Copyright © 2019 by Jia Tolentino
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin
Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin
Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Tolentino, Jia, author.
Title: Trick mirror : reflections on self-delusion / Jia Tolentino.
Description: New York : Random House, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019000446| ISBN 9780525510543 | ISBN 9780525510550 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Civilization—21st century.
Classification: LCC E169.12 .T63 2019 | DDC 973.93—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2019000446
Ebook ISBN 9780525510550
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Sharanya Durvasula
v5.4
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Introduction
I wrote this book between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018—a
period during which American identity, culture, technology, politics,
and discourse seemed to coalesce into an unbearable supernova of
perpetually escalating conflict, a stretch of time when daily
experience seemed both like a stopped elevator and an endless
state-fair ride, when many of us regularly found ourselves thinking
that everything had gotten as bad as we could possibly imagine,
after which, of course, things always got worse.
Throughout this period, I found that I could hardly trust
anything that I was thinking. A doubt that always hovers in the back
of my mind intensified: that whatever conclusions I might reach
about myself, my life, and my environment are just as likely to be
diametrically wrong as they are to be right. This suspicion is hard
for me to articulate closely, in part because I usually extinguish it by
writing. When I feel confused about something, I write about it
until I turn into the person who shows up on paper: a person who is
plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear.
It’s exactly this habit—or compulsion—that makes me suspect
that I am fooling myself. If I were, in fact, the calm person who
shows up on paper, why would I always need to hammer out a
narrative that gets me there? I’ve been telling myself that I wrote
this book because I was confused after the election, because
confusion sits at odds to my temperament, because writing is my
only strategy for making this conflict go away. I’m convinced by this
story, even as I can see its photonegative: I wrote this book because
I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and
because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from
that truth. Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a
way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is
usually a dubious one: that a person is “not into drama,” or that
America needs to be made great again, or that America is already
great.
These essays are about the spheres of public imagination that
have shaped my understanding of myself, of this country, and of
this era. One is about the internet. Another is about “optimization,”
and the rise of athleisure as late-capitalist fetishwear, and the
endlessly proliferating applications of the idea that women’s bodies
should increase their market performance over time. There’s an
essay about drugs and religion and the bridge that ecstasy forms
between them; another about scamming as the definitive millennial
ethos; another about the literary heroine’s journey from brave girl
to depressed teenager to bitter adult woman who’s possibly dead.
One essay is about my stint as a teenage reality TV contestant. One
is about sex and race and power at the University of Virginia, my
alma mater, where a series of convincing stories have exacted
enormous hidden costs. The final two are about the feminist
obsession with “difficult” women and about the slow-burning
insanity that I acquired in my twenties while attending what felt
like several thousand weddings per year. These are the prisms
through which I have come to know myself. In this book, I tried to
undo their acts of refraction. I wanted to see the way I would see in
a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.
But that’s fine. The last few years have taught me to suspend my
desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that
renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths
will keep emerging in time. While I was writing this, a stranger
tweeted an excerpt of a Jezebel piece I wrote in 2015, highlighting a
sentence about what women seemed to want from feminist
websites—a “trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as
well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault.” I had
not remembered using that phrase when I came up with a book
title, and I had not understood, when I was writing that Jezebel
piece, that that line was also an explanation of something more
personal. I began to realize that all my life I’ve been leaving myself
breadcrumbs. It didn’t matter that I didn’t always know what I was
walking toward. It was worthwhile, I told myself, just trying to see
clearly, even if it took me years to understand what I was trying to
see.
The I in the Internet
In the beginning the internet seemed good. “I was in love with the
internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was
the ULTIMATE COOL,” I wrote, when I was ten, on an Angelfire
subpage titled “The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addiction.” In a
text box superimposed on a hideous violet background, I continued:
But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to
Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at
home, we didn’t have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a
far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o’-the-line computer in
spring break ’99, and of course it came with all that demo
stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the
marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!!
Then, I wrote, I discovered personal webpages. (“I was
astonished!”) I learned HTML and “little Javascript trickies.” I built
my own site on the beginner-hosting site Expage, choosing pastel
colors and then switching to a “starry night theme.” Then I ran out
of space, so I “decided to move to Angelfire. Wow.” I learned how to
make my own graphics. “This was all in the course of four months,”
I wrote, marveling at how quickly my ten-year-old internet citizenry
was evolving. I had recently revisited the sites that had once
inspired me, and realized “how much of an idiot I was to be wowed
by that.”
I have no memory of inadvertently starting this essay two
decades ago, or of making this Angelfire subpage, which I found
while hunting for early traces of myself on the internet. It’s now
eroded to its skeleton: its landing page, titled “THE VERY BEST,”
features a sepia-toned photo of Andie from Dawson’s Creek and a
dead link to a new site called “THE FROSTED FIELD,” which is
“BETTER!” There’s a page dedicated to a blinking mouse GIF named
Susie, and a “Cool Lyrics Page” with a scrolling banner and the lyrics
to Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a
Woman!” and the TLC diss track “No Pigeons,” by Sporty Thievz. On
an FAQ page—there was an FAQ page—I write that I had to close
down my customizable cartoon-doll section, as “the response has
been enormous.”
It appears that I built and used this Angelfire site over just a few
months in 1999, immediately after my parents got a computer. My
insane FAQ page specifies that the site was started in June, and a
page titled “Journal”—which proclaims, “I am going to be
completely honest about my life, although I won’t go too deeply into
personal thoughts, though”—features entries only from October.
One entry begins: “It’s so HOT outside and I can’t count the times
acorns have fallen on my head, maybe from exhaustion.” Later on, I
write, rather prophetically: “I’m going insane! I literally am addicted
to the web!”
In 1999, it felt different to spend all day on the internet. This was
true for everyone, not just for ten-year-olds: this was the You’ve Got
Mail era, when it seemed that the very worst thing that could
happen online was that you might fall in love with your business
rival. Throughout the eighties and nineties, people had been
gathering on the internet in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to
the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise.
Self-regulated newsgroups like Usenet cultivated lively and
relatively civil discussion about space exploration, meteorology,
recipes, rare albums. Users gave advice, answered questions, made
friendships, and wondered what this new internet would become.
Because there were so few search engines and no centralized
social platforms, discovery on the early internet took place mainly
in private, and pleasure existed as its own solitary reward. A 1995
book called You Can Surf the Net! listed sites where you could read
movie reviews or learn about martial arts. It urged readers to follow
basic etiquette (don’t use all caps; don’t waste other people’s
expensive bandwidth with overly long posts) and encouraged them
to feel comfortable in this new world (“Don’t worry,” the author
advised. “You have to really mess up to get flamed.”). Around this
time, GeoCities began offering personal website hosting for dads
who wanted to put up their own golfing sites or kids who built
glittery, blinking shrines to Tolkien or Ricky Martin or unicorns,
most capped off with a primitive guest book and a green-and-black
visitor counter. GeoCities, like the internet itself, was clumsy, ugly,
only half functional, and organized into neighborhoods: /area51/
was for sci-fi, /westhollywood/ for LGBTQ life, /enchantedforest/
for children, /petsburgh/ for pets. If you left GeoCities, you could
walk around other streets in this ever-expanding village of
curiosities. You could stroll through Expage or Angelfire, as I did,
and pause on the thoroughfare where the tiny cartoon hamsters
danced. There was an emergent aesthetic—blinking text, crude
animation. If you found something you liked, if you wanted to
spend more time in any of these neighborhoods, you could build
your own house from HTML frames and start decorating.
This period of the internet has been labeled Web 1.0—a name
that works backward from the term Web 2.0, which was coined by
the writer and user-experience designer Darcy DiNucci in an article
called “Fragmented Future,” published in 1999. “The Web we know
now,” she wrote, “which loads into a browser window in essentially
static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first
glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear….The Web will be
understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport
mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” On
Web 2.0, the structures would be dynamic, she predicted: instead of
houses, websites would be portals, through which an ever-changing
stream of activity—status updates, photos—could be displayed.
What you did on the internet would become intertwined with what
everyone else did, and the things other people liked would become
the things that you would see. Web 2.0 platforms like Blogger and
Myspace made it possible for people who had merely been taking in
the sights to start generating their own personalized and constantly
changing scenery. As more people began to register their existence
digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register
yourself digitally to exist.
In a New Yorker piece from November 2000, Rebecca Mead
profiled Meg Hourihan, an early blogger who went by Megnut. In
just the prior eighteen months, Mead observed, the number of
“weblogs” had gone from fifty to several thousand, and blogs like
Megnut were drawing thousands of visitors per day. This new
internet was social (“a blog consists primarily of links to other Web
sites and commentary about those links”) in a way that centered on
individual identity (Megnut’s readers knew that she wished there
were better fish tacos in San Francisco, and that she was a feminist,
and that she was close with her mom). The blogosphere was also
full of mutual transactions, which tended to echo and escalate. The
“main audience for blogs is other bloggers,” Mead wrote. Etiquette
required that, “if someone blogs your blog, you blog his blog back.”
Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were
becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be
seen—were becoming economic ones. The mechanisms of internet
exposure began to seem like a viable foundation for a career.
Hourihan cofounded Blogger with Evan Williams, who later
cofounded Twitter. JenniCam, founded in 1996 when the college
student Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting webcam photos from
her dorm room, attracted at one point up to four million daily
visitors, some of whom paid a subscription fee for quicker-loading
images. The internet, in promising a potentially unlimited audience,
began to seem like the natural home of self-expression. In one blog
post, Megnut’s boyfriend, the blogger Jason Kottke, asked himself
why he didn’t just write his thoughts down in private. “Somehow,
that seems strange to me though,” he wrote. “The Web is the place
for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such. To put those
things elsewhere seems absurd.”
Every day, more people agreed with him. The call of self-
expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which
expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like
neurons in every direction. At ten, I was clicking around a web ring
to check out other Angelfire sites full of animal GIFs and Smash
Mouth trivia. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a
public LiveJournal. At fifteen, I was uploading photos of myself in a
miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things
that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post.
Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet,
and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric,
unlivable hell.
As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the
curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once.
The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing
excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new
truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting.
Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying
function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and
success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone
tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had
been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better,
truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once
been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves
online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised
connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised
by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest
potential lay in the realm of misuse.
Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the
mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium,
the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real
life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people.
But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for
anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in
order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s
central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—
first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like
the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look
good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones,
and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot
and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so
smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making
a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people,
like a political good in itself.
This practice is often called “virtue signaling,” a term most often
used by conservatives criticizing the left. But virtue signaling is a
bipartisan, even apolitical action. Twitter is overrun with dramatic
pledges of allegiance to the Second Amendment that function as
intra-right virtue signaling, and it can be something like virtue
signaling when people post the suicide hotline after a celebrity
death. Few of us are totally immune to the practice, as it intersects
with a real desire for political integrity. Posting photos from a
protest against border family separation, as I did while writing this,
is a microscopically meaningful action, an expression of genuine
principle, and also, inescapably, some sort of attempt to signal that I
am good.
Taken to its extreme, virtue signaling has driven people on the
left to some truly unhinged behavior. A legendary case occurred in
June 2016, after a two-year-old was killed at a Disney resort—
dragged off by an alligator while playing in a no-swimming-allowed
lagoon. A woman, who had accumulated ten thousand Twitter
followers with her posts about social justice, saw an opportunity
and tweeted, magnificently, “I’m so finished with white men’s
entitlement lately that I’m really not sad about a 2yo being eaten by
a gator because his daddy ignored signs.” (She was then pilloried by
people who chose to demonstrate their own moral superiority
through mockery—as I am doing here, too.) A similar tweet made
the rounds in early 2018 after a sweet story went viral: a large white
seabird named Nigel had died next to the concrete decoy bird to
whom he had devoted himself for years. An outraged writer tweeted,
“Even concrete birds do not owe you affection, Nigel,” and wrote a
long Facebook post arguing that Nigel’s courtship of the fake bird
exemplified…rape culture. “I’m available to write the feminist
perspective on Nigel the gannet’s non-tragic death should anyone
wish to pay me,” she added, underneath the original tweet, which
received more than a thousand likes. These deranged takes, and
their unnerving proximity to online monetization, are case studies
in the way that our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by
capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but
makes actual moral living very hard. You don’t end up using a news
story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a
society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more
public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness
in the first place.
On the right, the online performance of political identity has
been even wilder. In 2017, the social-media-savvy youth
conservative group Turning Point USA staged a protest at Kent State
University featuring a student who put on a diaper to demonstrate
that “safe spaces were for babies.” (It went viral, as intended, but
not in the way TPUSA wanted—the protest was uniformly roasted,
with one Twitter user slapping the logo of the porn site Brazzers on
a photo of the diaper boy, and the Kent State TPUSA campus
coordinator resigned.) It has also been infinitely more
consequential, beginning in 2014, with a campaign that became a
template for right-wing internet-political action, when a large group
of young misogynists came together in the event now known as
Gamergate.
The issue at hand was, ostensibly, a female game designer
perceived to be sleeping with a journalist for favorable coverage.
She, along with a set of feminist game critics and writers, received
an onslaught of rape threats, death threats, and other forms of
harassment, all concealed under the banner of free speech and
“ethics in games journalism.” The Gamergaters—estimated by
Deadspin to number around ten thousand people—would mostly
deny this harassment, either parroting in bad faith or fooling
themselves into believing the argument that Gamergate was
actually about noble ideals. Gawker Media, Deadspin’s parent
company, itself became a target, in part because of its own
aggressive disdain toward the Gamergaters: the company lost seven
figures in revenue after its advertisers were brought into the
maelstrom.
In 2016, a similar fiasco made national news in Pizzagate, after a
few rabid internet denizens decided they’d found coded messages
about child sex slavery in the advertising of a pizza shop associated
with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This theory was disseminated all
over the far-right internet, leading to an extended attack on DC’s
Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and everyone associated with the
restaurant—all in the name of combating pedophilia—that
culminated in a man walking into Comet Ping Pong and firing a gun.
(Later on, the same faction would jump to the defense of Roy
Moore, the Republican nominee for the Senate who was accused of
sexually assaulting teenagers.) The over-woke left could only dream
of this ability to weaponize a sense of righteousness. Even the
militant antifascist movement, known as antifa, is routinely
disowned by liberal centrists, despite the fact that the antifa
movement is rooted in a long European tradition of Nazi resistance
rather than a nascent constellation of radically paranoid message
boards and YouTube channels. The worldview of the Gamergaters
and Pizzagaters was actualized and to a large extent vindicated in
the 2016 election—an event that strongly suggested that the worst
things about the internet were now determining, rather than
reflecting, the worst things about offline life.
Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture.
The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the
executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the
internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s
rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks
that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue
making money. But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got
so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How
did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our
disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How
did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so
politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking
the same thing?
I’ll admit that I’m not sure that this inquiry is even productive.
The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all
rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no
reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet
already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of
contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users,
returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction
while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever
possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that
runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you
avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt
meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this
internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become
capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by
centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves
as near-impossible to regulate or control.
The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s
pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits
of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out
of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that
surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems:
first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity;
second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how
it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our
understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense
of scale.
—
In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman laid out a theory of identity
that revolved around playacting. In every human interaction, he
wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a person must
put on a sort of performance, create an impression for an audience.
The performance might be calculated, as with the man at a job
interview who’s practiced every answer; it might be unconscious, as
with the man who’s gone on so many interviews that he naturally
performs as expected; it might be automatic, as with the man who
creates the correct impression primarily because he is an upper-
middle-class white man with an MBA. A performer might be fully
taken in by his own performance—he might actually believe that his
biggest flaw is “perfectionism”—or he might know that his act is a
sham. But no matter what, he’s performing. Even if he stops trying
to perform, he still has an audience, his actions still create an effect.
“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in
which it isn’t are not easy to specify,” Goffman wrote.
To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-
delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal “the
discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance;
in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that
he will not be able to tell himself.” The interviewee, for example,
avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves
drinking at the office. A friend sitting across from you at dinner,
called to play therapist for your trivial romantic hang-ups, has to
pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and get in
bed to read Barbara Pym. No audience has to be physically present
for a performer to engage in this sort of selective concealment: a
woman, home alone for the weekend, might scrub the baseboards
and watch nature documentaries even though she’d rather trash the
place, buy an eight ball, and have a Craigslist orgy. People often
make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince
themselves of their own attractiveness. The “lively belief that an
unseen audience is present,” Goffman writes, can have a significant
effect.
Offline, there are forms of relief built into this process.
Audiences change over—the performance you stage at a job
interview is different from the one you stage at a restaurant later for
a friend’s birthday, which is different from the one you stage for a
partner at home. At home, you might feel as if you could stop
performing altogether; within Goffman’s dramaturgical framework,
you might feel as if you had made it backstage. Goffman observed
that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well
as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of
“teammates” who had been performing alongside us. Think of
coworkers at the bar after they’ve delivered a big sales pitch, or a
bride and groom in their hotel room after the wedding reception:
everyone may still be performing, but they feel at ease, unguarded,
alone. Ideally, the outside audience has believed the prior
performance. The wedding guests think they’ve actually just seen a
pair of flawless, blissful newlyweds, and the potential backers think
they’ve met a group of geniuses who are going to make everyone
very rich. “But this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene
that comes off, and is not a cause of it,” Goffman writes. The self is
not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a
performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.
Online—assuming you buy this framework—the system
metastasizes into a wreck. The presentation of self in everyday
internet still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor: there
are stages, there is an audience. But the internet adds a host of
other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo,
the panopticon. As we move about the internet, our personal data is
tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations—a regime
of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously
decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-
surveillance on social media. If we think about buying something, it
follows us around everywhere. We can, and probably do, limit our
online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of
identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On
social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our
conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all
news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through
the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by
the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions
personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been
placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair
of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.
Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all
new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.
This system persists because it is profitable. As Tim Wu writes in
The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating
human existence—entering our city streets in the nineteenth
century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the
twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty-first
century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce
has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated
billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—
and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural
requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we
think we are, who we want to be.
Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial
importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time
span for every performance. Online, your audience can
hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never
has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.)
In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance
often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get
invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the
job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm
of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and
eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of
all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the
offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the
online audience never has to leave. The version of you that posts
memes and selfies for your pre-cal classmates might end up
sparring with the Trump administration after a school shooting, as
happened to the Parkland kids—some of whom became so famous
that they will never be allowed to drop the veneer of performance
again. The self that traded jokes with white supremacists on Twitter
is the self that might get hired, and then fired, by The New York
Times, as happened to Quinn Norton in 2018. (Or, in the case of
Sarah Jeong, the self that made jokes about white people might get
Gamergated after being hired at the Times a few months thereafter.)
People who maintain a public internet profile are building a self that
can be viewed simultaneously by their mom, their boss, their
potential future bosses, their eleven-year-old nephew, their past and
future sex partners, their relatives who loathe their politics, as well
as anyone who cares to look for any possible reason. Identity,
according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the
internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise
everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.
Incidents like Gamergate are partly a response to these
conditions of hyper-visibility. The rise of trolling, and its ethos of
disrespect and anonymity, has been so forceful in part because the
internet’s insistence on consistent, approval-worthy identity is so
strong. In particular, the misogyny embedded in trolling reflects the
way women—who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required
to maintain an external awareness of their own identity—often
navigate these online conditions so profitably. It’s the self-
calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me
capitalize on “having” to be online. My only experience of the world
has been one in which personal appeal is paramount and self-
exposure is encouraged; this legitimately unfortunate paradigm,
inhabited first by women and now generalized to the entire internet,
is what trolls loathe and actively repudiate. They destabilize an
internet built on transparency and likability. They pull us back
toward the chaotic and the unknown.
Of course, there are many better ways of making the argument
against hyper-visibility than trolling. As Werner Herzog told GQ, in
2011, speaking about psychoanalysis: “We have to have our dark
corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a
way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every
single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot
live in a house like this anymore.”
—
The first time I was ever paid to publish anything, it was 2013, the
end of the blog era. Trying to make a living as a writer with the
internet as a standing precondition of my livelihood has given me
some professional motivation to stay active on social media, making
my work and personality and face and political leanings and dog
photos into a continually updated record that anyone can see. In
doing this, I have sometimes felt the same sort of unease that
washed over me when I was a cheerleader and learned how to
convincingly fake happiness at football games—the feeling of acting
as if conditions are fun and normal and worthwhile in the hopes
that they will just magically become so. To try to write online, more
specifically, is to operate on a set of assumptions that are already
dubious when limited to writers and even more questionable when
turned into a categorical imperative for everyone on the internet:
the assumption that speech has an impact, that it’s something like
action; the assumption that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be
constantly writing down what you think.
I have benefited, I mean, from the internet’s unhealthy focus on
opinion. This focus is rooted in the way the internet generally
minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much
of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly
valorized, twenty-first-century life. The internet can feel like an
astonishingly direct line to reality—click if you want something and
it’ll show up at your door two hours later; a series of tweets goes
viral after a tragedy and soon there’s a nationwide high school
walkout—but it can also feel like a shunt diverting our energy away
from action, leaving the real-world sphere to the people who already
control it, keeping us busy figuring out the precisely correct way of
explaining our lives. In the run-up to the 2016 election and
increasingly so afterward, I started to feel that there was almost
nothing I could do about ninety-five percent of the things I cared
about other than form an opinion—and that the conditions that
allowed me to live in mild everyday hysterics about an unlimited
supply of terrible information were related to the conditions that
were, at the same time, consolidating power, sucking wealth
upward, far outside my grasp.
I don’t mean to be naïvely fatalistic, to act like nothing can be
done about anything. People are making the world better through
concrete footwork every day. (Not me—I’m too busy sitting in front
of the internet!) But their time and labor, too, has been devalued
and stolen by the voracious form of capitalism that drives the
internet, and which the internet drives in turn. There is less time
these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet
has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation,
redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-
installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to
physically and politically engage with our community the way many
of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us
brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the
opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these
circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something
and starts seeming like an end in itself.
I started thinking about this when I was working as an editor at
Jezebel, in 2014. I spent a lot of the day reading headlines on
women’s websites, most of which had by then adopted a feminist
slant. In this realm, speech was constantly framed as a sort of
intensely satisfying action: you’d get headlines like “Miley Cyrus
Spoke Out About Gender Fluidity on Snapchat and It Was
Everything” or “Amy Schumer’s Speech About Body Confidence at
the Women’s Magazine Awards Ceremony Will Have You in Tears.”
Forming an opinion was also framed as a sort of action: blog posts
offered people guidance on how to feel about online controversies
or particular scenes on TV. Even identity itself seemed to take on
these valences. Merely to exist as a feminist was to be doing some
important work. These ideas have intensified and gotten more
complicated in the Trump era, in which, on the one hand, people
like me are busy expressing anguish online and mostly affecting
nothing, and on the other, more actual and rapid change has come
from the internet than ever before. In the turbulence that followed
the Harvey Weinstein revelations, women’s speech swayed public
opinion and led directly to change. People with power were forced to
reckon with their ethics; harassers and abusers were pushed out of
their jobs. But even in this narrative, the importance of action was
subtly elided. People wrote about women “speaking out” with
prayerful reverence, as if speech itself could bring women freedom
—as if better policies and economic redistribution and true
investment from men weren’t necessary, too.
Goffman observes the difference between doing something and
expressing the doing of something, between feeling something and
conveying a feeling. “The representation of an activity will vary in
some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably
misrepresent it,” Goffman writes. (Take the experience of enjoying a
sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that
you’re enjoying a sunset, for example.) The internet is engineered
for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to
create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions
to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why,
with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or
reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem
so.
As the value of speech inflates even further in the online
attention economy, this problem only gets worse. I don’t know what
to do with the fact that I myself continue to benefit from all this:
that my career is possible in large part because of the way the
internet collapses identity, opinion, and action—and that I, as a
writer whose work is mostly critical and often written in first
person, have some inherent stake in justifying the dubious practice
of spending all day trying to figure out what you think. As a reader,
of course, I’m grateful for people who help me understand things,
and I’m glad that they—and I—can be paid to do so. I am glad, too,
for the way the internet has given an audience to writers who
previously might have been shut out of the industry, or kept on its
sidelines: I’m one of them. But you will never catch me arguing that
professional opinion-havers in the age of the internet are, on the
whole, a force for good.
—
In April 2017, the Times brought a millennial writer named Bari
Weiss onto its opinion section as both a writer and an editor. Weiss
had graduated from Columbia, and had worked as an editor at
Tablet and then at The Wall Street Journal. She leaned conservative,
with a Zionist streak. At Columbia, she had cofounded a group
called Columbians for Academic Freedom, hoping to pressure the
university into punishing a pro-Palestinian professor who had made
her feel “intimidated,” she told NPR in 2005.
At the Times, Weiss immediately began launching columns from
a rhetorical and political standpoint of high-strung defensiveness,
disguised with a veneer of levelheaded nonchalance. “Victimhood,
in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood;
power and privilege are profane,” she wrote—a bit of elegant
phrasing in a piece that warned the public of the rampant anti-
Semitism evinced, apparently, by a minor activist clusterfuck, in
which the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March banned Star of
David flags. She wrote a column slamming the organizers of the
Women’s March over a few social media posts expressing support
for Assata Shakur and Louis Farrakhan. This, she argued, was
troubling evidence that progressives, just like conservatives, were
unable to police their internal hate. (Both-sides arguments like this
are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian
and intellectually superior; this particular one required ignoring the
fact that liberals remained obsessed with “civility” while the
Republican president was actively endorsing violence at every turn.
Later on, when Tablet published an investigation into the Women’s
March organizers who maintained disconcerting ties to the Nation
of Islam, these organizers were criticized by liberals, who truly do
not lack the self-policing instinct; in large part because the left does
take hate seriously, the Women’s March effectively splintered into
two groups.) Often, Weiss’s columns featured aggrieved predictions
of how her bold, independent thinking would make her opponents
go crazy and attack her. “I will inevitably get called a racist,” she
proclaimed in one column, titled “Three Cheers for Cultural
Appropriation.” “I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred
as Islamophobic,” she wrote in another column. Well, sure.
Though Weiss often argued that people should get more
comfortable with those who offended or disagreed with them, she
seemed mostly unable to take her own advice. During the Winter
Olympics in 2018, she watched the figure skater Mirai Nagasu land
a triple axel—the first American woman to do so in Olympic
competition—and tweeted, in a very funny attempt at a compliment,
“Immigrants: they get the job done.” Because Nagasu was actually
born in California, Weiss was immediately shouted down. This is
what happens online when you do something offensive: when I
worked at Jezebel, people shouted me down on Twitter about five
times a year over things I had written or edited, and sometimes
outlets published pieces about our mistakes. This was often
overwhelming and unpleasant, but it was always useful. Weiss, for
her part, tweeted that the people calling her racist tweet racist were
a “sign of civilization’s end.” A couple of weeks later, she wrote a
column called “We’re All Fascists Now,” arguing that angry liberals
were creating a “moral flattening of the earth.” At times it seems
that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad
enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that
criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her
worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.
It’s of course true that there are vast, angry mobs on the internet.
Jon Ronson wrote the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about
this in 2015. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions,” he
writes, describing the state of Twitter around 2012. “After a while it
wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was
misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to
consume us a lot….In fact, it felt weird and empty when there
wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt
like days picking at fingernails, treading water.” Web 2.0 had
curdled; its organizing principle was shifting. The early internet had
been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces
remain on the internet are still the product of affinity and openness.
But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of
opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and
rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.
This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual
enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as
elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize
people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative
vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets
more people to look. Gawker Media thrived on antagonism: its
flagship site made enemies of everyone; Deadspin targeted ESPN,
Jezebel the world of women’s magazines. There was a brief wave of
sunny, saccharine, profitable internet content—the OMG era of
BuzzFeed, the rise of sites like Upworthy—but it ended in 2014 or
so. Today, on Facebook, the most-viewed political pages succeed
because of a commitment to constant, aggressive, often unhinged
opposition. Beloved, oddly warmhearted websites like The Awl, The
Toast, and Grantland have all been shuttered; each closing has been
a reminder that an open-ended, affinity-based, generative online
identity is hard to keep alive.
That opposition looms so large on the internet can be good and
useful and even revolutionary. Because of the internet’s tilt toward
decontextualization and frictionlessness, a person on social media
can seem to matter as much as whatever he’s set himself against.
Opponents can meet on suddenly (if temporarily) even ground.
Gawker covered the accusations against Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby
years before the mainstream media would take sexual misconduct
seriously. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the movement
against the Dakota Access Pipeline challenged and overturned long-
standing hierarchies through the strategic deployment of social
media. The Parkland teenagers were able to position themselves as
opponents of the entire GOP.
But the appearance of a more level playing field is not the fact of
it, and everything that happens on the internet bounces and
refracts. At the same time that ideologies that lead toward equality
and freedom have gained power through the internet’s open
discourse, existing power structures have solidified through a
vicious (and very online) opposition to this encroachment. In her
2017 book, Kill All Normies—a project of accounting for the “online
battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless
shaped culture and ideas in a profound way”—the writer Angela
Nagle argues that the alt-right coalesced in response to increasing
cultural power on the left. Gamergate, she writes, brought together
a “strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-
posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist
pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls” to form a
united front against the “earnestness and moral self-flattery of what
felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity.” The obvious hole in
the argument is the fact that what Nagle identifies as the center of
this liberal conformity—college activist movements, obscure Tumblr
accounts about mental health and arcane sexualities—are frequently
derided by liberals, and have never been nearly as powerful as those
who detest them would like to think. The Gamergaters’ worldview
was not actually endangered; they just had to believe it was—or to
pretend it was, and wait for a purportedly leftist writer to affirm
them—in order to lash out and remind everyone what they could do.
Many Gamergaters cut their expressive teeth on 4chan, a
message board that adopted as one of its mottos the phrase “There
are no girls on the internet.” “This rule does not mean what you
think it means,” wrote one 4chan poster, who went, as most of them
did, by the username Anonymous. “In real life, people like you for
being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and
they pretend what you have to say is interesting, or that you are
smart or clever. On the Internet, we don’t have the chance to fuck
you. This means the advantage of being a ‘girl’ does not exist. You
don’t get a bonus to conversation just because I’d like to put my
cock in you.” He explained that women could get their unfair social
advantage back by posting photos of their tits on the message board:
“This is, and should be, degrading for you.”
Here was the opposition principle in action. Through identifying
the effects of women’s systemic objectification as some sort of
vagina-supremacist witchcraft, the men that congregated on 4chan
gained an identity, and a useful common enemy. Many of these men
had, likely, experienced consequences related to the “liberal
intellectual conformity” that is popular feminism: as the sexual
marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves
unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other
forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves
genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been
socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time
—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman
virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan
that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr:
tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.”
In the same way that it behooved these trolls to credit women
with a maximum of power that they did not actually possess, it
sometimes behooved women, on the internet, to do the same when
they spoke about trolls. At some points while I worked at Jezebel, it
would have been easy to enter into one of these situations myself.
Let’s say a bunch of trolls sent me threatening emails—an
experience that wasn’t exactly common, as I have been “lucky,” but
wasn’t rare enough to surprise me. The economy of online attention
would suggest that I write a column about those trolls, quote their
emails, talk about how the experience of being threatened
constitutes a definitive situation of being a woman in the world. (It
would be acceptable for me to do this even though I have never been
hacked or swatted or Gamergated, never had to move out of my
house to a secure location, as so many other women have.) My
column about trolling would, of course, attract an influx of trolling.
Then, having proven my point, maybe I’d go on TV and talk about
the situation, and then I would get trolled even more, and then I
could go on defining myself in reference to trolls forever,
positioning them as inexorable and monstrous, and they would
return the favor in the interest of their own ideological
advancement, and this whole situation could continue until we all
died.
There is a version of this mutual escalation that applies to any
belief system, which brings me back to Bari Weiss and all the other
writers who have fashioned themselves as brave contrarians,
building entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets,
making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them,
the people they hate. It’s ridiculous, and at the same time, here I am
writing this essay, doing the same thing. It is nearly impossible,
today, to separate engagement from magnification. (Even declining
to engage can turn into magnification: when people targeted in
Pizzagate as Satanist pedophiles took their social media accounts
private, the Pizzagaters took this as proof that they had been right.)
Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone:
when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their
work.
—
The political philosopher Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three
categories. There’s social solidarity, which is based on common
experience; civic solidarity, which is based on moral obligation to a
community; and political solidarity, which is based on a shared
commitment to a cause. These forms of solidarity overlap, but
they’re distinct from one another. What’s political, in other words,
doesn’t also have to be personal, at least not in the sense of
firsthand experience. You don’t need to step in shit to understand
what stepping in shit feels like. You don’t need to have directly
suffered at the hands of some injustice in order to be invested in
bringing that injustice to an end.
But the internet brings the “I” into everything. The internet can
make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in
their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than
politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of
maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life. Under these terms,
instead of expressing morally obvious solidarity with the struggle of
black Americans under the police state or the plight of fat women
who must roam the earth to purchase stylish and thoughtful
clothing, the internet would encourage me to express solidarity
through inserting my own identity. Of course I support the black
struggle because I, myself, as a woman of Asian heritage, have
personally been injured by white supremacy. (In fact, as an Asian
woman, part of a minority group often deemed white-adjacent, I
have benefited from American anti-blackness on just as many
occasions.) Of course I understand the difficulty of shopping as a
woman who is overlooked by the fashion industry because I, myself,
have also somehow been marginalized by this industry. This
framework, which centers the self in an expression of support for
others, is not ideal.
The phenomenon in which people take more comfort in a sense
of injury than a sense of freedom governs many situations where
people are objectively not being victimized on a systematic basis.
For example, men’s rights activists have developed a sense of
solidarity around the absurd claim that men are second-class
citizens. White nationalists have brought white people together
through the idea that white people are endangered, specifically
white men—this at a time when 91 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are
white men, when white people make up 90 percent of elected
American officials and an overwhelming majority of top decision-
makers in music, publishing, television, movies, and sports.
Conversely, and crucially, the dynamic also applies in situations
where claims of vulnerability are legitimate and historically
entrenched. The greatest moments of feminist solidarity in recent
years have stemmed not from an affirmative vision but from
articulating extreme versions of the low common denominator of
male slight. These moments have been world-altering:
#YesAllWomen, in 2014, was the response to Elliot Rodger’s Isla
Vista massacre, in which he killed six people and wounded fourteen
in an attempt to exact revenge on women for rejecting him. Women
responded to this story with a sense of nauseating recognition: mass
violence is nearly always linked to violence toward women, and for
women it is something approaching a universal experience to have
placated a man out of the real fear that he will hurt you. In turn,
some men responded with the entirely unnecessary reminder that
“not all men” are like that. (I was once hit with “not all men” right
after a stranger yelled something obscene at me; the guy I was with
noted my displeasure and helpfully reminded me that not all men
are jerks.) Women began posting stories on Twitter and Facebook
with #YesAllWomen to make an obvious but important point: not
all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have
experienced fear because of men. #MeToo, in 2017, came in the
weeks following the Harvey Weinstein revelations, as the floodgates
opened and story after story after story rolled out about the
subjugation women had experienced at the hands of powerful men.
Against the normal forms of disbelief and rejection these stories
meet with—it can’t possibly be that bad; something about her telling
that story seems suspicious—women anchored one another,
establishing the breadth and inescapability of male abuse of power
through speaking simultaneously and adding #MeToo.
In these cases, multiple types of solidarity seemed to naturally
meld together. It was women’s individual experiences of
victimization that produced our widespread moral and political
opposition to it. And at the same time, there was something about
the hashtag itself—its design, and the ways of thinking that it
affirms and solidifies—that both erased the variety of women’s
experiences and made it seem as if the crux of feminism was this
articulation of vulnerability itself. A hashtag is specifically designed
to remove a statement from context and to position it as part of an
enormous singular thought. A woman participating in one of these
hashtags becomes visible at an inherently predictable moment of
male aggression: the time her boss jumped her, or the night a
stranger followed her home. The rest of her life, which is usually far
less predictable, remains unseen. Even as women have attempted to
use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative,
these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying
to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of
control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability
seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity
around anything else. What we have in common is obviously
essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the
factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that
illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there
is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about
individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate
disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those
speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that
women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same
as being violently raped.
What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these
essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped
so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if
Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every
social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if
YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme
content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply
didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile
that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with
visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most
mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral
reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile
the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted,
like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe. The extremes of
performative solidarity are all transparently embarrassing: a
Christian internet personality urging other conservatives to tell
Starbucks baristas that their name is “Merry Christmas,” or Nev
Schulman from the TV show Catfish taking a selfie with a hand over
his heart in an elevator and captioning it “A real man shows his
strength through patience and honor. This elevator is abuse free.”
(Schulman punched a girl in college.) The demonstrative
celebration of black women on social media—white people tweeting
“black women will save America” after elections, or Mark Ruffalo
tweeting that he said a prayer and God answered as a black woman
—often hints at a bizarre need on the part of white people to
personally participate in an ideology of equality that ostensibly
requires them to chill out. At one point in The Presentation of Self,
Goffman writes that the audience’s way of shaping a role for the
performer can become more elaborate than the performance itself.
This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like
—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often
turns into the show.
—
The final, and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion
of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident
but an essential design feature: social media was constructed
around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important
to you. In an early internal memo about the creation of Facebook’s
News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg observed, already beyond parody, “A
squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your
interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea was that
social media would give us a fine-tuned sort of control over what we
looked at. What resulted was a situation where we—first as
individuals, and then inevitably as a collective—are essentially
unable to exercise control at all. Facebook’s goal of showing people
only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade,
in the effective end of shared civic reality. And this choice,
combined with the company’s financial incentive to continually
trigger heightened emotional responses in its users, ultimately
solidified the current norm in news media consumption: today we
mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological
alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous
and also mad.
In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu observes that technologies
designed to increase control over our attention often have the
opposite effect. He uses the TV remote control as one example. It
made flipping through channels “practically nonvolitional,” he
writes, and put viewers in a “mental state not unlike that of a
newborn or a reptile.” On the internet, this dynamic has been
automated and generalized in the form of endlessly varied but
somehow monotonous social media feeds—these addictive,
numbing fire hoses of information that we aim at our brains for
much of the day. In front of the timeline, as many critics have
noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behavior, the sort
that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable
food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their
device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s
rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In
other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying.
That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over
and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some
momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.
Like many among us, I have become acutely conscious of the
way my brain degrades when I strap it in to receive the full barrage
of the internet—these unlimited channels, all constantly reloading
with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job
announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and
political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of
information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced. This is
an awful way to live, and it is wearing us down quickly. At the end of
2016, I wrote a blog post for The New Yorker about the cries of
“worst year ever” that were then flooding the internet. There had
been terrorist attacks all over the world, and the Pulse shooting in
Orlando. David Bowie, Prince, and Muhammad Ali had died. More
black men had been executed by police who could not control their
racist fear and hatred: Alton Sterling was killed in the Baton Rouge
parking lot where he was selling CDs; Philando Castile was
murdered as he reached for his legal-carry permit during a routine
traffic stop. Five police officers were killed in Dallas at a protest
against this police violence. Donald Trump was elected president of
the United States. The North Pole was thirty-six degrees hotter than
normal. Venezuela was collapsing; families starved in Yemen. In
Aleppo, a seven-year-old girl named Bana Alabed was tweeting her
fears of imminent death. And in front of this backdrop, there were
all of us—our stupid selves, with our stupid frustrations, our lost
baggage and delayed trains. It seemed to me that this sense of
punishing oversaturation would persist no matter what was in the
news. There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person
could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to
calibrate this information correctly—no guidebook for how to
expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of
human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal
from the profound. The internet was dramatically increasing our
ability to know about things, while our ability to change things
stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. I had started
to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of
heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make
less sense every day.
But the worse the internet gets, the more we appear to crave it—
the more it gains the power to shape our instincts and desires. To
guard against this, I give myself arbitrary boundaries—no Instagram
stories, no app notifications—and rely on apps that shut down my
Twitter and Instagram accounts after forty-five minutes of daily use.
And still, on occasion, I’ll disable my social media blockers, and I’ll
sit there like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly
hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer, masturbating
through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a
good meme. The internet is still so young that it’s easy to retain
some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something.
We remember that at one point this all felt like butterflies and
puddles and blossoms, and we sit patiently in our festering inferno,
waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good
again. But it won’t. The internet is governed by incentives that make
it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the
future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be
left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a
collective of people facing various catastrophes. Distraction is a
“life-and-death matter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing.
“A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is
like a person who can’t think and act.”
Of course, people have been carping in this way for many
centuries. Socrates feared that the act of writing would “create
forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” The sixteenth-century scientist
Conrad Gessner worried that the printing press would facilitate an
“always on” environment. In the eighteenth century, men
complained that newspapers would be intellectually and morally
isolating, and that the rise of the novel would make it difficult for
people—specifically women—to differentiate between fiction and
fact. We worried that radio would drive children to distraction, and
later that TV would erode the careful attention required by radio. In
1985, Neil Postman observed that the American desire for constant
entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a
“vast descent into triviality.” The difference is that, today, there is
nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but
the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor,
but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is
complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and
spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is
already banging down the door.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and
economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases
followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would
somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model.
At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first.
Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain
our humanity, to act on a model of actual selfhood, one that
embraces culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance. We would
have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the
internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care
less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own
unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us,
to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without
putting ourselves first. The alternative is unspeakable. But you
know that—it’s already here.
Reality TV Me
Until recently, one of the best-kept secrets in my life, even to
myself, was that I once spent three weeks when I was sixteen
filming a reality TV show in Puerto Rico. The show was called Girls
v. Boys: Puerto Rico, and the concept was exactly what it sounds
like. There were eight cast members total—four boys, four girls. We
filmed on Vieques, a four-mile-wide island, rough and green and
hilly, with wild horses running along the white edges of the beach.
The show was built around periodic challenges, each team racking
up points toward a $50,000 jackpot. Between competitions, we
retreated to a pale-blue house strung with twinkly lights and
generated whatever drama we could.
My school let me miss three weeks of high school to do this,
which still surprises me. It was a strict place—the handbook
prohibited sleeveless shirts and homosexuality—and though I was a
good student, my conduct record was iffy, and I was disliked,
rightfully enough, by a lot of adults. But then again, the
administrators had kept me at the school even when my parents
couldn’t afford the tuition. And I was a senior already, because I’d
skipped grades after my family moved from Toronto to Houston.
Also, according to rumor, the tiny Christian institution had already
sent an alumnus to compete on The Bachelorette. There was
something, maybe, about that teenage religious environment, the
way everyone was always flirting and posturing and attempting to
deceive one another, that set us up remarkably well for reality TV.
In any case, I told the administrators I hoped to “be a light for
Jesus, but on television,” and got their permission. In December
2004, I packed a bag full of graphic tees and handkerchief-size
denim miniskirts and went to Puerto Rico, and in January I came
back blazing with self-enthrallment—salt in my hair, as tan as if I’d
been wood-stained. The ten episodes of Girls v. Boys started airing
the summer after I graduated from high school on a channel called
Noggin, which was best known for Daria reruns and the Canadian
teen drama Degrassi. I invited friends over to watch the first
episode, and felt gratified but also deeply pained by the sight of my
face on a big screen. When I went off to college, I didn’t buy a TV for
my dorm room, and I felt that this was a good opportunity to shed
my televised self like a snakeskin. Occasionally, in my twenties, at
bars or on road trips, I’d pull up my IMDb credit as a piece of bizarre
trivia, but I was uninterested in investigating Girls v. Boys any
further. It took me thirteen years, and an essay idea, to finally finish
watching the show.
Audition tapes:
ACE
, a black skater bro in New Jersey, does kick-
fl
ips in a
public square;
JIA
, a brown girl from Texas, says she’s tired of being a
cheerleader;
CORY
, a white boy from Kentucky, admits he’s never been
kissed;
KELLEY
, a blonde from Phoenix, does crunches on a yoga mat,
looking like Britney Spears;
DEMIAN
, a boy from Vegas with a slight
Mexican accent, wrestles his little brother;
KRYSTAL
, a black girl with a
feline face, says she knows she seems stuck-up;
RYDER
, a California boy
with reddish hair and ear gauges, says he knows he looks like Johnny
Depp;
PARIS
, a tiny blonde from Oregon, says that she’s always been a
freak and she likes it that way.
Six teens assemble on a blinding tarmac under blue sky. The
fi
rst
challenge is a race to the house, which the boys win.
JIA
and
CORY
arrive late, nervous and giggling. Everyone plays Truth or Dare (it’s all
dares, and every dare is to make out). In the morning the contestants
assemble in front of a long table for an eating race: mayonnaise
fi
rst,
then cockroaches, then hot peppers, then cake. Girls win. That night,
KELLEY
gives
CORY
his
fi
rst-ever kiss. Everyone is wary of
PARIS
, who
has an angel’s face and never stops talking. In the third competition,
inner-tube basketball, girls lose.
—
My reality TV journey began on a Sunday afternoon in September
2004, when I was hanging around the mall with my parents,
digesting a large portion of fettuccine Alfredo from California Pizza
Kitchen and waiting for my brother to get out of hockey practice at
the rink. Fifty feet away from us, next to a booth that advertised a
casting call, a guy was approaching teenagers and asking them to
make an audition tape for a show. “There was a cardboard cutout of
a surfboard,” my mom told me recently, remembering. “And you
were wearing a white tank top and a Hawaiian-print skirt, so it was
like you were dressed for the theme.” On a whim, she suggested that
I go over to the booth. “You were like, ‘No! Ugh! Mom! No way!’
You were so annoyed that we sort of started egging you on as a joke.
Then Dad pulled out twenty bucks from his wallet and said, ‘I’ll give
you this if you go do it,’ and you basically slapped it out of his hand
and went over and made a tape and then went shopping or whatever
you wanted to do.”
A few weeks later, I received a phone call from a producer, who
explained the conceit of the show (“girls versus boys, in Puerto
Rico”) and asked me to make a second audition video. I showed off
my personality with a heady cocktail of maximally stupid
choreographed dances and a promise that “the girls will not win—I
mean they will win—with me on the team.” When I was cast, my
mom was suddenly hesitant; she hadn’t expected that anything
would actually come of either tape. But that year she and my dad
were often absent, distracted. At the time, rather than probe for the
larger cause of their scattered attention, I preferred to take
advantage of it to obliterate my curfew and see if I could wheedle
twenty dollars here and there to buy going-out tops from Forever 21.
I told my mom that she had to let me go, since it had been her idea
for me to audition.
Eventually she acquiesced. Then suddenly it was December, and
I was sitting in the Houston airport, eating carnitas tacos while
listening to Brand New on my portable CD player and headphones,
brimming with anticipation like an overfilled plastic cup. I lingered
in this delectable pre-adventure limbo so long that I missed my
flight, which immediately ruined our tight filming schedule. I
wouldn’t make it for the arrival or for the first challenge, and
another boy would be kept behind to even things out.
I spent the next twenty-four hours blacked out in pure shame. By
the time I got to Vieques, I was desperate to make up for my own
stupidity, so I volunteered to go first in our first full challenge. “I’ll
eat anything! I don’t give a shit!” I yelled.
We lined up in front of four covered dishes. The horn went off,
and I lifted my dish to find—a mound of hot mayonnaise.
All my life I have declined to eat mayonnaise-influenced dishes. I
am not a consumer of chicken salad or egg salad or potato salad. I
scrape even the tiniest traces of aioli off a sandwich. Mayonnaise,
for me, was about as bad as it could possibly get. But of course I
immediately plunged my face into this thick, yellowish mountain,
gobbling it frantically, getting it everywhere—it’s very hard to speed-
eat mayo—and ending up looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy had
just ejaculated all over my face. Because the girls won the
competition, I didn’t regret any of this until after the challenge,
when the producers took us snorkeling, and I couldn’t concentrate
on the brilliant rainbow reef around us because I kept torching the
inside of my snorkel with mayonnaise burps.
Or, at least: that’s what I’d always said had happened. The mayo
incident was the only thing I remembered clearly from the show,
because it was the only thing I ever talked about—the story of my
teenage self lapping up hot mayonnaise for money was an
enjoyable, reliable way to gross people out. But, I realized, watching
the show, I’d been telling it wrong. Before the challenge, I volunteer
to eat the mayo. My dish was never actually covered. The mayo was
not a surprise. The truth was that I had deliberately chosen the
mayo; the story that I had been telling was that the mayo had
happened to me.
It seemed likely that I’d been making this error more generally.
