than usual. They hear the accent and decide I need educating. They hear Basildon and assume I need saving. They never ask what desire even looks like when you grew up knowing the electric meter could run out mid-argument and the nearest posh vibrator shop is a two-bus journey you can’t afford on a Thursday.
I grew up on the estate. Proper council. Mum still does the Sunday roast every other week and I still go because some things you don’t outgrow even when you’ve got a Substack and a blue tick and a flat in Hackney that costs more than her old rent. Desire on the estate was never this abstract thing you journaled about after therapy. It was squeezed in between the night shift and the school run and the fear that if you wanted too much you’d be called a slag or worse you’d actually get it and then what. Middle-class feminists talk about reclaiming pleasure like it’s a weekend workshop. They’ve got the language for responsive desire and brakes and accelerators and they drop Emily Nagoski like punctuation. Fair play. But they don’t talk about what happens when the accelerator is a bloke who might actually pay the gas bill or the brake is the knowledge that if you leave him the council won’t rehouse you for months. That’s not theory. That’s Tuesday.
I remember being seventeen and sitting on the wall outside the chippy with a girl from two streets over who was already pregnant and already tired and she looked at me and said I just want someone who doesn’t make me feel like I’m asking for the moon when I want to come first for once. We both laughed because it sounded greedy. Greedy. That’s the word that sticks to working-class girls. Want too much and you’re grasping. Want the nice thing and you’re above your station. The middle-class ones get to call it self-care. We get told to be grateful he didn’t knock us about. I swear down the first time I said that out loud in a feminist group chat I got three heart emojis and one private message asking if I was okay because that sounded like internalised misogyny. Internalised. Like the problem was in my head instead of in the fact that her dad paid her rent until she was twenty-six and mine was already on the sick.
They analyse patriarchy like it’s a seminar topic. Power, they say. Unpaid labour, they say. And they’re not wrong. But they analyse it from the side of the table where someone else cooked the dinner. I have watched women with nice degrees explain to me how heteronormativity constructs female desire as passive and I have wanted to laugh and cry at the same time because on the estate desire wasn’t passive it was rationed. You wanted the man who showed up. You wanted the one who didn’t drink the child benefit. You wanted the one who might actually listen when you said you were tired instead of taking it as a personal insult. That’s not low standards. That’s the difference between theory and the queue at the post office on a Monday morning when the money hasn’t gone in yet.
I work in the same media circles now. Novara, the odd Guardian piece, the Coven chat that’s half leak-sharing and half dragging whoever stepped out of line this week. And I still feel it. The way the room changes when I speak. They like the Essex when it’s a punchline or a bit of colour. They like it when I call a Tory a melt on camera. They go quiet when I say the feminism they’re selling doesn’t travel well past zone three. Last year I was on a panel about women’s pleasure and the woman next to me (private school, two books, the works) talked for twelve minutes about decolonising the orgasm. I sat there with my blue nails and my hoodie and thought who the fuck has time to decolonise an orgasm when you’re worrying if the washing machine’s going to last another cycle. I didn’t say it. I should have. Instead I nodded and then went home and ate toast over the sink like a stereotype because I was too wired to cook.
Desire gets shaped by what you can afford to risk. Middle-class feminists can afford to leave. They can afford the therapy that lets them name the thing. They can afford to wait for the man who does the work. Working-class women do the calculation in real time. Is he better than the last one. Will the kids like him. Can I stand the way he leaves his socks. And underneath that another calculation that never makes the reports: do I even remember what I want when I’ve spent ten years wanting whatever keeps the peace. I have friends from school who haven’t had an orgasm with another person in years and they don’t call it oppression they call it life. They don’t have the vocabulary. They have the Tesco value range and a bottle of wine on a Friday if the overtime came through. Tell them their desire has been constructed by patriarchy and they’ll look at you like you’ve grown another head. They’re not wrong either. The construction is real. The bills are also real.
I catch myself doing it too. The leak. The personal stuff that wasn’t supposed to be in the piece. I’ll be drafting something sharp about systemic this and structural that and suddenly I’m back in mum’s kitchen watching her plate up the roast and she’s asking if I’ve met anyone nice and I want to tell her that nice is a luxury and what I actually want is someone who doesn’t make me feel like I’m performing gratitude for basic decency. I don’t say it. We talk about the potatoes instead. That’s class too. The way you swallow the complicated want so the Sunday doesn’t turn into a row. Middle-class feminists write essays about the mental load. We just carry it and then feel guilty for noticing the weight.
They overlook it because it makes the story messy. Class doesn’t fit the clean narrative where all women are equally oppressed in the same pretty way. It introduces the possibility that some of us have been doing the emotional labour for other women as well as for men. The ones who clean their houses. The ones who look after their kids. The ones who get talked over in the meeting and then have to go home and do the same listening work for free. I have been in those meetings. I have watched a woman with a column in a national paper explain intersectionality to me while I sat there thinking you have never missed a rent payment in your life and you want to tell me how power works. The desire bit is the part they really can’t look at. Because if they looked properly they’d have to admit that wanting more (more time, more touch, more someone who actually shows up) looks different when more has always been a gamble you might not win.
I used to think if I just wrote enough threads it would shift. If I made the language accessible enough the women from the estate would see themselves in it. Some do. Most don’t have the hours. They’re too busy living the thing the thread is about. And the feminists who do have the hours keep writing like the estate is a case study instead of a place people come from and sometimes go back to every other Sunday with a bag of washing and a face that says don’t start. I still go back. I still sit at that table and feel the old pull between the girl who left and the girl who knows exactly how much a bag of potatoes costs this week. Desire sits in the middle of that. Not the glossy version. The version that knows pleasure is political and also knows politics doesn’t pay the water bill.
They can keep the reports. I’ll keep the voice that still slips into proper Essex when I’m pissed off or tired or both. I’ll keep saying the thing they skip. Class shapes the want. It shapes the shame around the want. It shapes whether you even recognise the want as yours or just another thing you were supposed to manage quietly so nobody calls you difficult. And until the people writing the analysis have stood in a kitchen that smells of roast and bleach and the faint worry that next week might be tighter they will keep missing it. They will keep talking over us. They will keep calling it feminism while the women who actually needed it most are still doing the washing up and wondering why the conversation never sounds like them. That’s not a conclusion. That’s just where I am on a Friday night with the vape going and the flat white gone cold and the same old argument running in my head like it never clocked off. Bare familiar. Bare unfinished. And I’m still here typing it because somebody has to say it in the accent they keep trying to correct.