Can porn be feminist? What happens when we replace women with men as objects of desire? Is rape different depending on the context? Eliza Clark’s debut novel, Boy Parts, asks these questions, and many more, through the dazzling curiosity of morally dubious narrator, Irina. Published in 2020, Clark’s novel won the Blackwell’s fiction book of the year, as well as being adapted by Gillian Greer, just three years later, into a one woman show at Soho Theatre. Since then, Clark has gone on to publish her second novel, Penance, which not only confirms her status as a writer to watch out for, but also highlights the need for fiction to be a place where no question is too bold to ask.
What seemingly begins as a Bridget Jones-esque story of girl struggling to navigate the ever-turbulent throws of adulthood, soon spirals into a full-blown panic of what happens when you’re living with the truth of being a murderer.
Irina, a budding photographer from Newcastle, has recently moved to London where she works at a bar whilst also living with her ex-girlfriend Flo. On the side, she scouts men to pose for explicit pictures which she uploads to her website or sells to keen buyers. However, after an incident at work, Irina gets put on six-week sabbatical, in which time she is recruited for an exhibition at a gallery in London.
After sifting through years' worth of art projects from college to university, we learn that Irina’s work mostly revolves around male objectification and the female gaze. With her collection names resembling something straight from a porn movie – ‘barely legal’ – we see what happens when women are replaced with men as objects of incessant desire. Paying homage to the title, Irina continuously refers to men as 'parts’, 'suits’ and ‘betas’, reducing them to ‘interchangeable, disposable objects.’ Clark's passages describing the power that Irina finds behind the lens of a camera are comparable to something orgasm inducing, as though each time she engages in this imbalanced dynamic she experiences intense euphoria.
Though her ability to exploit these men can be interpreted as calculated and sadistic, it seems this has become a form of therapy for her to fight back against the men who have wronged her in the past. In the same way that Irina is unable to distinctly draw the line between abuse and consent within her own life, she too cannot comprehend the cruelty that she inflicts upon others. She refers to an experience of sexual assault involving a teacher as a ‘relationship’, as well as suggesting that because she has never been subject to abuse from a man who outwardly resembles a monster, it means that she hasn’t been “raped raped”. Through internalising the often-skewed narratives within rape culture, it is easier to view Irina’s behaviour as a victim attempting to reclaim the power that has been stolen from her. Through every encounter, every photograph and every lie, Irina is desperate to be recognised as someone who is dangerous and has the potential to hurt people, to hurt men – ‘I wonder what the fuck I have to do for people to recognise me as a threat.’
In weaker moments, it’s easy to catch yourself becoming inexplicably drawn to Irina’s character: her disdain for men, her effortless ability to perform femininity and how powerful she appears to be. Yet when you stand a little further back, it is obvious to see that Irina is a troubled individual with a string of unhealthy familial, platonic and romantic relationships. Her ability to exploit men is rivalled only by the manipulation of her manager, friends, parents and work colleagues. Irina’s relationship with Eddie, seemingly one of the only genuine men she meets, initially feels as though it could be a step in the right direction of moving away from toxic interactions. Unfortunately, she is entirely intent on sabotaging anything that resembles happiness.
Yet, Clark’s tendency to lace the heavier passages with comedic notes renders certain scenes entirely comical. After hitting a man over the head and knocking him unconscious, Irina blackmails Will, a boy who previously raped her, into borrowing his car by calmly threatening to tell the truth about him – like something out of a farfetched comedy sketch. After chatting up a plastic surgeon that she meets at a bar – and forgetting his name – they begin to flirt by speculating over potential procedures that celebrities such as Meg Ryan and the Kardashians may have had done. As the verbal flirting turns into physical foreplay, she describes him as touching her ‘surgically’ as she feels ‘him weighing [her] breast in his palm.’ Irina’s observations relating to the ridiculousness of men’s behaviour and their definitions of masculinity, only serve to emasculate and mock them even further.
By the end of the novel, this highly satirical and sexually graphic tone becomes so commonplace that you almost don’t realise Irina is confessing to murdering a young boy – ‘I’d always heard manually strangling people was really hard.’ Clark exposes the dangers of the desensitisation within media, porn and films that is responsible for contaminating fantasy with reality, as well as the inability for disturbing information to impact us.
Perhaps more generally, Clark is asking questions about the ethics and implications of voyeurism, as well as what it means to be viewed as an object within a patriarchal society that prizes and rewards aesthetic beauty above all else. Irina simultaneously conforms to and defies these feminine tropes, proving that female power can be found within both. Yet, in constantly trying to reach for something that looks like strength or possession or freedom, she continues to stumble into an unrelenting cycle that ends where she begins – ‘It isn’t him. It never is.’