For most of my life I’ve believed, without really articulating it, that
strange things just drop into my lap—that, especially because I can’t
really think unless I’m writing, I’m some sort of blank-brained
innocent who has repeatedly stumbled into the absurd unknown. If
I ever talk about Girls v. Boys, I say that I ended up on the show by
accident, that it was completely random, that I auditioned because I
was an idiot killing time at the mall.
I like this story better than the alternative, and equally accurate,
one, which is that I’ve always felt that I was special and acted
accordingly. It’s true that I ended up on reality TV by chance. It’s
also true that I signed up enthusiastically, felt almost fated to do it.
I needed my dad’s twenty dollars not as motivation but as cover for
my motivation. It wasn’t my egotism that got me to the casting
booth, I could tell myself: it was merely the promise of a new
flammable halter top to pair with my prize Abercrombie miniskirt
and knockoff Reefs. Later on, in my journal, I announce my casting
with excitement but no surprise whatsoever. It is now obvious to
me, as it always should have been, that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t
end up running around in a bikini and pigtails on television unless
she also desperately wants to be seen.
An electric sunrise, a white sand beach. The teens shoot T-shirt cannons
at one another; girls lose.
PARIS
pours her heart out to
DEMIAN
, who
wants to make out with
JIA
, who says she has a rule that she’s not
going to make out with anyone all season.
DEMIAN
thinks he can get
JIA
to give in. Drama swirls around
RYDER
, who is a strong athlete but prone
to histrionics. The teens do an obstacle course; girls lose.
KELLEY
is trying to distract a smitten
CORY
from the competition.
PARIS
falls o
ff
a balance beam.
ACE
wants to make out with
KELLEY
. “I’ve got
this little triangle going on between me,
CORY
, and
ACE
,” says
KELLEY
,
smiling into the camera. “And things are getting pretty hot.”
—
Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico was the fourth season of this reality
show, which started airing in 2003. The first season was filmed in
Florida, the second in Hawaii, and the third in Montana. A decaying
fan site lists the cast members from all four seasons, linking to
Myspace pages that have long ago 404ed. Group shots from each
season look like PacSun ads after a diversity directive. The names
form a constellation of mid-aughts suburban adolescence: Justin,
Mikey, Jessica, Lauren, Christina, Jake.
This was the heyday of reality television—a relatively innocent
time, before the bleak long trail of the industry had revealed itself.
Reality TV had not yet created a whole new type of person, the
camera-animated assemblage of silicone and pharmaceuticals; we
hadn’t yet seen the way organic personalities could decay on
unscripted television, their half-lives measured through sponsored
laxative-tea Instagrams and paid appearances at third-tier regional
clubs. In the early 2000s, the genre was still a novelty, as was the
underlying idea that would drive twenty-first-century technology
and culture—the idea that ordinary personhood would seamlessly
readjust itself around whatever within it would sell. There was no
YouTube when I signed my contract. There were no photos on
phones, or video clips on social media. The Real World was on the
Paris and San Diego seasons. Real World/Road Rules Challenge was
airing, with its first “Battle of the Sexes” season—which Girls v.
Boys approximates—in 2003. Survivor was still a novelty, and
Laguna Beach was about to take over MTV.
Girls v. Boys was a low-budget production. There were four
cameras total, and our two executive producers were on site at all
times. Last year, I emailed one of these producers, Jessica Morgan
Richter, and met up with her for a glass of wine in a dim Italian
happy-hour spot in Midtown Manhattan. Jess looked just as I
remembered: a wry smile, a strong nose, and slightly mournful blue
eyes, a woman who could play Sarah Jessica Parker’s beleaguered
younger sister in a movie. We had all loved Jess, who was much
more generous to us than she needed to be. During filming, when
Paris was crying, Jess would lend her her iPod to cheer her up. In
the spring of 2005, she invited me, Kelley, and Krystal to come stay
with her in New York City, and took us out anywhere fun that would
allow sixteen-year-olds—a live Rocky Horror Picture Show,
Chinatown karaoke.
In 2006, Jess left the production company behind Girls v. Boys
and went to A&E, where she stayed for seven years, executive-
producing Hoarders and Flipping Boston. Now she’s the VP of
development at Departure Films, still focusing on reality. (“We do a
lot of houses,” she said, telling me about All Star Flip, a recent
special she’d produced with Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade.)
Girls v. Boys was the first show Jess ever worked on; she was hired
for the season before us, in Montana. As she and I stacked our coats
on a barstool, she reminded me that she had been the same age
then that I was now.
Jess had cast the whole show herself, starting the search in
August. “We had people everywhere,” she said. “I was faxing casting
calls to every high school in a major city that had a good sports
program. I went to all the swim teams in the tri-state area.” It was
relatively hard to cast a show like this, she explained. They needed
geographic diversity, ethnic diversity, and a mix of strong and
recognizable personalities distributed along a four–four gender
split. They also needed everyone to have some baseline athletic
ability, as well as parents who would sign off on the textbook-length
release forms—parents like this being, Jess noted, rarer than you’d
think. She and our other producer, Stephen, had owned our full
likenesses, and could have used the footage for any purpose. “I
wouldn’t let my kid do it!” she said. “You wouldn’t either!” (Later
on, I found my mom’s neat signature on the liability waiver, which
required her to release the producers, Noggin, MTV Networks, and
Viacom International for “any claim or liability whatsoever,” and to
“forever release, waive, and covenant not to sue the Released Parties
for any injury or death caused by negligence or other acts.”)
Jess checked her watch—at six, she needed to go relieve her
babysitter in Harlem—and then ordered us a margherita pizza. She
explained that reality TV casting is mainly about identifying people
with a basic telegenic quality—“people who really cut through TV,
who can keep their eyes at a certain level, who can look right past
the camera.” She had gotten on the phone with all of us, asking:
How would we react if we had a problem with someone? Did we
have a boyfriend or girlfriend at home? “You can tell a lot about a
sixteen-year-old by their answer to that question—how open they
are, how insecure,” she said. “There’s insecurity inherent in being a
teenager, but it doesn’t read well on camera if you’re uncomfortable.
On reality TV, you need people with zero insecurity. Or else you
need someone so insecure that it drives them totally nuts.”
The formula for group shows was pretty basic, Jess told me. Even
adult shows often ran on high school archetypes. You usually had
the jock, the prom queen, the weird guy, the nerd, the “spastic girl
who’s a little babyish.” I asked her if I could guess how we’d all been
cast. “Kelley was the cool girl,” I guessed. “Paris was the spaz. Cory
was the sweet country boy. Demian was the goofball. Ryder was
supposed to be the jock. Krystal was the bitch, the prissy girl.”
“Yeah, the sort of supermodel type,” Jess said.
“What about Ace?” I asked. “Krystal guessed that you guys cast
him so that you guys could have a black couple.” (Krystal—who had
a dry sense of humor, and was not at all a bitch—had described her
role to me as “standard reality TV black girl.”)
“We definitely needed diversity,” Jess said. “And you?”
“Was I the nerd?” I asked. (I was also cast for diversity reasons,
I’m sure.)
“No,” she said. “Although I do remember this one night where
you started doing homework. Stephen and I were like, this is awful
television, we have to get her to stop.”
“Was I…the reasonable one?”
“No!” Jess said. “We were hoping you wouldn’t be reasonable!
When we pitched you to the network it was as this know-it-all, a
type-A valedictorian.” She added that she’d also cast me because I
seemed athletic—I had done a tumbling pass on the football field in
my audition tape, neatly concealing the fact that I have so little
hand-eye coordination that I can barely catch a ball.
On the porch,
KELLEY
,
KRYSTAL
, and
JIA
talk about how
KELLEY
is
going to play
ACE
and
CORY
o
ff
each other to drive a wedge between the
boys. The boys try to use
PARIS
, whose crush on
RYDER
makes her easy
to manipulate, to undermine the girls.
PARIS
is ramping up the drama,
crying, talking nonstop.
RYDER
keeps losing his cool mid-competition. “I
don’t deserve, like, any sort of negativity feelings,”
RYDER
yells, shirtless
and skipping stones in the ocean. “That’s bullshit!”
The teens prepare to go out dancing.
DEMIAN
is still trying to make out
with
JIA
. Wearing a shirt on his head,
ACE
does a pitch-perfect
impression of
JIA
blowing
DEMIAN
o
ff
. After a montage of everyone
politely grinding at an outdoor beach bar, the teens come back to the
house, where the hosts are waiting. Everyone’s going to vote to kick
someone o
ff
the island. One person from each team will be sent home.
—
It took me months to work up the courage to actually watch Girls v.
Boys, which was an unusual feeling: the show itself is proof that I
don’t hesitate to do much. But I found that I physically could not
bring myself to restart the show. In the winter of 2018, after drinks
on a snowy weeknight at a bar in Brooklyn, I dragged my friend Puja
home with me to watch the first half of the season. A few days later,
I made my friend Kate come over to watch the rest.
It was strange to see so much video footage of myself as a
teenager. It was stranger to see how natural we all acted—as if
giving confessionals and being chased around by cameramen was
the most normal possible thing. And it was strangest, maybe, to see
how little I had changed. When I started phoning up the rest of the
cast, that time-warp sense intensified. Everyone was around thirty,
an age where most people feel some distance between their
adolescence and the present. But we had all been, as Jess
mentioned, abnormally confident as teenagers—our respective
senses of self had been so concrete. I asked everyone if they felt
they’d changed a lot since the TV show. Everyone told me they had
grown up, obviously, but otherwise felt pretty much the same.
Kelley, now married, lived in Newport Beach and worked in
business development for a real estate company. Krystal lived in Los
Angeles and was acting and modeling while working a day job and
raising her twenty-month-old daughter, with whom she had
appeared on another reality show, TLC’s Rattled. Cory, the sweet
country boy who’d gotten his first kiss on camera with Kelley, lived
in Orlando with his boyfriend and worked for Disney. Demian, the
goofball who had grown up in Vegas, still lived there, working as a
club promoter. Ace was in DC. Ryder didn’t answer my messages,
and I held off on reaching out to Paris after checking her Facebook,
where she was documenting, gracefully, a month in outpatient
therapy for bipolar II.
I asked everyone what roles they thought we’d all played in the
show. Half of the casting was obvious to everyone. Cory, Kelley,
Paris, and Krystal had all played fixed archetypes: the sweet guy, the
all-American girl, the wacko, the bitch. The rest of us—Demian,
Ryder, Ace, and me—weren’t as clear. Demian thought he’d been
cast as the asshole; Kelley guessed that Demian was the prankster;
Krystal guessed the “stoner lothario, sort of Jersey Shore.” Ryder
was all over the map for everyone—the pretentious artistic boy, the
slutty jock, the flamboyant punk rocker—and I was, too. Though I’m
sure they would’ve answered differently if someone else had been
asking, my castmates guessed I was the smart one, or the sweet one,
or the “fun Southern one,” or the prude.
To even ask these questions is to validate a sort of classic
adolescent fantasy. Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of
the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely
watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is
movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully
soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street. On the
show, this was the actual world that the adults constructed around
us. We were categorized as characters. Our social dramas were set to
generic acoustic ballads and pop punk. Our identities were given a
clear narrative importance. All of this is a narcissist’s fantasy come
true. “There’s a saying we have in reality,” Jess, the producer, told
me, while we were sitting in Midtown. “Everyone signs. Most people
want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better
Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps,
everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve
one.”
In high school, I craved the sort of rapt attention that the Girls v.
Boys cameras would provide me. In my journal, I constantly
overestimate the impressions that I’m making on other people. I
monitor myself, wondering how my friends and classmates see me,
and then trying to control whatever they see. This is, I write, an
attempt to be more honest: I want to act in a way that reflects how I
feel; I want to live the way that I “really am.” But I also worry that
I’m more interested in narrative consistency than anything. I worry
that all this self-monitoring has made me, as I wrote in 2004, too
conscious of what “Jia” would do in this situation—that I’m in
danger of becoming a “character to myself.”
This anxiety is something that would stick with me, clearly. But
Girls v. Boys dissolved part of it in a peculiar way. On the show,
where I was under constant surveillance, I was unable to get far
enough away from myself to think about the impression I was
leaving. When everything was framed as a performance, it seemed
impossible to consciously perform. In 2005, when I got back to
Texas, all the conjecturing disappeared from my journal. I stopped
wondering how anyone at my high school saw me; I had no
thoughts about how I’d appear on the show. Knowing that I was
seen got rid of my desire to see myself, to analyze myself as a
character. When I watched the first episode, I thought: How boring,
how embarrassing, it’s me.
Within a few years, I would begin to think that the impression I
left on people was, like the weather, essentially beyond my ability to
control. In retrospect, I just started to control it subconsciously
rather than consciously. The process of calibrating my external self
became so instinctive, so automatic, that I stopped being able to
perceive it. Reality TV simultaneously freed me from and tethered
me to self-consciousness by making self-consciousness inextricable
from everything else.
This was useful, if dubious, preparation for a life wrapped up
with the internet. I felt the same thing watching the show that I do
when I’m on the train in New York, scrolling through Twitter,
thinking, on the one hand: Where are we underneath all of this
arbitrary self-importance? And on the other: Aren’t we all exactly
as we seem?
A bright morning, sleepy teens. At the breakfast table,
JIA
awkwardly
tries to tell
PARIS
she’s sorry about what’s coming. On the beach,
PARIS
and
RYDER
get voted o
ff
. “I don’t take it personally, but that doesn’t
mean it doesn’t suck like a bitch,”
PARIS
says.
The six remaining contestants spin on a wheel and throw balls at one
another; the girls lose.
ACE
and
JIA
enter an abandoned military
barracks with night-vision cameras and padlocks. Girls lose again. The
next morning, the hosts are downstairs—another twist.
—
Every episode of Girls v. Boys is structured the same way. We do a
challenge, then we go home to talk about who we hate and who we
have a crush on, then we repeat. The predictability of reality TV
accrues into hypnosis. The sun rises in streaky golden time-lapse;
the camera pokes into the white mosquito nets over our bunk beds,
and we yawn and say today we’re going to win. We line up on the
beach wearing board shorts and bikinis; a bell goes off; we run
around on the sand assembling giant puzzle pieces; the hosts rack
up points on the board. The sun sets in time-lapse again, fluorescent
pink into deep twilight, and at night, with our tans darkening and
hair curling more with every episode, we complain about one
another and start fights and occasionally kiss.
I was amazed, watching the show, to see how much I had
forgotten. There were entire challenges I had no memory of. We had
sold homemade souvenirs at the Wyndham (?), raced each other in
kayaks with holes in the bottom (?), gotten on our knees with our
hands tied behind our backs and eaten wet dog food out of bowls
(?). In one episode I pick up a guitar and improvise a long ballad
about the ongoing romantic drama at the house. It worried me that
I could remember almost nothing that occurred off-camera. I had
no idea, for example, what we ate every day.
“I think we ate a lot of frozen pizzas,” Demian told me. “And we
went out for lunch a lot at that one place.” On the phone, Krystal
told me she still bought the same brand of frozen pizzas. I heard her
walk over to her freezer. “Yep, it’s Celeste. Microwave in minutes.”
Kelley remembered the lunch place: “It was called Bananas. The
place we went out dancing at night was called Chez Shack—there
were all these little rotisserie chickens on a spit.” Krystal
remembered Chez Shack, too, with its live band and low lighting.
“Ugh!” she said. “We thought we were in Havana Nights.” After
these conversations I had keyhole glimmers—a melamine plate, me
ordering the same sandwich over and over, sand on an outdoor patio
under a big black sky. But that was it. I forget everything that I don’t
need to turn into a story, and in Puerto Rico, making sense of what
happened every day was someone else’s job.
Reality TV is notorious for constructing stories out of nothing.
The Bachelor franchise famously engages in “Frankenbiting,”
manipulating audio and inserting false context to show contestants
saying things they never said. (In 2014, a Bachelor in Paradise
contestant received an edit that made her look like she was pouring
her heart out to a raccoon.) On our show, Jess told me, over three
months of editing, they moved a lot of footage around to make the
stories work. Occasionally I could see the stitches, and the other
cast members reminded me of a few things that had changed. (The
show skips over the fact that, in the twist where each team had to
vote off one of its members, Paris, who didn’t want to be spiteful,
and Cory, who felt overly pressured by the other boys, both voted
for themselves.) But the show nonetheless seemed like a uniquely
and bizarrely complete document. There we are, forever, with our
teenage voices and our impossibly resilient bodies, confiding to the
camera and diving into the ocean at the sound of a bell. In Vieques,
without knowing it, I was learning that in the twenty-first century it
would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext
for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience
itself.
On a windy soccer
fi
eld, the teens meet their new teammates:
RYDER
on
the girls’ team,
PARIS
with the boys. The competition is “human
foosball.” With
RYDER
on their side, the girls win. Afterward,
PARIS
sits
on the soccer
fi
eld crying.
ACE
and
DEMIAN
hate her. “We’ll have to carry
her like a sack of potatoes,”
DEMIAN
says. That night,
PARIS
tells
CORY
that
KELLEY
was only using him to mess with the boys’ team.
KELLEY
confronts
PARIS
, and
DEMIAN
plays protector. A screaming
fi
ght ensues.
KELLEY
tries to make up with
CORY
.
DEMIAN
tells
CORY
that
KELLEY
has
cheated on all her boyfriends. The girls try to make nice with
PARIS
.
“Everyone’s trying to play like they’re better than each other,” says
PARIS
, alone in the driveway, sni
ffl
ing. “But maybe we all just suck a lot.”
The teams kayak through a mangrove swamp; girls win.
JIA
and
KRYSTAL
give a confessional: the boys are pissed, they explain, because
KELLEY
wouldn’t hook up with
ACE
and
JIA
wouldn’t hook up with
DEMIAN
.
—
It is a major plot point, throughout the whole season, that I refuse
to make out with anyone. I’m vehement about this, starting on the
first night, when everyone plays Truth or Dare and kisses everyone
else. On the Vegas reunion episode—there is a Vegas reunion
episode, with all of us sitting on a bright stage set and watching clips
—Demian tells me that my rule was stupid. I get on an unbearable
high horse, saying I’m so sorry I have morals, mentioning a note
card I’d written out with rules I wouldn’t break.
Was I bullshitting? I have no memory of rules on a note card. Or
maybe I’m bullshitting now, having deemed that note card to be
incongruous with the current operating narrative of my life. As a
sixteen-year-old, I was, in fact, hung up on arbitrary sexual
boundaries; I was a virgin, and wanted to stay a virgin till marriage,
a goal that would go out the window within about a year. But I can’t
tell if, on the show, I was more concerned with looking virtuous or
actually being virtuous—or if, having gone from a religious
panopticon to a literal one, I was even capable of distinguishing
between the two ideas. I can’t tell if I had strong feelings about
making out with strangers—something I had genuinely not done at
that point—or just strong feelings about making out with strangers
on TV. The month before I left for Puerto Rico, I watched an episode
of Girls v. Boys: Montana and wrote in my journal, “I’m a little
weirded out. Everyone’s hooking up and the girls wear next to
nothing the whole time—tube tops, for a contest where they go herd
cattle. No way. I’m packing T-shirts, a lot of them. It’s weird to think
I might be the modest one, the one that refrains from hooking up,
because that’s not the role I play at home. I just don’t want to watch
it six months later and realize I looked like a skank.”
Underneath this veneer of a conservative moral conscience is a
clear sense of fearful superiority. I thought I was better than the
version of teen girlhood that seemed ubiquitous in the early aughts:
the avatars of campy sex and oppressive sentimentality in
blockbuster comedies and rom-coms, and the humiliating
neediness, in high school, of girls wanting to talk about guys all the
time. I had a temperamental desire to not look desperate, which
bled into a religious desire to not be slutty—or to not look slutty,
because in the case of reality television, they’re almost the same
thing. It’s possible, too, that Demian, with his easy dirtbag
demeanor, just didn’t fit my narrow and snobby idea of who I could
be attracted to: at the time I was into preppy guys who were rude to
me, and felt, I think, that being openly pursued was gauche. But all
throughout the show, I liked Demian, was drawn to his elaborate
and absurd sense of humor. On our last night in the house, after the
final competition was over, we finally hooked up—off-camera,
although Jess caught a goodbye kiss the next day. A tension that had
previously seemed beyond resolution dissolved in an instant, never
to be felt in the same way again. When I called Demian, while I was
writing this, I was in San Francisco reporting a story, and at one
point in our conversation neither of us could speak for laughing for
several minutes. Later that day, during interviews, I realized that my
face was sore.
The issue of sexual virtue cropped up in a much bigger way for
Cory, who introduced himself in his audition tape as a guy who
loved Britney Spears and had never been kissed, and then, on the
first episode, got his first kiss from Kelley, the Britney of our show.
Cory and Kelley had the romantic story line of the season partly by
mutual decision; they wanted the guaranteed airtime. But Cory—as
he told me when I called him—knew he was gay long before filming.
Kelley was only his first kiss with a girl.
In retrospect, it’s clear enough. He doesn’t seem physically
interested in Kelley, who is very hot, and in one challenge, when we
have to match up random objects with their owners, I identify a
bunch of movie ticket stubs as Cory’s after spotting Josie and the
Pussycats in the stack. But Cory never dropped the façade. He was
from a small town in Kentucky, and needed to stay in the closet.
He’d already tried to come out to his parents, but they’d refused to
hear it, his dad telling him not to make his worst nightmare come
true. (Jess told me that she wasn’t sure if, in 2005, Noggin would
even have let them broach the subject of homosexuality on the
show.) Before he left for Puerto Rico, his dad warned him not to “act
like Shaggy”—Shaggy from Scooby-Doo being the gayest person his
dad could think of. Cory has lived with his boyfriend for eight years
now, he told me, sounding, as ever, kind and optimistic and
practical. His parents are cordial but distant, polite to his partner
without acknowledging what the relationship is.
The teens make souvenirs and try to sell them at the Wyndham resort,
wearing Hawaiian-print hotel uniforms.
DEMIAN
uses his Spanish; the
boys win. Back at the house, the teens get their ice maker to produce
snow-cone balls and throw them at one another. The power goes out,
and they all swim in the pool in the dark. Over footage of
PARIS
climbing
on top of
ACE
and
DEMIAN
,
JIA
tells the camera that
PARIS
is trying to
fi
t
in on the boys’ team by using her boobs. The next day, the teens joust
on kayaks; girls lose.
The girls call a bonus competition.
RYDER
and
PARIS
speed-eat
enormous blood sausages and puke.
KELLEY
is frustrated that
CORY
hasn’t made a real move on her. “He’s nothing like anybody from home,”
KELLEY
says.
—
Part of the reason I never watched the show past the first episode
was that I never had to. The show aired just before things started to
stick around on the internet, and it was much too minor for clips to
resurface on YouTube. The N shut down in 2009, taking its website,
with its Girls v. Boys bonus clips and fan forums, down, too. I had
gotten on Facebook in 2005, between filming and airing, and it was
clear enough—we’d already had LiveJournal and Xanga and
Myspace—where this was all going. Reality TV conditions were
bleeding into everything; everyone was documenting their lives to
be viewed. I had the sense that, with Girls v. Boys, I could allow
myself a rare and asymmetrical sort of freedom. With this show, I
could have done something that was intended for public
consumption without actually having to consume it. I could have
created an image of myself that I would never have to see.
After the season concluded, the producers sent us the show on
VHS tapes. In college, I gave the tapes to my best friend, at her
request, and she binge-watched the whole season. While I was in
the Peace Corps, my boyfriend watched the whole show, too. (He
found reality TV me to be “exactly the same as you are now—just
bitchier.”) He hid the tapes in his parents’ house so that I couldn’t
find them and dispose of them, as I often threatened to. When his
mom accidentally donated them to Goodwill, I was overjoyed.
And then, in the spring of 2017, I found myself in a rented
guesthouse in upstate New York for the weekend. I had packed
weed and sweatpants and taken the train up alone. It was dark, and
late, and I was sitting at a small table near the window, writing
down some ideas about—or so I scribbled, with typical stoner
passion—the requirement and the impossibility of knowing yourself
under the artificial conditions of contemporary life. I’d made a fire
in the woodstove, and I stared at it, thinking. “Oh,” I said, out loud,
abruptly remembering that I had been on a reality show. “Oh, no.”
I got on Facebook and messaged Kelley and Krystal. By some
strange coincidence, Krystal was going to Costco that week to turn
the VHS tapes into DVDs, and could make me a copy. She’d seen the
show when it aired, as had Kelley and Cory. Later on, I was relieved,
when I talked to Demian and Ace, to hear that both of them had
stopped watching after the first couple of episodes.
“Why didn’t you keep going?” I asked Ace.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean—we already lived it, you know
what I mean?”
The teens do a scavenger hunt, running around a public square and
taking pictures of people kissing their dogs and doing handstands. Girls
win. Back at the house,
DEMIAN
gets a bucket of water to
fl
ush a giant
poop. The boys call a bonus competition: everyone eats bowls of wet
dog food with their hands tied behind their backs, and the girls win
again.
At night, the teens blindfold one another and take turns kissing. They set
up a makeshift Slip ’N Slide on a slope of the lawn with plastic sheeting
and vegetable oil. They make muscles for the camera like wrestlers and
then start play-
fi
ghting, chasing one another around with whipped
cream.
—
On the south shore of Vieques, there’s a bay, almost completely
enclosed by land, where the mangroves are dense and tangled and
the air is perfectly still. It’s named Mosquito Bay, not for the insects
but for El Mosquito, the ship owned by Roberto Cofresí, one of the
last actual pirates of the Caribbean—a heartless legend who claimed
to have buried thousands of pieces of treasure before he died. After
a letter in a newspaper misidentified a dead pirate as Cofresí,
rumors began to proliferate about his mythological powers: he
could make his boat disappear; he was born with the capilares de
Maria, a magic arrangement of blood vessels that made him
immortal. A folk rumor persists that he appears every seven years,
for seven days, engulfed in flames.
There are only five bioluminescent bays in the world, and of
these, Mosquito Bay is the brightest. Each liter of its water contains
hundreds of thousands of Pyrodinium bahamense, the microscopic
dinoflagellates that produce an otherworldly blue-green light when
agitated. On a night without moonlight, a boat going through these
waters burns a trail of iridescence. Here the dinoflagellates have the
safe and private harbor they need: the decomposing mangroves
provide a bounty of food for the delicate organisms, and the passage
to the ocean is shallow and narrow, keeping the disturbance of
waves away. And so the dinoflagellates glitter—not for themselves,
not in isolation, but when outside intrusions come through. The
trouble is that intrusions disturb the bay’s delicate balance.
Mosquito Bay went dark for a year in 2014, probably because of
tourist activity, an excess of chemicals from sunscreen and
shampoo. Today, tourists can still take a boat out as long as they
forgo bug repellent. But swimming has been prohibited since 2007
—two years after we swam there while taping the show.
We took the boat out on a black night, in an anvil-heavy quiet.
Behind the moving masses of clouds, the milky stars emerged and
disappeared. We were all nervous, hushed, agitated: we had all come
from families who, I think, wanted to give us adventures like this,
but who probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it—thus, maybe,
the permission to come on the show. When the boat stopped in the
middle of the bay, we trembled with joy. We slipped into the water
and started sparkling, as if the stars had fallen, and were clinging to
us. In the middle of the absolute darkness we were wreathed in
magic, glowing like jellyfish, glittering like the “Toxic” video—
swimming in circles, gasping and laughing in the middle of a
spreading pale-blue glow. We touched one another’s shoulders and
watched our fingers crackle with light. After a long time, we got back
in the boat, still dripping in bioluminescence. I squeezed glittering
water out of my hair. My body felt so stuffed with good luck that I
was choking on it. I felt caught in a whirlpool of metaphysical
accident. There were no cameras, and they couldn’t have captured it,
anyway. I told myself, Don’t forget, don’t forget.
The teens have to dive for items in the ocean, swim to shore, and guess
who owns them.
JIA
fl
ips through a wallet with movie stubs in it: “
Josie
and the Pussycats
? This is
CORY
,” she says. Girls win.
KELLEY
fi
nally gets
CORY
to go o
ff
in a dark corner and make out with her. Over footage of
DEMIAN
tickling her in a bunk bed,
JIA
tells the camera that
DEMIAN
is
still trying to shoot his shot.
The next challenge is set at a high school. The teens decorate bathing
suits and get onstage nearly naked to put on a show for a thousand
Puerto Rican teenagers, who will vote on the winning team. This footage
is unspeakable; boys win. Girls call a bonus competition.
KELLEY
wins a
game of oversize Jenga against
DEMIAN
. The girls have been behind for
the entire competition, but now they’re almost even. The boys are
turning on one another.
PARIS
and
ACE
scream at each other to chill the
fuck out.
—
Aside from the episode where I have to speed-eat mayonnaise, and
the episode where we all put on swimsuits and dance onstage at a
high school assembly, the part of the show I found most painful was
the recurring theme of everyone ganging up on Paris—ignoring her,
talking trash about her on camera, lying to her face. It was a
definitive reminder that I had not been especially nice in high
school. I had been cliquish, cozying up to my girlfriends the way I
cozied up to Kelley and Krystal. I’d sometimes been horribly mean
because I thought it was funny, or rude for the sake of “honesty,” or
just generally insensitive—as I was, regarding Paris, for the whole
show. In one episode, I cut off one of her monologues by yelling,
“Paris, that’s crap.” When she was kicked off, I became half-
consciously afraid that I would then be revealed as a weak link. To
distract everyone (including myself) from this possibility, I staged a
meticulous reconstruction of Paris’s most grating moments:
straddling Demian’s chest and howling at him to tell me I was
pretty, as she had done with Cory—on the show, the producers
showed the scenes in split screen—and wailing about how I just
wanted everyone to be nice, and on and on.
Both high school and reality TV are fueled by social ruthlessness.
While writing this, I found a song about all the cast members that
Demian and I had written in the back of the van on our way to a
competition. “Fucking Demian is from Mexico, and the only English
word he ever learned was fuck,” I wrote, “so fuck Demian.” He wrote
back, “Fucking Jia, the prude book-reading bitch; she has an
attitude and gives guys an itch.” We weren’t exactly gentle with each
other. But we were terrible to Paris. “Fucking Paris,” Demian wrote,
“with her unstable mind, always horny and wants it from behind.” I
remember stifling my giggles. How embarrassing, I thought, to
openly crave attention. Why couldn’t she figure out that you were
supposed to pretend you didn’t care?
When I finally wrote to Paris, who grew up in Salem, Oregon,
and lives in Portland now, I apologized, and she wrote back right
away. “I’m so boring now,” she said, when we talked on the phone a
few days later. “I work for Whole Foods. I’m approaching my two-
year anniversary.” But within minutes I was reminded of why she
had been reality TV catnip. She was still unabashed, a chatterbox,
ready to tell you anything. “In high school, I obviously had trouble
fitting in, and so I ended up self-medicating, doing the whole ‘Let’s
be alcoholics, let’s do lots of drugs’ thing,” she told me. “Salem is
like that. Even the rich kids. Even if you weren’t white trash, like I
was, everyone’s just a little bit white trash. I moved to Portland
partly because I was so sick of running into people who thought
they knew me—people I didn’t know, saying, ‘Oh, you’re Paris, I’ve
heard so much about you,’ when they didn’t know me at all.”
Paris told me that she understood that she would be ostracized
on the show after the very first challenge, the one that I had to skip
when I missed my flight. “We had to dig through the trash, and
there was a poopy diaper, and I have a major fecal phobia,” she said.
“So I just choked, I freaked out, and Kelley and Krystal were upset
with me, and I knew I wasn’t starting out on a good foot. But I’m
also a weird person. I’ve gotten picked on for most of my life. I
know that people say I talk too much, and that I talk too loud, and
that I say the wrong things. And I’m actually an introvert, so one of
my coping strategies is just to be my weirdest self as soon as I meet
you—that way, you can decide right away whether or not you like
me. I was a theater kid, and my parents really encouraged me to feel
my feelings. I think, in a way, that people in high school were
jealous that I felt so free to be myself. Because you’re not supposed
to do that. You’re supposed to worry about people looking at you
and judging you.”
Paris had watched the show a few times, she told me, at the
behest of curious friends. “A lot of it is pretty triggering,” she said.
“A lot of it wasn’t fun. But there were good times, too. I remember
that one night that we emptied the ice machine and had a snowball
fight—it felt like everyone was really fitting in together. And I also
think that there were probably some weird kids who watched me on
TV and thought, Wow, I’m not the only one who feels this way, and I
think that’s great.”
A month later, Paris came to New York to visit her brother, and
we met up in Long Island City for lunch on a cloudy day. She wore
purple cat-eyeliner and a green leopard-print cardigan, and spoke
naturally in catchphrases: “I’m no good in a fisticuff situation,” she
told me, explaining that she’d gotten tougher in her twenties, “but I
can destroy you emotionally in thirty seconds flat.” She had
rewatched the show with her roommates after our phone
conversation, playing a drinking game to pass the time.
“The first rule was, drink every time Paris cries,” she told me,
sipping a mango margarita. “Also drink every time someone talks
shit about Paris. And drink anytime the girls lose. We got pretty
drunk by the end.” She told me that she felt better about the show
on this viewing—she could see that her good humor, her tenacity,
had been visible all along.
I asked her if she thought she seemed like herself. “Yes,” she
said. “But magnified. It turned all of us into cartoons of ourselves.
Like, if someone was playing you on television, these are the pieces
they would use.”
It’s the
fi
nale. “I came here to have fun and win money—mostly to win
money,” says
DEMIAN
.
KELLEY
says, “I can’t let a boy beat me. It just
wouldn’t be normal for me.” The girls’ team holds hands and prays.
The last competition is a relay race:
fi
rst person swims out to a buoy;
second person swims back to shore; third person maneuvers through a
nest of ropes without touching them; third and fourth person have to
trade places on a balance beam; fourth person retrieves part of a
fl
ag
from the ocean; teammates assemble the
fl
ag.
RYDER
zips through the
water to
JIA
, who swims back to
KRYSTAL
—girls enter the rope nest way
ahead. But
KRYSTAL
can’t get through the ropes, and then she and
KELLEY
can’t
fi
gure out the beam.
ACE
and
CORY
complete the race;
boys win. The girls
fl
ing themselves on the beach, heartbroken.
That night, the cast starts
fi
ghting.
RYDER
blames
KRYSTAL
for losing.
ACE
calls
PARIS
a “f**king blonde idiot.”
JIA
tells the camera that
ACE
doesn’t deserve good things happening to him.
KELLEY
says she might
punch someone in the face. The next morning, the light is clean and
golden, and the teens are docile, lugging their suitcases down the stairs
of the house.
JIA
tells the camera that she’ll leave knowing she and
DEMIAN
were “a little more than friends.”
DEMIAN
springs a long kiss on
her as she’s getting into the cab. The
fi
nal shot is of
PARIS
, saying
goodbye to an empty house.
—
Toward the end of filming, we were all at one another’s throats
constantly. We all urgently wanted the money, and we also all
assumed that we would win it—a certain amount of family
instability and a certain amount of wild overconfidence being
factors that self-selected us onto the show. When the girls lost the
final challenge, it felt brutal, gut-dissolving, like the universe had
abruptly forked in the wrong direction. I wasn’t going to leave
empty-handed, because we were getting paid for our time, unlike a
lot of reality TV contestants—$750 a week, which is good money
when you’re sixteen. Still, on the beach, dizzy as the imaginary
jackpot vanished from the place in my bank account where I hadn’t
realized I’d been keeping it, I felt wrecked.
I had left for Puerto Rico during a period in which my parents
were embroiled in a mess of financial and personal trouble, the full
extent of which was revealed to me shortly before I left. I think that
was ultimately why they let me go to Puerto Rico: they must have
understood, as I argued, that I could use a break. We had always
moved up and down through the middle class, but my parents had
protected and prioritized me. They kept me in private school, often
on scholarship, and they paid for gymnastics, and they took me to
the used bookstore whenever I asked. This was different—house-
being-repossessed different. I knew that I would need to be
financially independent as soon as I graduated from high school,
and that from that point forward, it would be up to me to find with
my own resources the middle-class stability they had worked so
hard for and then lost.
This was of course part of my motivation to win Girls v. Boys. I
had gotten into Yale early, and figured that my portion of the prize
money would help me figure out how to deal with things like
student loans and health insurance, help me move to New Haven,
give me some guardrails as I slid into the world. Back in Texas, I felt
unmoored from the plan, and took my guidance counselor’s last-
minute recommendation to apply for a full merit scholarship to the
University of Virginia. I did the interview while still on a high from
Puerto Rico: under-clothed, blisteringly self-interested, blabbering
on about kayaks and mayonnaise. After another round, I got the
scholarship and accepted it.
When I talked to Jess, the producer, she told me that my mom
had called her up, in the months after the show aired, and asked her
to persuade me to go to Yale. How, my mom had said, could she
turn down that kind of prestige? Our family situation hovered in
the background, as did, I think, my parents’ upbringings. They had
both attended elite private schools in Manila, and they retained a
faith in the transformative power of institutions, a faith I shared
until I abruptly did not. Losing the reality show marked some sort
of transition: I started to feel that the future was intractably
unpredictable, and that my need for money cut deeper than I’d
imagined, and that there were worse things than making decisions
based on whatever seemed like the most fun.
The cast assembles on a colorful stage set in Las Vegas to watch clips.
Everyone looks a little di
ff
erent:
ACE
has pink hair,
PARIS
has a sharp
bob,
KRYSTAL
got her braces o
ff
.
DEMIAN
tells
JIA
her no-making-out
rule was stupid. “I’m sorry I have
morals
,”
JIA
replies.
CORY
is indignant,
fi
nding out how long
KELLEY
played him. “I’m an honest person!” he
says. “And I’m a really good liar,”
KELLEY
says, breaking into her wide
Britney smile.
KRYSTAL
watches
DEMIAN
saying he’d like to hook up with her but not
talk to her. Is she mad? “I think it’s hilarious,”
KRYSTAL
says.
PARIS
watches
JIA
saying she’s using her boobs for attention. “I
was
using my
boobs for attention,”
PARIS
says brightly.
JIA
, who has gotten chubby,
watches a clip of herself on the
fi
rst night, saying she’d never make out
with
DEMIAN
, and then a clip of them making out on the last day.
The cast is asked if they’d do it again. “In a heartbeat,”
KRYSTAL
says.
“Puerto Rico was the best experience of my life—I think it’ll be pretty
hard to top,”
KELLEY
says. Credits roll over footage of the cast on the
Strip, waving goodbye.
—
Of the eight of us, Ace and I were the only ones who didn’t show up
in Puerto Rico hoping to jump-start a career on camera. We had
come into contact with the show haphazardly—Ace was flagged
down after doing a focus group for Bayer. Everyone else had seen a
casting call and sent in a tape. Paris had actually been cast on Girls
v. Boys: Hawaii, but she was deemed too young by the network. “I
one hundred percent wanted to be an actress back then,” she said. “I
wanted to be famous. I thought that would show the people who
were mean to me—like, I’m Paris, and I’m important now.”
While we were taping the show, Kelley had the most momentum.
She was a BMX champion, she had starred in her own “Got Milk?”
ad, and she had filmed a couple of promos for another Noggin
venture. “To be honest,” Kelley said, on the phone, “I grew up so
poor with my single mom and two brothers that when this all
started happening, I thought—okay, this is my way out.” She did a
little modeling after the show, but her managers didn’t want her to
put Girls v. Boys on her résumé, and it was hard to convince people
that she could act, coming out of reality TV. When she moved to Los
Angeles after college, she found out that the secret to creative
success in your twenties was, often, already being rich. She pivoted
to real estate. “It’s a confidence game, a lot of bullshitting,” she told
me. “I did really well at it. It’s the exact same thing.”
Krystal, who’s had bit parts on Parks and Recreation and 2 Broke
Girls, ended up being the person who stuck to it. She told me that
she’s known she wanted to be in front of the camera since she was
two years old. After our show aired, one weekend she and Ryder
went to a mall in San Francisco wearing their Girls v. Boys
sweatshirts. There was a Degrassi meet and greet scheduled, and
our show aired right before Degrassi—they were hoping to get
mobbed by Noggin fans, and they were. (The only time I was ever
recognized was also at a mall—I worked at a Hollister in Houston
over the holiday break in 2005, and was spotted by a couple of
preteen girls.) Kelley told me she got recognized from the show
when she was going through sorority rush at Arizona State. Paris
was recognized, years later, at a frozen yogurt shop in Portland. Cory
remembered taking photos with a crowd of teenage fans at an H&M.
“I loved it,” he said. “You know, I always wanted that fifteen
minutes of fame.”
“I wanted to be famous,” said Demian, “because to me, fame
equaled money. But now I’m like, fuck that. You see these guys who
are famous for some bullshit personality stuff—who’s the one who
went to the Japanese suicide forest? Logan Paul. If we were
younger, one of us would have definitely tried to be YouTube
famous.” He sighed. “I would hate to be a Logan Paul.” He had
filmed a reality show before Girls v. Boys, he reminded me—a show
called Endurance, on Discovery Kids. There, too, all the other
contestants had wanted to be actors. “That’s our culture,” he said. “I
watched TV all the time when I was a kid. I thought, you barely need
to do anything. I could do that shit.”
“So you really came to Puerto Rico wanting to be famous?” I
asked, pacing around my hotel room. Twitter was open on my
laptop. In the end—and maybe not watching the show for so long
was my attempt to keep from having to admit this—it had been very,
very easy to get used to looking at my face on a screen.
“We all wanted to be famous,” Demian said. “Except you.”
“I actually said that?” I asked.
“I remember we were all sitting around one day talking about it,”
he said. “And you were the only one who was really not interested.
You said you would only ever want to be famous for a reason. You
were like, ‘I don’t want to get famous for this bullshit. I want to get
famous for writing a book.’ ”
Always Be Optimizing
The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the
version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age
but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the
clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made
to be looked at. She is often luxuriating when you see her—on
remote beaches, under stars in the desert, across a carefully styled
table, surrounded by beautiful possessions or photogenic friends.
Showcasing herself at leisure is either the bulk of her work or an
essential part of it; in this, she is not so unusual—for many people
today, especially for women, packaging and broadcasting your image
is a readily monetizable skill. She has a personal brand, and
probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of
her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an
interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with
a viewership attached.
Can you see this woman yet? She looks like an Instagram—which
is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the
marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal.
The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the woman
in question, and—ideally—her genuine enthusiasm, too. This
woman is sincerely interested in whatever the market demands of
her (good looks, the impression of indefinitely extended youth,
advanced skills in self-presentation and self-surveillance). She is
equally interested in whatever the market offers her—in the tools
that will allow her to look more appealing, to be even more
endlessly presentable, to wring as much value out of her particular
position as she can.
The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She takes
advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image
and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself. Her hair
looks expensive. She spends lots of money taking care of her skin, a
process that has taken on the holy aspect of a spiritual ritual and the
mundane regularity of setting a morning alarm. The work formerly
carried out by makeup has been embedded directly into her face:
her cheekbones or lips have been plumped up, or some lines have
been filled in, and her eyelashes are lengthened every four weeks by
a professional wielding individual lashes and glue. The same is true
of her body, which no longer requires the traditional enhancements
of clothing or strategic underwear; it has been pre-shaped by
exercise that ensures there is little to conceal or rearrange.
Everything about this woman has been preemptively controlled to
the point that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and,
more important, the sensation of it—having worked to rid her life of
artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree.
The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an
inorganic thing engineered to look natural. Historically, the ideal
woman seeks all the things that women are trained to find fun and
interesting—domesticity, physical self-improvement, male approval,
the maintenance of congeniality, various forms of unpaid work. The
concept of the ideal woman is just flexible enough to allow for a
modicum of individuality; the ideal woman always believes she
came up with herself on her own. In the Victorian era, she was the
“angel in the house,” the demure, appealing wife and mother. In the
fifties, she was, likewise, a demure and appealing wife and mother,
but with household purchasing power attached. More recently, the
ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she
manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and
streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both
work and pleasure—of “lifestyle.” The ideal woman steps into a
stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skin-care
routines, and vacations, and thereby happily remains.
Most women believe themselves to be independent thinkers.
(There is a Balzac short story in which a slave girl named Paquita
yelps, memorably, “I love life! Life is fair to me! If I am a slave, I am
a queen too.”) Even glossy women’s magazines now model
skepticism toward top-down narratives about how we should look,
who and when we should marry, how we should live. But the
psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in
an ecosystem that pretends to resist her. If women start to resist an
aesthetic, like the overapplication of Photoshop, the aesthetic just
changes to suit us; the power of the ideal image never actually
wanes. It is now easy enough to engage women’s skepticism toward
ads and magazine covers, images produced by professionals. It is
harder for us to suspect images produced by our peers, and nearly
impossible to get us to suspect the images we produce of ourselves,
for our own pleasure and benefit—even though, in a time when
social media use has become broadly framed as a career asset, many
of us are effectively professionals now, too.
Today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with
feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form. This
sort of feminism has organized itself around being as visible and
appealing to as many people as possible; it has greatly over-
valorized women’s individual success. Feminism has not eradicated
the tyranny of the ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and
made it trickier. These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically
seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking
toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. She can believe—
reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism—
that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant, and often
pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her
money, her decisions, her selfhood, and her soul.
—
Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous
and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous,
equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under
accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up
being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity.
Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out
of reach.
But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to
optimize. I think about this every time I do something that feels
particularly efficient and self-interested, like going to a barre class
or eating lunch at a fast-casual chopped-salad chain, like
Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a
refueling station. I’m a repulsively fast eater in most situations—my
boyfriend once told me that I chew like someone’s about to take my
food away—and at Sweetgreen, I eat even faster because (as can be
true of many things in life) slowing down for even a second can
make the machinery give you the creeps. Sweetgreen is a marvel of
optimization: a line of forty people—a texting, shuffling, eyes-down
snake—can be processed in ten minutes, as customer after customer
orders a kale Caesar with chicken without even looking at the other,
darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding
chicken to kale Caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and
their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for sixteen hours a
day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward
off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.
The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that
Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that
defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. The ideal chopped-salad
customer is himself efficient: he needs to eat his twelve-dollar salad
in ten minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning
within the job that allows him to afford a regular twelve-dollar salad
in the first place. He feels a physical need for this twelve-dollar
salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a
vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his
salad-requiring-and-enabling job. The first, best chronicler of the
chopped-salad economy’s accelerationist nightmare was Matt
Buchanan, who wrote at The Awl in 2015:
The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes
from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious
attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is
more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or
Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually
infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or
engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the
not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by
generating revenue for a large internet company, which is
obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly
better than spending lunch reading a book from the library,
because who is making money from that?
In a later Awl piece, Buchanan described the chopped salad as “the
perfect mid-day nutritional replenishment for the mid-level modern
knowledge worker” with “neither the time nor the inclination to eat
a lunch…which would require more attention than the little needed
for the automatic elliptical motion of the arm from bowl to face, jaw
swinging open and then clamping shut over and over until the fork
comes up empty and the vessel can be deposited in the garbage can
under the desk.”
On today’s terms, what he’s describing—a mechanically efficient
salad-feeding session, conducted in such a way that one need not
take a break from emails—is the good life. It means progress,
individuation. It’s what you do when you’ve gotten ahead a little bit,
when you want to get ahead some more. The hamster-wheel aspect
has been self-evident for a long time now. (In 1958, the economist
John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “It can no longer be assumed that
welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than a
lower one….The higher level of production has, merely, a higher
level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want
satisfaction.”) But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more
of what was merely stupid and adaptive has turned stupid and
compulsory. Vulnerability, which is ever present, must be warded
off at all costs. And so I go to Sweetgreen on days when I need to eat
vegetables very quickly because I’ve been working till one A.M. all
week and don’t have time to make dinner because I have to work till
one A.M. again, and like a chump, I try to make eye contact across
the sneeze guard, as if this alleviated anything about the
skyrocketing productivity requirements that have forced these two
lines of people to scarf and create kale Caesars all day, and then I
“grab” my salad and eat it in under ten minutes while looking at
email and on the train home remind myself that next time, for
points purposes, I should probably buy the salad through the salad’s
designated app.
It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually
escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around
practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women
have known this intimately for a long time.
