Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellman
Published: 2 July 2021
ISBN: 9781922458070
RRP:$22.99
Extent: 208 pp
In Things Are Against Us (2021), Lucy Ellmann covers a lot of ground. Over the course of the collection, Ellmann considers the climate crisis, inequality, ‘[f]ascism, poverty, carnage...tornadoes, tirades… oceanic levels of plastic...’ These issues, she argues, are inseparable from patriarchy. In fact, they are testament to its influence. Tackling these issues with sharp criticism and a healthy sense of humour, she makes a convincing argument that, ultimately, ‘[p]atriarchy has trashed the place’.[1]
In the first essay—the namesake, ‘Things Are Against Us’ —she gripes about the active troublemaking quality of objects—of ‘THINGS’. The ‘THINGS’ that surround us every day create unstable ground perfect for an equally unstable capitalist system to function. ‘THINGS’, she writes, ‘are decaying all around us’, as are the systems that sustain their value [2]. ‘Consumed by consumerism, [we] wallow in army fatigues and self-regard, coveting the next dynamite Apple doodad or an AK-47, plasma screen and some Nikes’ [3]. Ultimately, what Ellmann outlines is a kind of dance between capitalism and patriarchy.
Consumerism, Ellmann reminds us, has been a very effective means of distraction for the middle and upper classes. Capitalism, likewise, links consumerism to individualism. For white people, Ellman writes, this brand of individualism helps one ignore the plight of others. It is a brand of cognitive dissonance disconnects the middle class from a responsibility to their community. Western society’s addiction to consumption, Ellmann argues, is a distraction, and a conduit for the powerlessness that ensures capitalism continues unopposed:
‘All this powerlessness leaves more time for the ME stuff. Because, you know, there’s like all this pop music to consider, cosmetics to apply, and foreign slave-labour jeans to purchase, so many beggars to belittle, billionaires to emulate, elders to ignore, and theories about the purifying effects of mindfulness or green tea to propound… Never mind what the police are doing just down the street to Black men who don’t mow their lawns in the right direction.’[4]
Ellmann reminds us that climate disaster is, and will, affect all of us. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on climate change is a prescient reminder of this fact. Ellmann suggests that, historically, global crises such as climate change have always affected the less privileged. An example of this unequal impact is found in the discriminatory violence of the Iraq War. ‘Even after a million Britons protested against the Iraq War’, Ellmann observes, ‘Tony Blair went on lying his head off to Parliament and everyone else, insisting that the Iraq war was called for. He got away with it, and has played his desired role in genocide’ [5]. Violence is treated as a justified response to crisis, one that unfairly affects women, ‘... all violence is a hate crime against women since women gave birth to the people being murdered or mutilated, and women are usually the ones left to tend the wounded and mourn the dead’[6].
Immigrants too bear the brunt global crises as a result of a society that ignores their voices. Marginalised people bear the burden of the ignorance of the privileged, and ignorance, Ellmann proposes, which often allows the proliferation of blame: ‘Intolerance toward immigrants and foreigners closely resembles the negative male treatment of women and animals and other groups that are left out of calculations except as objects of blame’[7]. Minority groups, the poor, immigrants, women, the vulnerable, are characterised as burdens—an object upon which blame is projected. Just like the ‘things’ Ellmann writes of at the beginning of her collection, these groups are objectified. Specifically, they become objects that do not fulfill their designated purpose. Yet, as Ellman proposes, it is not that ‘things’ are against us, so much as powerful people have created a system where these groups are excluded and discarded as ‘things’. In support of this argument, Ellmann refers to Teresa Hayter’s opinion on immigration controls by Western countries. Hayter’s Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls (2004) describes immigration policies by the West as informed by an objective ‘to exclude poor people, and especially black people’[8]. For Ellmann, no individual avoid the effects of climate destruction, misogyny, or racism, at the hands of irresponsible leadership. These issues, and their resolutions, belong to everyone.
Ellman’s essay Three Strikes takes inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), wherein Woolf responds to a man who has asked her opinion on how to stop World War II. Ellmann summarises Woolf’s three guineas as three points: ‘the prevention of war; rebuilding a women’s college in Cambridge; or finding employment for women in the professions’ [9]. Ultimately, Woolf asks how women can be expected to help prevent war when they are excluded from society, as a consequence of patriarchy. She locates this exclusion in the realms of education, public life, and economic independence.
In the spirit of Three Guineas (1938), Ellmann discusses how contemporary society is still failing women, particularly disadvantaged women. She points out that ‘Greater Manchester Police have admitted that they ignored or erased seventy percent of reports of domestic abuse reported in 2020’ [10]. The compelling nature of Ellmann’s essays is reinforced by such stark uses of evidence. These statistics emphasise the shocking degree to which women are still subject to men in power, despite Virginia Woolf’s essay being over eighty years old.
Later in the collection, Ellmann considers the nature of women’s oppression by looking to the expectations surrounding appearance, and the beauty industry. She posits that women are fed a constantly changing narrative that forces them to submit to beauty standards and body enhancements to fill an image that can never be achieved. Ellmann identifies this toxic cycle as a repressive technique used against women:
‘Discrimination on the basis of how you look has long been an effective repressive weapon against women. Every cosmetic procedure performed puts pressure on other women to submit to body enhancements. When the fact is, even if you miraculously manage to be whatever’s considered beautiful in your era (the ideal is always changing), you’ll still be stuck in a sexist society that hates you!’ [11]
Ellmann offers a pertinent reminder that even if a cosmetic procedure makes you feel empowered in your body, this empowerment is a result of the ways in which your body exists in a system that tells you that you will feel more beautiful, more capable, more qualified, if you alter your body to conform to this system’s ideals. Additionally, Ellmann reminds us that notions of beauty are based on class and race privilege [12]. Things Are Against Us is about global climate crisis, about what life is like for women under patriarchy, and late-capitalism and its inherent inequalities. The essays collected here successfully draw connections between these systems and the numerous crises they create with wit and an urgency that is impossible to ignore.
Bibliography
Ellmann, Lucy. Things Are Against Us. Text Publishing, 2021.
Hayter, Teresa. Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt18fs4m7.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Hogarth Press. 1938.
Footnotes
[1] Ellmann, Things Are Against Us, 29.
[2] Ellmann, 20.
[3] Ellmann, 28.
[4] Ellmann, 35.
[5] Ellmann, 65.
[6] Ellmann, 49.
[7] Ellmann, 46.
[8] Hayter, The Case Against Immigration Controls, 1.
[9] Ellmann, 40.
[10] Ellmann, 45.
[11] Ellmann, 47.
[12] Ellmann, 6.
Madeline Sarich is a reader and writer from Boorloo/Perth. She is completing her Master of Publishing at the University of Sydney.