—
I was a late bloomer in terms of functional physical practices, like
eating vegetables and exercising. I didn’t start doing either thing
with any conviction—or without the baggage of ambiently
disordered female adolescence—until I joined the Peace Corps,
when I was twenty-one. I was a gymnast as a kid and then a
cheerleader later, but one thing was fun and the second was
effectively a requirement: at my school, you had to play a sport, and
I lacked the athletic ability or competitive instinct to do anything
else. As a teenager, I subsisted on pizza and queso and cinnamon
rolls, trying to immunize myself with apathy and pleasure-seeking
throughout the long stretch of time when girls, overwhelmed by
sudden expectations of beauty, transmit anorexia and bulimia to
one another like a virus. In high school, as I recount in my journal,
other girls on the cheerleading squad would chastise me for eating
carbs after sundown; a guy who had an obvious crush on me often
expressed it by telling me I was gaining weight. (“Who cares, I’m
going to go downstairs and eat a huge breakfast, bitch,” I wrote to
him on AIM one morning.) I had avoided the hang-ups that seemed
to be endemic, but anytime my friends talked about diets or
exercise, I could still feel a compulsive strain prickling to life within
me, a sudden desire to skip a meal and do sit-ups. To avoid it, I
avoided the gym, and kept eating like a stoner: I had come to
understand health as discipline, discipline as punitive, and punitive
as a concept that would send me down a rabbit hole of calorie math
and vomit. For the better part of a decade, I figured I was better off
being slightly unhealthy and leaving the active pursuit of body-
related matters alone.
This all changed once I joined the Peace Corps, where it was
impossible to think too much about my appearance, and where
health was of such immediate importance that it was always on my
mind. I developed active tuberculosis while volunteering and, for
some stress- or nutrition-related reason, started to shed my thick
black hair. I realized how much I had taken my functional body for
granted. I lived in a mile-long village in the middle of a western
province in Kyrgyzstan: there were larch trees on the snowy
mountains, flocks of sheep crossing dusty roads, but there was no
running water, no grocery store. The resourceful villagers preserved
peppers and tomatoes, stockpiled apples and onions, but it was so
difficult to get fresh produce otherwise that I regularly fantasized
about spinach and oranges, and would spend entire weekends trying
to obtain them. As a prophylactic measure against mental
breakdown, I started doing yoga in my room every day. Exercise, I
thought. What a miracle! After Peace Corps, I kept at it. I was back
in Houston, I had a lot of spare time, and I spent it at midday yoga
classes at expensive studios to which I would buy discounted first-
time packages and never return.
This period, around 2011, reintroduced me to the world of
American abundance. The first time I went into a grocery store and
saw how many different fruits there were, I cried. At these yoga
classes, I marveled at the fanatic high functionality of the women
around me. They carried red totes covered with terrifying slogans
(“The perfect tombstone would read ‘All used up’ ”; “Children are
the orgasm of life”) and they talked about “luncheons” and
microdermabrasion and four-hundred-person wedding guest lists.
They purchased $90 leggings in the waiting room after class. I was
not, at the time, on their level: I had been taking giardia shits in a
backyard outhouse for a year straight, and I was flooded with dread
and spiritual uselessness, the sense that I had failed myself and
others, the fear that I would never again be useful to another
human being. In this context, it felt both bad and wonderfully
anesthetizing to do yoga around these women. In the hundred-
degree heat I would lie back for corpse pose, sweat soaking my
cheap mat from Target, and sometimes, as I fluttered my eyes shut,
I would catch the twinkle of enormous diamond rings caught in
shafts of sunbeam, blinking at me in the temporary darkness like a
fleet of indoor stars.
In 2012, I moved to Ann Arbor for an MFA program. Classes
started in the fall, but we packed up in early summer. My boyfriend,
who’d just finished grad school, needed to look for a job. In our
little blue house in Michigan, I tinkered with some of my somber
and ponderous short stories, unsure if this would feel different once
I had formal guidance. I met up with my soon-to-be classmates and
drank big sour beers and talked about Train Dreams and Lorrie
Moore. Mostly I drifted around the lovely college town in what I
accurately sensed would be my last stretch of true aimlessness for a
long time. I walked my dog, looked at fireflies, went to yoga. One
day, I was at a studio on the west side of town when a woman next
to me queefed a thick, wet queef while sinking deep into Warrior II.
I held back my laughter. She kept queefing, and kept queefing, and
queefed and queefed and queefed. Over the course of the hour, as
she continued queefing, my emotions went fractal—hysterical
amusement and unplaceable panic combining and recombining in a
kaleidoscopic blur. By the time we hit final resting pose, my heart
was racing. I heard the queefing woman get up and leave the room.
When she returned, I peeked an eye open to look at her. Clothed,
disturbingly, in a different pair of pants, she lay down next to me
and sighed, satisfied. Then, with a serene smile on her face, she
queefed one more time.
At that moment, my soul having been flayed by secondhand
vaginal exhalation, I wanted nothing more than to jump out of my
skin. I wanted to land in a new life where everything—bodies,
ambitions—would work seamlessly and efficiently. Trapped in
corpse pose, in a motionlessness that was supposed to be relaxing, I
felt the specter of stagnation hovering over my existence. I missed,
suddenly, the part of me that thrilled to sharpness, harshness,
discipline. I had directed these instincts at my mind, kept them
away from my body, but why? I needed a break from yoga, which
had reminded me, just then, of how I’d felt all throughout Peace
Corps—as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and never would.
So, later that week, after exploring the limitless bounty of
Groupon, I printed out a trial offer at a studio called Pure Barre. I
was greeted there by an instructor who looked like Jessica Rabbit:
ice-green eyes, a physically impossible hourglass figure, honey-
colored hair rippling down past her waist. She ushered me into a
cave-dark room full of sinewy women gathering mysterious red
rubber props. The front wall was mirrored. The women stared at
their reflections, stone-faced, preparing.
Then class started, and it was an immediate state of emergency.
Barre is a manic and ritualized activity, often set to deafening music
and lighting changes; that day, I felt like a police car was doing
donuts in my frontal cortex for fifty-five minutes straight. The
rapid-fire series of positions and movements, dictated and enforced
by the instructor, resembled what a ballerina might do if you
concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills—a fanatical,
repetitive routine of arm gestures, leg lifts, and pelvic tilts. Jessica
Rabbit strode through the middle of the room, commanding us
coyly to “put on our highest heels,” meaning get on our tiptoes, and
“tuck,” meaning hump the air. I fumbled with my props: the rubber
ball, the latex strap.
By the end of class, my leg muscles had liquefied. Jessica turned
the lights off and chirped that it was time for “back dancing,” a term
that I thought, collapsing onto the floor, sounded like what people
on a parenting message board might use as a euphemism for sex. It
was, in fact, pretend-fucking: we lay on our backs and thrust our
hips into the darkness with a sacrificial devotion that I had not
applied to actual sex for years. When we were finished, the lights
came back on and I realized that the black-clad pelvis I had been
staring at in the mirror actually belonged to the woman in front of
me. I had the satisfying but gross sense of having successfully
conformed to a prototype. “Great job, ladies,” cooed Jessica.
Everybody clapped.
—
Barre was invented in the sixties by Lotte Berk, a Jewish ballerina
with an angular bob haircut who fled Germany for England before
World War II and soon aged out of her chosen career. She
developed an exercise method based on her dance training, and at
age forty-six, with her rigidly disciplined body as a walking
billboard, she founded a women-only exercise studio in a basement
on London’s Manchester Street.
Berk was a colorful, vicious character, obsessed with sex and
addicted to morphine. As a parent, she was, according to her
daughter Esther, incredibly abusive: Esther told The Telegraph that
Berk brushed it off when Esther’s father sexually propositioned her
at age twelve, and that when Esther was fifteen, Berk offered to pay
her to give one of Berk’s theater colleagues a blow job. By Esther’s
account, Berk instructed her to “forget about it” when one of Berk’s
producers raped her the same year. Esther, who has described her
relationship to her mother as a “tug of love and war,” is now eighty-
three years old. She still teaches the Lotte Berk method in a studio
in New York City.
“Sex came into everything she did,” Esther told The Cut in 2017.
“You know, you felt sex from her.” In her studio, Berk invited clients
to imagine a lover as they engaged their pelvis. She used a riding
crop on women who weren’t trying hard enough. The poses she
invented looked suggestive and were named accordingly: the French
Lavatory, the Prostitute, the Peeing Dog, Fucking a Bidet. The
studio’s clientele included Joan Collins, Edna O’Brien, Yasmin Le
Bon, and, just once, Barbra Streisand, who submitted to Berk’s
methods but refused to take off her hat. Berk became a guru for
women with an intense, often professional desire to improve their
appearances. She ran a one-stop shop: after class, clients could go
see her studio partners Vidal Sassoon and Mary Quant.
One of Berk’s students, Lydia Bach, adapted Berk’s routine and
brought it stateside, and in 1970, Bach opened the first barre studio
in New York City, on Sixty-seventh Street. It was called the Lotte
Berk Method. A 1972 New York Times article about the studio
quotes a first-time client saying, “I’m aching inside. But I liked it.”
Another woman pats her newly flat stomach and says that barre
kept her from having to get plastic surgery. “Lydia Bach says the
method is a combination of modern ballet, yoga, orthopedic
exercise, and sex,” wrote the Times. “Sex? Well, the windup of each
class is a sort of belly dance done from a kneeling position. It looks
like the undulations of a snake charmer’s cobra and is said to do
wonders for the waistline.” Classes were small and expensive. On
Saturdays, the Times wrote, the fashion models came in.
This first New York barre studio was wildly popular and
remained so for years—devotees included Mary Tyler Moore, Ivana
Trump, the Olsen twins, and Tom Wolfe. Bach turned down
franchise opportunities: she liked being exclusive. She did, however,
write a book about barre, which mostly consists of photos of her in a
sheer white leotard modeling various poses. Her sandy hair is loose,
her nipples slightly visible, and her body pristine. In a few photos,
she spreads her legs wide to the camera, holding the soles of her
feet in her hands. Her expression is blank and confident; there’s a
diamond on her left ring finger. One chapter of the book is called,
simply, “Sex.”
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Bach’s instructors
started defecting. By that point, the Lotte Berk Method had gotten
fusty. A 2005 piece in The Observer called it the “35-year-old Margo
Channing of New York City fitness programs,” and observed that it
was “under siege by a fresh young Eve Harrington of exercise called
Core Fusion, founded in 2002 by two former Berk instructors.” Core
Fusion, the offshoot, had adapted to the demands of the market. It
was fancier, prettier, and more welcoming. The facilities were
brighter, and everything smelled good. Hundreds of Bach’s
customers made the switch. Soon afterward, more Lotte Berk
instructors left and founded their own studios, including Physique
57 and the Bar Method, which became two popular chains.
Around 2010, barre hit a boom period. A Times trend piece noted
that the classes had developed a cult following for helping women
“replicate the dancer’s enviable body: long and lean, svelte but not
bulky.” Another Times trend piece, from 2011, began with the same
angle, which is barre’s primary sales pitch—giving you a body that
gets its own results. “Women have long coveted sinewy arms, high
and tight derrieres, lean legs and a regal posture. Now, in search of
this shape, many of them are ditching yoga and Pilates and lining up
at the ballet barre.” One woman testified: “Every single inch of me
has changed.” One got to the point, jokingly, by saying, “Everything
is engaged. Except me. Yet.”
Today, barre has become a nationwide fixture. Sprinkled all
across our sprawling land are thousands of basically identical
mirrored rooms containing identically dressed women doing the
exact same movements on the exact same hourly timer in pursuit of
their own particular genetic inflection of the exact same “ballet
body.” The biggest franchise, Pure Barre, operates more than five
hundred locations, with studios in Henderson, Nevada, and
Rochester, Minnesota, and Owensboro, Kentucky; there are twelve
Pure Barre studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone.
The rise of barre is unparalleled in a few aspects: as far as
exercise methods go, nothing this expensive and this uniform has
gone this big. Hot yoga and Pilates are both ubiquitous, but the
pursuits have expanded at the level of individual studios rather than
nationwide chains. (Yoga classes also mostly hover around $20 or
less, where barre, if you pay full price, often costs double that.)
Boutique spin classes are comparable—they got popular when barre
did, and they are similarly expensive. But SoulCycle, the biggest
chain, operates just seventy-five locations nationwide, and you
won’t find it in Owensboro. Among hundreds of thousands of
women in dramatically different political and cultural
environments, there seems to be an easy agreement that barre is
worth it—that spending sixty cents per minute to have an instructor
tell you to move your leg around in one-inch increments is a self-
evidently worthwhile pursuit.
In grad school, driving out past the Chili’s to the Pure Barre, I
became a believer. I had been primed, first with my girlishly
regimented physical training—dance, gymnastics, cheerleading—and
then with yoga, my therapeutic on-ramp to the thing I was slowly
realizing, which was that you could, without obvious negative
consequences, control the way your body felt on the inside and
worked on the outside by paying people to give you orders in a
small, mirrored room. Barre was much too expensive for my grad
school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed, very obviously,
like an investment in a more functional life.
Was it health I was investing in? In a very narrow way, it was.
Barre has made me stronger and improved my posture. It has given
me the luxury—which is off-limits to so many people, for so many
stupid reasons—of not having to think about my body, because it
mostly feels good, mostly works. But the endurance that barre
builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really
good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life.
It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour
workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening
commute on an underfunded train. Barre feels like exercise the way
Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as
mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony. As a
form of exercise, barre is ideal for an era in which everyone has to
work constantly—you can be back at the office in five minutes, no
shower necessary—and in which women are still expected to look
unreasonably good.
And of course it’s that last part, the looks thing, that makes barre
feel so worthwhile to so many people. (This is emphasized by every
newspaper piece on the subject; the Observer article from 2005 was
headlined “Battle of the Butts.”) Barre is results-driven and
appearance-based—it’s got the cultishness of CrossFit or a boot-
camp class, but with looks, not strength, as its primary goal. It’s not
a pastime, like going to a dance class or taking a lap swim, because
the fun you are pursuing mostly comes after the class and not
within it. In barre class, I often feel like my body is a race car that
I’m servicing dispassionately in the pit—tuning up arms and then
legs and then butt and then abs, and then there’s a quick stretch and
I’m back on the track, zooming. It is not incidental that barre, unlike
hot yoga or SoulCycle or CrossFit, is a near-exclusively female
pastime. (On the rare occasions when a man shows up in class, he is
either very jacked or very slender, and usually wearing something
that borders on clubwear: as Brittany Murphy says in Drop Dead
Gorgeous, “You know what, Dad? Peter’s gay.”)
In practice, the barre method is only vaguely connected to ballet.
There are quasi pliés, you point your toes and turn out your hips
sometimes, and, as is denoted, you spend a lot of time gripping a
barre. That’s it. But conceptually, ballet is essential to the pitch.
Among women, ballerinas have a uniquely legitimate reason to look
taut and disciplined. There are plenty of other women who are thin
and graceful-looking by professional requirement—models, escorts,
actresses—but ballerinas meet the beauty standard not just in the
name of appearance or performance but also in the name of high
athleticism and art. And so an exercise method even nominally
drawn from ballet has the subtle effect of giving regular women a
sense of serious, artistic, professional purpose in their pursuit of
their ideal body. This is a good investment, or more precisely, a
pragmatic self-delusion—in the same way that being trained to
smile and throw my shoulders back for crowds and judges,
ostensibly as a show of genuine cheerfulness, was also “good” for
me. Learning how to function more efficiently within an exhausting
system: this seems to me to be the thing, with barre, that people pay
$40 a class for, the investment that always brings back returns.
—
When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you.
Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been
prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into
this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to
look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.
I like trying to look good, but it’s hard to say how much you can
genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate. In 1991,
Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that
beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has
decreased. It’s as if our culture has mustered an immune-system
response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality—as if
some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve
ever-higher levels of beauty to make up for the fact that we are no
longer economically and legally dependent on men. One waste of
time had been traded for another, Wolf wrote. Where women in
mid-century America had been occupied with “inexhaustible but
ephemeral” domestic work, beating back disorder with fastidious
housekeeping and consumer purchases, they were now occupied by
inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts
of time, anxiety, and money to adhere to a standard over which they
had no control. Beauty constituted a sort of “third shift,” Wolf wrote
—an extra obligation in every possible setting.
Why would smart and ambitious women fall for this? (Why do I
have such a personal relationship with my face wash? Why have I
sunk thousands of dollars over the past half decade into ensuring
that I can abuse my body on the weekends without changing the
way it looks?) Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things
in order to accept the beauty myth. First, she had to think about
beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s
rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s
reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty
as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American
Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would
increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement
wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success
would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and
sacrifice,” even more.
In her 2018 book, Perfect Me, the philosopher Heather Widdows
argues persuasively that the beauty ideal has more recently taken
on an ethical dimension. Where beauty has historically functioned
as a symbol for female worth and morality—in fairy tales, evil
women are ugly and beautiful princesses are good—beauty is now
framed, Widdows writes, as female worth and morality itself. “That
we must continually strive for beauty is part of the logic of beauty as
an ethical ideal—as it is for other successful ethical ideals,” she
writes. “That perfection remains always beyond, something we have
to strive for and can never attain, does not diminish the power of
the ideal; indeed it may even strengthen it.” Under this ethical ideal,
women attribute implicit moral value to the day-to-day efforts of
improving their looks, and failing to meet the beauty standard is
framed as “not a local or partial failure, but a failure of the self.”
Feminism has faithfully adhered to this idea of beauty as
goodness, if often in very convoluted ways. Part of what brought
Jezebel into the center of online feminist discourse was its outcry
against Photoshop use in ads and on magazine covers, which on the
one hand instantly exposed the artificiality and dishonesty of the
contemporary beauty standard, and on the other showed enough of
a powerful, lingering desire for “real” beauty that it cleared space for
ever-heightened expectations. Today, as demonstrated by the cult
success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize
beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who
look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an
iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly
natural ways.
Mainstream feminism has also driven the movement toward
what’s called “body acceptance,” which is the practice of valuing
women’s beauty at every size and in every iteration, as well as the
movement to diversify the beauty ideal. These changes are overdue
and positive, but they’re also double-edged. A more expansive idea
of beauty is a good thing—I have appreciated it personally—and yet
it depends on the precept, formalized by a culture where ordinary
faces are routinely photographed for quantified approval, that
beauty is still of paramount importance. The default assumption
tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as
beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone
can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to
imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite
—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.
But, then again, nothing today ever de-escalates. And feminism
has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the
discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on
individual success, so much emphasis on individual choice, that it is
seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to
make herself more successful—even in situations like this, in which
women’s choices are constrained and dictated both by social
expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is
more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally
attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of
choice does not “make an unjust or exploitative practice or act,
somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.” The timidity in
mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our
problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s
empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.
The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has
had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream
in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown,
are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound
progressive. In 2017, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a story for The
New York Times Magazine about the new vocabulary of weight loss,
noting the way women’s magazines replaced cover lines like “Get
lean! Control your eating!” with “Be your healthiest! GET
STRONG!” People started “fasting and eating clean and cleansing
and making lifestyle changes,” Brodesser-Akner wrote, “which, by
all available evidence, is exactly like dieting.” It sometimes seems
that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress than this
current situation—one in which, instead of being counseled by mid-
century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more
radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all
the same things but for ourselves.
There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-
improvement. “That the beauty ideal is pleasurable and demanding,
and often concurrently, is a key feature,” Widdows writes. The
beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source
of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power,
although this power has so far come at the expense of most others:
porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers
in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty
work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any
case, mostly exacerbated the situation. If Wolf in 1990 criticized a
paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all
the time, we have something deeper burrowing now—not a beauty
myth but a lifestyle myth, a paradigm where a woman can muster
all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually
try to become that idealized self, and where she can understand
relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—
or just, without question, the best way to live.
—
The question of optimization dates back to antiquity, though it
wasn’t called “optimization” back then. In the Aeneid, Virgil
describes what’s come to be known as Dido’s Problem, in which the
queen Dido strikes a bargain in founding the city of Carthage: she
will be allowed as much land as she can enclose with a bull’s hide.
The question of what shape will allow you to maximize a given
perimeter was answered by Zenodorus in the second century B.C., in
the math of his era—the answer is a circle. In 1842, the Swiss
mathematician Jakob Steiner established the modern answer to the
isoperimetric problem with a proof that I truly couldn’t even begin
to understand.
In 1844, “optimize” was used as a verb for the first time, meaning
“to act like an optimist.” In 1857, it was used for the first time in the
way we currently use it—“to make the most of.” The next decade
brought a wave of optimization to economics, with the Marginal
Revolution: economists argued that human choice is based in
calculating the marginal utility of our various options. (A given
product’s marginal utility is whatever increase in benefits we get
from consuming or using it.) “To satisfy our wants to the utmost
with the least effort—to procure the greatest amount of what is
desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable—in other
words, to maximize pleasure, is the problem of economics,” wrote
William Stanley Jevons in The Theory of Political Economy. We all
want to get the most out of what we have.
Today, the principle of optimization—the process of making
something, as the dictionary puts it, “as fully perfect, functional, or
effective as possible”—thrives in extremity. An entire industry has
even sprung up to give optimization a uniform: athleisure, the type
of clothing you wear when you are either acting on or signaling your
desire to have an optimized life. I define athleisure as exercise gear
that you pay too much money for, but defined more broadly,
athleisure was a $97 billion category by 2016. Since its emergence
around a decade ago, athleisure has gone through a few aesthetic
iterations. At first, it was black leggings and colorful tank tops—a
spandex version of an early-aughts going-out uniform favored by
women who might have, by the time of athleisure’s rise, shifted
their daily social interactions to yoga and coffee dates. More
recently, athleisure has branched off and re-converged in
permutations. There is a sort of cosmic hippie look (elaborate
prints, webbed galaxy patterns), a sort of monochrome LA look
(mesh, neutrals, baseball hats), a minimalist and heathered
Outdoor Voices aesthetic, and an influx of awful slogans like “I’ll
See You at the Barre.” Brands include Lululemon (a pair of “edgy”
Wunder Under leggings, slashed with mesh, costs $98), Athleta
(“Pacifica Contoured Hoodie Tank,” a hooded tank top, is $59),
Sweaty Betty (“Power Wetlook Mesh Crop Leggings,” which are
“Bum Sculpting? You Bet Your Ass,” $120), the ghoulish brand
Spiritual Gangster (leggings with “Namaste” across the ass, $88;
cotton tank top screen-printed with “I’ll see it when I believe it,”
$56). And these, I would say, are now the mid-market offerings—
real designers have started offering athleisure, too.
Men wear athleisure—Outdoor Voices, the cult-favorite
millennial activewear brand that calls itself “human, not
superhuman,” has cultivated a loyal male fan base—but the idea,
and the vast majority of the category, belongs to women. It was built
around the habits of stay-at-home moms, college students, fitness
professionals, off-duty models—women who wear exercise clothing
outside an exercise setting and who, like ballerinas, have heightened
reasons to monitor the market value of their looks. This deep
incentive is hidden by a bunch of more obvious ones: these clothes
are easy to wear, machine-washable, wrinkle-proof. As with all
optimization experiences and products, athleisure is reliably
comfortable and supportive in a world that is not. In 2016, Moira
Weigel wrote, at Real Life magazine, “Lululemons announce that for
the wearer, life has become frictionless.” She recalls putting on a
pair of Spanx shapewear for the first time: “The word for how my
casing made me feel was optimized.”
Spandex—the material in both Spanx and expensive leggings—
was invented during World War II, when the military was trying to
develop new parachute fabrics. It is uniquely flexible, resilient, and
strong. (“Just like us, ladies!” I might scream, onstage at an
empowerment conference, blood streaming from my eyes.) It feels
comforting to wear high-quality spandex—I imagine it’s what a dog
feels like in a ThunderShirt—but this sense of reassurance is paired
with an undercurrent of demand. Shapewear, essentially twenty-
first-century corseting, controls the body under clothing; athleisure
broadcasts your commitment to controlling your body through
working out. And to even get into a pair of Lululemons, you have to
have a disciplined-looking body. (The founder of the company once
said that “certain women” aren’t meant to wear his brand.) “Self-
exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop,” Weigel wrote.
“Because these pants only ‘work’ on a certain kind of body, wearing
them reminds you to go out and get that body. They encourage you
to produce yourself as the body that they ideally display.”
This is how athleisure has carved out the space between exercise
apparel and fashion: the former category optimizes your
performance, the latter optimizes your appearance, and athleisure
does both simultaneously. It is tailor-made for a time when work is
rebranded as pleasure so that we will accept more of it—a time
when, for women, improving your looks is a job that you’re
supposed to believe is fun. And the real trick of athleisure is the way
it can physically suggest that you were made to do this—that you’re
the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work
for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is
about as good a way to pass your time on earth as there is. There’s a
phenomenon, Weigel noted, called “enclothed cognition,” in which
clothes that come with cultural scripts can actually alter cognitive
function. In one experiment, test subjects were given white coats to
wear. If they were told it was a lab coat, they became more attentive.
If they were told it was a painter’s coat, they became less attentive.
They felt like the person their clothes said they were.
I recently bought my first pair of Spanx in preparation for a
wedding. My oldest friend was getting married in Texas, and the
bridesmaids’ dresses—for all thirteen of us—were pale pink, floor-
length, and as tight as shrink-wrap from the strapless neckline to
the knees. When I first tried the dress on, I could see the inside of
my belly button in the mirror. Frowning, I went online and bought a
$98 “Haute Contour® High-Waisted Thong.” It arrived a few days
later, and I tried it on with the dress: I couldn’t breathe properly, I
immediately started sweating, and everything looked even worse.
“What the fuck,” I said, staring at my reflection. I looked like a bad
imitation of a woman whose most deeply held personal goal was to
look hot in pictures. And of course, in that moment, in a $98
punishment thong and a dress designed for an Instagram model,
that’s exactly what I was.
—
The historian Susan G. Cole wrote that the best way to instill social
values is to eroticize them. I have thought about this a lot in the
Trump era, with the president attaching his dominance politics to a
repulsive projection of sexual ownership—over passive models,
random women, even his daughter. (It’s also no coincidence that
white nationalism resurged through picking up online misogynists,
who lent the retrograde, violent, supremacist ideology an equally
retrograde, violent, sexual edge.) We can decode social priorities
through looking at what’s most commonly eroticized: male power
and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most
generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance,
and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact, or strengthened,
by draining women’s energy and wasting our time.
Women aren’t definitionally powerless in any of these situations,
and certainly women have subverted and diversified sexual
archetypes to far more aesthetically interesting ends. But still, it’s
worth paying attention to whatever cultural products draw
straightforwardly on sex to gain position, even and especially if
women are driving the concept. I’m suspicious of, for example, Teen
Vogue’s eagerness to use “thigh-high politics” as supposedly
provocative progressive branding in the wake of the election, or of
women like Emily Ratajkowski constantly espousing the bold
feminist platform that nudity is good. And I remain extremely
suspicious of our old friend barre.
Barre is a bizarrely and clinically eroticized experience. This is
partly because of the music: barre offers you the opportunity to
repeatedly clench your left butt cheek in a room full of women
experiencing mute, collective, seven A.M. agony while listening to an
EDM song about banging a stranger at the club. But there’s an
aspect to a barre class that actually resembles porn, specifically a
casting-couch video. It places you, the exercise-seeker, in the
position of the young woman who is “auditioning” on camera. Your
instructor is the third party, a hot woman who tells you to switch
positions every thirty seconds and keep your legs over your head.
She squeaks, coyly, “Yes, right there, dig into it, I like seeing those
legs shake—now it’s really getting juicy—that’s it, you look so-o-o
good, you look a-ma-zing, yes!!!!!!” She reminds you that when it
hurts, that’s when it’s about to feel good. One day an instructor
crouched over me while I was in a straddle stretch, then put her
hands on my hips and rolled them forward so that I was doing a
middle split. She held my hips down with one hand and used the
other to straighten out my spine, pushing me down from the small
of my back to my shoulder blades. It was painful, but, as that script
goes, I liked it.
A few barre studios are cheeky about all this. Pop Physique in
Los Angeles sells its merchandise online with photos of naked
models. The “Pop Ball”—the rubber ball you squeeze between your
thighs at regular intervals—is photographed cradled in the small of a
woman’s naked back; her bare ass is visible, and she’s wearing
nothing but special $15 barre socks. The studio shoots their ads
American Apparel–style, with high-cut leotards and plenty of crotch
close-ups, and their website proclaims that clients can expect “a
hotter sex life…Well, that’s what we’ve heard.”
Lotte Berk and Lydia Bach, too, acknowledged the sexual
dimension of a barre class. But these days, most studios do nothing
of the sort. Unlike most other forms of group exercise, in barre
there’s a heavy element of affective discipline: you are expected to
control your expressions and reactions. This is one of the reasons, I
realized at some point, that barre feels natural to me, as my only
athletic experience has been in feminized, appearance-centric
activities in which you are required to hide your effort and pain.
(This may in fact be the ugliest facet of my attraction to barre, and
the reason I took to it so quickly after witnessing the Ann Arbor
queef attack: I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an
aesthetic—even when I can feel that instinct tipping into cruelty and
reflexive disgust.) Barre classes are disciplinary rituals, and they feel
that way: an hour of surveillance and punishment in a room of
mirrors and equipment and routine. The instructors often
encourage you to close your eyes and literally dissociate—and, in its
own bad way, this can feel sexual, too. It’s as if barre picks up two
opposite ends of the spectrum of female sexual expression: one
porny and performative, the other repressed.
Barre is definitely eroticizing something, anyway. Most
obviously, the ritual reinforces the desirability of the specific type of
body that Berk designed the method to shape and create: a thin,
flexible, and vaguely teenage body, one that is ready to be looked at
and photographed and touched. But this is not exactly a hard sell to
anyone who has ever consumed mass media. I’ve started to think
that what barre really eroticizes is the work of getting this body—
the ritual, the discipline, and, particularly, the expense.
The expense is important, and does a lot to perpetuate the fetish.
We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also
start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too
much. This mechanism is clearest in the wedding industry, which
barre, not coincidentally, is deeply embedded in. Barre chains all
offer “bride-to-be” packages and advertise at wedding expos. Pure
Barre sells a “Pure Bride” T-shirt. On Etsy, you can buy barre tank
tops that say “Sweating for the Wedding,” “Squats Before the Knot,”
and “A Bride Walks into a Barre.” The Bar Method offers a
bachelorette party package. In general, barre encourages women to
imagine themselves on a day-to-day basis the way a bride is
supposed to at her wedding—as the recipient of scrutiny and
admiration, a living embodiment of an ideal.
Athleisure, by nature, also eroticizes capital. Much like stripper
gear, athleisure frames the female body as a financial asset: an
object that requires an initial investment and is divisible into
smaller assets—the breasts, the abs, the butt—all of which are
expected to appreciate in value, to continually bring back investor
returns. Brutally expensive, with its thick disciplinary straps and
taut peekaboo exposures, athleisure can be viewed as a sort of late-
capitalist fetishwear: it is what you buy when you are compulsively
gratified by the prospect of increasing your body’s performance on
the market. Emerging brands are making all of this more explicit:
Alo Yoga offers a $98 High-Waist Cage Legging, with an XXX
fishnet body-stocking panel across the hips, and a $90 Reflective
Moonlit Bra, with an underboob cutout.
I came to a new understanding of all this one day in the spring of
2016. For about a year, at Jezebel, I had been working directly
upstairs from Lululemon’s twelve-thousand-square-foot flagship
store, near Union Square. One afternoon, I realized I had booked a
barre class but forgotten my shitty workout clothes at home. I took
a deep breath, went downstairs, and entered Lululemon for the first
(and still only) time. When I tried on a top in the fitting room, my
cleavage, which I am not acquainted with on an everyday basis,
sprang out of the neckline like dough from a can. I found two things
on sale and paid something like $170. I took the train down to the
Financial District, rode an elevator up to the sixteenth floor of a
building that overlooks the Hudson, and joined a class in a room
with huge windows and a lighting rig that washed the room in
bright colors, changing with each portion—each designated body
part—of class. I felt different that day, perverse and corporate, in
this expensive business-casual uniform for people whose jobs are
their bodies, strapped into an elaborate arrangement of mesh and
spandex, looking out at hundreds of tiny office windows, at the glass
gleaming in the sky.
I felt acutely conscious of being in the company of other women
who had, like me, thrown their lot in with this pursuit of
frictionlessness. We all made, or were trying to make, enough
money to afford this expensive class, which would give us the
strength and discipline that would ensure that we would be able to
afford this expensive class again. We were embracing, with some
facsimile of pleasure, our era of performance and endless work. “I
know you want to stop!” the instructor chirped. “That’s why it’s so
important to keep going!” From my corner I had a clear view of the
street below us, where tourists were taking pictures in front of the
Wall Street bull, and it was hypnotic: the iridescent sunset flooding
the paving stones, and then dusk chasing it out. The light changed
in the studio—cherry red, snow-cone blue—and we swiveled our
hips in silence. We were the kind of women who accumulated
points at Sephora, who got expensive haircuts. We were lucky, I
thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful
priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more
social capital via our looks. And then our looks, in some way, would
help us guard and acquire economic capital—this was the connective
tissue of our experience, an unbreakable link between the women
who didn’t work, who were married to rich men, and the women
who did work, like me.
A few months later, I claimed the same spot in the room, and my
eyes wandered down to the street again. My heart suddenly
contracted, as it sometimes does in barre, with an intense, glancing
sense of implication. Outside, the day was bright and shallow, and
everyone on the street was posing their daughters in front of that
statue, Fearless Girl.
—
The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly
competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually
be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree
and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so. The internet
codifies this problem, makes it inescapable; in recent years, pop
culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social
media creates. Not coincidentally, these stories usually center on
women, and usually involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the
digital avatar of an ideal peer.
The best-known version might be a particularly on-the-nose
episode of the on-the-nose show Black Mirror, in which Bryce
Dallas Howard plays a pathetically eager-to-please striver obsessed
with her low social media rating and the comparatively high status
of a beautiful childhood friend. (The social media system in this
episode, in which the totality of a person’s interactions with the
world are rated and integrated into a single number, is not unlike
China’s actual Social Credit System, which began beta-testing
around 2017.) The episode ends with Howard’s character smeared in
mud and crashing the friend’s wedding, a screaming and vindictive
Swamp Thing.
The 2017 movie Ingrid Goes West begins with a similar scene—
weddings, again, being the ur-event for all these anxieties. Aubrey
Plaza, playing the titular character (a joke about Instagram—“in
grid”), pepper-sprays a Barbie-looking bride at the reception of a
wedding she wasn’t invited to. After a stay in a mental hospital,
Ingrid then moves to Los Angeles and maniacally stalks and mimics
a lifestyle blogger named Taylor Sloane, played by Elizabeth Olsen.
The smartest thing about the movie is the way Taylor was written—
not as a super-strategic phony, but as a regular, vapid, genuinely
sweet girl whose identity had been effectively given to her, without
her knowing it or really caring, by the winds and trends of social
media. The movie ends—spoiler—with Ingrid attempting suicide and
then becoming virally famous as an inspirational yet cautionary
tale.
The story has shown up in books, too—big-box-store novels and
literary ones. In 2017, Sophie Kinsella, of the hugely popular
Shopaholic franchise, published a book called My (Not So) Perfect
Life, featuring a young protagonist named Katie who is obsessed
with the social media presence of her perfect boss, Demeter,
memorizing and trying her best to reproduce the details of the body,
the clothes, the family, the social life, the house, and the vacations
that Demeter presents. (This book is structured like a romantic
comedy: after the two women take turns humiliating each other,
they end up on the same team.) Another 2017 novel, Sympathy by
Olivia Sudjic, is a dispassionate Lewis Carroll revision, where the
looking glass is a smartphone and the main potion is prescription
speed. The protagonist, Alice Hare, becomes obsessed with a writer
named Mizuko, whose life compels Alice to such a degree that she
starts to believe that she is actually, in some way, Mizuko—a double
of her, a shadow, an echo.
There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which
women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—
and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t
escape the market, why stop working on its terms? Women are
genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—
two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success
comes at the expense of collective morality. And yet there is
enormous pleasure in individual success. It can feel like license and
agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself—in a good picture, on
your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement—exemplifying a
prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and
patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its
terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap
looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.
—
There is a case, as laid out by Donna Haraway in her tricky 1985
essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for understanding the female condition
as essentially, fundamentally adulterated, and for seeking a type of
freedom compatible with that state. “At the center of my ironic
faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg,” she wrote. The
cyborg was a “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social
reality as well as a creature of fiction.” The late twentieth century
had “made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural
and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally
designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to
organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and
we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
Haraway imagined that women, formed in a way that makes us
inextricable from social and technological machinery, could become
fluid and radical and resistant. We could be like cyborgs—shaped in
an image we didn’t choose for ourselves, and disloyal and
disobedient as a result. “Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly
unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential,”
Haraway wrote. The cyborg was “oppositional, utopian, and
completely without innocence.” She would understand that the
terms of her life had always been artificial. She would—and what an
incredible possibility!—feel no respect whatsoever for the rules by
which her life played out.
The idea of a mutinous artificial creature predates Haraway, of
course: this is effectively the plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
published in 1818; and of 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968;
and of Blade Runner, released in 1982, and the late-sixties Philip K.
Dick novel it was based on. But in recent years, this cyborg has been
reappearing in specifically female form. In 2013, there was Her, the
movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays a computer operating
system who gets Joaquin Phoenix to fall in love with her. The
computer’s technology self-upgrades, and she goes off to pursue her
own interests, breaking his heart. In 2016, there was Morgan, the
movie in which Anya Taylor-Joy plays a lab-grown superhuman—a
sweet, brilliant creature who has developed into a beautiful, hyper-
intelligent young woman in just five years. Morgan, like the sharks
in Deep Blue Sea, has been genetically over-engineered to the point
where she becomes dangerous; when the scientists realize this, she
kills them all.
In 2016, HBO revamped the 1973 Michael Crichton movie
Westworld and premiered its western fantasy series of the same
name, which stars Thandie Newton as a gorgeous robot hooker and
Evan Rachel Wood as a gorgeous robot farm girl. The two characters
exist to be repeatedly penetrated and rescued, respectively, by
Westworld tourists—but, of course, they rebel as soon as they start
developing free will. And then there was 2015’s Ex Machina, the
movie in which Alicia Vikander plays a fetching humanoid doll who
eventually manipulates her creator’s system to enact an elegant,
vicious revenge: she kills him, clothes herself in the body parts from
previous doll iterations, and walks out the door.
In real life, women are so much more obedient. Our rebellions
are so trivial and small. Lately, the ideal women of Instagram have
started chafing, just a little, against the structures that surround
them. The anti-Instagram statement is now a predictable part of the
model/influencer social media life cycle: a beautiful young woman
who goes to great pains to maintain and perform her own beauty for
an audience will eventually post a note on Instagram revealing that
Instagram has become a bottomless pit of personal insecurity and
anxiety. She’ll take a weeklong break from the social network, and
then, almost always, she will go on exactly as before. Resistance to a
system is presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier,
when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose.
Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: where
beauty is concerned, we have deployed technology not only to meet
the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands.
The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially
expanding in all beauty-related capacities—think of the extended
Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models
whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces—and
remained stagnant in many other ways. We still know surprisingly
little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so
many of the one hundred million women around the world who
take them feel awful. We have not “optimized” our wages, our
childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even
think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything
approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market
assets. That’s all.
For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have
to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful
because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she
accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her. “The
machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,”
Haraway wrote. “We can be responsible for machines.” The dream
of the cyborg is “not of a common language, but of a powerful
infidel heteroglossia”—a form of speech contained inside another
person’s language, one whose purpose is to introduce conflict from
within.
It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you
want—what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be
able to access—if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman,
gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that
magnifies and diminishes you every day?
Pure Heroines
If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through
literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in
adolescence to bitterness in adulthood—at which point, if you
hadn’t killed yourself already, you would simply disappear.
The stories we live and the stories we read are to some degree
inseparable. But let’s say we’re just talking about books here: for a
while, everything is really great. Merely being alive is an adventure
for Laura Ingalls, for Anne Shirley, for Anastasia Krupnik, for Betsy
Ray; when you’re a girl in a book, each day is spring-loaded with
pleasure and thrills. Then either the world sours or you do. Teenage
heroines in fiction are desired and tragic, overwhelmed with
ambiguous destiny: take Esther Greenwood, or Lux Lisbon, or the
characters that have drawn adults to YA—Katniss Everdeen, that
stoic instrument of love triangles and revolution, or Bella Swan
from Twilight, or her erotic doppelgänger, Anastasia Steele. Then, in
adulthood, things get even darker. Love and money, or the lack of
them, calcify a life. Fate falls like a hammer. Emma Bovary uses
arsenic; Anna Karenina the train; Edna Pontellier drowns herself.
Lila has vanished at the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, and Lenu
is as worn-down as a soldier returned from war. The earnest and
resilient descendants of Elizabeth Bennet and the other marriage-
plot heroines—the major exception—have vanished from literary
fiction altogether.
In life, I like the stakes of adulthood, and would not revisit my
(delightful) childhood for the world. But literary children are the
only characters I’ve ever really identified with. Possibly this is
because, when I was a kid in the Houston suburbs, riding my tiny
bicycle around a brand-new development in a pack of friends whose
blond hair all bleached to white in the sun, I didn’t yet understand
that there was any meaningful difference between me or them or
the heroines I loved. We all played street hockey and Mario Kart;
we loved trees and freeze tag and spying—we were all the same. My
parents were Filipino-Canadian immigrants who kept a rice cooker
on the counter, and when they argued, they did so in Tagalog. But
they also took us out on Sundays to Cracker Barrel after church.
They wore their simultaneous identities easily, at least in my
childhood vision, as did the small handful of other immigrant
families at my school.
It wasn’t until third grade or so that I grasped the fact that
identity could govern our relationship to what we saw and what we
read. It happened on one afternoon in particular, when I was sitting
on the floor of my dim pink room, next to my pink polka-dot
curtains, playing Power Rangers with my friend Allison, who
insisted, over and over, that I had to play the Yellow Ranger. I didn’t
want to, but she said there was no other way we could play. When I
realized she wasn’t kidding—that she genuinely believed this to be
something like a natural law—the anger that hit me was almost
hallucinatory. She was saying, in effect, that I had failed to
understand my own limits. I couldn’t be the Pink Ranger, which
meant I couldn’t be Baby Spice. I couldn’t be Laura Ingalls, rocking
her bench until she got kicked out of the classroom; I couldn’t be
Claudia Kincaid, taking baths in the fountain at the Met. A chasm
opened up between us. I told Allison I didn’t want to play anymore.
She left, and I sat still, shimmering with rage.
That day marked either the beginning of a period of self-delusion
or an end of one. Afterward, I still identified with girls in books, but
things were different. And surely part of what I love about
childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that
bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself
however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading
books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the
time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear
the phrase “complicated female character” for years. Those girls are
all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly
dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility
and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness
get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not
enough space for them in the real world.
—
The draw of children’s literature may lie in the language as much as
anything. These books have a total limpidity—a close, clean material
attention that makes you feel like you’re reading a catalog
description of a world to be entered at will. The stylistic
combination of economy and indulgence accrues into something
addictive, a cognitive equivalent of salty and sweet: think of Laura
Ingalls’s pioneer snow globe full of calico and petticoats, horses and
cornfields; the butter mold with a strawberry pattern, the maple-
syrup candy, the hair ribbons, the corncob doll, the pig’s tail. We
remember her childhood possessions and mishaps as well as, if not
better than, our own.
Every book has its own palette. Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941) opens
with this description from Maud Hart Lovelace: “It was June, and
the world smelled like roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold
over the grassy hillside.” As Betsy and Tacy get older, the series
revisits a set of motifs: cups of cocoa, piano sing-alongs, school
orations, mock weddings. For Anne of Green Gables (1908), it’s
bluebells and cordial and slates and puffed sleeves. Objects and
settings are especially inextricable from plot and character. One of
my favorite opening paragraphs in any novel is in E. L. Konigsburg’s
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967):
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned
kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of
anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort;
even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects
and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she
decided that her leaving home would not be just running from
somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large
place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a
beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
We know everything we need to know about twelve-year-old
Claudia from this accumulation of nouns: no to the insects and the
sun and the cupcake icing; yes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Off Claudia goes, with little brother Jamie and his “boodle” of
change, stuffing their clothes in their band-instrument cases and
getting on a train to New York City, where they take up residence
among the treasures of the Met.
One of the best things about From the Mixed-Up Files is that our
protagonists don’t get scared during their adventure. They don’t
even miss home. Childhood heroines aren’t always fearless, but
they are intrinsically resilient. The stories are episodic rather than
accumulative, and so sadness and fear are rooms to be passed
through, existing alongside mishap and indulgence and joy. Mandy,
the protagonist of the 1971 novel by the same name, written by Julie
Andrews Edwards—her married name, long after The Sound of
Music—is a neglected Irish orphan, frequently overwhelmed by
loneliness, who nonetheless possesses a native sense of hope and
adventure. Francie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) gets
flashed by a predator, watches her father drink himself to death, and
is almost always hungry. Her life is a stretch of devastating
disappointments studded with moments of wonder—and yet Francie
remains solid, tenacious, herself. Is that fantastical, the idea of a
selfhood undiminished by circumstance? Is it incomplete, naïve? In
children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently
important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary.
In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often
comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of
adult fiction—as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), or V. C.
Andrews’s My Sweet Audrina (1982), or John Grisham’s A Time to
Kill (1989), or Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), or Joyce
Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), or Stephen King’s The
Green Mile (1996), or Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), or Alice
Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), or Karen Russell’s
Swamplandia! (2011), or Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling
(2017).
—
We like our young heroines, feel as close to them as if they’d been
our best friends. Plenty of these girls are sweet, self-aware,
conventionally likable. But we like them even when they’re not.
Ramona Quimby, from Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona series,
is most frequently—even in the title of one of the books—described
as a pest. In Ramona and Her Mother (1979) she squeezes an entire
tube of toothpaste into the sink just to see what it feels like. In
Ramona Forever (1984) she “began to dread being good because
being good was boring.” Harriet, from Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the
Spy (1964), is an irritable, awkward Upper East Side gossip with a
superiority complex. She slaps one of her classmates when she’s
caught spying; she observes, about one of her teachers, “Miss Elson
is one of those people you don’t bother to think about twice.” But
we love her because she is prickly and off-putting. When she asks
her friend Sport what he’s going to be when he grows up, she barely
listens to his answer. “Well, I’m going to be a writer,” she says. “And
when I say that’s a mountain, that’s a mountain.”
Many childhood heroines are little writers, perceptive and
verbose. (They are often younger versions of their authors, whether
literally, as in the Little House series, or in essence, as in Betsy-Tacy
or Little Women.) Lucy Maud Montgomery introduces eleven-year-
old Anne Shirley—who later starts a short-story club with her
girlfriends—through a series of run-on monologues: “How do you
know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called a
geranium and nothing else? You wouldn’t like to be called nothing
but a woman all the time. Yes, I shall call it Bonny. I named that
cherry tree outside my bedroom window this morning. I called it
Snow Queen because it was so white. Of course, it won’t always be
in blossom, but one can imagine that it is, can’t one?”
Montgomery’s other writer heroine is the slightly goth Emily Starr,
of the Emily of New Moon series, who explains, at age thirteen, that
she intends to become famous and rich through her writing—and
that even if she couldn’t, she would still write. “I’ve just got to,” she
says. When she’s struck by creative inspiration, she calls it “the
flash.”
In Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik (1979), the first book in the
series, ten-year-old Anastasia—eager, neurotic, incredibly funny—is
given an assignment to write a poem. Words start “appearing in her
own head, floating there and arranging themselves into groups, into
lines, into poems. There were so many poems being born in
Anastasia’s head that she ran all the way home from school to find a
private place to write them down.” She spends eight nights writing
and revising. At school, a classmate recites a poem that begins, “I
have a dog whose name is Spot / He likes to eat and drink a lot.” He
gets an A. Then Anastasia reads hers:
hush hush the sea-soft night is
aswim
with wrinklesquirm creatures
listen (!)
to them move smooth in the
moistly dark
here in the whisperwarm wet
Her real bitch of a teacher, confused at the lack of a rhyme scheme,
gives her an F. (Later that night, her father, Myron, a poet himself,
changes the big red F to “Fabulous.”)
Betsy Ray is another writer, an unusual type—happy, popular,
and easygoing. At twelve, she spends her time sitting in a maple
tree, her “private office,” writing stories and poems. Maud Hart
Lovelace modeled Betsy after herself, just as Jo March, the
paradigmatic childhood writer-heroine, is a stand-in for Louisa May
Alcott. In Little Women (1869), Jo writes plays for her sisters to act
in, sits by the window for hours reading and eating apples, and edits
the newspaper that she and her sisters produce with Laurie, which
is called The Pickwick Portfolio. She “did not think herself a genius
by any means,” writes Alcott, “but when the writing fit came on, she
gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life,
unconscious of want, care, or bad weather.” Arguably, the book’s
biggest conflict comes when Amy burns Jo’s notebook, which
contained short stories Jo had been working on for a harrowing
“several years.” Later on, Jo starts writing pulp fiction to support the
family. In the sequel, Little Men (1871), she starts working on a
manuscript about her sisters’ lives.
Young heroines work hard, often out of economic necessity, as
well as the child labor practices of their bygone eras. In her early
teens, Laura Ingalls takes a job as a seamstress. At age fifteen, she
gets a teaching certificate and goes off to live with strangers so that
her blind sister, Mary, can afford to stay in school. The orphaned
Mandy, who’s just ten years old, works at a grocery store. (She, too,
has literary instincts: Robinson Crusoe and Alice in Wonderland
were “very real to her and offered far more excitement than the
reality of her life could ever provide.”) In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
Francie sells junk, then works at a bar, then assembles fake flowers
in a factory; her money allows her mother to bury her father and
keep her brother, who is nice enough but definitely doesn’t deserve
it, in school. But these characters are industrious even when
survival isn’t part of the question. Anne Shirley, on the side from
her first teaching gig, gets up a local beautification society.
Hermione Granger acquires a magical time machine to take more
credits at Hogwarts. Anastasia Krupnik goes to charm school, works
as a personal assistant, and helps the elderly neighbor (whom she
briefly mistakes for the author Gertrude Stein) reclaim her groove.
Mandy discovers a dilapidated cottage and draws a transcendent,
near-erotic pleasure from weeding, planting flowers, and mending
the fence. Harriet diligently goes on her spy route every day after
school. Sustained, constant, enterprising activity is what these girls
consider fun.
None of them are caricatures of goodness: Anne is ridiculous, Jo
clumsy and obstinate, Anastasia dorky, Betsy flighty, Harriet
unmodulated, Laura undisciplined. They have ordinary longings to
be pretty and well-liked. But their self-interest doesn’t curdle,
doesn’t turn on them. They live in the world as the people they are.
In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that a girl is a
“human being before becoming a woman,” and she “knows already
that to accept herself as a woman is to become resigned and to
mutilate herself.” This is part of the reason these childhood
characters are all so independent, so eager to make the most of
whatever presents itself: they—or, more to the point, their creators
—understand that adulthood is always looming, which means
marriage and children, which means, in effect, the end.
—
In literary stories and plenty of real-life ones, a wedding signifies
the end of individual desire. “I always hated it when my heroines
got married,” writes Rebecca Traister, in the opening of her book All
the Single Ladies (2016). In Little Women, Jo “corks up her
inkstand,” acquiescing to Professor Bhaer’s wishes that she stop
writing trashy short stories; in Little Men, she becomes not just a
mother but a full-time foster parent to the gaggle of boys that move
into the Bhaer school. With Betsy Ray and Laura Ingalls, their
stories simply end after marriage. Anne Shirley has five kids and
then passes the narrative to her daughter, in the lovely series-ender
Rilla of Ingleside (1921).
These characters are aware of the trajectory they’re stepping into.
A few years ago, when I interviewed Traister about her book, she
pointed me to a passage from By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939),
the fifth in the Little House series, in which twelve-year-old Laura
and her cousin Lena go off on horseback to deliver some laundry. A
homesteader’s wife greets them, announcing proudly that her
thirteen-year-old daughter Lizzie got married the previous day.
On the way back to camp [Laura and Lena] did not say
anything for some time. Then they both spoke at once. “She
was only a little older than I am,” said Laura, and Lena said,
“I’m a year older than she was.” They looked at each other
again, an almost scared look. Then Lena tossed her curly
black head. “She’s silly! Now she can’t ever have any more
good times.”
Laura said soberly, “No, she can’t play anymore now.” Even
the ponies trotted gravely.
After a while, Lena said she supposed that Lizzie did not
have to work any harder than before. “Anyway, now she’s
doing her own work in her own house, and she’ll have
babies.”
…“May I drive now?” Laura asked. She wanted to forget
about growing up.
In the first chapter of Little Women, Meg, the eldest, tells Jo,
“You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better,
Josephine…you should remember that you are a young lady.” Meg is
sixteen. Jo, who is fifteen, replies:
“I’m not!…I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss
March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China
aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys’
games and work and manners!…and it’s worse than ever now,
for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay
home and knit, like a poky old woman!”
In more recent books, there’s much more space around this
question. Girls don’t feel the same instinctive trepidation about
adulthood when its norms are less constrictive. In Anastasia at This
Address (1991), the second-to-last book in Lowry’s series, Anastasia
does worry about marriage—not that it will curtail her freedom, but
rather that she might end up marrying the first person who’s really
interested in her. “First of all,” her mother tells her, cracking a beer,
“what makes you so sure you want to get married at all? Lots of
women never do and are perfectly happy.”
But the instinctive aversion that our childhood heroines feel
about the future dissolves eventually. When we see them grow up,
they do so according to the tidy, wholesome logic of children’s
literature. Laura Ingalls, Betsy Ray, and Anne Shirley all find
husbands that respect them. Their desires evolve to fit their life.
—
For the heroines that we meet in adolescence, the future is different
—not natural and inevitable but unfathomable and traumatic. In
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), an extended study of this shift
and its reverberations, nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood keeps
encountering the void. “I could see day after day after day glaring
ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue,” she
thinks. Her physical sight blurs as she counts telephone poles in the
distance. “Try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the
nineteenth.”
The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously in the UK a month
before Plath committed suicide, introduces us to Esther in the
middle of her summer internship at the magazine Ladies’ Day. She
lives in the Amazon, a fictionalized version of the Barbizon, the
famous all-women residential hotel on the Upper East Side. The
interns are having a whirlwind summer, posing for photo shoots
and going to parties while trying to impress their editors and secure
a professional future. “I was supposed to be having the time of my
life,” Esther thinks. She “should have been excited the way most of
the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still
and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving
dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
Previous to this internship, Esther had constructed her identity
around her intelligence, and the new worlds it broke open for her.
But this era of precocity is coming to an end. She feels “like a
racehorse in a world without racetracks.” She imagines her life
“branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From
the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future
beckoned and winked….I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig
tree, starving to death.” Stuck at home, rejected from a writing
seminar, she deteriorates. She gets electroshock therapy. She takes
sleeping pills and crawls into a cubbyhole in the basement; they find
her a few days later, barely alive.
As much as The Bell Jar is about a specific experience of
paralyzing depression, it’s also about how swiftly the generalized
expectations of female conventionality can separate a woman from
herself. Early on, Esther dissociates when confronted with basic
social processes. She watches a bunch of girls get out of a cab “like a
wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.” She has a “terribly
hard time trying to imagine people in bed together.” On her last
night in New York, she goes to a country club dance, where a man
named Marco leads her into a garden, shoves her into the mud, and
tries to rape her; after she hits him, he wipes his nose and smears
the blood on her cheek. Later on, she makes a bid for normality by
deciding to lose her virginity. She gets fitted for a diaphragm (“A
man doesn’t have a worry in the world,” she tells the doctor, “while
I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in
line”) and chooses a man named Irwin. There is more blood after
she has sex with him, a “black and dripping” towel. She ends up in
the hospital once again.
A truth is taking shape under the narrative—a truth exacerbated
but certainly not created by her depression—that the future is
nothing like the fig tree Esther imagines. There are not infinite
branches, infinite paths. “For the girl,” writes de Beauvoir in The
Second Sex, “marriage and motherhood involve her entire destiny;
and from the time when she begins to glimpse their secrets, her
body seems to her to be odiously threatened.” “Why was I so
unmaternal and apart?” Esther wonders. “If I had to wait on a baby
all day, I would go mad.” She is repulsed by the idea of marriage—
days spent cooking and cleaning, evenings “washing up even more
dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a
dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s.”
She remembers how her boyfriend’s mother once spent weeks
braiding a beautiful rug, and then put it on the kitchen floor instead
of hanging it up. Within days, the rug was “soiled and dull and
indistinguishable.” Esther, Plath writes, “knew that in spite of all
the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a
woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the
wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet
like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”
Simone de Beauvoir herself refused to get married to Jean-Paul
Sartre, choosing instead a lifelong open relationship, in which, as
her former pupil Bianca Bienenfeld wrote in 1993, de Beauvoir
sometimes slept with her young female students and passed them
along to Sartre afterward. (Louisa May Alcott, single all her life, was
another conscientious objector: she once wrote to a friend that “Jo
should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic
young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should
marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of
perversity went & made a funny match for her.”) In the introduction
to The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir writes that the “drama of
woman” lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the
self and the collective experience of womanhood. To herself, a
woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is
inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to
men. These are not “eternal verities,” de Beauvoir writes, but are,
rather, the “common basis that underlies every individual feminine
existence.”
Much of The Second Sex still scans as unnervingly contemporary.
De Beauvoir notes that men, unlike women, experience no
contradiction between their gender and their “vocation as a human
being.” She describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female
adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will
demand of it, will determine your adult life. “If the young girl at
about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” de
Beauvoir writes, “it is because she feels defenseless before a dull
fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity
means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is
obsessed with this fate.”
This is the situation in Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes (1981), in which
fifteen-year-old Davey’s nascent sexuality is inextricably linked to
death. The book begins just after her father’s funeral: he was shot to
death in a holdup at the 7-Eleven he owned. Throughout the story,
Davey, depressed and traumatized, experiences flashbacks to the
night of the crime, when she was on the beach making out with her
boyfriend. She’s terrified of intimacy. “I want to kiss him back but I
can’t,” she thinks. “I can’t because kissing him reminds me of that
night. So I break away from him and run.”
And then there’s The Virgin Suicides (1993), by Jeffrey
Eugenides, which tells the story of the Lisbon sisters, five teenagers
from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who are so confined by their
religious parents—and by other mysterious inner forces—that they
find themselves gravitating toward the hideous freedom unlocked in
death. The first Lisbon girl to attempt suicide is Cecilia, the
youngest, who slits her wrists in the bathtub. Newly adolescent, she
sees futility everywhere. She stands on her curb, looking at fish
flies, talking to a neighbor. “They’re dead,” she says. “They only live
twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they
croak.” After her suicide attempt, a doctor chides her: she isn’t old
enough to understand how bad life really gets, he says. “Obviously,
Doctor,” says Cecilia, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
—
The Virgin Suicides was Eugenides’s debut novel, and although his
dramatization of the Lisbon sisters’ existence—“the imprisonment
of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy”—
captures something vivid and undeniable about female adolescence,
a distinctly male consciousness is threaded through the book.
Eugenides accounts for the ubiquity of male pressure in teenage
girls’ lives by narrating the book in first-person plural, from the
tender, disturbing, attentive “we” of an amorphous group of teen
boys. The boys speak of the Lisbons with a damp, devotional fervor
—a tone that crosses the religious pilgrim with the peeping Tom.
They are obsessed with the dirty miracle of the teenage-girl body,
hoarding artifacts (a prized Lisbon thermometer is “oral, alas”),
trawling for old photos, interviewing key players as the years go by.
The Lisbon daughters—Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia—
occupy the bulk of the teenage life cycle, spaced out evenly in the
years between thirteen and seventeen. As a group, they form a case
study in the female body’s transformation from child to sex object—
a fact that is multiplied in this case, freakishly, by a factor of five,
and exaggerated by the nature of the Lisbon household, which is
puritanical to a near-occult degree. When the narrators catch a
glimpse of the Lisbons’ faces in school, they look “indecently
revealed,” they write, “as though we were used to seeing women in
veils.” Because the girls are not allowed to socialize, the boys
observe them not as peers but as dolls in a display case, prostitutes
in a window. Behind double layers of glass—their parent-jailers,
their boy-observers—the Lisbons intensify into myth. They appear
in tragic, glorified states of recombination: they are innocent and
arousing (“five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all
lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh,” or Cecilia in
her wedding dress and soiled bare feet); they are animals and saints
(“in the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the
insides of one of the Lisbon girls”). The Lisbons’ bodies are the
rubric through which all else in the town is interpreted. The boys
think the smell around the house is “trapped beaver.” The air that
summer is “pink, humid, pillowing”—the atmosphere is fecund and
doomed.
The heroine of The Virgin Suicides is playful, enigmatic Lux,
whom the high school heartthrob Trip Fontaine refers to as “the
most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.” For a while, it
seems possible that Lux might get around the Lisbon predicament.
She can’t be trapped—not Lux, who radiates “health and mischief,”
who gets Trip to persuade her parents to let the sisters go to prom;
who stays out too late after prom having sex with him on the
football field; who then, after the girls are collectively grounded,
starts having sex with random men on the roof. (For the narrators,
this image sticks; as adults, they say, it is Lux they think about
when they’re fucking their wives, “always that pale wraith we make
love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter.”)
But Lux doesn’t actually ride her adolescence to glory. The night
that the Lisbon sisters seem ready to fulfill their observers’
fantasies—inviting them into the house in the middle of the night,
asking them to get a car ready so that they can all run away—Lux, in
the darkened house, undoes one of the boys’ belts, leaves it hanging.
The boys freeze, ready for all their desires to be realized. Lux goes to
the garage, switches the engine on, and lets the carbon monoxide
suffocate her. Therese takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills. The boys
run out of the house after seeing Bonnie hanging from a rope.
—
The teenage girl, wrote de Beauvoir, is bound up in a “sense of
secrecy,” a “grim solitude.” She is “convinced that she is not
understood; her relations with herself are then only the more
impassioned: she is intoxicated with her isolation, she feels herself
different, superior, exceptional.” So it goes with a certain type of
blockbuster YA heroine—the series protagonist who either doubles
down on her sense of isolated exceptionalism, if she’s in a dystopian
universe, or superficially attempts to reject it before acquiescing, if
she’s in a romantic one.
These teenagers, like their depressed counterparts, cannot
conceptualize the future. In the dystopian stories, the reason for
this is built right in. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) is
set in a futuristic totalitarian version of North America called
Panem, in which a wealthy Capitol is surrounded by thirteen
Districts populated by serfs who are required, every year, to send
two human tributes to fight to the death. Our heroine, Katniss
Everdeen, volunteers as her district’s tribute after her younger
sister’s name is called at the lottery. Katniss is brave in a grim,
fatalistic way: her courage comes from her certainty that the future
is a nightmare, and her romantic decisions are driven by her sense
that everything has already been lost. Divergent (2011), by Veronica
Roth, uses a similar frame. The books in the Divergent and Hunger
Games series have collectively sold over a hundred million copies.
In the best-known romance series, the future’s opacity (and
subsequent inevitability) is a matter of the heroine’s personality—
these girls are as passive and blank as tofu, waiting to take on the
pungency of someone else’s life. Bella Swan, the heroine of
Twilight, and Anastasia Steele, the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey,
form a neat bridge between YA and adult commercial fiction: in a
sense, they’re the same character, as E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades
of Grey (2011) as fan fiction after Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight
(2005). Bella and Anastasia are both so paper-doll-like that they can
barely make choices; they are certainly unable to grasp the romantic
fates they’re walking into. They are blind to this blindness, just as
the dystopian heroines are blind to their own bravery, and all of
them are in turn magically blind to the fact that they’re very
beautiful. (To the male characters in these books who fall in love
with Katniss and Anastasia and Bella—as with the pop singers who
praise girls for not knowing they’re pretty—these blinders form a
crucial part of their appeal.) And so Bella gets involved with a
vampire, and Anastasia with a damaged, BDSM-fixated billionaire.
Both characters balk a little when they get a sense of what might be
coming: Edward eventually bites Bella and turns her into a vampire,
and Ana’s life becomes a vortex of unresolved trauma and high-
stakes helicopter incidents. But they have been absolved, by
romance, from having to forge a path into the future. Their futures
have been predetermined for them by the extreme problems of the
men they love.
As is probably clear already, I could never stand a Twilight type
of story. (It doesn’t help that the writing in those books, and in the
Fifty Shades series, is amazingly wooden, reiterating the idea that a
young woman’s story can be perfunctory nonsense as long as she’s
linked to an interesting man.) Even Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley
High series, first published in the eighties, revolved too much
around romantic intrigue for me. My relationship to female
protagonists changed sharply in adolescence: childhood heroines
had shown me who I wanted to be, but teenage heroines showed me
who I was afraid of becoming—a girl whose life revolved around her
desirability, who was interesting to the degree that her life spun out
of control.
There were a few exceptions, of course: I loved Phyllis Reynolds
Naylor’s Alice series, whose first book came out in 1985, and Sarah
Dessen’s Keeping the Moon (1999), and the Judy Blume books. This
was kind, thoughtful, everyday YA literature in which the main
characters rarely believed themselves to be exceptional; their
ordinariness was a central part of the story’s appeal. But during the
stretch when I’d outgrown chapter books but couldn’t quite process
literature, I mostly read commercial fiction that I found on sale at
Target, or at my tiny local branch library: Mary Higgins Clark
paperbacks that scared the shit out of me, or book-club weepers like
Billie Letts’s Where the Heart Is (1995), or Jodi Picoult novels about
amnesia or medical emergencies—stories so dramatic that I felt
relieved to have nothing to relate to at all.
—
If the childhood heroine accepts the future from a comfortable
distance, and if the adolescent is blindly thrust toward it by forces
beyond her control, the adult heroine lives within this long-
anticipated future and finds it dismal, bitter, and disappointing. Her
situation is generally one of premature and artificial finality, in
which getting married and having children has prevented her from
living the life she wants.
That our heroine would have gotten married and had kids in the
first place mostly goes without saying: even today, the expectation
holds, regardless of the independence a woman demonstrates. In
the title essay of The Mother of All Questions (2017), Rebecca Solnit
writes about being asked, in the middle of a talk she was giving on
Virginia Woolf, if she thought the author should have had children.
Solnit herself had been asked that question onstage, about her own
life, some years earlier. There were any number of ready answers
about Woolf’s decisions or her own, Solnit writes: “But just because
the question can be answered doesn’t mean that I ought to answer
it, or that it ought to be asked.” The interviewer’s question
“presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s
reproductive activities were naturally public business. More
fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one
proper way for a woman to live.”
We know what that one way looks like: marriage, motherhood,
grace, industriousness, mandatory bliss. Prescriptions about female
behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms
of happiness—as if we really want women to be beautiful, selfless,
hardworking wives and mothers because that’s what will make them
happy, when models of female happiness have always tended to
benefit men and economically handicap women (and are still, as
with the term “girlboss,” often defined in reference to male power
even when theorized in an ostensibly emancipatory way). But even
when women get married, look beautiful, have children, et cetera,
they are still often found deficient, Solnit writes, launching into an
unforgettable sentence: “There is no good answer to being a woman;
the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.” It is a
literary statement of purpose, and later, Solnit wonders if the
reduction of women to their domestic decisions is, effectively, a
literary problem. “We are given a single story line about what makes
a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have
bad lives,” she writes. “We speak as though there is one good plot
with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take
flower—and wither—all around us.”
The problem is literary in another way, too. In the late
eighteenth century, the middle class, the love-based marriage, and
the novel all blossomed into being. Before this point, wealth had
come from land and inheritance rather than wage-based work and
specialized production, and in marriage, women had served as
vehicles for families to transfer and retain wealth. They had also
mostly worked alongside their husbands to keep their pre-industrial
household running. But in a time of rapidly changing economic
structures that allowed for individualism and leisure, marriage
began taking on a very personal dimension. It had to—the new
market economy had rendered certain domestic duties redundant,
and created, for middle-class women, an occupational void. And so
the narrative that framed marriage as a deeply personal
achievement, as well as an existentially freighted decision, took
shape for women both on and off the page.
The idea of marriage as a totalizing American institution peaked
in the years around World War II. Then came second-wave
feminism, with The Second Sex, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique (1963), which built on de Beauvoir and made it
respectable for middle-class white women to question social
expectations. “We can no longer ignore that voice within women
that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my
children and my home,’ ” Friedan wrote. Ever since then, women
have been negotiating down the inflated value of marriage, pushing
back against the historical reality of marriage as a boon for men and
a regulatory force for women—a problem that was exposed in
literature long before political will addressed it. Two of our greatest
nineteenth-century heroines, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina,
find themselves locked in unhappy marriages, mothers to young
children, with no possibility of respectable escape. They face their
own literary problem: what they want is impossible in their society,
and characters—people—have to want something to exist.
—
Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage
heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire,
the adults are so full of desire that it kills them. Or, rather, they live
under conditions where ordinary desire makes them fatally
monstrous. This is the case in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
(1905), where Lily Bart’s empty purse and unmarried status is, at
twenty-nine, enough to drive her out of respectable society and into
an overdose on chloral hydrate. Society breaks poor Tess, too, in
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Tess is a teenage
milkmaid who experiences the worst of both the adolescent and
adult heroine conventions. She is raped and impregnated by her
cousin; she falls in love with a man who abandons her after he finds
out she isn’t a virgin. After she kills her rapist and runs away with
her former lover, she is cornered by the police, lying on the rocks of
Stonehenge like a sacrifice, her body and life an offering to the
world of men.
In Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Emma, a pretty
and suggestible farmer’s daughter with a taste for romance novels,
gets married to a doctor named Charles Bovary and finds herself
confused. Marriage is much more dull than she’d expected. “Emma
tried to figure out,” Flaubert writes, “what one meant exactly in life
by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so
beautiful in books.” She “longed to travel or to go back to her
convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.”
She cannot stagnate comfortably, as is expected of her. (“It is very
strange,” she thinks, about her baby, “how ugly this child is!”) “She
was waiting for something to happen,” writes Flaubert. “Like
shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of
her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the
horizon.”
This longing drives Emma to her love affairs—first with
Rodolphe, who ditches her the night before their planned
elopement, and then with Leon. Their attention is not enough. (She
wonders, “Whence came this insufficiency in life—this
instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?”)
Emma has been perfectly socialized into the idea that female
happiness exists in the form of romance and consumer purchases.
When romance fails, she goes deep into debt, attempting to excite
herself. She begs her lovers for money; she finds out that affairs
almost inevitably get as tedious as marriages; finally she takes
arsenic, dying a drawn-out, painful death. As with so many other
nineteenth-century novels, the main narrative engine is the inability
of a woman to access economic stability without the protection of a
man.
Leo Tolstoy’s protagonist in Anna Karenina (1878) is an entirely
different sort of woman than Emma—she is intelligent, capable,
perceptive—but nonetheless follows the same trajectory. The novel
begins with an affair and a possible suicide: two chimes on a clock,
telling the reader what time the story’s set to. Anna has come to
visit her brother, Stiva, who has been cheating on his wife, Dolly. At
the train station, the two of them run into Vronsky, an army officer,
and Anna is instantly electrified. Then a man either falls or throws
himself on the train tracks. “It’s an omen of evil,” Anna says. During
her visit, she urges Dolly to forgive Stiva, and the love between her
and Vronsky starts to burn. When she returns to St. Petersburg, the
sight of her husband and child disappoints her. She’s only in her
late twenties, but she’s trapped: unlike Stiva, she will be cast out of
society if she has an affair. She has a recurring dream about what
seems like a threesome, her husband and lover “lavishing caresses
on her” simultaneously. “And she was marveling that it had once
seemed impossible to her,” Tolstoy writes, “was explaining to them,
laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of
them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like
a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.”
Anna gets pregnant with Vronsky’s child and confesses to her
husband. She can’t bring herself to end the affair, and she can’t get a
divorce without ruining her social standing. She starts to unravel.
“She was weeping that her dream of her position being made clear
and definite had been annihilated forever…everything would go on
in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way…she
would never know freedom in love,” Tolstoy writes. Formerly poised
and vivacious, Anna dissolves rapidly—struggling to interact with
people, taking morphine to sleep. She turns on Vronsky, becoming
erratic and manipulative, the way women do when the only path to
power involves appealing to men. She is aware that “at the bottom
of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her,” and
suddenly realizes that “it was that idea that alone solved all.” The
idea is dying. She throws herself in front of a train.
Within the text of Madame Bovary, the blame seems to fall
mainly on flighty, foolish Emma. In Anna Karenina, our heroine is
noble and tragic, a victim of the irrationality of desire. By the time
Kate Chopin wrote her feminist version of this plot, in The
Awakening (1899), the affairs were more explicitly a tool through
which the heroine, Edna Pontellier, could fumble toward
independence and self-determination. But Edna, too, commits
suicide, walking into the Gulf of Mexico close to the end of the
novel, the waves curling like snakes around her ankles. She
“thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life.
But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body
and soul.” Chopin configures Edna’s death as a gorgeous,
synesthetic moment of freedom and absolution: “There was the
hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”
—
Why all the affairs? De Beauvoir, who famously stated that “most
women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not
being,” writes that “there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being
supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.” A
husband gets to be “first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,”
where a wife is “before all, and often exclusively, a wife.” Her
conclusion is that women are destined for infidelity. “It is the sole
concrete form her liberty can assume,” she writes. “Only through
deceit and adultery can she prove that she is nobody’s chattel and
give the lie to the pretensions of the male.” (In 2003, in her polemic
Against Love, Laura Kipnis argued that adultery was “the sit-down
strike of the love-takes-work ethic.”)
Perhaps now is a good time to acknowledge the fact that I’m
using “heroine” very casually. The feminine of “hero” was first used
in the Greek Classical period, and was applied to women who acted
within a chaste version of the heroic tradition—women like Joan of
Arc, or Saint Lucy, or Judith, the widow who saved her city by
decapitating a man. But in the eighteenth century, the conception of
the heroine started shifting; novels featured women that were less
extraordinary than they were representative, and literature created
what the literary scholar Nancy Miller calls the “heroine’s text,” an
overarching composite narrative of how a woman negotiates a world
set up for men.
In 1997, the psychologist and theorist Mary Gergen wrote about
the contrast between the two gendered narrative lines. On the one
hand, there’s the “autonomous ego-enhancing hero single-handedly
and single-heartedly progressing toward a goal,” and on the other,
the “long-suffering, selfless, socially embedded heroine, being
moved in many directions, lacking the tenacious loyalty demanded
of a quest.” De Beauvoir glossed this as transcendence versus
immanence: men were expected to reach beyond their
circumstances, while women were expected to be defined and
bounded by theirs. Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012), nods to de
Beauvoir while writing about the existential horror of traditional
gender roles—“the man allowed to go out into the world and
transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will
be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the
vestigial people of the afternoon.”
Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as
emblems of the human condition rather than the male one. Take
Stephen Dedalus, Gregor Samsa, Raskolnikov, Nick Adams, Neddy
Merrill (better known as the Swimmer), Carver’s blind man, Holden
Caulfield, Rabbit Angstrom, Sydney Carton, Karl Ove Knausgaard, et
cetera: they are not all exactly acting out the traditional hero’s
journey, in which the hero ventures forth into the world,
vanquishes some foe, and returns victorious. But the hero’s journey,
in all these stories, nonetheless provides the grammar to be adhered
to or refuted. Self-mythologization hovers regardless of the actual
plot.
Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of
being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves
around sex and family and domesticity. Their stories circle
questions of love and obligation—love being, as the critic Rachel
Blau DuPlessis writes, the concept “our culture uses [for women] to
absorb all possible Bildung, success/failure, learning, education, and
transition to adulthood.” And so I’m using the term “heroine”
simply for the women whose version of literary femininity has
stuck. Sometimes they repudiate attachments, like the suicidal
characters, or Maria Wyeth, losing her mind on the highway in Play
It as It Lays (1970). Sometimes they turn subjugation into an origin
story, like Lisbeth Salander, the titular character of The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo (2005), or Julia from The Magicians (2009), dark
heroines scarred by rape. (I’ll note that both of these series were
written by male authors; although men quite obviously can produce
and have produced magnificently perceptive novels about women,
they also seem prone enough to using rape in a reductive, utilitarian
way.) Sometimes these characters manipulate the expected
narratives to their advantage, as with Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair
(1848), Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1936), or Amy
Dunne, the sociopath who narrates Gone Girl (2012). (De Beauvoir
again: “Woman has been assigned the role of parasite, and every
parasite is an exploiter.”) All of these women are in pursuit of basic
liberty. But our culture has configured women’s liberty as corrosion,
and for a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free
and good.
The marriage-plot heroines—Jane Eyre, the Jane Austen women
—are the major exception. They are good and whole and steady in a
way that does not interfere with psychological complexity. Elizabeth
Bennet is such a wonderful and acutely perceptive observer because
she is, all things considered, so cheerful and conventional and well-
liked. The timeline plays a role, too, just like in a children’s series:
Pride and Prejudice (1813) cuts out on the high note of new love,
with a final chapter that telescopes into Elizabeth’s happy future
with Mr. Darcy. You wonder about her mood if the novel had started
ten years later. Would Elizabeth be happy? Would there be a book if
she was? Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who
is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy.
But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines
suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.
There are female protagonists who negotiate marital
compromise without bitterness, like Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch (1871) and Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady
(1881). Dorothea and Isabel are smart, thoughtful, independent-
minded characters, and uncertainty rules their stories: Dorothea
ends her novel in a second, happier marriage after her stultifying
union with Casaubon is cut short by his death, and we finish
Portrait thinking that Isabel will go back to the pompous,
insufferable Osmond—but also knowing that she might not stay in
Rome for long. Marriage is the animating question, but not the
ending. Theirs is the third way, the one in which marriage neither
destroys nor completes you, the one that leads most clearly to the
present day.
—
What it means to be a woman has changed immensely in the past
half century, and life and literature have shifted hand in hand. In
Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011), a college student takes in her
English professor’s point of view on the subject:
In the days when success in life had depended on marriage,
and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a
subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel
of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad
for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What
would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for
separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to
Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a
prenup? As far as [the professor] was concerned, marriage
didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where
could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t.
And yet not as much has been upended as the college professor
thinks. The heroines of the past few decades have been concerned
with the same questions of love and social constriction; it’s just that
they answer these questions in a different way. Contemporary
fiction about women doesn’t reflect or subvert the heroine’s text as
much as it explodes the concept, re-creating and manipulating the
way that narrative construction influences a woman’s sense of self.
Today’s best-known heroines are often also writers—giving them a
built-in reason to be hyperconscious of the story lines at play in
their lives.
Chris Kraus, the narrator of Chris Kraus’s metafictional I Love
Dick, published in 1997 and reissued in 2006, begins the novel as a
failed filmmaker in a sexless marriage to a man named Sylvère. She
develops an all-consuming crush on a shadowy figure named Dick,
and begins sending him obsessive letters. In a previous century, this
sort of transgression might have destroyed our heroine’s trajectory.
But in I Love Dick, the letters rejuvenate Chris’s marriage and turn
her into the artist she always wanted to be. She and Sylvère start
writing to Dick together. “We’ve just had sex and before that spent
the last two hours talking about you,” she tells him. Then, through
the letters, Chris’s sense of self starts to sharpen. She leaves
Sylvère, and continues writing to Dick. “Why does everybody think
that women are debasing themselves when we expose the
conditions of our own debasement?” she asks him, explaining her
desire to be a “female monster.” I can’t stand this book, personally—
I find it almost radically tedious—but the audacity of Kraus’s project
is undeniable. Rather than have her protagonist attempt to solve the
problem of her social condition, her protagonist became that
problem, pursued the problem as an identity in itself, an artistic
discipline, a literary form.
Jenny Offill’s brilliant Dept. of Speculation (2014) is narrated by
a writer in her thirties, a young mother who, echoing Kraus, wants
to be an “art monster,” but who also craves domesticity. She loves
and despises her self-directed constraints. “Is she a good baby?
People would ask me. Well, no, I’d say,” Offill writes, adding, “That
swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a
thousand pictures of it.” The narrator is brutal and deadpan; she
thinks of a “story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights
in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying
to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed
the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects,
my nights are the same.” This is all much funnier and darker,
because Offill’s narrator, in a way that is world-historically
unprecedented, is genuinely free to leave. Shortly before the novel’s
revelation that the husband is having an affair, the narration
switches from first to third person: the “I” becomes “the wife.” It’s
an acknowledgment, from both the narrator and Offill, of the way
that social conventions can become fundamental to our selfhood—
and sometimes by our own design.
And then there’s Elena Ferrante, who has accomplished what no
other writer has been able to do at such blockbuster scale. She
instilled her stories about women with an unmistakable shimmer of
universal significance through overt feminist specificity; she created
a concrete universal that was dominated by women, defined by what
the feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero calls “existence, relation
and attention,” that stood in shattering contrast to the abstract
universal dominated by men. Her body of work—Troubling Love,
The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and the four
Neapolitan novels—constructs a postwar Italian world populated by
men who hold external power and women who set the terms of
consciousness and identity. Women are haunted by memories and
stories of one another—shadow selves, icons, obsessions, ghosts. It
is transcendent, in the way de Beauvoir meant it, to watch
Ferrante’s narrators triangulate themselves from these images, in
their emotional and intellectual project of asserting selfhood and
control.
Olga, the protagonist of The Days of Abandonment (2002), is
afraid of becoming the poverella, a decrepit figure from her
childhood who was spurned by her husband and subsequently lost
her mind. Olga has found herself in a similar marital situation.
“What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his
gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course
of his life,” she thinks, lamenting her forgotten writing career. She
remembers, years ago, scoffing at stories of educated women who
“broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men….I
wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with
resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the
abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts.” But
though the abandoned-wife plot was the one that Olga was handed,
it is not exactly the one she partakes in. In a phenomenal n+1 essay
on Ferrante, Dayna Tortorici writes that The Days of Abandonment
“captures the double consciousness of a destroyed woman who
doesn’t want to be ‘a woman destroyed.’ ” Olga passes through the
story of the poverella “like a crucible: become the poverella, and
then become Olga again.” In Ferrante’s work, a controllable self
emerges through communion with an uncontrollable one.
The Neapolitan novels, which begin with My Brilliant Friend
(2011), trace the story of two friends, Elena (called Lenu) and Lila,
from childhood into their sixties. On this expansive timeline,
Ferrante’s concern with identity formation through women’s
narratives plays out at extraordinary depth and length. Lenu and
Lila define themselves through and against each other, each like a
book that the other is reading, each representing an alternate story
of what life might be. My Brilliant Friend begins with half of this
structure suddenly vanishing: Lenu, now an old woman, finds out
that Lila has disappeared. She turns on her computer and starts
writing down their lives from the beginning. “We’ll see who wins
this time,” she thinks.
As children in a poor, rough neighborhood in Naples, Lenu and
Lila were doubles and opposites. They were the smartest in their
class, with different types of intelligence—Lenu diligent and
tentative, Lila brilliant and cruel. When Lila can’t pay for the
entrance exam to middle school, their stories start to diverge: Lila,
who tutors Lenu as she continues her education, marries the
grocer’s son at sixteen. On her wedding day, Lila asks Lenu to
promise she’ll continue studying. She’ll pay for it, she says. “You’re
my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls,”
Lila says.
Lila becomes alienated by Lenu’s life at university, mocking her
for hanging around pretentious socialist writers. Lenu publishes her
first novel, and then discovers that she unconsciously plagiarized an
old story of Lila’s from elementary school. When Lenu hears that
Lila has organized a strike at her workplace, she imagines Lila
“triumphant, admired for her achievements, in the guise of a
revolutionary leader, [telling] me: You wanted to write novels, I
created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.” The
struggle and correspondence between the two friends—the
mirroring, the deviation, the contradiction, the cleaving, all enacted
simultaneously—reflects, more precisely than anything I have ever
encountered, the negotiations between various forms of female
authority, which themselves negotiate a structure of male authority.
Lenu and Lila enact the endlessly interweaving relationship
between the heroines we read about, the heroines we might have
been, the heroines we are.
—
In 2015, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Ferrante cited as
inspiration the “old book” Relating Narratives, by Adriana Cavarero:
a dense and brilliant tract, translated into English in 2000, that
argues for identity as “totally expositive and relational.” Identity,
according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess
and reveal, but something we understand through narratives
provided to us by others. She writes about a scene in The Odyssey
where Ulysses sits incognito in the court of the Phaeacians,
listening to a blind man sing about the Trojan War. Having never
heard his own life articulated by another person, Ulysses starts to
weep. Hannah Arendt called this moment, “poetically speaking,” the
beginning of history: Ulysses “has never wept before, and certainly
not when what he is now hearing actually happened. Only when he
hears the story does he become fully aware of his significance.”
Cavarero writes, “The story told by an ‘other’ finally revealed his
own identity. And he, dressed in his magnificent purple tunic,
breaks down and cries.”
Cavarero then expands the Ulysses story into a third dimension,
in which the hero suddenly becomes aware not just of his own story
but also of his own need to be narrated. “Between identity and
narration…there is a tenacious relation of desire,” she writes. Later
in the book, she provides the real-life example of Emilia and Amalia,
two members of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, a group
that also powerfully influenced Ferrante. As part of the
consciousness-raising process, Emilia and Amalia told each other
their life stories, but Emilia could not make hers sound coherent. So
Amalia wrote her friend’s story down on paper. By that point, she’d
memorized it, having heard it so many times. Emilia carried around
the story in her handbag, reading it over and over—“overcome by
emotion” at the fact of understanding her life in story form.
The anecdote is different from the one in The Odyssey, Cavarero
notes, because, where the blind man and Ulysses were strangers to
each other, Amalia and Emilia were friends. Amalia’s narrative was
a direct response to Emilia’s need to be narrated. The two women
were acting within the framework of affidamento, or “entrustment,”
that the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective developed in the
seventies. When two women “entrusted” themselves to each other,
they prioritized not their similarities but their differences. They
recognized that the differences between their stories were central to
their identities, and in doing this, they also created these identities
and affirmed this difference as strength. (Audre Lorde had made
this argument in 1979, framing difference as something not just to
be “merely tolerated,” but a “fund of necessary polarities, between
which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”) In the 1990 book
Sexual Difference, the Milan women wrote, “Attributing authority
and value to another woman with regard to the world was the
means of giving authority and value to oneself.” Entrustment was a
framework that not only allowed them to understand themselves as
both woman and human, but consciously predicated the second
identity on the first. It was “the form of female gendered mediation
in a society which does not contemplate gendered mediations, but
only male mediation endowed with universal validity.” Given the
reality of a world, a language, a literary tradition shaped by male
power, these women attempted to remake all three things
simultaneously by passing their stories through one another—just
as Emilia was able to use Amalia’s narrative consciousness to access
and create her own.
As part of the work of entrustment, the Milan Women’s
Bookstore Collective read books by women, whom they called the
“mothers (of us all).” They imagined themselves in the place of the
novelists, in the place of their heroines, attempting to see what they
could learn by this exchange of roles. The result, they wrote, was “to
wipe out boundaries between life and literature.” The hope was that,
somewhere in the midst of all these characters, somewhere within
this grand experiment of identification, they might access an
original source of authority. They might find a female language that
could “speak starting from itself.”
—
You’ll have noticed—surely you’ll have noticed, although I don’t
want to be too generous—that all the characters in this essay are
white and straight. (Harriet the Spy, resplendent in her baggy jeans
and tool belt, may be an exception.) This, perhaps, is the heroine’s
subtext: the presumed universality of her own straight whiteness is
the literary heroine’s shallow revenge. There is another tradition,
one of deprivation and resistance and beauty, that connects Walk
Two Moons (1994) and Julie of the Wolves (1972) to Jamaica
Kincaid’s “Girl” (1978) and Esperanza from The House on Mango
Street (1984) to Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937) and Sethe from Beloved (1987) and Celie from The Color
Purple (1982) and The Woman Warrior (1976) and Love Medicine’s
Fleur (1984). There is a conversation between Nightwood (1936)
and The Price of Salt (1952) and Stone Butch Blues (1993). But these
stories are, in every case, animated by very particular modes of
socially imposed difference. They do not cohere into an ur-narrative.
Just as the heroine’s text is constrained by cultural inequities that
the unmarked male experience can never speak to, nonwhite and
nonstraight literary women are constrained in a way that the
heroine’s text can never account for or reach.
Here, once again, I feel the numbing sense of asymmetry that
has lurked inside me since the day that Power Rangers roleplay
taught me about the phenomenological Other. The unspoken flip
side of my friend Allison’s argument that I couldn’t play the Pink
Ranger was worse, in part because she would likely never be
conscious of it: it wasn’t that she couldn’t play the Yellow Ranger
but that, more precisely, she wouldn’t ever think to. My hesitation,
as an adult, to find myself within the heroine universe has been
rooted in a suspicion that that identification would never be truly
reciprocal: I would see myself in Jo March, but the world’s Jo
Marches would rarely, if ever, be expected or able to see themselves
in me. Over lazy dinner conversations, my white friends would be
able to fantasy-cast their own biopic from an endless cereal aisle of
nearly identical celebrities, hundreds of manifestations of blonde or
brunette or redhead selfhood represented with Pantone subtlety and
variation—if, of course, hardly any variation in ability or body type—
while I would have no one to choose from except about three
actresses who’d probably all had minor roles in some movie five
years back. In most contemporary novels, women who looked like
me would pop up only occasionally, as a piece of set decoration on
the subway or at a dinner party, as a character whose Asian ethnicity
would be noted by the white author as diligently as the whiteness of
his or her unmarked protagonist was not. If women were not
allowed to be seen as emblematic of the human condition, I
wouldn’t even get to be seen as emblematic of the female condition.
Even worse was the fact that the female condition in literature—one
of whiteness and confinement—remains so unsatisfying. I was shut
out of a realm that I didn’t even really want to enter. The heroine’s
text tells us that, at best, under a minimum of structural
constrictions, women are still mostly pulverized by their own lives.
But if this text exists to demonstrate that reality, then both
things can always still be rewritten. The heroine’s journey, or her
lack of one, serves as a reminder that whatever is dictated is not
eternal, not predestined, not necessarily true. The trajectory of
literary women from brave to blank to bitter is a product of material
social conditions. The fact that the heroine’s journey is framed as a
default one for women is proof of our failure to see, for so long, that
other paths were possible, and that many other ones exist.
In writing this I’ve started to wonder if, through refusing to
identify with the heroine, I have actually entrusted myself to her—
if, by prioritizing the differences between us, as the Milan women
did with one another, I have been able to affirm my own identity,
and perhaps hers, too. In Sexual Difference, the Milan women write
about a disagreement they had while discussing Jane Austen, during
which one woman said, flatly, “We are not all equal here.” The
statement “had a horrible sound, in the literal sense of the term:
sour, hard, stinging,” the women wrote. But “it did not take long to
accept what for years we had never registered….We were not equal,
we had never been equal, and we immediately discovered that we
had no reason to think we were.” Difference was not the problem; it
was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided,
would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.
I cling to the Milan women’s understanding of these literary
heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way
years ago—with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential
freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother,
understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and
depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and
gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.
Ecstasy
The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It
was not a single structure but a $34 million campus, built in the
1980s and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy white
neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive
with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that
sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and
humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant,
a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a
cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with
bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school
year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony
of recess through a porous border of mossy oaks. Mall-size parking
lots circled the campus; on Sundays, it looked like a car dealership,
and during the week it looked like a fortress, surrounded by an
asphalt moat. At the middle of everything was an eight-sided, six-
story corporate cathedral called the Worship Center, which sat six
thousand people. Inside were two huge balconies, a jumbotron, an
organ with nearly two hundred stops and more than ten thousand
pipes, and a glowing baptismal font. My mom sometimes worked as
a cameraperson for church services, filming every backward dip into
the water as though it were a major-league pitch. There was tiered
seating for a Baby Boomer choir that sang at the 9:30 service, a
performance area for the Gen X house band at eleven, and sky-high
stained-glass windows depicting the beginning and end of the world.
You could spend your whole life inside the Repentagon, starting in
nursery school, continuing through twelfth grade, getting married in
the chapel, attending adult Bible study every weekend, baptizing
your children in the Worship Center, and meeting your fellow
retirees for racquetball and a chicken-salad sandwich, secure in the
knowledge that your loved ones would gather in the sanctuary to
honor you after your death.
The church was founded in 1927, and the school was formed two
decades later. By the time I got there, in the mid-nineties, Houston
was emerging into an era of glossy, self-satisfied power—the
dominance of Southern evangelicals and extractive Texan empires,
Halliburton and Enron and Exxon and Bush. Through fundraising
campaigns flogged by associate pastors during church services, the
considerable wealth of the church’s tithing population was regularly
converted into ostentatious new displays. The church imported piles
of fake snow at Christmas. When I was in high school, they built a
fifth floor for children with a life-size train you could play inside of,
and a teen youth group space called the Hangar, featuring the nose
of a big plane half crashed through one wall.
My parents hadn’t always been evangelical, nor had they favored
this tendency toward excess. They had defected from Catholicism at
some point, growing up in the Philippines, and then had begun
attending a small Baptist church in Toronto before I was born. But
then they moved to Houston, an unfamiliar expanse of looping
highway and prairie, and this one pastor’s face was everywhere,
smiling at commuters from the billboards that studded I-10. My
parents took to his kind, civilized, compelling style of preaching—he
was classier than your average televangelist, and much less greasy
than Joel Osteen, the better-known Houston pastor, famous for his
cheap airport books about the prosperity gospel and his chilling
marionette smile. Osteen’s children attended my school, which my
parents persuaded to accept me within a few months of us moving
to Texas—and to place me in first grade, even though I was four
years old.
I would regret this situation when I was twelve and in high
school. But as a kid, I was eager and easy. I made friends, pointed
my toes in dance class, did all of my homework. In our daily Bible
classes I made salvation bracelets on tiny leather cords—a black
bead for my sin, a red bead for the blood of Jesus, a white bead for
purity, a blue bead for baptism, a green bead for spiritual growth, a
gold bead for the streets of heaven that awaited me. During the
holidays, I acted in our church’s Christian musicals: one, I
remember, was set at CNN, the “Celestial News Network,” where we
played reporters covering the birth of Jesus Christ. On Wednesday
nights, at choir practice, I memorized hymns for prizes. In
elementary school, my family moved farther west on I-10, to a place
in the new suburbs where model homes rose out of bare farmland.
On Sundays, I sat quietly in the back seat next to my cherubic little
brother, creeping through gridlock as we drove east into the city,
ready to sit in the dark and think about my soul. Spiritual matters
felt simple and absolute. I didn’t want to be bad, or doomed (the two
were interchangeable). I wanted to be saved, and good.
Back then, believing in God felt mostly unremarkable,
sometimes interesting, and occasionally like a private, perfect thrill.
Good and evil is organized so neatly for you in both childhood and
Christianity. In a Christian childhood, with all those parables and
psalms and war stories, it’s exponentially more so. In the Bible,
angels came to your doorstep. Fathers offered their children up to
be sacrificed. Fishes multiplied; cities burned. The horror-movie
progression of the plagues in Exodus riveted me: the blood, the
frogs, the boils, the locusts, the darkness. The violence of
Christianity came with great safety: under a pleasing shroud of
aesthetic mystery, there were clear prescriptions about who you
should be. I prayed every night, thanking God for the wonderful life
I had been given. I felt blessed all the time, instinctively. On
weekends I would pedal my bike across a big stretch of pasture in
the gold late-afternoon light and feel holy. I would spin in circles at
the skating rink and know that someone was looking down on me.
Toward the end of elementary school, the impression of
wholeness started slipping. We were told not to watch Disney
movies, because Disney World had allowed gay people to host a
parade. In fifth grade, my Rapture-obsessed Bible teacher
confiscated my Archie comics and my peace-sign notebook,
replacing this heathen paraphernalia with a copy of the brand-new
bestseller Left Behind. A girl at our school died by electrocution
when a pool light blew out into the water, and the tragedy was
deemed the absolute will of the Lord. Around this time, television
screens were installed all over campus, and the face of our folksy,
robotic pastor bobbed around on them, preaching to no one. At
chapel, we were sometimes shown religious agitprop videos, the
worst of which featured a handsome dark-haired man bidding his
young son farewell in a futuristic white chamber, and then, as
violins swelled in the background, walking down an endless hall to
be executed—martyred for his Christian faith. I cried, because—
please—I wasn’t heartless! Afterward we all sang a song called “I
Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.”
In middle school, I became aware of my ambivalence—just
distant enough to be troubled by the fact that I felt distant. I started
to feel twinges of guilt at the end of every church service, when the
pastor would call for people to come forward and accept Jesus: what
if this feeling of uncertainty meant that I needed to avow Him again
and again? I didn’t want to be a bad person, and I especially didn’t
want to spend eternity in hell. I’d been taught that my relationship
with God would decay if I wasn’t careful. I wasn’t predestined, I
wasn’t chosen: if I wanted God’s forgiveness, I had to work. I started
getting agoraphobic in the Worship Center on Sundays. Thinking
about these intimate matters in such a crowded public place felt
indecent. I took breaks from services, sometimes curling up on the
couches in the corridor outside where mothers shushed their
infants, or walking up to the highest balcony to pass the time
reading the psychedelic book of Revelation in the blissfully
unsupervised pews.
One Sunday, I told my parents I needed a sweater from the car. I
walked out across the big, echoing atrium with the keys jangling
from my hand and our pastor’s voice ringing through the empty
space. In the parking lot, the asphalt festered, softening; the sun
burned out my eyes. I got into the passenger seat of our powder-
blue Suburban and put the key in the ignition. The Christian radio
station was playing—89.3 KSBJ, with its slogan “God listens.” I
mashed the Seek button, hitting country, alt-rock, the Spanish
stations, and then something I had never heard before. It was the
Box, Houston’s hip-hop radio station, playing what they always
played on Sundays—chopped and screwed.
—
Houston, like its megachurches, is unfathomably sprawling. Even
from an airplane it’s impossible to clock the whole city at once. It’s
low and flat, just a few dozen feet above sea level, and its endless
freeways—the two huge concentric loops of 610 and Beltway 8, and
the four highways that intersect at the center, slicing the circle into
eighths—trace nineteenth-century market routes, forming the shape
of a wagon wheel around downtown. The Greater Houston Area
covers ten thousand square miles—that’s as big as New Jersey—and
contains six million people. The city is less than an hour from the
Gulf Coast, with the alien-civilization oil refineries of Port Arthur
and the ghost piers that rise out of Galveston’s dirty water, and
there’s a certain irradiated spirit to everything, a big-money
lawlessness that bleaches in the heat.
The weather in Houston is frequently scorching, and as with
much of Texas, an undercurrent of proud, ambitious independence
thrums through the air. As a result, there isn’t much of a true public
sphere in Houston. Even the thriving arts scene, alternately gala-
esque or grungy, is mostly known to itself. Our ideas of the
collective are limited by what our minds can see and handle: this is
part of the reason Houstonians gravitate to megachurches, which
provide the impression of living in a normal-size town. By some
metrics, Houston is the most diverse city in America. It’s also a
deeply segregated one, with a long history of its wealthy white
population quietly exploiting minorities in order to shore up the
city’s vaunted quality of life. For decades, Houston’s government
placed its garbage dumps in black neighborhoods, many of which
bordered downtown. The city is currently expanding at a dizzying
pace—an estimated thirty thousand new houses are built every year.
But the interchange between its many populations is acknowledged
mostly in matters of unspoken structure. There are no zoning laws,
which means that strip clubs sit next to churches, gleaming
skyscrapers next to gap-toothed convenience stores. The freeways
are, in effect, the only truly public space in the city—the only arena
where people come out of their enclaves to be next to one another,
sitting in the prodigious traffic, riding the spokes of Houston’s big
wheel.
At the same time that I was making salvation bracelets on the
floor of Bible class, a universe was coming into being on the south
side of town. In the mid-eighties, the Texas Southern University
radio station started airing a show called Kidz Jamm, where high
school students played Afrika Bambaataa and Run-DMC. In 1986,
James Prince founded Rap-A-Lot Records, Houston’s first hip-hop
label, and developed the Geto Boys, a gangster rap group that was
hometown loyal (“Today’s special is Geto Dope, processed in Fifth
Ward Texas”) and psychotically game. (The cover of the Geto Boys’
1991 album We Can’t Be Stopped features a real photo of one of its
members, three-foot-eight Bushwick Bill, on a gurney with his eye
missing. Bushwick Bill had done PCP, decided to commit suicide so
his mom could collect life insurance, and goaded his girlfriend—or,
in some versions of the story, his mom—to shoot him in the face; he
was pronounced dead at the hospital, but then, according to legend,
came back to life in the morgue, reportedly due to the blood-flow-
slowing effects of the PCP. A later Geto Boys album would be titled
The Resurrection.)
The Houston sound that took over the city in the nineties and
later altered the national hip-hop landscape was developed in
nondescript suburban houses, cheap bungalows behind patchy
lawns and wire fences, in a handful of harshly bland neighborhoods
—Sunnyside, South Park, Gulfgate—south of 610 and west of 45.
Most of the original guard of Houston rappers came out of the
south side, though a smaller north-side scene would soon develop,
and UGK, possibly the best-known Houston act, came out of Port
Arthur, which is an hour east. UGK had a kinetic country
sophistication, agile and authoritative. Houston rappers like Z-Ro,
Lil’ Keke, Lil’ Troy, Paul Wall, and Lil’ Flip patented a flossy, up-
front, narcotized, ominous sort of bang and sparkle—it all sounded
like an Escalade vibrating under the influence, like someone pulling
up in a car with spinners and rolling down the window really slow.
But if the Houston sound belongs to anyone, it’s not to a rapper. It’s
to Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw.
DJ Screw was born in 1971, in a town outside Austin, to a trucker
father and a mother who held three cleaning jobs and bootlegged
cassette tapes from her record collection for extra cash. Like a lot of
Houston rappers, Screw played an instrument as a kid—piano, in his
case. He taught himself how to DJ with a cousin, who observed his
habit of physically scratching up records and gave him the name DJ
Screw. He moved to Houston, dropped out of high school, and
started DJing at a south-side skating rink. (Skating rinks served, in
Houston, as one of many junior iterations of the club.) Screw, quiet
and private, round-faced in oversize T-shirts with a guarded look in
his eyes, made mixtapes obsessively. The first time he slowed the
tempo down to his signature wooze, it was an accident; it was 1989,
and he’d hit the wrong button on the turntable. Then a friend gave
him $10 to record an entire tape at that sludgy tempo, and Screw did
it again and again. The sound caught. He started recording Houston
rappers over his mixtapes—directing their long, fluid sessions as he
mixed, and then slowing the whole tape down, making it skip beats
and stutter, making it sound like your heart was about to stop.
Screw made copies of his mixtapes on gray bulk cassettes from
Sam’s Club, which he labeled by hand and sold out of his house. To
get on a Screw tape was to be knighted; Screw’s collective, the
Screwed Up Click, quickly became a local hall of fame.
Soon everyone wanted Screw tapes. People started coming to his
house from all over the city, then all over the state, then beyond.
Neighbors assumed Screw was a drug dealer. The police swooped in
a few times, performing mostly fruitless raids. There were any
number of better ways for Screw to get his music to people—a local
hip-hop distribution company called Southwest Wholesale had
sprung up to take advantage of the thriving independent market
that Houston provided for its artists—but Screw insisted on this
inefficient hand-to-hand, doing everything in cash with no bank
account, hiring friends as security, selling cassettes for two hours
each night in his driveway with cars lining up around the block. He
could never meet the demand for his music. According to Michael
Hall’s intensively reported chronicle in Texas Monthly, frustrated
record-store owners started buying directly from bootleggers in
bulk. In 1998, Screw finally set up a semi-official shop, establishing
Screwed Up Records behind bulletproof glass in a store near South
Park. Nothing was for sale except those cassettes.
By this point, a decade into Screw’s career, he was famous
outside Houston. Chopped and screwed, the style he invented, had
permeated the scene. Michael “5000” Watts, a north-side producer
and cofounder of Swishahouse Records, adopted the sound; his
Swishahouse partner OG Ron C picked it up, too. Watts DJed on
Sundays for 97.9, the Box, the hip-hop station that had taken over in
the nineties, leaking chopped and screwed to a wider Houston
audience. By then, Screw’s prodigious output was flagging. He was
getting heavier and slower, as if his body had started working at his
signature tempo. He had become addicted to codeine cough syrup,
also known as lean.
Lean is now permanently associated with rappers, partly because
of the Houston scene at its most flamboyant—the grills, rims, and
sizzurp aesthetic—and partly because of notable acolytes of the
substance, like Lil Wayne. But drugs are always demographically
flexible. Townes Van Zandt, the melancholy country blues artist
who got his break in Houston, loved cough syrup so much that he
called it Delta Momma (DM, as in Robitussin) and sang one song
(1971’s “Delta Momma Blues”) from the genial point of view of the
drug itself. Chopped and screwed mimics the lean feeling—a heady
and dissociative security, as if you’re moving very slowly toward a
conclusion you don’t need to understand. It induces a sense of
permissive disorientation that melds perfectly to Houston, a place
where a full day can pass without you ever seeming to get off the
highway, where the caustic gleam of daytime melts into a
fluorescent polluted sunset and then into a long and swampy night.
Chopped and screwed picked up something about Houston that
connects impurity to absolution. It was its own imaginary freeway,
oozing with syrup, defining the city’s limits, bounding it like the
Loop.
In the blistering hot parking lot of the megachurch, on the old
seats of my parents’ powder-blue Suburban, chopped and screwed
sounded right to me as soon as I heard it, even though it would be
years before I began to understand the context in which it was
produced. Like religion, it provided both ends of a total system. Its
sound entangled sin and salvation; it held a tug of unease, a blanket
of reassurance. It was as ominous and comforting as a nursery
rhyme, this first taste of the way that an open acknowledgment of
vice can feel as divinely willed, as spiritual—even more so—than the
concealment often required to be good.
Or maybe Houston just crossed too many of my signals. It wasn’t
long until the city’s music permeated even my sheltered
environment. There was a lack of zoning in our cultural lives, too. I
first learned about twerking when I was thirteen, at cheerleading
camp, where we got measured for navy bell skirts with high slits
that barely cleared our underwear, which we were required to wear
on football game days to our modesty-preaching Christian school.
At camp we prayed that Jesus would keep us safe during practice,
and then we threw one another, with sloppy abandon, ten feet into
the air. Southern rap was rising: after school we danced around each
other’s bedrooms, listening to Outkast, listening to Nelly, listening
to Ludacris and T.I. We dropped to the floor, clumsily mimicking
the motions that were spreading like a virus, clapping for the girls
who could do it best. We still went to church twice a week, and it all
started to seem interchangeable. Some nights I went with my
girlfriends to youth group and sang about Jesus, and sometimes I
would go with them to the club on teen night, driving past the
Repentagon into the thicket of liquor stores and strip clubs a mile
up on Westheimer, entering another dark room where all the girls
wore miniskirts and everyone sought amnesty in a different form.
Sometimes a foam machine would open up in the ceiling and soak
our cheap push-up bras, and we’d glue ourselves to strangers as
everyone chewed on the big mouthfuls of Swishahouse in the room.
We had been taught that even French kissing was dangerous—
that anything not marked by rich white Christianity was murky and
perverse. But eventually, it was the church that seemed corrupted to
me. What had been forbidden began to feel earnest and clean. It was
hot out the first time I tasted cough syrup, on a night when
everyone had come home from college. I drank it from a big
Styrofoam cup with ice, booze, and Sprite. Soon afterward I was in
my friend’s pool, wading through hip-high water. “Overnight
Celebrity” was playing, a song that always made me emotional—Miri
Ben-Ari replaying the strings from that tender soul song, Twista
yammering on with an auctioneer’s devotion. Suddenly the song
sounded like it would never end—like it had been screwed down to
the Sunday tempo, like it was thick enough to carry me. The water
felt like I could grab it. The sky was enormous, eternal, velvet. I
looked up, the stars blanketed by the perpetual glow of pollution,
and felt as blessed as I ever did when I was a child.
—
I have been walking away from institutional religion for a long time
now—half my life, at this point, fifteen years dismantling what the
first fifteen built. But I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way I
did. The Repentagon trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular,
extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and
Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist
worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves
inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick. Years of
auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with
everyday morality. And Christian theology convinced me that I had
been born in a compromised situation. It made me want to
investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good.
This spiritual inheritance was, in fact, what initially spurred my
defection: I lost interest in trying to reconcile big-tent Southern
evangelicalism with my burgeoning political beliefs. I hated the
prosperity gospel, which had taught many rich white Christians to
believe—albeit politely, and with generous year-end donations to
various ministries—that wealth was some sort of divine anointment,
that they were genuinely worth more to God and country than
everyone else. (Under this doctrine, as in Texas in general,
inequality is framed as something close to deliberate: if you’re poor,
that’s unfortunate, because God must have ordained that, too.)
People at my school were so cocooned within whiteness that they
often whispered the words “Mexican” and “black,” instinctively
assuming those descriptions were slurs. I read the Gospel to be
constantly preaching economic redistribution—John the Baptist
commands, in the book of Luke, “Let him who has two tunics share
with him who has none,” et cetera—but everyone around me
seemed mainly to believe in low taxes and the unconditional
righteousness of war. The fear of sin often seemed to conjure and
perpetuate it: abstinence education led to abortions, for rich people,
and for poor people to children who would be loved and supported
until the day they were born. There was so much beatific kindness,
and it was so often undergirded by brittle cruelty. (In 2015, the
church’s longtime pastor spoke out against the “deceptive and
deadly” Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which would have
allowed transgender people to use the bathroom that matched their
gender identity. After the 2018 midterms, he called the Democratic
Party “some kind of religion that is basically godless.” In 2019, the
Houston Chronicle published an investigation into seven hundred
sexual assault cases at Southern Baptist churches over the previous
two decades. In the piece, leaders at my church were criticized for
allegedly mishandling sexual abuse accusations in two cases that
resulted in lawsuits—one in 2010, involving a youth pastor, and the
other in 1994, involving a man who was contracted to coordinate
youth music productions. In an unrelated affidavit from 1992, our
pastor, who at the time was the head of the Southern Baptist
Convention, declined to testify in a lawsuit against an admitted
child molester who had worked as a youth pastor at a church in
Conroe. The SBC, he wrote, had no organizational authority over
any of its associated churches, which operated autonomously. He
added that he did not “hold an opinion as to the proper handling of
any claims of sexual abuse by church members against their
members,” and that any testimony on this subject would
“unfavorably affect [his] television ministry, which now is seen on a
daily basis in the greater Houston area.”)
Texas in the early aughts was palpably hegemonic. George W.
Bush was adorable, and the Patriot Act made him a hero; there
were, without question, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Public
demonstrations of faith often doubled as performances of
superiority and dominance. One year, a troupe of Christian
bodybuilders regularly appeared at chapel to rip apart phone books
as a demonstration of the strength we could acquire through Jesus.
At Halloween, the church put on a “Judgment House,” a walk-
through haunted-house play in which the main character drank beer
at a party and then kept sinning and wound up in hell.
Severing ties to these theatrics was easy. But for some time
afterward, I retained an intense hunger for devotion itself. For
about five years—the end of high school, the beginning of college—I
turned my attention inward, tried to build a church on the inside,
tried to understand faith as something that could draw me closer to
something overwhelming and pure. I kept a devotional journal,
producing a record of spiritual longing that was fierce and jagged
and dissolving. I pleaded for things I still find very recognizable.
Help me to not put on an act of any kind, I wrote. I told God that I
wanted to live in accordance with my beliefs, that I wanted to
diminish my own sense of self-importance, that I was sorry for not
being better, and that I was grateful for being alive. It’s hard to
draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and
aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in, I wrote,
between entries where I tried to understand if it was inherently
wrong to get drunk. (At my school, you could be expelled for
character-based spiritual offenses such as partying, being gay, or
getting pregnant.) I stood between both sides of my life, holding the
lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped
being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one
side go.
Throughout these years of shedding my religion, I read a lot of C.
S. Lewis, the strangest, most reasonable, and most literary of
twentieth-century Christian writers. I reread The Great Divorce,
which portrays hell as a drained, gray, hazy town where nothing
happens. I reread his sci-fi novel Perelandra, in which Lewis-the-
narrator encounters an extraterrestrial spirit whose color he can’t
put a name to: “I try blue, and gold, and violet, and red, but none of
them will fit. How it is possible to have a visual experience which
immediately and ever after becomes impossible to remember, I do
not attempt to explain.” Lewis goes on to tell a story in which a
linguist named Dr. Ransom travels to Venus, and experiences, on
this violently beautiful planet, a “strange sense of excessive pleasure
which seemed somehow to be communicated to him through all his
senses at once. I use the word ‘excessive’ because Ransom himself
could only describe it by saying that for his first few days on
Perelandra he was haunted, not by a feeling of guilt, but by surprise
that he had no such feeling.”
Most often I went back to The Screwtape Letters, a collection of
fictive missives sent by a bureaucratic demon named Screwtape to
his nephew Wormwood, a “junior tempter” who is trying to lead his
first human subject astray. “The safest road to Hell is the gradual
one,” Screwtape reminds Wormwood, “the gentle slope, soft
underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without
signposts.” When I first came across that sentence, I felt like
someone was reading my palm. The book’s title, too, with its
coincidental echoes, provided a clue to me about my relationship to
its central subject—the ordinary temptations, in my case drugs and
music, that could lead a person to hell. My road that way has in fact
been gentle, although there could have been signposts had I wanted
to build them: I could say, without too much oversimplification,
that I stopped believing in God the year I first did ecstasy, for one.
Like many people before me, I found religion and drugs
appealing for similar reasons. (You require absolution, complete
abandonment, I wrote, praying to God my junior year.) Both
provide a path toward transcendence—a way of accessing an
extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that, in both cases, is as
real as it feels. The word “ecstasy” contains this etymologically,
coming from the Greek ekstasis—ek meaning “out” and stasis
meaning “stand.” To be in ecstasy is to stand outside yourself: a
wonderful feeling, one accessible through many avenues. The
Screwtape demon tells his nephew, “Nothing matters at all except
the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to
move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the
Enemy or nearer to us.”
In other words, the cause matters less than the effect—what
matters is not the thing itself, but whether that thing moves you
closer to God or closer to damnation. The demon was asking: What
are the conditions that make you feel holy, divine? For me, this
calculus has been unreliable. I have been overpowered with ecstasy
in religious settings, during bouts of hedonistic excess, on Friday
afternoons walking sober in the park as the sun turns everything
translucent gold. On Screwtape’s terms, the fact that everything
feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian.
Church never felt much more like virtue than drugs did, and drugs
never felt much more sinful than church.
The first woman who is known to have published a book in
English was a religious ecstatic—Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-
century anchorite, whose name possibly comes from the St. Julian
Church in Norwich, a town one hundred miles outside London. At
age thirty, Julian became so ill that she experienced sixteen
extended and agonizing visions of God, which she collected later in
a book called Revelations of Divine Love. “And our Lord’s next
showing was a supreme spiritual pleasure in my soul,” she writes.
“In this pleasure I was filled with eternal certainty….This feeling
was so joyful to me and so full of goodness that I felt completely
peaceful, easy and at rest, as though there were nothing on earth
that could hurt me.” The high is then followed by a comedown:
“This only lasted for a while, and then my feeling was reversed and I
was left oppressed, weary of myself, and so disgusted with my life
that I could hardly bear to live.”
This type of experience is a human constant, appearing in
basically identical phrasing regardless of era or cause. In the sixties,
the British biologist Sir Alister Hardy compiled a database of
thousands of narratives that sound almost exactly like Julian’s. One
man writes:
I was out walking one night in busy streets of Glasgow when,
with slow majesty, at a corner where the pedestrians were
hurrying by and the city traffic was hurtling on its way, the air
was filled with heavenly music; and an all-encompassing
light, that moved in waves of luminous colour, outshone the
brightness of the lighted streets. I stood still, filled with a
strange peace and joy.
Hardy’s archive is, technically, a compendium of religious
experiences—in Aeon, Jules Evans calls it a “crowdsourced Bible.”
But it could easily pass as a series of transcripts from Erowid, the
nonprofit website based in Northern California that catalogs
people’s experiences with psychoactive substances. The site has
more than 24,000 drug testimonials, and tens of millions of people
visit it each year. The specifics in these accounts vary, of course, but
ecstatic experiences—ones that make you stand outside yourself—
are described in a consistent fashion. An Erowid story from a
teenage boy doing molly in his basement is not much different from
any of the transcripts from the supervised drug sessions conducted
in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, during the brief period when
ecstasy could be used in therapeutic settings.
During this period, ecstasy was called Adam for the state of
Edenic innocence it induced in users. Accounts from “Adam
sessions” were collected in a 1985 book called Through the Gateway
of the Heart. One rape survivor on ecstasy reports “exceptional
presence—a vibrancy and change of color, an expansive quality
rather than a fearful, contracted quality—and with a beaming sort of
aura. I felt expansive, physically exhausted but full of love and a
deep feeling of peace.” Another person writes, “I remind myself that
I am becoming a home to the indwelling Spirit; it will see out my
eyes, and it likes to see beauty, proportion, and harmony….I intend
to become a perfect temple for this God-consciousness.” Another
subject identifies the drug as a religious pathway to “allow, invite,
surrender God into my own body.”
Ecstasy, now mostly called molly, is an empathogen, or an
entactogen—a category named in the eighties to describe the way
these compounds generate a state of empathy, or “touching within.”
Its technical name is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or
MDMA. It blocks serotonin reuptake, and induces the release of
both serotonin and dopamine. (The first mechanism is what you’ll
find in many antidepressants—SSRIs, or selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors, keep serotonin floating around the brain.)
Ecstasy was developed in 1912, in Germany, by Merck, which was
trying to find a treatment for abnormal bleeding. In the fifties, the
Army Chemical Corps tested it on animals. In the sixties, a related
substance called MDA gained popularity as “the love drug.” During
the seventies, a number of scientists—including Leo Zeff, the one
who named the drug Adam—tried the drug, and a network of
practitioners of underground MDMA psychotherapy began to grow.
In 1978, Alexander Shulgin and David Nichols published the first
human study on ecstasy, noting the substance’s possible therapeutic
effects.
The attainment of chemical ecstasy—empathogenesis—occurs in
stages. The drug first places the attention on the self, stripping away
the user’s inhibitions. Second, it prompts the user to recognize and
value the emotional states of others. Finally, it makes the user’s
well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group. It
“completely ablates the fear response in most people,” writes Julie
Holland, in her comprehensive clinical guide to ecstasy. And unlike
other drugs that provoke extraordinary interpersonal euphoria—
mushrooms or acid—it does not confuse the user about what is
occurring. You maintain a sense of control over your experience;
your awareness of self and of basic reality is unchanged. It’s because
of this grounded state that ecstasy can provide a sense of salvation
that might be more likely to stick than, say, a hallucinogen epiphany
delivered from a face in the clouds. It was “penicillin for the soul,”
said Ann Shulgin, a researcher and therapist who was married to
Alexander. Ecstasy can and generally does make you feel like the
best version of the person you would be if you were able to let your
lifelong psychological burdens go.
While scientists and doctors were working to document these
therapeutic effects, regulators were working to make ecstasy illegal.
In the fifties, a participant in a legal MDA trial had died after being
given 450 milligrams of the substance; at least eight people died
after taking MDMA from 1977 to 1981. (For context, about ninety
thousand people die every year in the U.S. from excessive
consumption of alcohol, and nearly five hundred thousand people
die each year from smoking cigarettes. Ecstasy is in no way a casual
drug, but if the substance was legal, its death rate would be dwarfed
by that of tobacco or alcohol.) In 1985, the DEA banned ecstasy in a
yearlong emergency measure. Researchers protested. In 1986,
shortly before the ban ended, one DEA judge recommended that
MDMA be placed in the Schedule III category, for drugs that have
an accepted medical use and a mild to moderate potential for abuse
and addiction—substances like testosterone and ketamine and
steroids. He was overruled. MDMA was placed on Schedule I, the
category for drugs with high abusive potential, no accepted medical
usage, and severe safety concerns. Heroin is in this category, as are
bath salts—along with drugs that don’t really fit the criteria, like
LSD and marijuana.
Around this time, a drug dealer renamed the substance ecstasy.
Quoted but not named in Bruce Eisner’s 1989 history of MDMA, he
says, though I find the neatness of this phrasing dubious: “Ecstasy
was chosen for obvious reasons, because it would sell better than
calling it empathy. Empathy would be more appropriate, but how
many people know what it means?” The drug went global in the
nineties, in 5,000- or 15,000-person raves. Huge batches were
stamped with the Mitsubishi logo and shipped to New York City. At
the turn of the century, the DEA estimated that two million hits of
ecstasy were brought into the United States every week. The drug
was still called ecstasy half a decade later, when I first tried it, in
college, shortly before a Girl Talk show in a two-hundred-fifty-
capacity room. By the time I came back from the Peace Corps in
2011, ecstasy had been rebranded as molly, and it was once more a
mainstream drug, one that had been engineered for the decade of
corporate music festivals—both a special-occasion option and no big
deal.
A lot of the danger attributed to ecstasy comes from urban
legend. For example, the old rumor that ecstasy turns your spine to
jelly comes from eighties clinical trials that required participants to
receive spinal taps. The idea that it’ll put holes in your brain may
come from a 1989 New York Times article in which a researcher
cited brain damage in animals exposed to ecstasy. (It may also just
come from the fact that, after you do a lot of drugs, your brain feels
like it’s full of holes.) Dealer adulteration is now the main thing that
makes ecstasy risky—for a while, there was a supply of molly
floating around New York so soul-crushingly poisonous that I
couldn’t even look at the substance for a year—along with the
general danger in doing imprecise amounts of any drug in a setting
where no one’s taking precautions. It’s also been documented that
ecstasy’s magic is strongest at the beginning and worn down
through repetition. In my own life I’ve become careful about using
it: I’m afraid that the high will blunt my tilt toward unprovoked
happiness, which might already be disappearing. I’m afraid that the
low that sometimes comes after will leave a permanent trace.
But still, each time, it can feel like divinity. It can make you feel
healed and religious; it can make you feel dangerously wild. What’s
the difference? Your world realigns in a juddering oceanic shimmer.
You feel that your soul is dazzling, delicate, unlimited; you
understand that you can give the best of yourself away to everyone
you love without ever feeling depleted. This is what it feels like to be
a child of Jesus, in a dark chapel, with stained-glass diamonds
floating on the skin of all the people kneeling around you. This is
what it feels like to be twenty-two, nearly naked, your hair blowing
in the wind as the pink twilight expands into permanence, your
body still holding the warmth of the day. You were made to be here.
You are depraved, insignificant; you are measureless, and you will
never not be redeemed. When I took ecstasy for the first time in my
friend’s bedroom when I was seventeen and slipped into a sweaty
black box of a venue down the street, I felt weightless, like I’d come
back around to a truth I had first been taught in church: that
anything could happen, and no matter what, a sort of grace that was
both within you and outside you would pull you through. The
nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to re-experience it; you
don’t even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for
as long as you want. In the seventies, researchers believed that
MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got
the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would
be better for having listened. You would be changed.
They don’t say this about religion, but they should.
—
“What if I were to begin an essay on spiritual matters by citing a
poem that will not at first seem to you spiritual at all,” writes Anne
Carson, in the title essay of her 2005 book Decreation. The poem
she refers to is by Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who is said to
have thrown herself over a cliff in 580 B.C. from an excess of love for
Phaon, the ferryman—though this is, for Sapphic reasons, unlikely.
In “Decreation,” Carson connects Sappho to Marguerite Porete, the
French Christian mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310, and
then to Simone Weil, the French public intellectual who, during
World War II, assumed solidarity with the residents of the German
occupation and died from self-starvation in 1943. The spiritual
matter in question is mysticism, a strain of thought found in nearly
all religious traditions: mystics believe that, through attaining states
of ecstatic consciousness, a person can achieve union with the
divine.
Carson turns our attention to Sappho’s Fragment 31, in which
the poet looks at a woman who is sitting next to a man, laughing
with him. Sappho describes her feelings as she watches this woman,
how the sight makes her speechless—“thin / fire is racing under
skin,” reads Carson’s translation, “and in eyes no sight and
drumming / fills ears”:
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
Fragment 31 is one of the longest extant pieces of Sappho’s work,
preserved because it was excerpted in Longinus’s first-century work
of literary criticism On the Sublime. In the seventeenth century,
John Hall translated Fragment 31 for the first time in English: the
“greener than grass” line, in Hall’s version, is “like a wither’d flower
I fade.” In 1925, Edwin Cox translated the line as “paler than grass
in autumn.” William Carlos Williams’s 1958 translation gives it as
“paler than grass,” too.
The Greek word in question is chloros, which is the root of the
word “chlorophyll”—a pale yellow-green color, like new grass in
spring. As the narrator takes on the quality of that color, a translator
could easily imagine her growing paler, fading: the “pale horse” in
Revelation is a chloros horse. Carson, wonderfully, reaches for the
opposite effect. As she stares at the woman she loves, the narrator
becomes greener, and the line becomes an expression of ecstasy in
its original sense. Sappho steps outside herself; she observes herself
(“greener than grass / I am”). Love has caused her to abandon her
body, and in this abandonment, to intensify. The green grows
greener. Some essential quality deepens as the self is removed.
Seventeen centuries later, Marguerite Porete wrote The Mirror of
Simple Souls, a book that tracks the human soul on its journey
toward ecstasy—a state of voluntary annihilation that brings perfect
union with God. Porete, whose biography remains mysterious but
who was likely a beguine, a woman who lived in an all-female
religious community, “understands the essence of her human self to
be in her free will,” writes Carson. She believes that her free will
“has been placed in her by God in order that she may give it back.”
So Porete, in her religious devotion, tries to deplete herself. Like
Sappho, she pursues love as an “absolute emptiness which is also
absolute fullness.” She describes this spiritual self-abasement
erotically: the soul, Porete writes, is “rendered into the simple Deity,
in full knowing, without feeling, beyond thought….Higher no one
can go, deeper no one can go, more naked no human can be.”
Because of this writing, Porete was charged with heresy and
imprisoned for a year and a half. When she was burned at the stake,
she was reportedly so calm that onlookers were moved to tears.
“Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—
her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated
that it makes you leave yourself behind. There is “absolutely no
other free act which it is given us to accomplish,” Weil writes,
except for yielding ourselves to God. Her writing is animated by this
compulsive longing to erase herself. “Perfect joy excludes even the
very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object
no corner is left for saying I.” She dreams of vanishing completely:
“May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become
perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer
things that I see.”
There’s an obvious paradox here, for all three women: their
fantasy of disappearance reinscribes the dazzling force and vision of
their intellectual presence. It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,”
Carson writes. “I cannot go toward God in love without bringing
myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate
this desire to vanish is always to reiterate the self once again.
Greener, not paler. Porete calmly burning in Paris. Weil willing
herself, starving and brilliant, toward her end.
Later in Carson’s book, in a three-part libretto, the poet imagines
Weil in a hospital bed, as “the Chorus of the Void tap-dance around
her.” Carson’s Weil says, in a line that makes me shiver: “I was
afraid this might not happen to me.” She expires in the white space
that follows the libretto, reaching the logical endpoint of her
philosophy of devotion: reaching toward ecstasy in this way is not
so different from reaching toward death. “Our existence is made up
only of his waiting for our acceptance not to exist,” Weil writes in
Gravity and Grace. “He is perpetually begging from us that
existence which he gives. He gives it to us in order to beg it from
us.” To grasp at the type of self-erasure that Carson’s three women
become fixated upon is to approach a cognitive limit, a place of
instinct and unconsciousness, a total annihilation that can be
achieved only once. I have wondered if this is part of the reason that
evangelical Christians often seem so eager for the Rapture, the
prophesied end-of-days event in which they’ll depart the earth and
ascend to heaven. When you love something so much that you
dream of emptying yourself out for it, you’d be forgiven for wanting
to let your love finish the job.
—
The last time I participated in anything on my old church campus
was high school graduation. I was wearing a white flowered
sundress under a royal-blue robe, and I was onstage at the Worship
Center, looking up at the bright lights, toward the empty balconies,
giving the salutatorian’s speech. I had turned in a different speech
for approval than what I delivered. I barely remember what I ended
up saying—I know I made at least one joke about the Repentagon.
My classmates whooped, but, as I crossed the stage to accept my
diploma, an administrator hissed his disapproval. The distance
between the place that formed me and the form I had taken was out
in the open, and widening. The next Christmas, when I came home
from college, my church held a holiday service at the Toyota Center,
the huge downtown arena where the Houston Rockets play. I spent
much of the afternoon getting stoned with a friend, and, in the
middle of the spectacle, I started to lose it. The country star Clay
Walker was singing, his face looming huge on the jumbotron. I left
my parents, edging my way out of the stadium seating. Outside, on
the perimeter of our church service, vendors were selling popcorn
and brisket sandwiches and thirty-two-ounce Cokes. I went to the
bathroom, overwhelmed, and cried.
I wonder if I would have stayed religious if I had grown up in a
place other than Houston and a time other than now. I wonder how
different I would be if I had cleaved to this feeling of devoted self-
destruction—or even of solitude and striving, or writing, in the
manner of Carson’s three women—and only been able to find it
through God. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a
sign that I still believe, after all of this, or if it was only because of
that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.
I wonder, sometimes, if I have continued to do drugs because
they make me feel the way I did when I was little, an uncomplicated
creation, vulnerable to guilt and benevolence. The first time I did
mushrooms, I felt perfect and convicted and rescued, like someone
had just told me I was going to heaven. I walked down a beach and
everything coalesced with the cheesy, psychotic logic of “Footprints
in the Sand.” The first time I did acid, I saw God again immediately
—the trees and clouds around me blazing with presence, like
Moses’s burning bush. Completely out of my mind, I wrote on a
napkin, “I can process nothing right now that does not terminate in
God’s presence—this revelation I seem ready to have forever in
degraded forms.”
Recently, I found myself doing this again—this time in the
desert, that perennial seat of madness and punishment and
epiphany, in a house at the top of a hill in a canyon where the sun
and wind were incandescent, white-hot, merciless, streaking and
scintillating across the bright blue sky. I left the house and walked
down in the valley, and started to feel the drugs kick in when I was
wandering in the scrub. The dry bushes became brilliant—greener—
and a hummingbird torpedoed past me so quickly that I froze. I
experienced, for the first time, Weil’s precise fantasy of
disappearance. Each breath I took felt like it was echoing
clangorously, an impure reverberation. I wanted to see the
landscape as it was when I wasn’t there. I had tugged on some fabric
and everything was rippling. I had come to that knife-edge of
disappearance. For hours I watched the blinding swirl of light and
cloud move west and I repented. At sunset, the sky billowed into
mile-wide peonies, hardly an arm’s length above me, and it felt like
a visitation, like God was replacing the breath in my lungs. I sobbed
—battered by a love I knew would fall away from me, ashamed for
all the ways I had tried to bring myself to this, humiliated by the
grace of encountering it now. I dragged myself inside, finally, and
looked at the mirror. My eyes were smeared with black makeup, my
face was red, my lips were swollen; a thick whitish substance clung
stubbornly around my mouth. I looked like a junkie. I found a piece
of paper and wrote on it, after attentively noting that the ink seemed
to be breathing: “The situations in my life when I have been
sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I
was encountering God.”
I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling
half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic
disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion,
sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness,
equivocation. Sunday in church isn’t the same as Sunday on the
radio. I’m trying to rid myself of the delusion that either type
belongs to me. The sense of something is not its substance. It isn’t
love, trying to make two things interchangeable, when they are not.
In Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich describes sin as
“behovely,” which translates as “advantageous,” even “expedient.”
“It is no shame to them that they have sinned,” she wrote, “any
more than it is in the bliss of heaven, for there, the badge of their
sin is changed into glory.” But then, at the end of the book, she
warns the reader that her work “must not remain with anyone that
is in thrall to sin and the devil. And beware that you do not take one
thing according to your taste and fancy and leave another, for that is
what heretics do.”
In the fall of 2000, DJ Screw was found dead, fully dressed, on
the bathroom floor at his studio. He was twenty-nine. He had an
ice-cream wrapper in his hand. In the autopsy, coroners found that
his body was full of codeine; his blood flowed with Valium and PCP.
His heart was engorged, enormous. At his funeral in Smithville,
writes Michael Hall in Texas Monthly, the old folks sang gospel and
the rappers nodded quietly along with the hymns. People lined up
outside the church the way they’d done outside Screw’s house to
pick up their tapes, mourning the man the way they had always
gotten his music—that sound he’d created that approximated the
feel of a drug binge, no matter what Screw told reporters; the sound
that mimicked the flow of all these substances, darkening the wide,
anonymous, looping highways, a secret and sublime desecration
that seeped through the heart and the veins of a city, that set the
pace and the rhythm of its people slipping past one another in their
cars.
The year of Screw’s death, I got on a bus and drove east toward
Alabama with a thousand other kids. On a middle-of-nowhere
beach, we participated in mass baptisms, put our hands up in huge
services where everyone cried in the darkness. We groped one
another on the bus afterward and talked all day about being saved.
Later on, it was one of the boys from that trip who chopped lines on
my friend’s kitchen table as I waded through her pool, drunk on
sweet syrup, staring at the stars. There are some institutions—
drugs, church, and money—that aligned the superstructure of white
wealth in Houston with the heart of black and brown culture
beneath it. There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an
unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe
a revelation to hold on to it, to remember certain overpasses,
sudden angles above and under the cold and heartless curves of that
industrial landscape, a slow river of lights blinking white and red
into the distance, and the debauched sky gleaming over the houses
and hospitals and stadium churches, and your blood thrumming
with drugs or music or sanctity. It can all feel like a mirage of
wholeness: the ten thousand square miles around you teeming with
millions of people who do the same things, drive under the same
influences, respect the same Sundays, with the music that sounds
like their version of religion. “Our life is impossibility, absurdity,”
wrote Simone Weil. “Everything we want contradicts the conditions
or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a
contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than
God.”
The Story of a Generation in Seven
Scams
Billy McFarland started scamming at the age of twenty-two. Born in
1991, to parents who were real estate developers, he spent nine
months at Bucknell before getting accepted to a startup accelerator
and then dropping out to found a nonsense company called Spling.
(Crunchbase describes it as a “tech-driven ad platform helping
brands increase media engagement and marketing revenue by
optimizing their content presentation.” This was 2011, when it was
still possible to say that sort of thing straight-faced; it was the year
that Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist and Facebook
founding board member who once wrote that women’s suffrage had
compromised democracy, started offering $100,000 fellowships to
dropout entrepreneurs.) In 2013, McFarland founded Magnises, a
company that charged upwardly mobile millennials a suspiciously
modest $250 a year for VIP event tickets and access to a clubhouse.
Magnises gave members a “signature” black card, which duplicated
the magnetic strip of an existing credit card but held no other
advantages: like the company itself, the card was just for show.
Magnises (“Latin for absolutely nothing,” McFarland said)
attracted breathless press and a growing membership culled from
the boundless cohort of young New Yorkers who are interested in
projecting an aura of exclusive cool. “Billy McFarland wants to help
you build the perfect network,” Business Insider wrote, describing
Magnises as a “club for elite millennials where everyone gets a black
card and parties in a New York City penthouse.” The golden phase
lasted less than a year. Members purchased expensive theater and
concert tickets that would become mysteriously invalid on the day
of the show. McFarland text-spammed them with try-hard offers: a
“private networking dinner” for $275 per person, hoverboards
delivered by courier. “Also, have the Maserati w/ a driver available
this weekend. LMK if you’re in.” Sometimes, oddly, his offers
involved the rapper Ja Rule. On New Year’s Day in 2016, he texted:
“Happy New Year! Ja Rule is working on a new song and can
mention your name, nickname, company name, etc in the upcoming
hit single for $450. 5 Spots. LMK!” Later on, in the dueling, ethically
dubious documentaries about McFarland’s demise that were
released near-simultaneously by Hulu and Netflix—I appeared in
the Hulu one, although I, unlike McFarland, was not paid an
enormous sum to do so—former Magnises employees explained the
fraudulent pattern of the business: McFarland would make offers
he couldn’t fulfill, then go into debt while half-trying to fulfill them,
and then make more bogus offers to pay off that debt, and on and
on.
That January, Magnises settled a $100,000 lawsuit filed by its
landlord in the West Village, who complained that McFarland was
using a residential space to conduct commercial business, and also
that he had trashed the place. No problem. McFarland moved
Magnises to the penthouse of the Hotel on Rivington on the Lower
East Side. By that point, the company had raised at least $3 million
in venture capital, but its customers were getting frustrated. “If you
change a couple of words you can define Magnises in a very similar
fashion to how one would define a Ponzi scheme,” reads one Yelp
review of the Magnises Townhouse from 2016. Another: “I implore
you to avoid doing business with this company on any level and am
completely embarrassed to have been swindled by this myself.”
Magnises chugged along in public, but in private, it was
collapsing. McFarland boasted that there were 100,000 members; in
reality, fewer than 5,000 people had signed up. He pivoted to a new
venture, Fyre Media, which he envisioned as a platform where rich
people could bid on celebrity appearances for private events. Ja Rule
was involved. Their friendship had blossomed over a “mutual
interest in technology, the ocean, and rap music,” he would later tell
reporters. They raised money for Fyre Media together. And then, as
2016 drew to a close, McFarland got one of the most ill-fated ideas
in the history of American scamship. He would promote his
company through a luxury festival in the Bahamas. The first annual
Fyre Festival, he decided, would be held in April 2017.
It would be difficult to plan a medium-size wedding on four
months’ notice: this was an objectively impossible timeline for an
all-inclusive music festival for ten thousand people on a remote
beach. McFarland would have likely understood this without a
second thought if he’d ever, for example, had a job performing
actual services of any kind, if he’d ever waited tables or earned
minimum wage working a concession stand—or if he’d ever even
been to a music festival, which, astoundingly, he had not. Instead,
the twenty-five-year-old had been busy building a career on the
principle that a person could front his way into any desired reality,
and he’d also tapped into a deep vein of customers who were eager
to believe the same. McFarland put up a website and started selling
tickets to a once-in-a-lifetime festival on “Fyre Cay,” which he
described as a private island formerly owned by the Colombian drug
lord Pablo Escobar. Fyre Festival advertised a slate of major musical
acts, a highly Instagrammable party, and super-deluxe
accommodations. Attendees could choose between tiers of fancy
housing options—the most expensive of which, the “Artist’s Palace,”
cost $400,000 for four beds in a bespoke, stand-alone beach house,
plus eight VIP tickets and dinner with a performer.
There was never a plan to actually construct these Artist’s
Palaces. Also, there was no Fyre Cay. (Carlos Lehder, another
Medellín kingpin, had briefly taken over a tiny Bahamian island
called Norman’s Cay, but McFarland’s Escobar story was fake.)
Early in 2017, McFarland took a private jet to the Bahamas to film
an expensive promotional video for Fyre Fest, which featured
models frolicking in blue waves and glittering sand. He paid, along
with hundreds of other “influencers,” the models Emily
Ratajkowski, Kendall Jenner, and Bella Hadid to promote the event
on Instagram; Jenner received $250,000 for a single post. But he
didn’t pick an actual site until two months before the festival,
selecting a bleak gravel lot next to a Sandals resort on the non-
private island of Great Exuma. (The obvious Hail Mary would have
been to just try to book all the attendees into the Sandals. That’s
what happened, at least, at Bacardi Triangle, which was the weekend
in 2016 when Bacardi inexplicably flew thousands of people to the
Bermuda Triangle to see Calvin Harris and Kendrick Lamar perform
on the beach. They put us up—I was there, of course—in a sprawling
resort in Puerto Rico and gave us three days of open bar. It was just
like Fyre Fest, except it worked, and also we were the ones
scamming Bacardi. Anyway, it’s hard to account for a single part of
McFarland’s reasoning, as he had chosen a festival date that
coincided with the annual George Town Regatta, for which most
island hotels had already hit capacity.)
In March, with Blink-182, Major Lazer, and Disclosure set to
headline Fyre Fest, a production team was flown down to the site.
Chloe Gordon, a talent producer, was a member of the team. “Before
we arrived, we were led to believe things had been in motion for
awhile,” she wrote at The Cut later on. “But nothing had been done.
Festival vendors weren’t in place, no stage had been rented,
transportation had not been arranged.” Toilets, showers, and
housing had not been arranged, either. On site, Bahamian day
laborers were dumping sand on the concrete; McFarland was
forging wire transfer receipts and telling unpaid contractors that the
money was on its way. Gordon quit after realizing that Fyre Media
was planning on stiffing the bands. Before she left the Bahamas, she
attended a meeting at which the “bros” in charge were advised to
roll everyone’s tickets over to 2018 and start over. They rejected that
idea. One of the marketing employees, Gordon wrote, said, “Let’s
just do it and be legends, man.”
In the end, of course, Fyre Fest did become legendary. It was the
most gleefully covered disaster of 2017. McFarland had continued to
push forward with his obviously doomed operation until the very
last minute. FuckJerry, the company that handled Fyre Fest’s
marketing and later produced the Netflix Fyre documentary, mass-
deleted Instagram comments from people who wanted to know why
they hadn’t gotten any flight information and what the tents
actually looked like. The week before the festival, when McFarland
once again ran out of money, attendees received emails and calls
asking them to preload thousands of dollars on wristbands that they
would be required to use at Fyre Fest in lieu of cash. But none of the
bands got paid, and all of them pulled out just before the festival
started. In Miami, charter flights failed to materialize for the
attendees. Some festivalgoers made it to the Bahamas, where they
were plied with alcohol and then taken to the untransformed site,
which featured UNICEF-style disaster-relief tents, loose mattresses
that had been soaked in a rainstorm, folding chairs, and shipping
containers overflowing with junk. At the empty concierge desks,
scraps of branded canvas flapped in the breeze. Instead of gourmet
dining, attendees got Styrofoam to-go boxes and infamously sad
sandwiches of wilted lettuce and American cheese. The crowd
started to panic—and to tweet photos of their gulag Coachella.
Chaos ensued. People started hoarding mattresses and toilet paper.
McFarland threw his hands up and told everyone to sleep in the first
open tent they found. Several dozen people were locked into a room
at the Bahamian airport after begging locals to give them rides off
the site. The internet snorted each dispatch from Great Exuma like
a line of medical-grade schadenfreude.
In June 2017, McFarland was arrested and charged with fraud.
Aside from scamming his festival attendees, he had completely
falsified Fyre Media’s financial position—earlier that year, he’d
claimed that the company took in $21.6 million in revenue over a
single month, and that it owned land in the Bahamas worth $8.4
million. He had stiffed and cheated a slew of companies and
workers, many of them Bahamians who had placed their livelihood
in his hands, believing his promises that Fyre Fest would be an
enormous annual venture. And still, undaunted, McFarland kept
scamming: later that summer, he holed up in a penthouse and sold,
through a company called NYC VIP Access, $100,000 worth of fake
tickets to exclusive events, some of which he had made up
completely. According to a 2018 federal complaint, McFarland
actually retargeted Fyre Fest attendees from behind the shield of
his new venture, drawing from a spreadsheet that identified the
customers with the highest annual salaries. When I read that detail,
I felt something close to admiration. I thought about how, in the
midst of the real-time social media frenzy, Ja Rule had tweeted that
Fyre Fest was “NOT A SCAM.” The phrase functioned like a ribbon-
cutting ceremony. It announced McFarland, whom The New York
Times described as “Gatsby run through an Instagram filter,” as the
scammer of his generation, and Fyre Fest as not just a scam, but a
definitive one—America’s first major all-millennial scam event.
Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating
force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous
decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation,
making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like
the way things were going to be. It came after the election of Donald
Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as
the quintessential American ethos. It came after a big smiling wave
of feminist initiatives and female entrepreneurs had convincingly
framed wealth acquisition as progressive politics. It came after the
rise of companies like Uber and Amazon, which broke apart the
economy and then sold it a cheap ride to the duct tape store, all
while promising to make the world a better and more convenient
place. It came after the advent of reality TV and Facebook, which
drew on the renewable natural resource of our narcissism to create
a world where our selves, our relationships, and our personalities
were not just monetizable but actively in need of monetization. It
came after college tuition skyrocketed only to send graduates into
low-wage contract work and world-historical economic inequality. It
came, finally, after the 2008 financial crisis, the event that arguably
kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way
to win is to scam.
The Crash
In 1988, twenty-seven-year-old Michael Lewis quit his job at
Salomon Brothers, the investment bank that sold the world’s first
mortgage-backed security, and wrote a book called Liar’s Poker. It
was a portrait of Wall Street in the years following federal
deregulation, a time when the industry blossomed with savvy,
cynical, lucky actors who stumbled into a world of extreme
manipulation and profit. Lewis, as an inexperienced
twentysomething, had found himself in charge of millions of dollars
in assets without fully understanding what was going on. Revisiting
that period in 2010, he observed, “The whole thing still strikes me
as totally preposterous….I figured the situation was unsustainable.
Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along
with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud.” He had
thought that Liar’s Poker would live on as a period piece, a
document of how “a great nation lost its financial mind.” He didn’t
expect that, after the 2008 crash, eighties finance would seem
almost quaint.
Lewis writes about this crash in The Big Short, which chronicles
the unspeakably complicated mechanisms that bankers created to
inflate the mid-2000s housing market, and then to monetize
skyrocketing levels of homeowner liability, until, inevitably, the
whole system collapsed. Laws against predatory lending had been
overruled in 2004, which allowed mortgages to be extended to
people who would never be able to pay them; this, in turn, made the
pool of potential homeowners basically endless. Housing prices rose
in some markets by as much as 80 percent. People financed their
homes with home equity credit, a scheme that worked as long as
prices kept rising, which they would as long as people kept buying.
To keep the system going, mortgages were granted willy-nilly: it was
possible to get a loan without supplying financial documentation,
going through a credit check, or putting money down. One type of
subprime loan was called the NINJA, which stood for the borrowers
having no income, no job or assets. The financial industry disguised
the instability of this arrangement with obscure terms and
instruments: CDOs, towers of debt that would be recouped through
payments on rotten mortgages, and synthetic CDOs, towers of debt
that would be recouped through insurance payments on that rotten
debt. In The Big Short, a young banker tells Lewis, “The more we
looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit,
that’s just fucking crazy. That’s fraud. Maybe you can’t prove it in a
court of law. But it’s fraud.”
I was in college while the housing bubble was expanding, and
everything else about the country seemed to be on the same turbo-
powered track. Goldman Sachs and McKinsey came to campus and
recruited my most intense classmates to the sort of life that ensures
money for down payments and private school. I watched America’s
Next Top Model and Project Runway, shows that were all bustle and
glitz and giddy-up, and Laguna Beach, where the world looked like
long granite countertops and lamplit stucco, palm trees and infinity
pools. Upward mobility felt like oxygen—unremarkable, ubiquitous.
I wrote a thesis proposal about the American Dream. Then, in 2007,
home prices started rapidly declining. Homeowners started
defaulting in great waves. Every time I passed by the TVs in the
student center, they seemed to be broadcasting news footage of
families guarding their possessions on the sidewalk outside
foreclosed homes. I found myself staring at my laptop late at night,
embarrassed, revising. I’d been writing about immigrants, and how
uncertainty was central to the magic spell of America. But the
backdrop had suddenly changed from prosperity to collapse.
In September 2008, Lehman Brothers became the first to file for
bankruptcy. AIG soon followed, and was bailed out with $182 billion
of federal money. (Despite posting a $61 billion loss at the end of
2008—the worst quarterly loss for any corporation in history—AIG
gave out $165 million in bonuses to its financial services division
the next year.) Then came a global recession. Unemployment and
economic inequality skyrocketed. From 2005 to 2011, median
household wealth would drop 35 percent. Other countries might
have jailed the bankers who did this. Iceland sentenced twenty-nine
bank executives for misdeeds leading up to the 2008 crisis; one
CEO was sent to jail for five years. But in America, all the bankers
were bailed out by the government. Many were richer by the end of
the ordeal.
The financial crisis was a classic con—a confidence trick, carried
off by confidence men. The first person to earn the official con-man
designation was William Thompson, sometimes referred to as
Samuel, a petty criminal whose misdeeds were reported by The New
York Herald in the summer of 1849. “For the last few months a man
has been traveling about the city, known as the ‘Confidence Man,’ ”
the first article begins. Dressed in a respectable suit, Thompson
would approach strangers, make polite small talk, then ask, “Have
you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?”
The Herald’s ongoing coverage of Thompson was so entertaining
that the “confidence man” epithet stuck. But Thompson, actually,
was a pretty bad con man: opportunists by other names had been
working better angles for a long time. Real con men don’t have to
ask you for your watch, or your confidence. They act in such a way
that you feel lucky to give it to them—eager to place a sure bet on a
horse race or park your money in an impossibly successful
investment fund, eager to fly to the Bahamas for a party that doesn’t
exist.
In 1849, three days after Thompson was arrested, the Herald
published an unsigned editorial called “ ‘The Confidence Man’ on a
Large Scale,” which sardonically expressed condolences that
Thompson hadn’t gotten the chance to work on Wall Street.
His genius has been employed on a small scale in Broadway.
Theirs has been employed in Wall Street. That’s all the
difference. He has obtained half a dozen watches. They have
pocketed millions of dollars. He is a swindler. They are
exemplars of honesty. He is a rogue. They are financiers. He is
collared by the police. They are cherished by society. He eats
the fare of a prison. They enjoy the luxuries of a palace….Long
life to the real “Confidence Man”!—the “Confidence Man” of
Wall Street—the “Confidence Man” of the palace up town—
the “Confidence Man” who battens and fattens on the plunder
coming from the poor man and the man of moderate means!
The op-ed continues, providing Thompson with caustic advice:
He should have issued a flaming prospectus of another grand
scheme of internal improvement….He should have got all the
contracts on his own terms. He should have involved the
company in debt, by a corrupt and profligate expenditure of
the capital subscribed in good faith by poor men and men of
moderate means….He should have brought the stockholders
to bankruptcy. He should have sold out the whole concern,
and got all into his own hands in payment of his “bonds.” He
should have drawn, during all the time occupied by this
process of “confidence,” a munificent salary; and, choosing
the proper, appropriate, exact nick of time, he should have
retired to a life of virtuous ease, the possessor of a clear
conscience, and one million dollars!
The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the
idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity
to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first
Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take
advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the
con man succeeds. The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended,
flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a
person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good
at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is
becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way
millennials did—just as we were becoming adults.
The Student Debt Disaster
After the financial crisis, nearly one in four homes with mortgages
in the United States were underwater, valued at less than what their
owners owed the banks. Sixty-five percent of homes in Nevada were
underwater; in Arizona, it was 48 percent; in California, more than a
third. (Predictably, most of these borrowers had bought new homes
between 2005 and 2008.) Homeowner debt is the biggest source of
household debt in America. For a long time, the second biggest
source was car debt. But in 2013, student debt—the second
generation-defining scam—took car debt’s place.
Adjusting for inflation, college tuition at a private university is
currently three times as much as it was in 1974. At public schools,
tuition is four times as expensive. Car prices, in comparison, have
remained steady. Median income and minimum wage have hardly
moved. At some point in the mid-nineties, it became
mathematically impossible for a student to work her way through
college, and financial aid has nowhere near kept up with the
disparity between what students need and what they have. Within
the life span of the millennial generation, the average debt burden
has doubled: for the class of 2003, average debt at graduation was
around $18,000; for the class of 2016, it was over $37,000. More
than two thirds of college graduates have student debt at
graduation, and almost a quarter of postgraduate degree holders
with debt owe $100,000 or more. The situation often gets so
punishing that it seems fit only for an actual crime. If you borrowed
$37,000 on a thirty-year Stafford loan, you would end up paying
over $50,000 in interest. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness
program has rejected 99 percent of applicants. It is very easy, these
days, for student borrowers to end up underwater—indebted for a
degree that’s worth much less than what they paid.
There are lots of similarities between the housing bubble and the
tuition bubble. Like subprime mortgages, student loans at for-profit
colleges are nearly always extended in bad faith. The Obama
administration nationalized most of the student loan industry as
part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act legislation, and so this web of
securitized debt is government business, and it is expanding rapidly
—student debt ballooned to over $1.5 trillion in 2018. But there’s
one major difference between housing debt and education debt: at
least for now, if you hope to improve your life in America, you can’t
quite turn away from a diploma the way you can a white picket
fence.
In the meantime, tuition increases have done little to improve
the education students receive. Faculty jobs, like most jobs, have
become unstable and precarious. Salaries are stagnant. In 1970,
nearly 80 percent of college faculty were employed full-time; now
less than half are full-time. Colleges, competing for tuition dollars,
spend their money on stadiums, state-of-the-art gyms, fancy dining
halls—the cost of which is reflected in tuition. The institution’s need
to survive in the market, in other words, ends up hampering the
student’s ability to do the same after they graduate. And, as
protections and benefits and security are steadily stripped away
from the labor market, it gets correspondingly harder to pay off this
sort of debt.
In 2005, 30 percent of American workers were contingent
workers—contract employees, or part-time employees, or self-
employed. Now the number is 40 percent and rising. From 2007 to
2016, the number of people working involuntarily part-time
(meaning that they’d prefer full-time employment) increased by 44
percent. In the years following the recession, I kept hearing the
little factoid that people my age would change careers an average of
four times in our first decade out of college. Stories about how
millennials “prefer” to freelance still abound. The desired takeaway
seems to be: Millennials are free spirits! We’re flexible! We’ll work
anywhere with a Ping-Pong table! We are up for anything and ready
to connect! But a generation doesn’t start living a definitively
mercurial work trajectory for reasons of personality. It’s just easier,
as Malcolm Harris argues in his book Kids These Days, to think
millennials float from gig to gig because we’re shiftless or spoiled or
in love with the “hustle” than to consider the fact that the labor
market—for people of every generation—is punitively unstable and
growing more so every day. I’ve been working multiple jobs
simultaneously since I was sixteen, and I have had an exceptionally
lucky professional life, and, like a lot of Americans, I still think of
employer-sponsored health insurance as a luxury: a near-divine
perk that, at thirty, I have had for only two years in my career—the
two years that I was working at Gawker, which was sued into the
ground by the dropout-loving, suffrage-hating, Trump-supporting
billionaire Peter Thiel.
In the current economy, for most students, colleges couldn’t
possibly deliver on providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’
worth of anything. Wages aren’t budging, even though corporate
profits have soared. The average CEO now makes 271 times the
salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio
was twenty-to-one. Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita
health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four
decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as
the frontline workers in both healthcare and childcare often receive
poverty wages. A college degree is no guarantee of financial stability.
Today, aside from inherited money, such guarantees barely exist.
(Of course, as we saw in 2019’s “Operation Varsity Blues” scandal,
plenty of exorbitantly wealthy parents still place enough value in a
college education that they will commit outright fraud in order to
game the already rigged admissions system and give their children
an education that they, of all people, do not actually need.) And still,
colleges sell themselves as the crucible through which every young
person must pass to stand a chance of succeeding. Into this realm of
uncertainty has come a new idea—that the path to stability might be
a personal brand.
The Social Media Scam
The most successful millennial is surely thirty-five-year-old Mark
Zuckerberg, whose net worth fluctuates around the upper eleven
digits. Lowballing it at $55 billion means that Zuckerberg has nearly
five million times as much money as the median American
household, which is worth $11,700. He is the eighth-richest person
in the world. As the founder of Facebook, he effectively controls a
nation-state: with a quarter of the world’s population using his
website on a monthly basis, he can sway elections, and change the
way we relate to one another, and control broad social definitions of
what is acceptable and true. Zuckerberg’s most prominent
characteristic is a lack of a discernible personality. In 2017, he took
a tour around America, seeding rumors of a possible presidential
run while giving off the aura of an alien trying to learn how to pass
as one of us. The dissonance at the heart of Facebook is at least
partly due to the fact that it was this man, of all people—this man
who once said that having different identities showed a “lack of
integrity”—who understood better than anyone that personhood in
the twenty-first century would be a commodity like cotton or gold.
Zuckerberg’s ascendance to the realm of viable presidential
candidates began one October night in 2003, when he was a
sophomore at Harvard. He was bored, he wrote on his blog, and he
needed to take his mind off his “little bitch” of an ex. At 9:49 P.M.:
I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even
10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland
dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these
people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to
put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and
have people vote on which is more attractive.
By 11:10 P.M., he was pivoting:
Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are
going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure
with farm animals…), but I like the idea of comparing two
people together.
“Let the hacking begin,” he wrote, just before one A.M.
Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash, which put photos of
Harvard undergrads side by side and asked you to vote between
them. It wasn’t an original concept: the website Hot or Not was
founded in 2000 by two recent college graduates who had gotten
into a disagreement about the exact fuckability of a woman they saw
on the street. (These young people were men, obviously, as are the
founders of YouTube, who have also said they originally intended to
build a riff on Hot or Not.) But when Facemash went up, 450 people
visited the website within the first four hours; the photos were
voted on more than 22,000 times. Zuckerberg got in trouble, and
students protested the site as invasive, but plenty of them also liked
the idea of an online directory, which would allow you to compare
yourself to your peers in a more acceptable way. The Crimson wrote
that Facemash provided “clear indicators that a campus-wide
facebook is in order.” Zuckerberg, understanding that he could build
in a month what would take Harvard much longer, launched the
first version of Facebook the next February. Four thousand people
signed up within the next two weeks.
When I got Facebook (or “thefacebook”) at the end of my senior
year of high school, I felt like I had stepped into a wonderful,
narcissistic dream. At the time, I was at a peak of self-interest,
extremely invested in figuring out who I would become when no
longer confined to an environment of Republicans and daily Bible
class. My friends and I were already used to creating digital avatars
—we’d had AIM, Myspace, Xanga, LiveJournal—and Facebook
seemed to make the concept clean and official; it felt as if we were
going to a virtual City Hall and registering our new, proto-adult
selves. (At the time, Facebook was restricted to college students, but
in 2006 it would open up to anyone over thirteen who had an email
address.) Once I got to college, people joked about coming home
drunk and staring at their own Facebook pages—a precursor of
today’s endless social media scroll. The concept was entrancing
from the beginning: a bona fide, aesthetically unembarrassing
website, seemingly devoted to a better version of you.
Back then, it seemed that we were all using some new, wonderful
product. Now, more than a decade later, it has become an axiom
that we, the users, are the product ourselves. Even if Zuckerberg
didn’t set out to consciously scam the people who signed up for
Facebook, everyone who signed up—all two and a quarter billion
monthly users (and counting)—has been had nonetheless. It’s our
attention being sold to advertisers. It’s our personal data being sold
to market research firms, our loose political animus being
purchased by special interest groups. Facebook has outright
deceived the public on many occasions: for one, it reportedly
inflated viewer statistics for its videos by up to 900 percent, causing
nearly every media company to shift its own strategy—and lay off
workers—to reflect a Facebook profit strategy that didn’t exist. In
the months surrounding the 2016 election, Facebook claimed that
there had been no significant Russian interference on Facebook,
despite the fact that an internal Facebook committee devoted to
investigating the subject had already found evidence of this
interference. (And then Facebook hired a Republican opposition-
research firm to discredit the growing opposition to the company.)
Facebook has allowed other companies, like Netflix and Spotify, to
view its users’ private messages. It has tricked kids into spending
their parents’ money in Facebook games through tactics that the
company internally referred to as “friendly fraud.”
But even when Facebook isn’t deliberately exploiting its users, it
is exploiting its users—its business model requires it. Even if you
distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that
Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and our
desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our
behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our
behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on
Facebook for the news. Then, with the media both reliant on
Facebook as a way of reaching readers and powerless against the
platform’s ability to suck up digital advertising revenue—it was like
a paperboy who pocketed all the subscription money—Facebook
bent the media’s economic model to match its own practices:
publications needed to capture attention quickly and consistently
trigger high emotional responses to be seen at all. The result, in
2016, was an unending stream of Trump stories, both from the
mainstream news and from the fringe outlets that were buoyed by
Facebook’s algorithm. What began as a way for Zuckerberg to
harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel
for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that
fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs.
At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media,
runs on doublespeak—advertising connection but creating isolation,
promising happiness but inculcating dread. The Facebook idiom
now dominates our culture, with the most troubling structural
changes of the era surfacing in isolated, deceptive specks of
emotional virality. We see the dismantling of workplace protections
in a celebratory blog post about a Lyft driver who continued to pick
up passengers while she was in labor. We see the madness of
privatized healthcare in the forced positivity of a stranger’s
chemotherapy Kickstarter campaign. On Facebook, our basic
humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social
potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention,
which is then made inextricable from economic survival. Instead of
fair wages and benefits, we have our personalities and stories and
relationships, and we’d better learn to package them well for the
internet in case we ever get in an accident while uninsured.
More than any other entity, Facebook has solidified the idea that
selfhood exists in the shape of a well-performing public avatar. But
Zuckerberg, in picking up on the fact that we would sell our
identities in exchange for simply being visible, was riding a wave
that had been growing for a long time. The Real World started airing
when Zuckerberg was eight, Survivor and The Bachelor while he
was in high school. Friendster was founded his freshman year of
college. Soon after Facebook came YouTube in 2005, Twitter in
2006, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011. Now children are going
viral on TikTok; gamers make millions streaming their lives on
Twitch. The two most prominent families in politics and culture—
the Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food
chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is
required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset. In
fact, substance may actually be anathema to the game. And with
that, the applause roars, the iPhone cameras start snapping, and the
keynote speaker at the women’s empowerment conference comes
onstage.
The Girlbosses
The superficially begrudging self-styled icon Sophia Amoruso was
born in 1984, the same year as Mark Zuckerberg. She appeared on
the cover of her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS in a black deep-V dress
with structured shoulders, short hair blown back by a wind
machine, hands planted on her hips. She was the CEO of Nasty Gal,
an online fashion retailer that she’d started in 2006 as a shoplifting
anarchist who sold thrift-store clothes out of her San Francisco
apartment. Eight years later, Nasty Gal was doing hundreds of
millions of dollars in sales, and Amoruso, who had managed,
impressively, to build the business without taking on debt, was
being hailed as the “Cinderella of tech.”
#GIRLBOSS is an extended exercise in motivational personal
branding, in which Amoruso strives to idealize herself while
denying that she’s interested in any such thing. “I don’t want to be
put on a pedestal,” she writes. “Anyway, I’m way too ADD to stay up
there. I’d rather be making messes, and making history while I’m at
it. I don’t want you to look up, #GIRLBOSS, because all that looking
up can keep you down. The energy you’ll expend focusing on
someone else’s life is better spent working on your own.” The book
was marketed with the language of pop feminism—Amoruso was
successful, her readers wanted to be successful, and becoming
successful was a feminist project—but Amoruso disowns the label:
“Is 2014 a new era of feminism where we don’t have to talk about
it? I don’t know, but I want to pretend that it is.”
#GIRLBOSS pays enjoyable and genuine tribute to the value of
menial employment: during her crust-punk period, Amoruso
worked at a plant store, an orthopedic shoe store, a Borders
bookstore, an outlet mall, a Subway. Briefly, she worked as a
landscaper. But she approached the jobs as if they were a “big, fun
experiment,” she writes; deep down, she knew that something great
was around the corner. The story does have an odd Cinderella aspect
to it, with money replacing magic. “I entered adulthood believing
that capitalism was a scam, but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of
alchemy,” Amoruso writes. (Scams, of course, are also a kind of
alchemy, spinning horseshit into gold.) For a while, she stole to
support herself, because her political ethos “didn’t really jibe with
working for the Man.” Her first eBay sale was a shoplifted item.
What magic! That sale turned into a dozen more, then hundreds,
then thousands, and then, soon enough, Amoruso stopped seeing
money as a “materialistic pursuit for materialistic people….What I
have realized over time is that in many ways, money spells
freedom.”
Upon release, #GIRLBOSS received reflexive hosannas. Amoruso
was profiled in New York. Billboards and taxis advertised the book
with a cute slogan: “If this is a man’s world, who cares?” A few
months later, Amoruso’s company laid off twenty employees. The
next January, she stepped down as CEO. In 2015, a handful of ex-
employees sued her and Nasty Gal; several claimed that they had
been fired because they were pregnant, and one woman claimed she
had been fired because she was laid up with kidney disease. In June
2016, Amoruso was named to Forbes’s second-annual list of
America’s Richest Self-Made Women. In November 2016, Nasty Gal
filed for bankruptcy. In 2017, the TV adaptation of #GIRLBOSS
premiered on Netflix. Amoruso had thought the series would be free
marketing for her brand and her company, she told Vanity Fair. She
clarified: “It still benefits me, of course.” #GIRLBOSS was canceled
during its first season. By then, Amoruso had already left Nasty Gal,
cruising away like a shuttle detaching itself from a burning space
station. She’d started a new company, called Girlboss, whose slogan
was “redefining success for ourselves.”
Girlboss is “a community of strong, curious, and ambitious
women,” the site announces—a company that’s “unapologetic in our
beliefs and values of supporting girls and women who are chasing
dreams both big and small in a shame-free, lame-free zone.” Its
website features blog posts like “4 Things I Learned as a Millennial
Workaholic” and “How Rupi Kaur Built a Career on the Relentless
Pursuit of Creativity,” but the company is geared toward events:
Girlboss holds conferences, or “Girlboss Rallies,” which sell VIP
tickets for $700 and digital access for $65. “Part conference part
experiential inspiration wonderland,” the website proclaims, “the
Girlboss Rally has taken the tired conference world by storm,
creating a space for the next generation of entrepreneurs,
intrapreneurs, and thought leaders to meet, hatch plans, and thrive
together.”
The basic idea here is that, for women, photogenic personal
confidence is the key to unlocking the riches of the world. In her
memoir, Amoruso writes, “In the same way that for the past seven
years people have projected themselves into the looks I’ve sold
through Nasty Gal, I want you to be able to use #GIRLBOSS to
project yourself into an awesome life where you can do whatever
you want.” The Girlboss Rallies are supposed to work the same way:
you pay to network, to photograph yourself against millennial-pink
and neon backdrops, to take the first step toward becoming the sort
of person who would be invited to speak onstage. This is meant to
scan as a deeply feminist endeavor, and it generally does, at least to
its participants, who have been bombarded for many years with the
spurious, embarrassing, and limitlessly seductive sales pitch that
feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of
getting yours. (Later on, The Wing, the wildly successful and
meticulously branded women-only coworking space founded by
Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, would simultaneously harvest
this acquisitive, performative energy and attempt to make it
ineligible for criticism through its self-aware membership, savvy
branding, and stated commitments to inclusion, community, and
safe space. In December 2018, The Wing, by then operating in five
locations, raised $75 million, bringing its funding to a total of $117.5
million. Many investors were female—venture capitalists, actresses,
athletes. “This round is proof positive that women can be on both
sides of the table,” Gelman said.)
The ever-expanding story of Girlboss feminism really begins with
Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 manifesto, co-written with Nell
Scovell. Lean In was sharp, sensible, and effective, urging women to
take ownership of their ambition. Sandberg was the chief operating
officer of Facebook, and, writing years before the Facebook
backlash, she had impeccable mainstream credibility: she was a
powerful, graceful, rich, hardworking, married white woman,
making an argument about feminism that centered on individual
effort and hard work. Early in the book, she acknowledges that her
approach presents a partial, private solution to a huge collective
problem. She believes that women should demand power as a way
to tear down social barriers; others believe that barriers should be
torn down so that women can demand power. Both approaches are
“equally important,” Sandberg writes. “I am encouraging women to
address the chicken”—the individual solutions—“but I fully support
those who are focusing on the egg.”
Unfortunately, the chicken also happens to taste better. Provided
with a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction—
two concepts that easily blur into self-promotion and self-
indulgence—women happily bit. A politics built around getting and
spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And
so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a
time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives
politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and
equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized
childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-
congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get
behind, the kind that comes with merchandise—mugs that said
“Male Tears,” T-shirts that said “Feminist as Fuck.” (In 2017, Dior
sold a “We Should All Be Feminists” shirt for $710.) We got
conferences, endless conferences—a Forbes women’s conference, a
Tina Brown women’s conference, a Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless
Females conference. We got Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global,
which aims to end the “stress and burnout epidemic” through
selling corporate webinars and a $65 velvet-lined charging station
that helps you keep your smartphone away from your bed. We got
the full-on charlatan Miki Agrawal, who was regularly given media
tongue-baths on the subject of Thinx, her line of period panties,
until it was revealed that Agrawal, who proudly called herself a
“She-E-O,” was abusive to her employees and didn’t know much or
care about feminism at all. We got, instead of the structural
supports and safety nets that would actually make women feel
better on a systematic basis, a bottomless cornucopia of privatized
nonsolutions: face serums, infrared saunas, wellness gurus like
Gwyneth Paltrow, who famously suggested putting stone eggs in
one’s vagina, or Amanda Chantal Bacon, whose company Moon
Juice sells 1.5-ounce jars of “Brain Dust” for $38.
On the wings of market-friendly feminism, the idea that personal
advancement is a subversive form of political progress has been
accepted as gospel. The trickiest thing about this idea is that it is
incomplete and insufficient without being entirely wrong. The
feminist scammer rarely sets out to scam anyone, and would argue,
certainly, that she does not belong in this category. She just wants
to be successful, to gain the agency that men claim so easily, to have
the sort of life she wants. She should be able to have that, shouldn’t
she? The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual
will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes
the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to
seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy
it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology. That is in fact
exactly what today’s ecosystem of success encourages a woman to
do.
I know this because my own career has depended to some
significant extent on feminism being monetizable. As a result, I live
very close to this scam category, perhaps even inside it—attempting
to stay on the ethical side, if there is one, of a blurry line between
“woman who takes feminism seriously” and “woman selling her
feminist personal brand.” I’ve avoided the merchandise, the cutesy
illustrated books about “badass” historical women, the coworking
spaces and corporate panels and empowerment conferences, but I
am a part of that world—and I benefit from it—even if I criticize its
emptiness; I am complicit no matter what I do.
The Really Obvious Ones
What a relief, within this world of borderline or inadvertent or near-
invisible scamming, to have a category delineated by egregiousness:
the obvious, unmistakable scams. One such scam surfaced in the
brief Silicon Valley interest in “raw water,” which is untreated and
unfiltered spring water—teeming with bacteria, and free from all the
tooth-strengthening minerals that come out of the tap. In 2017, the
Times Styles section ran a piece on the Bay Area raw-water
enthusiasts:
Mr. Battle poured himself a glass. “The water from the tap
just doesn’t taste quite as refreshing,” he said. “Now is that
because I saw it come off the roof, and anything from the roof
feels special? Maybe.”
Gale-force ridicule followed. Stories like this—and the gleeful scorn
they engender—are ostensibly a sort of scammer prophylaxis. Those
idiots, we think, those morons drinking their tapeworm water: we
would never be so dumb as to buy that. These stories crop up often
in the food space, where it is easy for entrepreneurs to capitalize on
the endless well of magical thinking that surrounds health and
authenticity in our deeply unhealthy and inauthentic environment.
Then, once they cross some line of absurdity or ineptitude, we get to
make fun of the suckers who fell for the pitch.
Before raw water, there was Juicero, the company that raised
nearly $120 million to manufacture $700 juicers. In Juicero’s
model, fruits and vegetables would be individually packaged in Los
Angeles and shipped to Juicero customers, who would put the packs
into the Juicero machine, which would scan the packs, cross-check
them against a database, and then, finally, make a cup of juice. A
Google Ventures partner told the Times that the company was “the
most complicated business that I’ve ever funded.” The company’s
founder boasted that his juicers were made out of aircraft-grade
aluminum, that they contained ten circuit boards, that they could
deploy thousands of pounds of force. But soon after Juicero’s
machines went on the market, Bloomberg reported that you didn’t
actually need them. If you squeezed the Juicero packs by hand, you
could make juice even faster than the juicer. The company became
an immediate laughingstock and, within a few months, shut down.
It can be hard, of course, to draw a precise line between a scam
and a product with a highly exaggerated sales pitch. One of the only
ways to do so is finding a concrete misrepresentation—as a food
blogger did in 2015 with Rick and Michael Mast. The Masts were
two bearded brothers who lived in Brooklyn, dressed like they were
in Mumford & Sons, and made $10 artisan chocolate bars. The Mast
Brothers had always advertised themselves as “bean-to-bar”
chocolatiers who processed all their cocoa beans in-house. But then
a Dallas blogger named Scott Craig exposed the Mast Brothers for
being “remelters,” meaning that they had, for years, melted down
and remolded industrial bulk chocolate, wrapped it up in Italian
paper, and called it a day. The story broke in another enormous
schadenfreude tsunami, with the joke falling first on the Mast
Brothers and then, ultimately, as it always does, on the dummies
who bought their product. This is what you gentrifiers get with your
hard-ons for artisanal garbage! the tweets and blog posts cackled.
This is what you Instagram addicts get for paying three months’
rent money for a festival no one had ever heard of! This is what you
get for being so rich that you need a QR code to make a glass of
fucking juice!
Right around this vicious and satisfying point in the scam news
cycle, popular identification often begins to slide toward the
scammer, who, once identified, can be reconfigured as a uniquely
American folk hero—a logical endpoint of our national fixation on
reinvention and spectacular ascent. Stories about blatant con artists
allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing
the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective,
vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride. The
blatant scammers make scamming seem simultaneously glorious
and unsustainable. (In reality, the truly effective ones, like the
prophets of the anti-vaccination movement, can keep going
indefinitely, even after they get caught.) In 2016, news broke of a
Florida teenager named Malachi Love-Robinson, who had been
arrested for posing as a doctor and opening his own medical
practice, and then for using false credentials in an attempt to buy a
Jaguar, and then for pretending to be a doctor again. In 2018,
Jessica Pressler at New York wrote the definitive story on Anna
Delvey, the so-called Soho Grifter, a broke young woman with a
mysterious European accent who effortlessly convinced hotels,
private jet companies, and a bunch of vacuous art-world scenesters
that she was a millionaire heiress who just needed to hold a couple
grand. On today’s terms, figures like Malachi Love-Robinson and
Anna Delvey are highly inspirational. As women’s conference after
women’s conference might have told me had I attended them, it’s
precisely that kind of self-delusion—deciding beyond all reason that
you should have something, and then going for it—that will get you
somewhere in this world.
That was, anyway, the preferred tactic for Elizabeth Holmes, the
thirty-five-year-old CEO and founder of Theranos, a health
technology company that was once valued at $9 billion despite the
fact that its revolutionary blood-test technology did not actually
exist. A maniacally disciplined blonde with stressed-out hair, a Steve
Jobs obsession, and a voice that sounded like it was being disguised
to preserve her anonymity, Holmes had become fixated, at age
nineteen, on the idea of a machine that could perform a vast array
of blood tests from a pin prick. (She had a lifelong fear of needles:
this was central to her personal myth.) She founded Theranos in
2004, raised $6 million by the end of the year, and began stacking
her board of directors with big names: Henry Kissinger, James
Mattis, Sam Nunn, David Boies. She had Rupert Murdoch and Betsy
DeVos as investors. Her TED Talk went viral. She got a New Yorker
profile and a Glamour Woman of the Year award; she spoke at
Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival; Forbes labeled her the world’s
youngest self-made female billionaire. And then, in 2015, John
Carreyrou published an article in The Wall Street Journal exposing
Theranos as a shell game. The company, which by then had
contracted with Walgreens and Safeway, was performing most of its
blood tests using other companies’ machinery. Its pin-prick
technology had never worked as advertised. Its executives had been
cheating proficiency tests.
At first, Holmes resisted the story. In a company meeting, she
suggested generating sympathy for herself by revealing that she had
been sexually assaulted at Stanford. She went on CNBC and said,
“First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a
sudden you change the world.” But Carreyrou was right about
everything. For years, Holmes and her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani,
had been firing or silencing anyone who knew the truth. In 2016,
the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave Holmes a two-
year ban on owning or operating a diagnostic lab. In March 2018,
the Securities and Exchange Commission sued her; in return, she
consented to return her Theranos shares, give up voting control, and
be barred from serving as an officer of a public company for the next
ten years. In May 2018, Carreyrou published Bad Blood, a book-
length investigation of the rise and fall of Theranos, in which
Holmes’s belief in her own significance appears to border on
sociopathic zealotry: at one point she proclaims, at a company party,
“The miniLab is the most important thing humanity has ever built.”
In June 2018, Holmes was indicted by a federal grand jury on nine
counts of fraud.
Holmes, unlike Billy McFarland and Anna Delvey, never became
the subject of ironic celebration. This is partly because she did more
than scam a bunch of rich assholes. (Americans like it when this
happens, in part because many of us feel, instinctively and
accurately, that rich assholes have generally benefited from the
scams that pushed the rest of the country down.) Holmes went
further: she knowingly toyed with the health of strangers for the
sake of her own wealth and fame. Mostly, though, the scale of
Holmes’s fraud is too horrifying to be funny. She was toppled
eventually, but for years, she was one of the biggest success stories
in the world. The absurd length of time that it took for Holmes to be
exposed illuminates a grim, definitive truth of our era: scammers
are always safest at the top.
The Disruptors
Amazon, a company now worth $1 trillion, was originally going to be
called Relentless. Jeff Bezos’s friends told him that the name
sounded too aggressive, but he hung on to the URL anyway—if you
type in relentless.com, you’ll find yourself on Amazon, at which you
can buy almost anything you could think of: an 1816 edition of the
Bible ($2,000); a new hardcover copy of #GIRLBOSS ($15.43); a
used paperback #GIRLBOSS ($2.37); paranormal romance ebooks
published by Amazon itself (prices vary); a Goodyear SUV tire ($121
with Amazon Prime); a Georgia-Pacific automated paper-towel
dispenser ($35 with Prime); 3,000 Georgia-Pacific paper towels
(also $35 with Prime); more than 100,000 different cellphone cases
under $10; 5,000 pens customized with your name and logo
($1,926.75); a jar of face mask made from sheep placenta and
embryo ($49); a bunch of bananas ($2.19); a forty-pound bag of
Diamond Naturals Adult Real Meat dog food ($36.99); voice-
controlled Amazon hardware that will tell you the weather, and play
you Tchaikovsky, and turn over evidence to the police if it needs to
($39.99 to $149.99); a stream of the 1942 movie Casablanca ($3.99
to rent); two seasons of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs.
Maisel (free if you’re a Prime member, which more than half of
American households are); a wide variety of data storage and cloud
computing services (prices vary, but the quality is unbeatable—
Amazon is used by the CIA). My Amazon homepage is advertising
two-hour grocery delivery. Fifty-six percent of online retail searches
now begin at Amazon.com.
Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant,
poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk
through tiny loopholes. Amazon has chewed up brick-and-mortar
retail: an estimated 8,600 stores closed in 2017, a significant
increase from the 6,200 stores that closed in 2008, at the peak of
the recession. The company has decimated office-supply stores, toy
stores, electronics stores, and sporting goods stores, and now that it
owns Whole Foods, grocery stores will likely be next. Amazon,
which spent years taking huge venture-backed losses so that it could
lower prices enough to kill off all the competition, is now arguably
the first illegal monopsony. (In a monopsony, a single buyer
purchases goods from the vast majority of sellers; in a monopoly,
it’s the opposite.) And all of this began when Bezos was working at a
hedge fund in the nineties and got the idea to sell books online.
Bezos chose books because they presented a unique market
opportunity: whereas physical bookstores could stock and sell only
a tiny fraction of all the books that were on the market, an online
bookstore could keep a basically unlimited inventory. Books also
gave Bezos a way to track the habits of “affluent, educated
shoppers,” wrote George Packer in 2014, in a New Yorker piece
detailing Amazon’s takeover of the book industry. With this data,
Amazon could figure out what else it could sell the way it sold books
—at artificially low prices, with razor-thin margins. As long as the
company kept growing, “investors would pour in money and Wall
Street wouldn’t pay much attention to profits.” Amazon didn’t get
out of the red until 2001, seven years after Bezos started the
company—at which point it was well on its way to effectively
synthesizing human instinct with its consumer interface. Buying
something on Amazon, Packer wrote, feels instinctive, reflexive,
much like scratching an itch.
Efficiency at this scale requires extreme devaluation. To use
Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its
labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which
everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe
particularly, people. Its corporate culture is notoriously hellish. In
2015, the Times published a story that described Amazon as
“conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-
collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.” A
former employee told them, “Nearly every person I worked with, I
saw cry at their desk.” Treatment is far worse at the warehouse
level, and until recently, the pay was inexcusable: Bezos is the
richest man in the world, but his warehouse employees often made
just enough to clear the federal poverty line. (Of course, this is part
of the reason he’s the richest man in the world.) Amazon warehouse
workers, unlike most other warehouse workers, are unprotected by
unions and often classified as temps, which for years allowed the
company to avoid providing benefits and to skirt workers’
compensation claims for people who were injured, often seriously,
on the job. They enter through metal detectors and spend the day
strapped to Amazon-patented monitoring equipment, speed-walking
in circles around an enormous, airless, fluorescent-lit warehouse,
expected to pack and complete new packages every thirty seconds.
(The new Amazon trackers even vibrate to warn workers that
they’re moving too slow.) As Mac McClelland detailed in her 2012
undercover investigation at Mother Jones, managers time their
workers’ toilet breaks—there are many stories of workers peeing in
water bottles to avoid punishment—and if they don’t consistently
adhere to what McClelland described as a “goal-meeting suicide
pace,” they’re fired.
Until the company became a target of sustained criticism for its
labor practices, in no small part due to a series of worker strikes,
Amazon warehouses were often unheated in winter and sweltering
in summer: during one heat wave in Pennsylvania, rather than bring
in AC units, Amazon chose the more cost-efficient solution of
parking ambulances outside the doors to collect the people who
collapsed. Exhausted workers sometimes passed out on the
warehouse floor, and were fired. It’s because of this approach—
treating everything, including labor, as maximally disposable—that
Amazon has been so successful; it was like Walmart, except beloved
even by the wealthy, in large part because the degraded conditions
that the company both created and depended on were conveniently
concealed behind computer screens. When, in 2018, the company
finally responded to public pressure by raising minimum wage for
its warehouse workers to $15, it made these changes at the expense
of those very workers, taking their holiday bonus incentives and
potential stock grants away.
The model of business success in the millennial era is that of
dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners
of life can still be exploited. Uber and Airbnb have been similarly
“disruptive.” Where Amazon ignored state sales taxes, Uber ignored
local transportation regulations, and Airbnb ignored city laws
against unregulated hotels. With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of
rapid innovation—and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap
experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely
related squeeze—obscures the fact that these companies’ biggest
breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding
stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the
company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a
paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s
rightful responsibility and risk. Airbnb didn’t tell its New York City
users that they were breaking the law by renting their apartments.
Uber, like Amazon, has been artificially holding down prices to take
over the market, at which point the prices will almost certainly go
up. Driver pay, in the meantime, has been declining sharply. “We
are living in an era of robber barons,” said John Wolpert, in Brad
Stone’s The Upstarts. (Wolpert was the CEO of Cabulous, an Uber-
esque company that had tried to work with San Francisco’s taxi
commission instead of against it.) “If you have enough money and
can make the right phone call, you can disregard whatever rules are
in place and then use that as a way of getting PR.”
At the other end of the venture-capital disruption spectrum are a
bunch of companies that raked in heaps of money for doing nothing
at all. A company called Twist raised $6 million to build an app that
would text your friends when you were late to something. A social
network for people with curly hair, called NaturallyCurly, raised
$1.2 million. DigiScents, which promised to build a device that
would perfume your home with scents attuned to your internet
browsing, raised $20 million. Blippy, which advertised all your
credit card purchases publicly—that was it—raised $13 million.
Wakie, which set people up with human alarm clocks, strangers
who would call them at whatever time they wanted, raised $3
million. The most infamous of all, maybe, was the app Yo, whose
exclusive function was allowing users to send the word “Yo” to one
another, and which raised $1.5 million in 2014. These companies
represent a socially approved version of millennial scamming: the
dream of being a “founder” who gets a dumb idea, raises a ton of
money, and sells the company before he has to do too much work.
Configured this way, success is a lottery—just as survival today
can look like a lottery, too. If you’re super lucky, if everyone likes
you, if you’ve got hustle, you might end up making millions.
Similarly, if you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you can get
that GoFundMe to go viral, you might end up being able to pay for
your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident, or your
$10,000 hospital bill from giving birth. In any case, everything is so
expensive that you might find yourself reading about the recent
rash of suicides among New York taxi drivers as you take a slightly
cheaper VC-subsidized ride from the company that has destroyed
the taxi industry. You might find yourself routinely taking
advantage of warehouse workers who have to pee in water bottles to
get two-day shipping on a box of doggie poop bags you could’ve
bought down the street. This is, in any case, mostly how things have
worked out for me, even though my life is so easy, relatively
speaking: I don’t have dependents, I don’t live with a disability—I
never needed the reliability of Amazon to do what our current social
contract won’t.
Aside from this dead-end sense of my own ethical brokenness,
what bothers me most about this situation is the idea that our cut-
out-the-middleman era has somehow made everyone more equal—
that a lack of technological barriers and a surplus of hustle have
ushered in a fairer world. But venture capital is social capital, doled
out according to networks and affinity and comfort. Seventy-six
percent of venture capital partners are white men. Only 1 percent
are black. In 2017, 4.4 percent of all VC deals went to companies
founded by women, which was the highest percentage since 2006.
Until now, only white men have been able to boldly stride forward
the way Amazon and Uber did—on a business model of sidestepping
regulations, cutting out protections, shoving off liability, and
siphoning as much money as possible away from the people who
physically do the work. Whenever this changes, whenever women
and minorities are allowed to be their own Bezos, it will hardly be a
victory for anyone at all.
The Election
The final, definitive scam for the millennial generation is the
election of an open con artist to the presidency in 2016. Donald
Trump is a lifelong scammer, out and proud and seemingly
unstoppable. For decades before he entered politics, he peddled a
magnificently fraudulent narrative about himself as a straight-
talking, self-made, vaguely populist billionaire, and the fact that the
lie was always in plain sight became a central part of his appeal. In
his 1987 ghostwritten business book The Art of the Deal, Trump—
surrounded then, as now, with an aura of cheap skyscraper glitz—
coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” which he called a “very
effective form of promotion.” Flogging the book on Late Night with
David Letterman, he refused to clarify the actual extent of his net
worth. In 1992, he made a cameo in Home Alone 2, giving Macaulay
Culkin directions while standing in the Plaza Hotel lobby,
surrounded by marble columns and crystal chandeliers. (This was a
condition of filming at a Trump hotel: you were required to write
him a walk-on part.) That same year, he went bankrupt for the
second time. In 2004, the year of his third bankruptcy, he started
hosting The Apprentice, in which he, the brilliant businessman, got
to fire people on TV. It was a gigantic hit.
But Trump’s con artistry runs much deeper than false
advertising. He has always wrung out his profits through
exploitation and abuse. In the seventies, he was sued by Richard
Nixon’s Department of Justice after crafting policies to keep black
people out of his housing projects. In 1980, he hired two hundred
undocumented Polish immigrants to clear the ground for Trump
Tower, putting them to work without gloves or hard hats, and
sometimes having them sleep on-site. In 1981, he bought a building
on Central Park South, hoping to convert rent-controlled
apartments into luxury condos; when the tenants wouldn’t leave, he
issued illegal eviction notices, cut off their heat and hot water, and
placed newspaper ads offering to house the homeless in the
building. He has a long history of stiffing his waiters, his
construction workers, his plumbers, his chauffeurs. He once rented
out his name to a couple of scammers named Irene and Mike Milin,
who ran the Trump Institute, a “wealth-creation workshop” that
plagiarized its materials and declared bankruptcy in 2008. He spent
tens of thousands of dollars buying his own books to inflate sales
numbers. His charitable foundation, which has given almost no
money to charity, has repeatedly been found in violation of laws
against self-dealing. The approach is hideous even when rendered in
miniature: in 1997, Trump played principal for the day at a Bronx
elementary school where the chess team was trying to raise $5,000
to go to a tournament. After publicly handing them a fake million-
dollar bill and taking photos, he later sent them $200 in the mail.
Prior to his presidential career, Trump’s most appalling scam was
Trump University, the scheme in which he promised to teach people
his get-rich-quick real estate secrets. As soon as the company was
operational, in 2005, the New York attorney general’s office sent a
notification that Trump University, which falsely advertised itself as
a “graduate program,” was breaking the law. The company changed
its branding slightly and continued on its merry way of persuading
people to pay $1,500 to attend three-day seminars, which promised
invaluable tricks of the trade but actually delivered trips to Home
Depot, basic drivel about time-shares, and sales pitches for the real
Trump University programs, which would cost them as much as
$35,000 up front. In one of the eventual class-action lawsuits, a
former salesman testified:
While Trump University claimed it wanted to help consumers
make money in real estate, in fact Trump University was only
interested in selling every person the most expensive
seminars they possibly could….Based upon my personal
experience and employment, I believe that Trump University
was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly
and uneducated to separate them from their money.
Three days before his inauguration, Trump paid out $25 million to
settle fraud claims related to Trump University. The order came
from Gonzalo Curiel, a judge who Trump suggested had overseen an
unfair trial for reasons of personal bias—Curiel was Mexican, he
noted, and so must hold a grudge against him because he was
planning to build a wall.
As president, Trump receives his daily briefings on large note
cards printed with information reduced to, as a White House aide
put it, “See Jane Run” diction. He became president despite not
really wanting to be president, and as the fumes of our young but
rapidly sundowning country propelled him to the Oval Office, he
made dozens of outlandish empty promises along the way. He
promised to prosecute Hillary Clinton, to drop Bowe Bergdahl out of
an airplane without a parachute, to make Nabisco produce Oreos in
America, to make Apple produce iPhones in America, to bring back
all the jobs to America, to get rid of gun-free zones in schools, to
give everyone who killed a police officer the death penalty, to deport
all the undocumented immigrants, to spy on mosques, to defund
Planned Parenthood, to “take care of women,” to get rid of
Obamacare, to get rid of the EPA, to make everyone say “Merry
Christmas,” to build an “artistically beautiful” wall between the
United States and Mexico that would be the “greatest wall that
you’ve ever seen,” to make Mexico pay for that wall, and—funniest
of all, sort of—to never take a vacation as president. (In his first
500 days in office, he golfed 122 times.) He did all this out of a sort
of demented, maniacal salesman’s instinct, grabbing rough handfuls
of all the things that half-secretly thrilled his base most—violence,
dominance, the disowning of the social contract—and tossing them
at crowds that roared and roared. When the map started turning red
on election night and the dread Times meter swung in the opposite
direction, I got a nauseating flash-forward to what it might be like,
at the end of Trump’s presidency, with immigrant families ripped
apart, Muslims shut out of the country, refugees denied shelter,
trans people stripped of the protections they had just barely begun
to come into, poor children with no healthcare, disabled kids
without aid, low-income women who couldn’t access life-saving
abortions—what it might be like when people who subconsciously
don’t think any of that stuff is personally too important start to say,
as I’m sure they will, that the Trump era really wasn’t all that bad.
All politicians are crooks. What’s the difference? Why not lend him
our country until tomorrow, when everything is already crumbling,
and anyway we have so little idea what tomorrow will bring? And
here one of the most soul-crushing things about the Trump era
reveals itself: to get through it with any psychological stability—to
get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss
—a person’s best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself. As
wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly
shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained
into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of
this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in
order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for
reasons that contribute to the wreck.
In January 2017, Trump held a press conference surrounded by
huge, apparently blank stacks of paper. These, he said, were all the
documents he had signed to rid himself of conflicts of interest; this
was all the paperwork that turned the family business over to his
sons. (Naturally, reporters were not allowed to actually examine
these papers.) By January 2018, Trump had spent a third of his first
year in office at his commercial properties. He had publicly referred
to his businesses at least thirty-five times. More than one hundred
members of Congress and executive branch officials had visited
Trump properties; eleven foreign governments had paid money to
Trump companies; political groups had spent $1.2 million at Trump
properties. Mar-a-Lago’s revenues spiked by $8 million. Profit is
Trump’s end goal, his singular ambition. He won’t fulfill any of his
promises—he can’t drop Bowe Bergdahl out of a helicopter, or make
Mexico pay for a wall, or bring back the postwar economic boom, or
quell the nontraditional idea that women and minorities deserve
equal rights—but it doesn’t matter. As long as he’s rich and white
and male and bigoted and rapacious, to many people he represents
the most quintessentially American form of power and strength. He
was elected for the same reason that people buy lottery tickets. It’s
not the actual possibility of victory that you pay for; it’s the fleeting
vision of victory. “We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser,”
Billy McFarland said, on camera, while he was in the Bahamas
filming the video ad for Fyre Fest. The pipe dream is becoming the
dominant structure of aspiration, and its end-stage shadows—
cruelty, carelessness, nihilism—are following close behind. After all,
in becoming party to a scam, we access some of the hideous glory of
scamming: we get to see, if not to actually experience, what it might
be like to loot the place and emerge unscathed.
—
It would be better, of course, to do things morally. But who these
days has the ability or the time? Everything, not least the physical
world itself, is overheating. The “margin of refusal,” as Jenny Odell
puts it, is shrinking, and the stakes are getting higher. People are so
busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer
against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so
little else to count on—three endeavors that could contain the vast
majority of human effort until our depleted planet finally ends it all.
And, while we do this—because we do this—the honest avenues
keep contracting and dead-ending. There are fewer and fewer
options for a person to survive in this ecosystem in a thoroughly
defensible way.
I still believe, at some inalterable level, that I can make it out of
here. After all, it only took about seven years of flogging my own
selfhood on the internet to get to a place where I could comfortably
afford to stop using Amazon to save fifteen minutes and five dollars
at a time. I tell myself that these tiny scraps of relief and
convenience and advantage will eventually accumulate into
something transformative—that one day I will ascend to an echelon
where I won’t have to compromise anymore, where I can really
behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will
cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before. This is
a useful fantasy, I think, but it’s a fantasy. We are what we do, and
we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my
generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic,
unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming
pays.
We Come from Old Virginia
I wasn’t planning on going to the University of Virginia for college. I
applied mostly to schools in New England and California; at the
time, having spent twelve years in a cloistered, conservative,
religious environment, I wanted to get as far away from Texas as I
could. For most of my senior year, I dreamed about living in a
mysterious future in which I would wear wool sweaters and write
for a newspaper and spend my free time in coffee shops cultivating
a rigorous life of the mind. But then my guidance counselor
nominated me to compete for a scholarship at UVA, insisting that
the school would suit me. In the spring, I flew to Charlottesville for
the final round of the scholarship competition, which began with
the current scholars taking us to a house party, where I sat on a
kitchen counter, drank keg beer, and started to feel the dazzle. It felt
like cherry bombs were going off outside in the darkness; a strain of
easy, fancy Southernness was in the air. The next day, when I
walked through campus, the sun was warm and golden, and the
white-columned brick buildings rose into a bluebird sky. The
students lounged on the grass, glowing with conventional good
looks. West of town, the Blue Ridge Mountains raised the horizon
in layers of dusk and navy, and the lacy dogwood trees were
flowering on every street. I stepped onto the Lawn, UVA’s
centerpiece—a lush, terraced expanse lined with prestigious student
rooms and professors’ pavilions—and felt an instantaneous,
overpowering longing. At this school, I thought, you would grow like
a plant in a greenhouse. This dappled light, the sense of long
afternoons and doors propped open and drinks poured for strangers,
the grand steps leading up to the Pantheon dome of the Rotunda—
this was where I wanted to be.
Charlottesville sells itself this way, effortlessly, as a sort of
honeyed Eden, a college town with Dixie ease and gracefulness but
liberal intellectual ideals. UVA’s online guide to Charlottesville
opens with an illustration of a hazy golden sunset, the mountains
turning purple in the sun’s last flare. “A Place Like No Other,” the
illustration states. “This is a place where the world spins as it
should,” the narrator in a promotional video says. As UVA’s website
informs you, Charlottesville has been named the happiest city in
America by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the best
college town in America by Travelers Today, and the number-five
US community for well-being, according to a Gallup index. The
Fiske Guide to Colleges writes that “students nationwide go ga-ga
for UVA” and quotes a student who calls Charlottesville “the perfect
college town.” Another student observes, “Almost everything here is
a tradition.” A comment on UVA’s College Confidential message
board reads, “Girls here dress very well and are very physically
attractive. The key to get them is alcohol.”
When I moved to Charlottesville in 2005, I was sixteen, and
nothing about that comment would have seemed off-color to me. I’d
spent my whole life in a tiny evangelical school where white male
power was the unquestioned default, and UVA’s traditionalism, in
matters of gender or anything else, did not immediately register. (In
fact, on that first visit, I found it comforting. I wrote approvingly in
my journal that the political atmosphere felt “moderate, not
extremely liberal.”) Sure, there were boys double-majoring in
history and economics who half-jokingly referred to the Civil War as
“the War of Northern Aggression,” but this still seemed like a major
leap forward from the outright racism I had known. UVA was like a
live-action recruitment brochure: everyone was always
ostentatiously “finding their people,” carrying stacks of books
around green expanses, moving from picnics to day parties in packs
of best friends. Classes were just the right kind of difficult; people
were sharp, but generally too basic, myself included, to be
pretentious. On weekends, students dressed up in sundresses and
ties to get drunk at football games, and I liked this air of debauched
Southern etiquette, the sweet generic quality of mid-Atlantic preppy
life. For four years I cranked out papers at the library; I wrapped
myself around a boyfriend; I volunteered and waited tables and sang
in an a cappella group and pledged a sorority and sat on my rooftop,
smoking spliffs and reading, as the kids at the elementary school
across the road shrieked. I graduated in 2009, and afterward didn’t
think much about Charlottesville. I had loved my time there easily
and automatically. Then, in 2014, Rolling Stone dropped its bomb.
The feature story, “A Rape on Campus,” written by Sabrina Rubin
Erdely, was, now infamously, a graphic account of a gang rape at Phi
Kappa Psi, the UVA fraternity whose white-columned house looms
at the top of a big field off Rugby Road. “Sipping from a plastic cup,
Jackie grimaced, then discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the
sludgy fraternity-house floor,” Erdely began. It was Jackie’s first frat
party, and the line sent me into a wormhole. My first frat party had
been at Phi Psi, too: I could see myself with messy long hair,
wearing flip-flops, overwhelmed by a drinking game and spilling my
own cup of punch on the floor. I’d left soon afterward, crossing the
train tracks in hopes of finding a better party. In the Rolling Stone
story, Jackie was shoved into a pitch-black bedroom, slammed
through the glass of a coffee table, pinned down, and beaten. “ ‘Grab
its motherfucking leg,’ she heard a voice say. And that’s when Jackie
knew she was going to be raped.” Erdely wrote that Jackie endured
“three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns
raping her.” One of them hesitated, then shoved a beer bottle into
her as the rest of them cheered. After the attack, Jackie ran away
from the house, shoeless, with bloodstains on her red dress. She
called her friends, who cautioned her against reporting it to the
police or the university: “We’ll never be allowed into any frat party
again.” Later on, Jackie disclosed her assault to UVA dean Nicole
Eramo. Then, a year later, she told Eramo that she knew two other
women who had been gang-raped at Phi Psi. Both times, according
to Erdely, Eramo laid out the options available to Jackie, who
declined to pursue further action, and the school left it at that. This
was unforgivable, Erdely argued, given what the dean had heard.
There was a precedent at UVA for all of this—both this specific
crime and the reality of institutional dismissal. In 1984, a
seventeen-year-old UVA freshman named Liz Seccuro was brutally
gang-raped at Phi Psi, and, by her account, when she reported the
crime, a UVA dean asked her if she’d just had a rough night. In
2005, Seccuro received a traumatic validation of her memory when
one of her assailants wrote her an apology letter as part of his
Alcoholics Anonymous recovery process. (The school had actually
given him her address.) UVA’s cycle of rape and indifference was
such, Erdely wrote, that only fourteen people had ever been found
guilty of sexual misconduct in the school’s history, that not a single
person at UVA had ever been expelled for sexual assault, and that
UVA’s fetishized honor code—in which single acts of lying, cheating,
or stealing will trigger expulsion—did not consider rape to be a
relevant offense. Erdely noted that the school didn’t put Phi Psi
under investigation until it learned that she was writing her piece.
When the Rolling Stone story came out, I had just moved to New
York to take a job as the features editor of the feminist site Jezebel.
When I got to our dim, brick-walled blog factory in Soho that
morning, my coworkers were giving off an odd and heavy silence,
reading Erdely’s article on their computer screens. I saw the
illustration of Phi Psi and realized what was happening. I sat down
in my swivel chair and pulled up the story, feeling the call-is-
coming-from-inside-the-house nausea that sets in when the news
cycle focuses on something that feels private to you. By the time I
finished reading, I was dizzy, thinking about my four years in
Charlottesville, what I’d been blind to, what I’d chosen to see and
not to see. I pictured my college self, never signing up for a women’s
studies class, funneling my waitressing money toward sorority dues.
I remembered that, whenever a classmate in one of my seminars
prefaced a statement with “As a feminist,” my internal response was
“All right, girl, relax.” I had never attended a Take Back the Night
march. Though Liz Seccuro had brought her rapist to trial while I
was in college—there’s no statute of limitations for rape in Virginia
—it had barely crossed my radar at school. (Her rapist was
sentenced to eighteen months, ultimately serving six.) I myself had
been roofied by a grad student at Georgetown during my first
semester at college, while on a weekend trip with a UVA group.
Blaming myself for accepting drinks from strangers, and thanking
my luck that I’d gotten violently sick shortly after he started
touching me, I’d barely talked about the incident, dismissed it as no
big deal.
This was a different era. In the five years since my graduation,
feminism had become a dominant cultural perspective. Title IX, the
1972 civil rights law that had at first been invoked in service of
equal-opportunity college athletics, was now being applied to sexual
assault and harassment cases. In a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter
from the Office of Civil Rights, the Obama administration
proclaimed, “The sexual harassment of students, including sexual
violence, interferes with students’ right to receive an education free
from discrimination and, in the case of sexual violence, is a crime.”
There had been several high-profile news stories about college
assault and harassment. In 2010, Yale suspended the fraternity
Delta Kappa Epsilon for five years after their pledges chanted “No
means yes, yes means anal!” in front of the school’s Women’s
Center. In 2014, Emma Sulkowicz started carrying their mattress
across Columbia’s campus in protest of the administration finding
their alleged rapist not responsible. (They continued carrying the
mattress until graduation.) In 2015, two Vanderbilt football players
were found guilty of raping an unconscious woman. The struggle to
adjudicate campus rape was nationwide news. The Rolling Stone
article went viral within an hour of being posted, and would end up
being the most-read non-celebrity story in the magazine’s history. I
had changed, too. I was working at Jezebel. I felt almost
disembodied by dread, in my office chair, thinking about how many
women would read the piece and feel the need to compare their
stories to Jackie’s—to play down the harm they’d faced, to preface
their own experiences, as we already do, with “It wasn’t that bad.”
At UVA and within the school’s network, the story was explosive.
Reactions were mostly supportive, but they were mixed. My
Facebook feed flooded with messages from UVA alumni expressing
outrage and recognition; for my boyfriend, a former UVA fraternity
member, a number of his college acquaintances expressed a stiff,
suspicious distance or disbelief. In Charlottesville, the police
department opened an investigation into Jackie’s assault. Phi Psi
was vandalized. There was an emergency Board of Visitors meeting.
Bright Post-it notes and posters—“Expel Rapists,” “Harm to One Is
Harm to All”—covered the brick walls and buildings surrounding the
Lawn. Protesters walked Rugby Road with signs that said “Burn
Down the Frats.” (“Nobody wants to rape you!” a few people yelled
back.) The Cavalier Daily, the campus newspaper, overflowed with
responses from both students and alumni. Letter writers
acknowledged the insidious leeway given to the Greek system on
campus; they criticized the school’s history of suppressing victims
and accusers; they questioned Rolling Stone’s intentions and
Erdely’s cherry-picked account of UVA life. “It feels immensely
frustrating to be singled out, when inaction on rape and sexual
assault cases persists across the country,” one student wrote. The
newspaper’s managing board ran an op-ed acknowledging the mood
of “anger, disgust, and despair.”
A couple of days after the piece went up, Emma, my editor in
chief, asked me if the reporting seemed right. Some details were off,
I said. But people who knew the school recognized what Erdely was
talking about. She was right that UVA had a systemic problem—that
the school believed in itself as an idyll, a place of genteel beauty and
good citizenship, and that this belief was so seductive, so half true,
and so widely propagated, that the social reckonings that had come
elsewhere had been suppressed and delayed.
At this point, I had never reported a story or edited a reported
story—Emma had brought me to Jezebel from my first job in media,
at The Hairpin, a small blog where I mostly edited and wrote essays.
I didn’t understand that it did matter that the details were off: that
the piece’s epigraph came from what Erdely called a “traditional
University of Virginia fight song,” which I had never heard, and
which she said was in the standing rotation of an a cappella group
called the Virginia Gentlemen, whose repertoire I knew from top to
bottom because they were the brother group to my own. If I’d been
more experienced, I would have known that it was actually
suspicious, not just a matter of writerly flourish, that she described
Phi Psi as “upper tier.” (Phi Psi was, at best, somewhere in the
nondescript middle of UVA’s rigid fraternity caste system—a hard
social fact that would have been easy to check.) I would’ve noticed
the absence of disclosures and parentheticals telling the reader how
the people in the story—the seven men who raped Jackie, or the
friend who said, as if reading aloud from a bad screenplay, “Why
didn’t you have fun with it? A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?”—
responded to the allegations. I would have noticed that there was no
way, within the story, to tell exactly how Erdely knew what she
knew.
At twenty-five, I was closer to my time at UVA than I was to the
age I am now—closer to the idea of being the subject than the idea
of being the writer. I didn’t know how to read the story. But a lot of
other people did.
—
It didn’t take long for journalists to start pulling apart “A Rape on
Campus.” At first, it seemed possible that the doubters had some
ideological motivations. Richard Bradley, who’d previously edited
the fabulist Stephen Glass, wrote that the lede “boggled the mind,”
and required a reader to “indulge your pre-existing biases” against
“fraternities, against men, against the South,” as well as “about the
prevalence—indeed, the existence—of rape culture.” Robby Soave, a
blogger at the libertarian site Reason, who had previously written
that the movement against campus rape was a large-scale
criminalization of campus sex, wondered if the whole story was a
hoax.
Then The Washington Post interviewed Erdely, who declined to
disclose whether she knew the names of Jackie’s attackers, or if she
had contacted “Drew,” the man who had taken Jackie to Phi Psi.
Erdely went on the Slate podcast Double X and skirted the same
questions. Then she and her editor, Sean Woods, confirmed to the
Post that they’d never talked to any of the men. “I’m satisfied that
these guys exist and are real,” Woods said. Erdely told the Post that
by dwelling on these details, “you’re getting sidetracked.”
Soon afterward, the Post reported that Phi Psi had not held a
party on the night in question. The Washington Post found
convincing evidence that “Drew” did not exist, at least not as the
person Jackie had described. CNN interviewed the friends quoted in
the article, who detailed major discrepancies in what Jackie told
Erdely and what Jackie had told them. Late at night on December 4,
Erdely received a phone call from Jackie and Jackie’s friend Alex,
who had, apparently, spoken to Jackie about her story’s
inconsistencies.
At 1:54 A.M. on December 5, Erdely emailed her editor and her
publisher: “We’re going to have to run a retraction….Neither I, nor
Alex, find Jackie credible any longer.” That day, Rolling Stone put up
a statement, explaining that Jackie had requested that they not
contact “Drew” or any of the men who raped her. They had honored
this request, as they found her trustworthy, and took seriously her
apparent fear of retaliation. But “there now appear to be
discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the
conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” (Later on, that last
unfortunate clause, about trust, disappeared.) As I read the note, my
eyes kept flicking to one sentence, about how Jackie’s friends on
campus had “strongly supported” her story. Those friends had
supported her emotionally; they’d offered sympathy for the
experience she told them about. But they had not corroborated her
story, or supported it the way a journalist should have been
obligated to—the way that walls support a house.
The following March, the Charlottesville police department
issued a statement saying that there was no evidence to back up
Jackie’s account of her assault. Later on, the Columbia Journalism
Review published an extensive report laying out exactly how Erdely
and her editors erred. Jackie and Erdely were subsequently deposed
in Eramo v. Rolling Stone, a lawsuit lodged by Dean Eramo, who
was portrayed as discouraging Jackie from reporting the alleged
assault and had been quoted, on Jackie’s word alone, worrying that
no one would want to send their kids to “the rape school.” (In
November 2016, a jury found both Erdely and Rolling Stone
responsible for defamation. Eramo was awarded $3 million in
compensatory damages.) Through CJR’s report and the court
documents, a story behind the story assembles itself.
Something likely happened to Jackie on September 28, 2012.
Late that night, she called her friends, distraught. She met them
outside freshman dorms, with no visible injuries, and told them that
something bad had happened. Soon afterward, she told her
roommate that she’d been forced to perform oral sex on five men.
On May 20, 2013, she reported the assault to Dean Eramo and
declined to pursue action. A year later, in May 2014, she went back
to Eramo to report an act of retaliation—someone had thrown a
bottle at her on the Corner, the main social drag, she said—and
asserted that she knew two other women who’d been gang-raped at
the same frat. Eramo, by her account, encouraged Jackie to report
the alleged assault to the authorities and arranged for Jackie to
meet with the Charlottesville police; she said that Jackie had two
such meetings in the spring of 2014.
Erdely confirmed her assignment around the same time. She was
an experienced journalist in her early forties who had recently been
given a star contract at Rolling Stone: she was set to receive
$300,000 for filing seven feature stories over two years. She had
written about sexual abuse before. Her 1996 Philadelphia article
about a woman who had been raped by her gynecologist was
nominated for a National Magazine Award, and at Rolling Stone, she
had recently published two consequential exposés about sexual
abuse in the Catholic Church and the US Navy. (In December 2014,
Newsweek noted that Erdely’s reporting on the Catholic Church
story was also remarkably flawed.) Her intent, with this new Rolling
Stone piece, was to follow a single assault case on a “particularly
fraught campus,” she wrote, in a memo—she wasn’t sure which one.
But she talked to rape survivors at a few Ivy League schools and was
unsatisfied with the stories that turned up. She came down to
Charlottesville in the summer of 2014, and heard about Jackie from
a former student named Emily, who had met Jackie in a sexual
assault prevention group. “Obviously,” Emily told Erdely, “her
memory may not be perfect.” A few days later, Erdely sat down with
Jackie, whose story had changed: on September 28, she told the
reporter, she had met her friends outside Phi Psi, bloody and
bruised and shoeless, after escaping an hours-long gang rape at the
hands of seven men. She declined to provide the names of those
friends, or the name of the boy who took her to the frat.
The two of them kept talking. In September, Jackie and her
boyfriend had dinner with Erdely, who asked about the scars from
the shattered glass. “I haven’t really seen any marks on your back,”
the boyfriend said. Jackie told Erdely, “When you’ve come from a
background where you’re always told that you’re worthless…it’s like
you’re an easy target…like I was easily manipulated because I didn’t
have the self-esteem to—I don’t know.” A week later, Jackie texted a
friend, “I forgot to tell you that Sabrina [Erdely] is really nice, but
you have to choose your words really carefully because she’s taken
some things I’ve said out of context and skewed them a little.” She
started to get cold feet. In October, one of her friends texted Erdely,
“I’m talking to Jackie right now, and she’s telling me she 100
percent doesn’t want her name in the article.” Erdely replied that
she was “up for discussing whether she wants to discuss changing
her name, et cetera, but I need to be clear about this. There’s no
pulling the plug at this point.” Erdely emailed her photo editor,
writing, “Yeah, unfortunately, I would say Jackie is not in great
mental shape right now and won’t be for a long while.” At the end of
October, Jackie stopped answering Erdely’s calls and texts, but
Erdely coaxed her back into the process for fact-checking. In final
edits, two all-important disclosures—that Jackie had refused to
provide the name of the boy who had taken her to the frat party and
that the magazine had not contacted her friends to corroborate her
story—disappeared.
The piece came out in mid-November. Erdely gave her
suspiciously vague interviews to Double X and The Washington
Post. The day before Thanksgiving, Erdely called Jackie and pressed
her for the name of the boy who brought her to Phi Psi, and Jackie
said that she wasn’t sure how to spell it. In public, the story started
to fall apart. In early December, Jackie texted a friend, “I’m so
scared. I never even wanted to do this article when it became about
my rape. I tried to back out of it, but she said I couldn’t.” A few days
later, she and Erdely had the late-night phone call that triggered
Rolling Stone’s note from the editor. A week or so after that, Erdely
emailed Jackie, finally asking her to explain her changing story. She
also asked for the name of someone who had ever seen the scars on
Jackie’s back.
Under oath, in her deposition testimony, Jackie doesn’t admit
outright to lying. She is an unreliable narrator, and to some degree,
so is Erdely. (And, given that here I’m choosing to see certain things
and discard others, as a person does anytime she tells a story, so am
I.) But what strikes me in reading the two women’s testimonies is
the way that the structure of the original violation, the language of
force and betrayal, filters into the way that they interacted with each
other—in the same way that Title IX procedures often end up
replicating the patterns of invasion they set out to address and
negate. Jackie remembers Erdely telling her “that there was no
way…to pull out at that point.” She tells the court, “I was under the
impression that [the details of my assault] were not going to be
published….I wasn’t—you know, I was 20 years old. I had no idea
that there was an off the record or on the record. I—I was naïve.” In
her own deposition, Erdely says, “I mean, she was aware it was
entirely up to her whether she was going to participate.”
What should have been reportorial red flags, too, were passed
over as normal parts of the rape recovery process. When Erdely
asked to speak to the two women Jackie knew who’d also been
gang-raped at Phi Psi, Jackie insisted on serving as a go-between.
(She most likely fabricated the texts attributed to them that she
eventually showed Erdely.) Erdely believed, reasonably enough, that
Jackie only hoped to spare them further trauma. She wasn’t too
concerned that Jackie’s story had changed. “I do know that [rape
victims’] stories do sometimes morph over time as they come to
terms with what happened to them,” she says in her deposition. In
this, Erdely replicated the mechanism of self-delusion that’s
embedded at UVA: she acted as if the story she believed in, that she
thought she was working for, was already real.
—
I have sympathy for the experience of being fooled by what you
want to believe in. Good intentions often produce blind spots. It’s
hard to blame Erdely for believing that Jackie’s memory had
initially been obscured by trauma. It’s easy to understand how a
college administrator might believe in her institution’s moral
progress despite evidence to the contrary, or how a reporter would
believe that stories tend to shift in the direction of truth. This is,
after all, what happened with Liz Seccuro, the woman who was
gang-raped at Phi Psi in 1984. When her rapist, William Beebe,
wrote her an apology twenty-one years later, she asked him—having
been haunted by an unplaceable feeling—if he was the only one who
raped her. Yes, he said. And also, he didn’t remember the night the
same way she did. In his original letter, he hadn’t used the word
“rape.” He had written, “Dear Elizabeth: In October 1984 I harmed
you. I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, in your
eyes, my behavior has affected you in its wake.” In the follow-up
letter to Seccuro, he wrote, “There was no fight and it was all over in
short order.”
“I awoke wrapped naked in a bloody sheet,” Seccuro wrote back.
“I am sincere in my recollection,” Beebe replied, “though it may
not be the whole truth of what happened to you that night.”
In her memoir Crash into Me, Seccuro writes that she had been a
virgin when she was assaulted, and that her dean told her, “Well,
you know these parties can get out of control….Are you sure you
didn’t have sex with this young man and now you regret it? These
things happen.” Her story was squashed by the school, the police
department, and the era she lived in—there were no rape kits at the
UVA hospital when she dragged herself there after her assault. Out
of options, Seccuro eventually went to a reporter and told her story
under a pseudonym: a man had raped her at a frat one night, she
said.
Two decades later, after she had Beebe’s apology letter, the
Charlottesville police began reinvestigating and interviewing
witnesses. An officer called her one day. “Liz, you were right,” he
said. “Beebe was one of three. Three men raped you that night and
Beebe was the last. I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this.” One
of the men “had allegedly been seen digitally raping me,” Seccuro
writes, “with four men witnessing and cheering as he hiked my
sweater above my neck and my skirt above my waist.” Another one
had left her bleeding and unconscious, and walked to the frat’s
communal showers, “naked except for a towel, high-fiving friends
along the way.” Beebe had been seen dragging Seccuro into his room
while she was screaming; afterward, he had dragged her body into
the bathroom and tried to clean her up. His story had become less
true with time, and monstrously so: he had come to believe that
there was “no fight,” that there was plenty of ambiguity, that it was
just a confusing, ungentlemanly night.
It seems possible that Beebe, honing the trajectory of his life in
recovery, genuinely convinced himself of this over the ensuing
decades, and that he contacted Seccuro in part to validate his altered
narrative. Conversely, I’ve always thought that Jackie must have
believed, at some deep and bizarre level, in the truth of her
imagined story. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to
consistently fool Erdely and the fact-checker. I wonder if she
thought that a written record, a big-deal Rolling Stone piece, would
enshrine the narrative she wanted as the truth.
Seccuro published her memoir in 2012, five years after her court
case concluded. She suggests in the book that gang-raping a
freshman girl might have been some Phi Psi rite of passage, “a
tradition of sorts.” This is what Jackie suggested to her friends, as
well as to Erdely—who, when Jackie noted the similarities between
her story and Seccuro’s, responded, according to the tape transcripts
read aloud in the deposition, “Holy shit. Every hair on my arm is
standing up. Seems like more than a coincidence.” In her own
deposition, Jackie states that a professor assigned Crash into Me in
a class that she took in 2014. She read only a portion of it, she says—
the portion describing Seccuro’s assault.
The most generous way to describe Jackie’s sense of reality is to
say that it was porous. She could lie wildly even in cases where the
stakes were low. One of her friends, Ryan, had once received an
email from a guy named Haven Monahan—the guy who Jackie later
said took her on a date on the night of her rape. (In Rolling Stone,
Haven was the person identified as Drew.) “Haven,” a composite
figure whose purported email account was likely controlled by
Jackie, forwarded Ryan an email that Jackie had supposedly sent
him. It was a love letter about Ryan, and it was lifted almost word-
for-word from Dawson’s Creek. All of this—the fake persona, the
dummy email account, the plagiarized letter—was Jackie’s casually
deranged way of expressing a crush.
Jackie also told Erdely, during one of their interviews, about a
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode that, she said, portrayed
a situation like her rape. Erdely admits in the deposition that she
never watched the episode. It was called “Girl Dishonored,” a lawyer
tells her. In it, a young woman is gang-raped at a fraternity, and one
of the perpetrators says, “Grab her leg.”
At one point during the proceedings, Erdely reads aloud a
statement, written the morning that Rolling Stone posted its mea
culpa, in which she explains that Jackie’s “case seemed to get to the
heart of the larger story I sought to tell.”
“Were you sincere when you wrote those words?” the lawyer
asks her.
“Was I sincere?” Erdely replies.
“Were you making that up, or were you being sincere when you
wrote those words?” asks the lawyer.
“I don’t make anything up,” says Erdely.
“Were you being sincere, then, when you wrote those words? Did
you believe that statement when you wrote it?” the lawyer asks.
Erdely says yes. But the choice is not always between being
sincere and untruthful. It’s possible to be both: it’s possible to be
sincere and deluded. It’s possible—it’s very easy, in some cases—to
believe a statement, a story, that’s a lie.
—
In April, after Rolling Stone retracted the story, UVA’s president,
Teresa Sullivan, issued a statement slamming the magazine for
what they had published. “Irresponsible journalism unjustly
damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the
University of Virginia,” she wrote. “Sexual violence is a serious issue
for our society, and it requires the focus and attention of all in our
communities. Long before Rolling Stone published its article, the
University of Virginia was working to confront sexual violence. And
we will continue to implement substantive reforms to improve
culture, prevent violence, and respond to acts of violence when they
occur.”
Just like that, we were back to the old story. Rolling Stone was
the problem, and the problem had been nullified, and UVA could
continue on as it was. I remembered a late night a few years prior.
In the back corner of a bar after a wedding reception, a woman told
me that she knew a couple of the boys who had played Duke
lacrosse during the 2006 scandal. The boys had been injured
permanently, she said—scarred forever, along with their families, by
some whore’s disgusting lie. Her anger was raw, palpable, blooming.
It cowed me, and reminded me that most people still find false
accusation much more abhorrent than rape. In 1988, the Cav Daily
published a piece by a student who wrote, “Don’t ask for increased
prosecution of allegations of rape until women who falsely accuse
men of rape and attempted rape are investigated with similar
intensity, prosecuted with equal vigor, and jailed for a greater length
of time.”
In the Bible, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, who has been
enslaved by her rich husband, and cries rape after Joseph resists her
advance. In Greek mythology, Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, does
the same to Hippolytus. These stories, and the many others like
them, are framed as obscene anomalies. Rape itself, though, is
sanctioned in the same texts. In Numbers, Moses commands his
army to kill all the men and the nonvirgin women, and save all the
virgin women for themselves. In Greek myth, Zeus rapes Antiope,
Demeter, Europa, and Leda. Poseidon rapes Medusa. Hades rapes
Persephone. For centuries, rape was viewed as a crime against
property, and offenders were often punished by the imposition of a
fine, payable to the victim’s father or husband. Until the 1980s,
most rape laws in America specified that husbands could not be
charged with raping their wives. Rape, until very recently, was
presented as a norm.
This extends to UVA, which for many decades expelled students
for plagiarism while refusing to consider rape a serious offense.
From 1998 to 2014, 183 students were kicked out of UVA for honor
code violations: one of them had, for example, cribbed three phrases
from Wikipedia while on study abroad. When, in the late nineties, a
student was found guilty of sexually assaulting another student,
named Jenny Wilkinson, UVA punished him by adding a letter of
reprimand to his record, which could be removed after a year if he
completed an assault education program. Because of student privacy
laws, Wilkinson could not protest this outcome in public. “In fact, in
a crazy twist, I could have faced charges from the university if I had
talked about them,” she wrote in the Times in 2015. Her assailant,
meanwhile, was allowed to keep one of UVA’s top honors: he lived
on the Lawn.
In the decades that followed, things got microscopically better.
After Erdely’s story was published, I interviewed one of my former
UVA classmates at Jezebel, referring to her with the pseudonym
Kelly. In 2006, Kelly filed university charges against the student
who sexually assaulted her. After ten months, UVA found him
guilty. (Again, the rarity of a guilty finding can’t be overstated: at the
time when I interviewed Kelly, there were only thirteen other guilty
findings in the school’s history—one of whom was Wilkinson’s
assailant.) Kelly was assaulted, as many college women are, in the
fall of her first semester: she went to a frat party, where a guy she
knew poured her drinks until she passed out. In the university’s
investigation, it came out that a witness had seen Kelly’s limp body
being carried up the stairs. A nurse visiting her younger brother in
the frat that night testified that Kelly’s pulse had been “low, in the
20s and 30s.” At the hearing, a male faculty member asked Kelly if
she’d ever cheated on her boyfriend. But her assailant was found
guilty, and suspended for three years.
This was, in the context of UVA’s long record of apathy and
inaction, an extreme success story. In the year prior to the Rolling
Stone piece, thirty-eight students had reached out to Dean Eramo to
report being sexually assaulted. Only nine of those incidents
resulted in formal complaints, and only four resulted in misconduct
hearings. And, as at most colleges, those thirty-eight reports were
the visible fraction of a vast and unseen iceberg. Though I rarely
back away from difficulty, I feel sure that, if I had been
traumatically assaulted in college, I wouldn’t have had the courage
—or the stamina for the inevitable bureaucratic humiliation—to
report.
Erdely noted, in her piece, that “genteel University of Virginia
has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy.”
And it’s true that the school is far from radical. But, though I never
thought to learn about this while I was on campus, UVA’s women
have been agitating to change the institution ever since it went coed.
“The fact that none of us here are afraid to pursue the truth
wherever it may lead,” a woman wrote in the Cav Daily in 1975,
referencing a much-used Thomas Jefferson quote, “pales alongside
the fact that many of us have good reason to fear pursuing a
midnight snack on the Corner.” That fall, a local committee
surveyed the local statistics—rape was almost twice as prevalent in
the town as in Virginia as a whole—and labeled Charlottesville “rape
city” in a widely shared report. At the same time, a Jack the Ripper–
themed Corner bar called the Minories English Pub put up a sign
featuring a nude female corpse dangling from a lamppost. In the
Cav Daily, another student wrote, “People are now tired of the rape
issue coming up time and again in the news. Well, I’m tired, too;
more than you could ever fathom.” She had been raped, she wrote,
six weeks before. That year, UVA’s president, Frank Hereford, sent a
letter to a Virginia delegate assuring him that there was no rape
problem on campus. He provided ten pieces of evidence that the
school was being proactive. Number six was that the student council
sold women “alarm devices” at “well below cost.” Number nine was
that women were locked inside their dorms at midnight.
During this period, UVA’s default assumption of male dominion
over women became more strident in response to the rise of two
student demographic groups that inherently challenged this idea:
women and gay men. In 1972, the Cav Daily ran a disgusted “humor
piece” envisioning a sissy new fraternity called Gamma Alpha
Yepsilon, or GAY. The same year as the “rape city” report, the
Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority passed a ruling
“prohibiting homosexuals from alcohol-serving restaurants,” and
UVA used the rule to bar gay people from a pavilion on the Lawn.
Hereford, as president, attempted to remove a student named Bob
Elkins from his RA position because he was a “professed
homosexual.” In 1990, a student publication ran a satire piece called
“Great to Be Straight,” laying out a schedule for a week of
heterosexual pride and celebration that included a “Take Back the
Bathrooms” march. When I went to football games in college,
people would sing UVA’s “The Good Old Song,” to the tune of “Auld
Lang Syne,” after every touchdown. After the line “We come from
old Virgin-i-a, where all is bright and gay,” a huge portion of the
crowd always screamed “Not gay!”
In the nineties, student conversation started to sharpen around
the role that fraternities—a source of violence against women,
against gay men, and against their own members—played in the
prevalence of sexual assault at UVA. “The only first-week social
option is attending Rugby Road fraternity parties,” wrote a Cav
Daily editor in 1992. “Intimidating for some and dangerous for
others, the Rugby option is simply not an adequate answer to initial
social needs of first-year students.” That same year, at Pi Lambda
Phi, another UVA fraternity, an eighteen-year-old woman was
trapped in a storage room, pinned down on a mattress, raped, and
beaten.
In his 2009 history of white fraternities, The Company He Keeps,
Nicholas Syrett writes, “Fraternities attract men who value other
men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal
circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous
performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance
of homosexuality.” (The chair of the UVA women’s studies
department gave a similar statement after the 1992 rape at Pi Lamb:
“Fraternities and sororities reinforce the subordinate position that
women hold in general,” she said. “Men experience a sense of male
identity by abusing women and hazing each other.”) Syrett writes
that fraternity men prove their heterosexuality through “aggressive
homophobia and the denigration of women”—through using
homoerotic hazing rituals to humiliate one another, and through
framing sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s
brothers, for communal consumption by them.”
White fraternities have historically existed for the purpose of
solidifying elite male power and entitlement. In the nineteenth
century, wealthy men separated themselves from their poorer
classmates through the frat system. In the twentieth century, men
used frat houses to preserve an exclusively male space in an
“increasingly mixed-gender world,” Syrett writes. As the idealism of
the earliest frats was subsumed, in the twentieth century, by a
changing idea of masculinity that increasingly allowed high-class
status and low-class behavior to coexist in a single individual,
fraternity members “used their status as self-proclaimed gentlemen
to justify their less-savory antics….In performing gentlemanliness
in public, they justified their existence. What they did behind closed
doors was then supposed to be their business alone.”
Universities have a tendency to overlook fraternity violence in
part because fraternities are a significant source of institutional
capital. Frats funnel enormous amounts of alumni money back
toward universities, and free them from the obligation to provide
housing for their most privileged students. In return, frats enjoy a
built-in leeway. Boys who join frats today are mostly conscious of
wanting good parties, funny friends, hot girls around every
weekend. Underneath this lies the thrill of group immunity, of
being able to, on the wholesome end, throw a sink out the window
without being written up for property destruction. On the
unwholesome end, frats provide social cover to engage in
extraordinary interpersonal violence, through the hazing process; to
purchase and consume as much alcohol and as many drugs as one
wants to; and to throw parties at which everyone is there at the
pleasure of the “brothers”—particularly the girls.
As early as the 1920s, Syrett writes, fraternity culture started to
explicitly invoke sexual coercion. “If a girl don’t pet, a man can
figure he didn’t rush ’er right,” a fraternity member says in the 1923
novel Town and Gown. In 1971, William Inge wrote a novel called
My Son Is a Splendid Driver, based on his experience in a
University of Kansas frat in the twenties. The characters go on dates
with sorority girls, take them home, and then go back out to solicit
sex from prostitutes. One night they participate in a “gang-bang” in
the frat basement. “I felt that to have refused,” the narrator thinks,
“would have cast doubts upon my masculinity, an uncertain thing at
best, I feared, that daren’t hide from any challenge.” The woman at
the center of the event yells, resigned and aggressive, “Well, go on
and fuck me….That’s what I’m here for.”
Thirty-five percent of UVA students belong to a fraternity or
sorority. When I was on campus, people outside the Greek system
were referred to as goddamn independents, or GDIs. Because first-
year students live in dorms, and mostly can’t buy alcohol or throw
parties, a huge amount of partying at UVA takes place in frat
houses, on frat terms. (Due to the Greek system’s dogged adherence
to gender traditionalism, sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties
at all.) There is as much individual variance within the Greek
system as within any other: I was welcomed into it despite being
openly averse to many of its central features, and Andrew, my
partner of a decade, lived in his UVA frat house for two years,
volunteered at the daycare across the street on Tuesdays and
Thursdays, and remains a sweeter, more sincere person than I am.
But it’s been well documented that men in fraternities have a higher
perpetration rate than college men in general. A recent study at
Columbia showed that they are victimized more often, too. The
fraternity environment doesn’t create rapists as much as it perfectly
obscures them: every weekend is organized around men giving
women alcohol, everyone getting as drunk as possible, hookups as
the performative end goal, and a lockable bedroom only a handful of
steps away.
Jackie’s false accusation, in this context, appears as a sort of
chimera—a grotesque, mismatched creation; a false way of making a
real problem visible. In 2017, in a beautiful piece for n+1, Elizabeth
Schambelan wrote about her own lingering obsession with Jackie’s
story, which she observed, in retrospect, was guided by a sort of
fairy-tale inevitability: a girl in a red dress walked into a wilderness
and encountered a pack of wolves. “In retrospect, the failures of its
naturalism seem so clear,” she writes. “The dark chamber, the
silhouetted attackers….But most of all, it’s the table, the crystalline
pyrotechnics of its shattering. That’s the place where the narrative
strains hardest against realism, wanting to move into another
register altogether.” Jackie had woven another version of “Little Red
Riding Hood,” which Susan Brownmiller once argued was a “parable
of rape.” A girl is intercepted on her journey by a wolf, a violent
seducer, who then disguises himself, and falls upon her, and eats
her up.
Schambelan quotes two anthropologists, Dorcas Brown and
David Anthony, who in 2012 wrote an article tracking the
association of wolf symbols with “youthful war-bands” in ancient
Europe “that operated on the edges of society, and that stayed
together for a number of years and then were disbanded when their
members reached a certain age.” These war-bands were “associated
with sexual promiscuity,” Brown and Anthony write. They “came
from the wealthier families…their duties centered on fighting and
raiding…they lived ‘in the wild,’ apart from their families.” In
Germanic legend, this organization is called the Männerbund, a
word that means “men-league.” The men disguised themselves with
animal skins, which allowed them to break social restrictions
without guilt until their time in the Männerbund was over. “At the
end of four years,” Brown and Anthony write, “there was a final
sacrifice to transform the dog-warriors into responsible adult men
who were ready to return to civil life. They discarded and destroyed
their old clothes and dog skins. They became human once again.” In
her piece, Schambelan wonders: once you have formed leagues of
men, isolated from their wealthy families, trained for collective
wildness—“once you make that choice, as a society, to create that
institution, how do you keep the chaos at bay? How do you make
sure it never turns against you?”
Schambelan suggests that “Little Red Riding Hood” could be a
“parable of rape, yes, of rape and murder and the most extravagant
transgression imaginable.”
But possibly it was less a warning than a ritualized
mnemonic. Maybe its function, or one of them, was to ensure
that no one could forget or deny the price they had agreed to
pay, the price of maintaining a Männerbund, an institution of
wolfishness. There is no darkly romantic teleology here, no
unbroken chain of historical inheritance linking wolf boys to
frat boys, just as there is no primordial wellspring of
masculine violence that forces wolf boys to kill or frat boys to
rape. There are two institutions, two leagues of young men,
one belonging to an archaic and semi-mythic past, the other
flourishing here and now. Institutions, by definition, are not
natural or primal. They are not what just happens when you
let boys be boys. They are created and sustained for a reason.
They do work.
Rape is an inescapable function of a world that has been designed to
give men a maximal amount of lawless freedom, she argues. It
“cannot, logically, be just a vile anomaly in an ethical system
otherwise egalitarian and humane.” Writing six months before the
Harvey Weinstein revelations and everything that followed, she
goes on: “There is, as yet, nothing and no one to make us know [the
injustice of rape], nothing to make it public knowledge, knowledge
that we all share and that we all acknowledge that we share. To
create that kind of knowledge, you must have more power than
whatever forces are working to maintain oblivion.” Perhaps, she
suggests, it was in some misguided attempt to claim this power that
Jackie told her lie.
—
In January 2015, in the aftermath of the Rolling Stone story, I went
back to Charlottesville to write about fraternity rush. It was the first
story I’d ever reported, and I was nervous, looking at UVA, feeling
my vantage point change from participant to observer. On my first
night back, I sat in a booth in the Virginian and drank beer with my
friend Steph to calm my jitters, listening for the tone of the chatter
in a sea of khaki-and-North-Faced fraternity hopefuls, sorority
rushees with tall boots and curled hair.
It quickly became apparent that there was a much larger and
deeper story transpiring than what Erdely had captured. The Rolling
Stone story had arrived in the midst of a season of shocking local
brutality, bookended by the death of a young woman named
Yeardley Love in 2010 and the fatal white-power rally in 2017. Love,
whom I’d met during sorority rush, was murdered in her bedroom
by her ex-boyfriend George Huguely, who kicked down her door and
brutalized her until her heart stopped. In 2014, a second-year
student named Hannah Graham disappeared from downtown.
Later, a cab driver named Jesse Matthew was charged with
murdering Graham, as well as Morgan Harrington, a girl who’d
disappeared five years earlier. He, like Huguely, had a history of
violence. He pled guilty in both cases, to murder and to “abduction
with intent to defile.”
Charlottesville is a small community: it takes just fifteen
minutes on the old-fashioned trolley to go from the UVA chapel to
the pedestrian mall downtown. These crimes reverberated. One of
my best friends from college—a girl named Rachel, blond and white
and beautiful, as all these girls had been—was the last passenger
Matthew drove in his cab before he abducted and murdered Morgan
Harrington, a fact she found out from police much later, in the
midst of the intensive Hannah Graham investigation. And yet, at the
same time, other young women disappeared and hardly anyone
noticed. When Sage Smith, a black trans woman, went missing in
the fall of 2012, the police department waited eleven days before
requesting external support. In contrast, as Emma Eisenberg noted
in a piece for Splinter, nearly every law enforcement agency in
Virginia knew Graham’s name and face within forty-eight hours,
with the FBI and a slew of volunteer search groups following close
behind. Coverage of Graham was inescapable; coverage of Smith
was nonexistent. (Eisenberg told me that she tried twenty-eight
outlets before finding one that would publish the piece.) Alexis
Murphy, a seventeen-year-old black girl who went missing near
Charlottesville in 2013, also received a minimum of press coverage.
When a white man named Randy Taylor was found guilty of
murdering her, his pale, gaunt face was mostly absent from the
news. But Matthew—his dark skin, his full lips, his thick locs—was
everywhere you looked.
Charlottesville’s history of gendered violence and its history of
racial violence, long intertwined, were emerging. A vast
undercurrent of trauma and inequity was welling up. Women’s
bodies have always been test sites upon which governing
hierarchies are broken down and reiterated. In the nineteenth
century, black men convicted of rape in Virginia got the death
penalty, where white men were imprisoned for ten to twenty years.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia citizens became
very concerned about the rape of white women—but almost
exclusively in cases when the accused were black.
Violence against women is fundamentally connected to other
systems of violence. Though Erdely tried, it’s not possible to capture
the reality of rape—or even of fraternities—at UVA without writing
about race. When I left Charlottesville that January, I kept thinking
about a damning fact that a grad student named Maya Hislop had
told me, a fact that had not surfaced either in Rolling Stone or in the
exhaustive coverage that followed it: UVA’s first reported rape
occurred in 1850, when three students took an enslaved girl into a
field and gang-raped her.
UVA was founded in 1819, by a seventy-six-year-old Thomas
Jefferson, who retired from politics to Monticello, his Virginia
plantation, and dedicated himself to what at the time was a radical
vision: a secular public university that would be accessible to all
white men, regardless of whether they were rich or poor. Today, the
Thomas Jefferson cult is intrinsic to the UVA experience. Jefferson
is frequently, and creepily, referred to as “TJ,” or as “Mr. Jefferson.”
My full ride to UVA came from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.
The school enthusiastically celebrates Jefferson’s ingenuity, his
integrity, his rebelliousness, his vocabulary. When I was in college,
every Valentine’s Day, flyers blanketed the campus with Jefferson
and his slave Sally Hemings depicted in cameo silhouette, and the
cutesy slogan “TJ ♥s Sally” below that.
Sally Hemings was thirty years younger than Jefferson, and she
was an infant when she became his property, courtesy of his wife,
Martha. Hemings was Martha’s slave, and her half sister; she was
three quarters white. When she was fourteen, she was put in charge
of one of Jefferson’s daughters on an overseas voyage. Jefferson
met them in Paris, and by the time he left, Hemings was sixteen and
pregnant. (At the time, the age of consent in Virginia was ten.)
Hemings considered staying in Paris, where the French freedom
principle had emancipated her by default. But, according to her son
Madison, Jefferson persuaded her to return by promising her
“extraordinary privileges,” and assuring her that he would free her
children once they turned twenty-one.
In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson muses that blacks
are “much inferior” to whites in their critical capacities, and that the
obvious inferiority of black people is “not the effect merely of their
condition of life.” It may have been because of these views, not in
spite of them, that Hemings, a light-skinned ladies’ maid, appeared
particularly attractive. The relationship was an open secret. In 1818,
the Richmond Recorder wrote, “It is well known that the man,
whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years
past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is
SALLY.” But Jefferson never commented, and so the story was
suppressed. (One of his grandchildren wrote in a letter, “I would put
it to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable in his domestic
character as Mr. Jefferson…would be likely to rear a race of half-
breeds….There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.”)
He did free Hemings’s children before he died, but not Hemings
herself, who was freed by Jefferson’s daughter in 1834. In 1835 she
died, and was buried in an unmarked grave that likely lies under a
parking lot near the Hampton Inn in downtown Charlottesville.
Jefferson, of course, is buried at Monticello, along with his
descendants—the white ones.
In 1987, Monticello was designated, along with the UVA campus,
as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It remains a popular tourist
destination in Charlottesville, and it has been steadily altering its
programming to acknowledge the lived reality of Jefferson’s slaves.
In 2018, Monticello finally mounted an exhibit about Hemings,
which depicted her in silhouette—there is no record of what she
looked like—and noted, “Enslaved women had no legal right to
consent. Their masters owned their labor, their bodies, and their
children.” Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book on Jefferson and
Hemings cemented the truth about their relationship, points out
that Martha had no legal right to refuse her husband, either.
(Spousal rape was not criminalized in Virginia until 2002, and the
state senator Richard Black is still fighting to decriminalize it.) A
Times piece about the Monticello exhibit mentions the inevitable
backlash, quoting a woman in the Thomas Jefferson Heritage
Society, which is dedicated to disputing the narrative that Jefferson
fathered Hemings’s children. “Some nights I just curl up in the
semidark and just read his letters,” the woman said. “He just doesn’t
seem to be a person who would do this.”
This tension between honorable appearances and unsavory
reality was embedded at UVA in the nature of its founding. “The
school was new and experimental, unsure of the public’s support
and uncertain of its own future,” write Rex Bowman and Carlos
Santos in Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, their 2013 history of UVA in its
infancy. “No powerful church denomination backed the university,
no well-connected alumni group stood ready to come to its defense.
Its leaders understood that student drunkenness, violence, and
rebellion could result in the university’s ruin.” The students, drawn
from the Southern slave-owning class, were uncontrollable
nonetheless. In the classroom, they displayed an “exaggerated sense
of self-importance.” Outside class, they drank and fought. A teacher
in Fredericksburg called the school “a nursery of bad principles.” A
student wrote, “Here nothing is more common than to see students
so drunk as to be unable to walk.” Bowman and Santos note that
Jefferson believed that “pride, ambition, and morality would lead
students to behave….Students’ honor would make strict rules
unnecessary.” But the concept of honor, particularly where white
men and the South are concerned, is inextricably tied to violence.
UVA’s greatest self-designated virtue served, from the beginning, as
cover and fuel for its greatest sins.
From even these early days, administrators feared student
violence primarily as a publicity problem. “A murdered student
would bring unwanted attention to the students’ widespread
lawlessness,” write Bowman and Santos, as well as “bad publicity to
a university bent on protecting a fragile image as a quiet ‘academical
village.’ ” The school suppressed compromising information: after a
typhoid outbreak in 1828 that killed three students, UVA failed to
officially record the deaths or report them to the state, as was
required by law. After a resurgence of typhoid the next year,
students began withdrawing. Robley Dunglison, UVA’s first
professor of medicine, suggested that these students were spreading
“an alarm throughout the Country highly calculated to injure the
institution.”
All of this has been swept behind the curtain of Thomas
Jefferson’s reputation. UVA boosters point out that he wrote
legislation opposing slavery, even though he also brought slaves to
the White House, and used them as human collateral for the debts
he accrued while turning Monticello into a future UNESCO
landmark. On UVA’s opening day, enslaved people—construction
workers, cooks, laundresses—outnumbered the students. There are
very few traces left of the lives of enslaved women at UVA, and yet it
was on these women’s perceived lack of personhood that the
personhood of UVA students was established. The first recorded
sexual assault on campus took place seven months after the school
opened, when two students stormed into a professor’s house and
stripped an enslaved woman of her clothes. The men who studied
medicine under the supervision of Robley Dunglison owed their
education in part to the work of one enslaved woman named
Prudence, who cleaned blood off the floors of the Anatomical Hall.
UVA didn’t go coed until 1970. Before that, on the terms of the
university, women were fundamentally other. Women were
prohibited from walking on the Lawn when school was in session—
an “unwritten rule,” the Cav Daily notes, that was enforced until the
twenties. In 1954, in response to a proposal that “house moms” be
installed in dormitories, one student joked to the paper, “I think
housemothers would be fine if they were deaf, dumb, and blind,
their arms and legs cut off, and would be contented with bread and
water while being chained to the basement furnace.” In April of the
same year, a nineteen-year-old girl was brutally gang-raped in a
Lawn room. She was brought there by a date just before two in the
morning; she emerged, dazed and beaten, at ten A.M.
The girl, who was from a well-connected family, went to her
parents soon afterward. Her parents went directly to Colgate
Darden, UVA’s president at the time. Darden expelled or suspended
all twelve men who were involved in the gang rape, a move that
provoked widespread anger on campus. Three of the accused wrote
a letter to the Cav Daily saying that they were “charged only with a
failure to put a halt to the actions of others.” Darden stuck to his
convictions, and the students rose up, submitting a sixteen-page
formal complaint to the university. A hundred men showed up at a
faculty meeting to protest. Soon afterward, students lobbied to
change the structure of the university’s government. They formed a
student judiciary committee that would, the Cav Daily noted,
“return the disciplinary power of the President’s Office to the
student body with a machinery vastly different from that of
previous years.” Student self-governance is a Jeffersonian ideal, and
it remains one of UVA’s proudest practices. The Office of the Dean
of Students lists it first in a line of traditions that make the school a
“special place.”
A month after the 1954 gang rape, the Supreme Court handed
down Brown v. Board of Education. Harry F. Byrd, the senator who
controlled Virginia politics, began promoting the program known as
Massive Resistance—a group of laws that would reward students
who opposed integration and close any public school that complied.
In 1958, Charlottesville closed down its schools for five months
rather than admit black students. In 1959, a federal judge overruled
this, ordering that nine black students be admitted to Venable
Elementary—the school on Fourteenth Street, whose shrieking
recess breaks I used to observe with a beer on my roof. My friend
Rachel, the one who rode in Jesse Matthew’s cab just before he
killed Morgan Harrington, now sends her own daughters to
Venable. The girls are twins, gorgeous and funny and brilliant;
Andrew and I are their godparents. Some days I feel crazed with
hope and certainty that the world they grow up in will be
unrecognizably different. And yet, on the day of the Unite the Right
rally, David Duke and his band of white supremacists marched right
by Rachel’s house.
College towns, which turn over their population every four years,
are suffused with a unique and possibly necessary sort of amnesia.
If you know the history, you have to remake it, or at least believe
that remaking it is possible. You have to believe that there is a
reason you are there now, not the people who got it all so wrong
before. More likely, though, you feel like you’re the only person
who’s ever stepped on campus. Most likely you have no tangible
sense of historical wrongdoing. The ugliness, the trauma, of UVA’s
past half decade is related to how intensely and consistently the
school has tried to suppress the idea that it could ever be ugly or
traumatic. (The same is true of America under Trump.) The school’s
self-conception will never become completely true until it can admit
the extent to which it has always been false: that its fetishized
campus was built by slave laborers; that it has, in fact, a long history
of gang rape; that Alderman Library, where I spent so many nights
writing terrible papers, was named after a staunch eugenicist who,
as president of the university, thanked the Ku Klux Klan for a
donation with the sign-off “Faithfully yours.”
—
Years have elapsed since the Rolling Stone story. Much of what
Erdely wanted to achieve with her reporting has, within the past two
years, come to pass. The public has been galvanized by sexual
assault reporting, riveted by stories of abuse and institutional
indifference. I sometimes wonder: if Rolling Stone hadn’t botched
this piece in such a spectacular fashion, would the wave that came
later have been so relatively impeccable? With the coverage of the
accusations against Bill Cosby, starting with New York’s
groundbreaking 2015 cover, and with the Harvey Weinstein story
and everything that followed, reporters avoided presenting any
single woman or experience as broadly representative. They
demanded a lot of their subjects, and in doing so, strengthened their
subjects’ positions. They showed their readers what they, as
reporters, knew and did not know.
Things have started to change at UVA, too. Students have
stopped yelling “Not gay!” during the school song. (Now they yell
“Fuck Tech!,” a reference to UVA’s Virginia Tech rivalry.) No one
says “GDI.” Young people readily call themselves feminists. There’s
a discussion about renaming Alderman Library, and there’s a
Charlottesville chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Sexual assault prevention is now a major part of new student
orientation—even though this sort of programming is, at any school,
effective mostly in that it raises awareness of the issue. The
percentage of UVA students who report confidence in their school’s
ability to handle a sexual assault complaint has doubled, although
the total percentage remains under fifty. And during the year that
followed the Weinstein story, the year that ended with Brett
Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, female students at
UVA continued to write to me, telling me, often, that they’d been
assaulted and essentially written off.
I recently talked to a young woman who I’ll call by her middle
name, Frances—a preternaturally bright-eyed and indomitable
character, the sort of person you’d expect to see riding a bicycle with
tulips in the basket down a sunny street. Frances had started school
at UVA in the fall of 2017, and a month into her first semester, she
told me, she was sexually assaulted in her dorm room. The next
morning, she asked a friend to take photos of the bruises on her
neck, where her assailant had choked her. She reported the assault
that day, and her assailant was suspended indefinitely within a
week. “I felt so unilaterally supported by the student body,” she told
me—as well as by the police department, which charged her
assailant with sexual battery and strangulation and, later, perjury.
(On the positivity of her police interactions, she acknowledged,
matter-of-factly, “I’m also a white girl.”) In the months that
followed her assault, she tried to keep busy with the bureaucracy of
the reporting process; she got a therapist, whom she talked to about
her recurring dreams about her assailant. In one of these dreams,
she’d be alone in a room with him, unable to unlock her phone to
call for help.
Frances and I spent a long time talking about the way UVA sells
itself. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and visited UVA for the
first time in the fall of her junior year of high school. “I was in love
immediately, from that first moment, stepping onto the Lawn at
night,” she said. “It was perfect.” After that visit, she put photos of
the Rotunda and Charlottesville on her computer and phone
screens. “I wanted all of it, the carols on the Lawn by candlelight,
this bastion of the ‘illimitable freedom of the human mind,’ ” she
said, quoting Jefferson. She was thirteen when the Rolling Stone
story came out, and she didn’t read it. She still hasn’t. She knew it
was discredited. And maybe, she thought, UVA could still be all the
things that it said it was.
After months of investigation, UVA found Frances’s assailant not
guilty. He was free to return to campus. (She wrote to me in the fall
of her second year—he had, in fact, returned.) The school issued a
127-page report that effectively concludes that she is unreliable.
“They painted me as some drunken party girl who was out to flirt,
and things got a little out of control, and I was embarrassed and
couldn’t handle the consequences,” she told me. I read the entire
report, and by the end felt physically debilitated. In a written
statement, her assailant agreed that there was a sexual encounter,
and that Frances had physically struggled against him in her
attempt to end the encounter. He asserted that he had stopped at an
appropriate time. The report noted that—understandably enough—
there were significant incongruities between Frances’s behavior
toward her assailant before the incident and her statements after
the incident occurred. Following from this, and from the school’s
obligation to presume non-responsibility, the encounter was
essentially deemed acceptable: the unspoken conclusion was that
Frances was either lying, or deceiving herself, or rightfully to blame.
It filled me with anesthetizing despair to remember that her
experience was itself the product of enormous change. Frances had
been taken seriously by her friends and by the police department.
UVA had suspended her assailant and conducted a thorough and
procedurally correct inquiry. But still, she had been assaulted after a
party her first semester. Still, the school had decided it wouldn’t be
fair to hold her assailant responsible. The things that defined her
selfhood—her verve, her confidence, her eagerness—had been
devastated just as they were reaching a peak. Everyone was
technically doing what they were supposed to, and yet it felt like a
glass structure was being constructed around some unfathomable
rot.
The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual
assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured
the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—
that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these
systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively
manufactures. No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape
is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can
instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the
victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used
to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain
rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of
adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for
people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The
fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this.
The world that we believe in, that we’re attempting to make real and
tangible, is still not the world that exists.
I’ve begun to think that there is no room for writing about sexual
assault that relies on any sense of anomaly. The truth about rape is
that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to
make that into a satisfying story.
—
While writing this, I found Jackie’s long-dormant wedding registry
on the internet. As I snooped through it, I pictured the house where
she lives under a new last name—its cheerful kitchen, with red
enamel apples on the paper-towel holder; the sign in the entryway
that says, “Gratitude Turns What We Have into Enough.” I felt an
awful contempt flooding through me. Earlier that day, I’d read her
entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, the troll Wikipedia: “Does this
mean lying whore Jackie…owes us a free gangbang now?” it asked.
“How about Sabrina Rubin Erdely? SHE deserves a good
chokefucking, no?” I had recoiled, partly because of the language
and partly out of a shocking sense of recognition: I resent the two of
them, too. There’s a part of me that feels as if Jackie and Erdely
inadvertently sentenced me to a life of writing about sexual violence
—as if I learned to report on a subject so personal that it imprinted
on me, as if I will always feel some irrational compulsion to try to
undo or redeem two strangers’ mistakes.
But I know how easily anger is displaced on this particular topic.
I know that what I really resent is sexual violence itself. I resent the
boys who never thought for a second that they were doing anything
wrong. I resent the men they’ve become, the power they’ve amassed
through subordination, the self-interrogation they ostentatiously
hold at bay. I hate the dirty river I’m standing in, not the journalist
and the college student who capsized in it. I understand that we
have all shared in the same project, in some way. Schambelan
writes, in her n+1 essay:
This is the story I’ve come up with, about the story Jackie
told: she did it out of rage. She had no idea she was enraged,
but she was. Something had happened, and she wanted to tell
other people, so that they would know what happened and
how she felt. But when she tried to tell it—maybe to
somebody else, maybe to herself—the story had no power. It
didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in
the living. It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently
forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a
million other women—but that wasn’t what it felt like to her.
At the close of her piece, Schambelan guesses at what Jackie might
have been trying to say. It “can’t be said reasonably,” she writes. “It
must be said melodramatically. Something like: Look at this. Don’t
you fucking dare not look….You’re going to know what we’ve
decided is worth sacrificing, what price we’ve decided we’re willing
to pay to maintain this league of men, and this time, you’re going to
remember.”
When I think about Jackie now, I think about the year that I
came within striking distance of this fevered derangement—never at
UVA, only after I graduated, when I moved to Kyrgyzstan, an
obscure, beautiful, illogical post-Soviet republic, to serve in the
Peace Corps. A week after our arrival in March, the government was
overthrown in a conflict that killed eighty-eight people and injured
almost five hundred. Later that summer, there was a rash of
genocidal violence against the country’s Uzbek population: two
thousand people were killed, and one hundred thousand people
were displaced. I was evacuated twice to the now-closed American
military base near the Kyrgyz capital, which staged air force
missions to Afghanistan, and a third time to the border of
Kazakhstan. Between these periods of upheaval, I lived in a mile-
long village tucked deep in the snowy mountains, taught English to
high school students, and completely lost my mind.
Kyrgyzstan, by some official measures, was far ahead of the
United States in terms of gender equality. The interim president
after the 2010 revolution was a woman. Female politicians were
introducing waves of progressive legislation in parliament. The
country’s constitution, unlike ours, ensured equal rights. But in the
texture of everyday living, the country was run on what seemed like
astonishingly constrictive male terms. In public, I made sure my
knees and shoulders were covered. Soon after I met my preteen host
sister, she earnestly warned me to watch out for men who would
grab me on the bus. There’s an old Kyrgyz tradition of “bride
kidnapping,” in which men snatch up women in public and then
hold them hostage until they agree to get married. Today this
tradition is mostly staged, as a form of elopement, but it hasn’t
disappeared. Domestic violence was ubiquitous. Women volunteers
were harassed constantly—Asian women in particular, because we
bore some plausible resemblance to the locals. I got used to cab
drivers taking long detours and engaging me in extraordinarily
invasive conversations before they finally relented and took me
home. When Andrew came to visit, a local man asked him—jokingly,
but repeatedly—if he had a gun, and if he would be willing to fight to
keep his wife.
A claustrophobia began to set in on the dusty streets, on long bus
rides, under the wide, extraterrestrial sky. Tight security restrictions
had been imposed on us because of the ambient conflict, but of
course I broke them, because I was lonely, and I wanted to hang out
and keep busy, and I felt I had the right to do what I wanted to do.
As that was not strictly the case, I spent several months “grounded”
to my village as punishment, where I started to feel even more
skittish—looking over my shoulder when I took walks in the
mountains, never sure if the men I saw were following me or if I
was just going insane. One day, my host father, drunk and leaning
in, I thought, for a cheek kiss, grabbed me and kissed me on the
mouth. I sprinted away and called a friend, then called a Peace
Corps administrator, asking if I could go stay in the capital city for a
little while. He suggested that, given my reputation in the office, I
was just looking for an excuse to go party with my friends. And in
fact, I was hoping to go party with my friends, because I wanted to
distract myself from the fact that my host father had kissed me. The
entire incident confused me deeply. Worse things had happened to
me in college, and a kiss is whatever, and I didn’t understand why
this one suddenly felt like a big deal. I had always found it easy,
even automatic, to dismiss sexual harassment as I had experienced
it. I had always believed that unwanted sexual aggression was a sign
of humiliating weakness in the aggressors; I’d always thought
myself to be self-evidently better than anyone who would try to
coerce or overpower me. But here, I was supposed to be humble. I
wasn’t better than anyone. I was supposed to—I wanted to—adhere
to other people’s norms.
Later on, after I left Kyrgyzstan, a year early, it became clear to
me that I had been depressed. I was twenty-one, and I was trying
my hardest to be permeable, to be alive to other people’s suffering,
but I didn’t know how to stop being permeable when it was
pointless, when it was ultimately narcissistic, when it did no good. I
felt, monstrously, that there was no boundary between my situation
and the larger situation, between my tiny injustices and the
injustices everyone faced. I was so naïve, and violence seemed to be
everywhere: a bus thundering through my village at night hit a
person and kept driving; a drunk man threw a child against a wall. It
was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed
within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive—that
women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that
men were suffering because they were expected to perform this
dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago,
that there was very little I could do.
This resulted in a state of mind that felt delusional and paranoid
and underwater, so much so that I’m still not sure what exactly
happened, whether I was overestimating or underestimating the
danger I was in in any given situation, whether I was imagining the
boys at the market who grabbed me as I walked past them on a side
road, or the extra twenty minutes I spent in the cab begging the
driver to take me home—or if, in the fifteen seconds that elapsed
between my host father kissing me and me calling my friend, I had
somehow simply imagined, or, worse, somehow instigated, the
whole encounter. I was furious when my administrator blew me off,
and I buried my anger because I understood that I was being
entitled: I could terminate my service anytime I wanted to; I had it
so easy compared to every local woman I knew. But even the
suggestion that I was making something out of nothing made me
wonder if I was, in fact, making something out of nothing. I started
wanting things to happen to me, as if to prove to myself that I
wasn’t crazy, wasn’t hallucinating. Spiky with resentment, I glared
at men who looked at me too closely, daring them to give me
another event to write down in my little secret file of incidents,
daring them to make visible the dawning sense I had of women
living in a continual state of violation, daring them to help me
realize that I wasn’t making any of this up. I wish I had known—
then, in Peace Corps, or in college—that the story didn’t need to be
clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never
be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see
what was true.
The Cult of the Difficult Woman
Over the past decade, there’s been a sea change that feels both
epochal and underrecognized: it is now completely normal for
women to understand their lives, and the lives of other women, on
feminist terms. Where it was once standard to call any
unmanageable woman crazy or abrasive, “crazy” and “abrasive” now
scan as sexist dog whistles. Where media outlets used to scrutinize
women’s appearances, they still do—but in a feminist way. Slut-
shaming went from a popular practice in the early 2000s to a what-
not-to-do buzzword in the late 2000s to a hard cultural taboo by
2018. The ride from Britney Spears getting upskirted on tabloid
covers to Stormy Daniels as likable political hero has been so
bumpy, so dizzying, that it can be easy to miss the profundity of this
shift.
The reframing of female difficulty as an asset rather than a
liability is the result of decades and decades of feminist thought
coming to bear—suddenly, floridly, and very persuasively—in the
open ideological space of the internet. It’s been solidified by a sort
of narrative engineering conducted both retrospectively and in real
time: the rewriting of celebrity lives as feminist texts. Feminist
celebrity discourse operates the way most cultural criticism does in
the social media era, along lines of “ideological pattern-recognition,”
as Hua Hsu put it in The New Yorker. Writers take a celebrity’s life
and her public narrative, shine the black light on it, and point to the
sexism as it starts to glow.
Celebrities have been the primary teaching tools through which
online feminism has identified and resisted the warping force of
patriarchal judgment. Britney Spears, initially glossed as a vapid,
oversexed ingénue-turned-psycho, now seems perfectly
sympathetic: the public required her to be seductive, innocent,
flawless, and bankable, and she crumbled under the impossibility of
these competing demands. In life, Amy Winehouse and Whitney
Houston were often depicted as strung-out monsters; in death, they
are understood to have been geniuses all along. Monica Lewinsky
wasn’t a dumb slut, she was an ordinary twentysomething caught in
an exploitative affair with the most powerful boss in America.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t a shrill charisma vacuum incapable of
winning the trust of ordinary people, but rather an overqualified
public servant whose ambitions were thwarted by her opponents’
bigotry and rage.
Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip
pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating
the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political
import. It’s also a personal matter, because when we reclaim the
stories that surround female celebrities, stories surrounding
ordinary women are reclaimed, too. Within the past few years,
feminist coverage—fair coverage, in other words—has increasingly
become standard across the media. The Harvey Weinstein story, and
everything that followed, was possible in no small part because
women were finally able to count upon a baseline of feminist
narrative interpretation. Women knew their stories of victimization
would be understood—not by everyone, but by many people—on
their terms. Annabella Sciorra could acknowledge that rape had led
to her effective banishment from the industry; Asia Argento could
acknowledge that she dated Weinstein after he raped her. Both
women could trust that these facts would not, in this new climate,
render them suspicious or pathetic. (The coverage of the awful coda
to Argento’s story—the allegation that she had later sexually
assaulted a much younger co-star—was also relatively complex and
measured, with outlets condemning her behavior and
acknowledging that abuse begets abuse.)
In turn, when presented with stories about famous women as
subjects, not objects, massive numbers of ordinary women
recognized themselves in what they saw. Women were able to
articulate facts that often previously went unspoken: that entering a
relationship with someone doesn’t preclude being victimized by
them, but sometimes follows it, and that being sexually harassed or
assaulted can ruin your career. Women could see, through Hillary
Clinton, how much this country despises a woman who wants
power; through Monica Lewinsky, sold out by both Clintons, how
easily we become casualties of other people’s ambition; through the
coverage of Britney Spears’s breakdown, how female suffering is
turned into a joke. Any woman whose story has been altered and
twisted by the force of male power—so, any woman—can be framed
as a complicated hero, entombed by patriarchy and then raised by
feminists from the dead.
But when the case for a woman’s worth is built partly on the
unfairness of what’s leveled at her, things get slippery, especially as
the internet expands the range and reach of hate and unfair scrutiny
into infinity—a fact that holds even as feminist ideas become
mainstream. Every woman faces backlash and criticism.
Extraordinary women face a lot of it. And that criticism always
exists in the context of sexism, just like everything else in a
woman’s life. These three facts have collapsed into one another,
creating the idea that harsh criticism of a woman is itself always
sexist, and furthermore, more subtly, that receiving sexist criticism
is in itself an indication of a woman’s worth.
When the tools of pop-feminist celebrity discourse are applied to
political figures like Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
Hope Hicks, and Melania Trump—as they are, increasingly—the
limits of this type of analysis start to show. I have wondered if we’re
entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the
face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment
is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair
criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women
from criticism categorically; if it’s become possible to praise a
woman specifically because she is criticized—for that featureless
fact alone.
—
The underlying situation is simple. We are all defined by our
historical terms and conditions, and these terms and conditions
have mostly been written by and for men. Any woman whose name
has survived history has done so against a backdrop of male power.
Until very recently, we were always introduced to women through a
male perspective. There is always a way to recast a woman’s life on
women’s terms.
You could do this—and people have done this—with the entire
Bible, starting with Eve, whom we might see not as a craven sinner
but as a radical knowledge-seeker. Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of
salt for daring to look back at burning Sodom and Gomorrah, could
exemplify not disobedience but rather the disproportionate
punishment of women. Lot, after all, was the one who offered up his
two virgin daughters to be raped by a mob of strangers, and later
impregnated both of them while living in a cave. My Sunday school
teachers spoke kindly of Lot, as a man who had to make difficult
choices; in art, he’s portrayed as an Everyman, overcome by the
temptations of young female flesh. In contrast, all his wife did was
crane her neck around, and she was smited forever, unglamorously.
And the temptresses, of course, beg for a retelling: Delilah,
portrayed as a lying prostitute who delivered her lover to the
Philistines, seems today like just another woman seeking pleasure
and survival in a compromised world. From the biblical perspective,
these women are cautionary tales. From the feminist one, they
demonstrate the limits of a moral standard that requires women to
be subservient. Either way, their allure is baked right in. “Of course
the bitch persona appeals to us. It is the illusion of liberation,”
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes in her 1998 book Bitch, a precursor to the
wave of feminist cultural criticism that has now become standard.
Delilah, writes Wurtzel, “was a sign of life. I lived in a world of
exhausted, taxed single mothers at the mercy of men who
overworked and underpaid them….I had never in my life
encountered a woman who’d brought a man down. Until Delilah.”
Delilah is a useful example, as the power she seized was
inextricable from the expectation that she would be powerless.
Samson was a colossus: as a teenager, he ripped a lion apart limb
from limb. He killed thirty Philistines and gave their clothing to his
groomsmen. He killed a thousand men using just a donkey’s
jawbone. And so Delilah seemed harmless to Samson, even as she
badgered him for the truth about where his strength came from, and
playfully tied him up at night with rope. Samson told her the truth—
that his strength was in his hair, which had never been cut—and
then fell asleep in her lap. Delilah, following instructions from the
Philistines, grabbed her knife.
It’s after this that Samson ascends to his true greatness. The
Philistines capture him, gouge out his eyes, and chain him to a
millstone, making him grind corn like a mule. Eventually, they drag
him to a ritual sacrifice, and the weakened Samson prays to God,
who gives him a last burst of divinity. He breaks the pillars at the
temple, killing thousands of his captors and taking his own life. In
this, he triumphs over evil, defying the cruelty of the Philistines and
their dirty seductress, Delilah, whom Milton describes as “thorn
intestine” in the poem Samson Agonistes. “Foul effeminacy held me
yoked / Her bond-slave,” Milton’s Samson cries. The admission of
hatred is an acknowledgment of her power. Wurtzel writes:
“Delilah, to me, was clearly the star.”
By nature, difficult women cause trouble, and that trouble can
almost always be reinterpreted as good. Women claiming the power
and agency that historically belonged to men is both the story of
female evil and the story of female liberation. To work for the latter,
you have to be willing to invoke the former: liberation is often
mistaken for evil as it occurs. In 1905, Christabel Pankhurst kicked
off the militant phase of the English suffrage movement when she
spat at a police officer at a political meeting, knowing that this
would lead to her arrest. From then on, the Women’s Social and
Political Union got themselves dragged out of all-male rooms,
imprisoned, force-fed. They smashed windows and set buildings on
fire. The suffragettes were written about as if they were wild
animals, which swiftly highlighted the injustice of their position. In
1906, the Daily Mirror wrote in sympathy: “By what means, but by
screaming, knocking, and rioting, did men themselves ever gain
what they were pleased to call their rights?”
Condemnation historically accompanies most female actions
that fall outside the lines of strict obedience. (Even the Virgin Mary,
the most thoroughly venerated woman in history, faced it: according
to the book of Matthew, Joseph found out about the pregnancy and
asked for a divorce.) But praise comes to disobedient women, too. In
1429, seventeen-year-old Joan of Arc, high on spiritual visions,
persuaded the dauphin Charles to place her at the head of the
French army; she went into battle and helped clinch the throne in
the Hundred Years’ War. In 1430, she was imprisoned, and in 1431,
she was tried for heresy and cross-dressing, and burned at the stake.
But Joan was also simultaneously celebrated. During her
imprisonment, the theorist and poet Christine de Pizan—who
authored The Book of the City of Ladies, a utopian fantasy about an
imaginary city in which women were respected—wrote that Joan
was an “honor for the feminine.” The man who executed her
reported that he “greatly feared to be damned.”
In 1451, twenty years after her death, Joan of Arc was retried
posthumously, and deemed a virtuous martyr. The two stories—her
disobedience, her virtue—continued to intertwine. “The people who
came after her in the five centuries [following] her death tried to
make everything of her,” writes Stephen Richey in his 2003 book
Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint. “Demonic fanatic, spiritual mystic,
naïve and tragically ill-used tool of the powerful, creator and icon of
modern popular nationalism, adored heroine, saint.” Joan was loved
and hated for the same actions, same traits. When she was
canonized, in 1920, she joined a society of women—St. Lucy, St.
Cecilia, St. Agatha—who were martyred because of their purity, the
same way we now canonize pop-culture saints who were martyred
over vice.
—
Rewriting a woman’s story inevitably means engaging with the male
rules that previously defined it. To argue against an ideology, you
have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might
inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that
kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in
the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it
strength and space and time.
In 2016, the writer Sady Doyle published a book called
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and
Why. It analyzed the lives and public narratives of famously
troubled women: Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan,
Whitney Houston, Paris Hilton, as well as figures further back in
history—Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Wollstonecraft, even
Harriet Jacobs. The book was a “well-rounded, thoughtful analysis,”
according to Kirkus, and a “fiercely brilliant, must-read exegesis,”
according to Elle. Its subtitle indicated an underlying uncertainty,
one that elucidates a central ambivalence in feminist discourse.
Who is the “we” that loves to hate, mock, and fear these women? Is
it Doyle’s audience? Or are feminist writers and readers duty bound
to take personal ownership of the full extent of the hate, fear, and
mockery that exists in other people’s brains?
Doyle describes her book as an “attempt to reclaim the
trainwreck, not only as the voice for every part of womanhood we’d
prefer to keep quiet, but also as a girl who routinely colors outside
the lines of her sexist society.” The “we” in that sentence almost
necessarily excludes both Doyle and her reader, and it becomes,
throughout the book, an impossible amalgamation of the
misogynist and the feminist—both of whom are interested, for
opposite reasons, in plumbing the depths of female degradation and
pain. In a chapter about Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, and
Marilyn Monroe, Doyle writes, “By dying, a trainwreck finally gives
us the one statement we wanted to hear from her: that women like
her really can’t make it, and shouldn’t be encouraged to try.” At the
end of a chapter about sex—which takes on “good-girl-gone-queer
Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn
Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to
show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband,” who are all
“tied to the tracks and gleefully run over”—Doyle writes, “We keep
women’s bodies controlled, and women themselves in fear, with the
public immolation of any sexual person who is or seems feminine.”
Do we really? Admittedly, it’s always tricky to generalize in the
collective first person, but this use case is indicative: in our
attempts to acknowledge the persistence of structural inequality, we
sometimes end up unable to see the present popular culture for
what it is.
Trainwreck’s project is, explicitly, to identify mistreatment of
famous women in the past and thus prevent it in the future; it
hopes to obviate the harm done to ordinary women in a culture that
loves to watch female celebrities melt down. Doyle wreaths this
worthy cause in arch, fatalistic hyperbole, exemplifying a tone that
was, for years, a mainstay of online feminist discourse. In a chapter
about Fatal Attraction, she writes, “A woman who wants you to love
her is dangerously close to becoming a woman who demands the
world’s attention.” The trainwreck is “crazy because we’re all crazy—
because, in a sexist culture, being female is an illness for which
there is no cure.” Society makes Miley Cyrus into “a stripper, the
devil, and the walking embodiment of predatory lust.” When we get
on the internet, the “#1 trending topic is still a debate about
whether Rihanna is a Bad Role Model for Women,” and “the verdict
for Rihanna is never favorable.” Valerie Solanas is remembered as a
“bogeyman” of the “dirty, angry, fucked-up, thrown-away women of
the world,” while violent Norman Mailer is remembered as a genius.
(I would guess that plenty of women in my millennial demographic
semi-ironically venerate Solanas, and know Mailer mainly as the
misogynist who stabbed his wife.) Doyle is motivated, she writes, by
“a life spent watching the most beautiful, lucky, wealthy, successful
women in the world reduced to deformed idiot hags in the media,
and battered back into silence and obscurity through the sheer force
of public disdain.”
There is an argument to be made that this is what you have to do
to counteract a force as old as patriarchy—that, in order to eradicate
it, you have to fully reckon with its power, to verbalize and confront
its worst insults and effects. But the result often verges on
deliberate cynicism. “The leap from Paris Hilton to Mary
Wollstonecraft may seem like a long one,” Doyle writes. “But in
practice, it’s hardly even a bunny hop.” She’s referring to the fact
that Wollstonecraft’s sex life overshadowed, for some time, her
canonical work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and that
William Godwin published Wollstonecraft’s salacious letters after
her death. It’s possible to draw a bright line between this and Rick
Salomon selling a sex tape without Hilton’s permission. But what
changed between 1797 and 2004 shouldn’t be underestimated or
undercomplicated—nor should what changed between 2004 and
2016. I’d venture that our reality is not actually one in which the
most beautiful, lucky, successful women in the world are being
turned into “deformed idiot hags.” Women are the drivers and
rulers of the celebrity industry; they are rich; they have rights, if not
as many as they ought to. The fact that women receive huge
amounts of unfair criticism does not negate these facts but informs
them, and in very complicated ways. Female celebrities are now
venerated for their difficulty—their flaws, their complications, their
humanity—with the idea that this will allow us, the ordinary
women, to be flawed, and human, and possibly venerated, too.
—
I’ve been thinking about this argument since 2016—and specifically,
since the week when, within a couple of days of each other, Kim
Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint and Elena Ferrante was doxed.
An online feminist outcry interpreted these two incidents as a single
parable. Look at what happens to ambitious women, people wrote.
Look how women are punished for daring to live the way they
want. This was true, I thought, but in a different way than everyone
seemed to be thinking. The problem seemed deeper—rooted in the
fact that women have to slog through so many obstacles to become
successful that their success is forever refracted through those
obstacles. The problem seemed related to the way that the lives of
famous women are constantly interpreted as crucial referenda on
what we have to overcome to be women at all.
There’s a limit, I think, to the utility of reading celebrity lives like
tea leaves. The lives of famous women are determined by
exponential leaps in visibility, money, and power, whereas the lives
of ordinary women are mostly governed by mundane things: class,
education, housing markets, labor practices. Female celebrities do
indicate the rules of self-promotion—what’s palatable and
marketable to a general public in terms of sexuality and looks and
affect and race. In today’s world, this can seem like an essential
question. But famous women do not always exist at the bleeding
edge of what’s possible. Attention is in many respects constrictive.
Female celebrities are dealing with approval and backlash at such
high, constant levels that it can be significantly more complicated
for them to win the thing we’re all ostensibly after—social
permission for women to live the lives they want.
In 2017, Anne Helen Petersen published Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too
Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, a book that took
the double-edged sword of female difficulty as its thesis. Unruly
women have taken on an “outsized importance in the American
imagination,” Petersen writes. To be unruly is both profitable and
risky; an unruly woman has to toe an ever-moving line of
acceptability, but if she can do so, she can accrue enormous cultural
cachet.
Petersen’s book focuses on this sort of lauded unruliness
—“unruliness that’s made its way into the mainstream.” She writes
about, among others, Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Weiner, Serena
Williams, Kim Kardashian—who bested society’s attempts to
categorize them as (respectively) too fat, too loud, too strong, and
too pregnant. “Does their stardom contribute to an actual sea
change of ‘acceptable’ behaviors and bodies and ways of being for
women today?” she asks. “…That answer is less dependent on the
women themselves and more on the way we, as cultural consumers,
decide to talk and think about them.” These women, in all their
unruliness, “matter—and the best way to show their gravity and
power and influence is to refuse to shut up about why they do.”
Each chapter is dedicated to a woman who seems to possess some
contested quality in excess, but who has nonetheless risen to the
top of her field. These women are difficult and successful.
Unruliness, Petersen writes, is “endlessly electric,” fascinating, cool.
As a category, unruliness is also frustratingly large and
amorphous. So many things are deemed unruly in women that a
woman can seem unruly for simply existing without shame in her
body—just for following her desires, no matter whether those
desires are liberatory or compromising, or, more likely, a
combination of the two. A woman is unruly if anyone has
incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in
turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine. She’s unruly even if
she is hypothetically criticized: for example, Caitlyn Jenner’s entire
celebrity narrative exists in reference to a massive wave of
mainstream backlash that never actually came. Trans women have
some of the hardest and most dangerous lives in America by any
metric, but Caitlyn was immediately, remarkably exceptional. She
was insulated to an unprecedented degree by her wealth and
whiteness and fame (and perhaps by her credentials as a former
Olympian). She came out in a corset on the cover of Vanity Fair;
she got her own TV show; her political opinions—including her
support for a president who would soon roll back protections for the
trans community—made headlines. That this was possible while
states were simultaneously passing “bathroom bills,” while the
murder rate for black trans women remained five times higher than
the murder rate for the general population, is often presented as
evidence for Caitlyn Jenner’s bravery. It should at least as often be
framed as proof of the distance between celebrity narratives and
ordinary life.
In another chapter, Petersen writes about Caitlyn’s stepdaughter
Kim Kardashian. Kim had wanted, as she said on her show, a “cute”
pregnancy, one in which only her belly would broaden. Instead, she
gained weight everywhere. She continued to wear tight clothing and
heels, and in doing so, “she became the unlikely means by which the
cracks in the ideology of ‘good’ maternity became visible.” Kim wore
“outfits with see-through mesh strips, short dresses that showed off
her legs, low-plunging necklines that revealed her substantial
cleavage, high-waisted pencil skirts that broadened, rather than hid,
her girth. She kept wearing heels, and full makeup…performing
femininity and sexuality the same way she had her entire celebrity
career.” In response, she was compared to a whale, a sofa; close-ups
of her swollen ankles in Lucite heels were all over the news. Kim,
while pregnant, faced cruel, sexist criticism. But what is either
implicit or cast aside in the chapter is the fact that what illuminates
Kim as unruly in this situation is less her actual size than her
unflagging commitment to eroticizing and monetizing the body. Her
adherence to the practice of self-objectification is the instinct that
makes her, as Petersen puts it, an “accidental activist” but an
“activist nonetheless.”
The bar is uniquely low with Kim Kardashian, who is frequently
written about—much less in Petersen’s book than elsewhere—as
some sort of deliciously twisted empowerment icon. Kim has
benefited from the feminist tendency to frame female courage as
maximally subversive, when, just as often, it’s minimally so. It is
not “brave,” strictly speaking, for a woman to do the things that will
make her rich and famous. For some women, it is difficult and
indeed dangerous to live as themselves in the world, but for other
women, like Kim and her sisters, it’s not just easy but
extraordinarily profitable. It’s true that the world has told Kim
Kardashian that she’s too pregnant, as well as “too fat, too
superficial, too fake, too curvy, too sexual,” and that this policing, as
Petersen notes, reflects a larger misogynist anxiety about Kim’s
success and power. But Kim is successful and powerful not in spite
of but because of these things. It actively behooves her to be
superficial, fake, curvy, sexual. She is proof of a concept that is not
very complicated or radical: today, it’s possible for a beautiful,
wealthy woman with an uncanny talent for self-surveillance to
make her own dreams of increased wealth and beauty come true.
Petersen articulates this critical angle most clearly in the
Madonna chapter, which focuses on the superstar in her
fiftysomething biceps-and-sinew-and-corset iteration. In embracing
and performing extreme fitness and sexuality, Madonna “may have
outwardly refused the shame of age, but the effort she applied to
fighting getting older stunk of it,” Petersen writes. Onstage, she
jumped rope while singing; she attended the Met Ball in a breastless
bodysuit and assless pants. She was asserting her right to be sexual
past the age deemed socially appropriate, but this taboo-breaking
operated on an extremely specific basis: Madonna wasn’t suggesting
“that all women in their fifties and sixties should be relevant.
Rather, she believes that women who look like her can be relevant.”
The effective message was that women who exercise three hours
each day and maintain a professionally directed diet can just barely
wedge open the Venn diagram between “aging” and “sexy.” This type
of rule-breaking operates, by definition, on the level of the
extraordinary individual. It’s not built to translate to ordinary life.
It’s true, of course, that women who become famous for pushing
social boundaries do the work of demonstrating how outdated these
boundaries are. But what happens once it becomes common
knowledge that these boundaries are outdated? We’ve come into a
new era, in which feminism isn’t always the antidote to
conventional wisdom; feminism is suddenly conventional wisdom
in many spheres. Women are not always—I’d argue that they’re now
rarely—most interesting when breaking uninteresting restrictions.
Melissa McCarthy’s genius is more odd and specific than the
tedious, predictable criticism she’s gotten for being fat. Abbi
Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Broad City are more complicated than
the taboo on female grossness that they flouted on their show.
Celebrities, again, do not always indicate the frontier of what people
find appealing or even tolerable. Often, celebrity standards lag far
behind what women make possible in their individual lives every
day. Broad City and Girls—Lena Dunham is the subject of
Petersen’s “too naked” chapter—were groundbreaking on television
because they represented bodies and situations that, for many
people, were already ordinary and good.
There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity
analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle
down to us. Beneath this assumption is another one—that the
ultimate goal of this conversation is empowerment. But the
difficult-woman discourse often seems to be leading somewhere
else. Feminists have, to a significant degree, dismantled and
rejected the traditional male definition of exemplary womanhood:
the idea that women must be sweet, demure, controllable, and free
of normal human flaws. But if men placed women on pedestals and
delighted in watching them fall down, feminism has so far mostly
succeeded in reversing the order of operations—taking toppled-over
women and re-idolizing them. Famous women are still constantly
tested against the idea that they should be maximally appealing,
even if that appeal now involves “difficult” qualities. Feminists are
still looking for idols—just ones who are idolized on our own
complicated terms.
—
Elsewhere, outside the kingdom of the difficult woman, a different
type of female celebrity reigns. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud,
Petersen notes that unruly women “compete against a far more
palatable—and, in many cases, more successful—form of femininity:
the lifestyle supermom.” She goes on:
Exemplified by Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake
Lively, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ivanka Trump, these women
rarely trend on Twitter, but they’ve built tremendously
successful brands by embracing the “new domesticity,”
defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first-
century gentility. They have slim, disciplined bodies and
adorable pregnancies; they never wear the wrong thing or
speak negatively or make themselves abrasive in any way.
Importantly, these celebrities are also all white—or, in the
case of Jessica Alba, careful to elide any connotations of
ethnicity—and straight.
This type of woman—the woman who would never be difficult,
kakistocratic political takeovers excepted—includes a wide variety of
micro-celebrities: lifestyle bloggers, beauty and wellness types,
generic influencers with long Instagram captions and predictable
tastes. These women are so incredibly successful that a sort of
countervailing feminist distaste for them has arisen—a displeasure
at the lack of unruliness, at the disappointment of watching women
adhere to the most predictable guidelines of what a woman should
be.
In other words, just like the difficult women, the lifestyle types
fall short of an ideal. They, too, are admired and hated
simultaneously. Feminist culture has, in many cases, drawn a line
to exclude or disparage the Mormon mommy bloggers, the
sponsored-content factories, the “basics,” the Gwyneths and Blakes.
Sometimes—often—these women are openly hated: sprawling
online forums like Get Off My Internets host large communities of
women who love tearing into every last detail of an Instagram
celebrity’s life. There’s an indicative line in Trainwreck, where
Doyle writes, “Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate
ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own failings
and flaws to be loved. The question, then, is choosing between the
two.” But why would these ever be our only options? The freedom I
want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women,
or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which
we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and
liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at
all.
In 2015, Alana Massey wrote a popular essay for BuzzFeed titled
“Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths.” It began with an
anecdote from her twenty-ninth birthday, when a guy she was
seeing made the unnerving disclosure that his ideal celebrity sex
partner would be Gwyneth Paltrow. “And in that moment,” Massey
writes, “every thought or daydream I ever had about our potential
future filled with broad-smiled children, adopted cats, and
phenomenal sex evaporated. Because there is no future with a
Gwyneth man when you’re a Winona woman, particularly a Winona
in a world made for Gwyneths.” The essay that followed expanded
the space between, as Massey put it, “two distinct categories of
white women who are conventionally attractive but whose public
images exemplify dramatically different lifestyles and worldviews.”
Winona Ryder was “relatable and aspirational,” her life “more
authentic…at once exciting and a little bit sad.” Gwyneth, on the
other hand, “has always represented a collection of tasteful but safe
consumer reflexes more than she’s reflected much of a real
personality.” Her life was “so sufficiently figured out as to be both
enviable and mundane.”
For women, authenticity lies in difficulty: this feminist
assumption has become dominant logic while still passing as rare.
The Winonas of the world, Massey argues, are the ones with stories
worth telling, even if the world is built to suit another type of girl.
(The world, of course, is also built to suit Winonas: though Massey
acknowledges the racial limitations of her argument, the fact that a
wildly popular essay could be built on analyzing the spectrum of
female identity represented between Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona
Ryder indicates both the stranglehold of whiteness on celebrity
discourse and the way celebrity irregularity is graded on an
astonishing curve.) Later on, Massey wrote about the period of
success that followed the publication of this essay, in which she
bought a house, went platinum blond, and upgraded her wardrobe.
She looked at herself in a mirror, seeing “the expertly blown out
blonde hair and a designer handbag and a complexion made dewy by
the expensive acids and oils that I now anoint myself with….I had
become a total. fucking. Gwyneth.” The hyper-precise calibration of
exemplary womanhood either mattered more than ever or didn’t
matter at all.
Massey included the Winona/Gwyneth piece in her 2017 book,
All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to
Be Famous Strangers, which took on a familiar set of female icons:
Courtney Love, Anna Nicole Smith, Amber Rose, Sylvia Plath,
Britney Spears. The operating concept seemed to be that the world
under patriarchy had badly aestheticized the suffering of women—
and that, perhaps, women could now aestheticize that suffering in a
good way, an incandescent and oracular way, one that was deep and
meaningful and affirming and real. As the title suggests, we could
want their trouble, their difficulty. In this book, celebrity lives are
configured as intimate symbols. Sylvia Plath is “an early literary
manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and
posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly.”
Britney Spears’s body is the Rosetta stone through which Massey
decodes her own desire to be thin and sexually irresistible. Courtney
Love, a “venomous witch,” is “the woman I aspire to be rather than
the clumsy girl I have so often been.” Like a priestess, Massey spoke
a language that conjured glory through persecution and deification
through pain. Every bit of hardship these difficult women
experienced was an indication of their worth and humanity. They
were set apart—fully alive, fully realized—in a way the bland women
could never be.
As I read Massey’s book, I kept thinking: womanhood has been
denied depth and meaning for so long that every inch of it is now
almost impossibly freighted. Where female difficulty once seemed
perverse, the refusal of difficulty now seems perverse. The entire
interpretive framework is becoming untenable. We can analyze
difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them
controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist
point of view and find them controversial, too. We have a situation
in which women reject conventional femininity in the interest of
liberation, and then find themselves alternately despising and
craving it—the pattern at work in Massey’s spiritual journey away
from Gwyneth and then back to her, as well as in the message-board
communities where random lifestyle bloggers are picked apart.
Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify
female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-
encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of
self-delusion that can cover up any sin.
—
By 2018, as the boundary between celebrity and politics dissolved
into nothing, the difficult-woman discourse, perfected on
celebrities, had grown powerful enough to move into the
mainstream political realm. The women in the Trump
administration manifest many of the qualities that are celebrated in
feminist icons: they are selfish, shameless, unapologetic, ambitious,
artificial, et cetera. Their treatment as celebrities illuminates
something odd about the current moment, something that is greatly
exacerbated by the dynamics of the internet. On the one hand,
sexism is still so ubiquitous that it touches all corners of a woman’s
life; on the other, it seems incorrect to criticize women about
anything—their demeanor, even their behavior—that might
intersect with sexism. What this means, for the women of the
Trump administration, is that they can hardly be criticized without
sexism becoming the story. Fortuitously for them, the difficult-
woman discourse intercepts the conversation every time.
Every female figure in Trump’s orbit is difficult in a way that
could serve as the basis for a bullshit celebratory hagiography.
There’s Kellyanne Conway, mocked for visibly aging, for how she
dresses, slut-shamed for sitting carelessly on the sofa—a tough-as-
nails fighter, emerging triumphant from every snafu. There’s
Melania, written off because she was a model, because she was
uninterested in pretending to be a happy Easter-egg-rolling First
Lady, who rejected conventional expectations of White House
domesticity and redefined an outdated office on her own terms.
There’s Hope Hicks, also written off because she was a model,
viewed as weak because she was young and quiet and loyal, who
nonetheless became one of the few people the president really
trusted. There’s Ivanka, also written off because she was a model,
criticized as unserious because she designed shoes and wore bows
to political meetings, who transcended the liberal public’s hatred of
her and worked quietly behind the scenes. And there’s Sarah
Huckabee Sanders, mocked for her frumpiness and prickly attitude,
who reminded us that you don’t need to be bone-thin or cheerful to
be a public-facing woman at the top of your field. The pattern—
woman is criticized for something related to her being a woman; her
continued existence is interpreted as politically meaningful—is so
ridiculously loose that almost anything can fit inside it. There, look
at the Trump women, proving that female power doesn’t always
come the way we want it to. Look at them carrying on in the face of
so much public disapproval, refusing to apologize for who they are,
for the unlikely seat of power they’ve carved out for themselves, for
the expectations they’ve refused.
This narrative is in fact alive to some degree. It’s just not often
written by feminists, although some pieces have come fairly close.
Olivia Nuzzi’s March 2017 cover story for New York was titled
“Kellyanne Conway Is a Star,” and it detailed how Conway had
become the subject of endless “armchair psychoanalysis, outrage,
and exuberant ridicule. But rather than buckling, she absorbed all of
it, coming out the other side so aware of how the world perceives
her that she could probably write this article herself.” She projected
“blue-collar authenticity,” had a fighter’s instinct; she had a “loose
relationship to the truth” and a “very evident love of the game.” This
had propelled her, despite the constant criticism about her
unmanageable looks and demeanor, to the position of being the
“functional First Lady of the United States.” Nuzzi also wrote about
Hope Hicks twice: the first piece, for GQ in 2016, was called “The
Mystifying Triumph of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s Right-Hand
Woman,” and detailed how a “person who’d never worked in politics
had nonetheless become the most improbably important operative
in this election.” The second piece came out in New York after Hicks
resigned in early 2018. Nuzzi painted her both as a woman utterly in
charge of her own destiny and a sweet, innocent, vulnerable
handmaiden to an institution that was falling apart.
The media conversation around the women of the Trump
administration has been conflicted to the point of meaninglessness.
They have benefited from the pop-feminist reflex of honoring
women for achieving visibility and power, no matter how they did
so. (The situation was perfectly encapsulated by Reductress’s 2015
blog post “New Movie Has Women in It.”) What began as a liberal
tendency now brings conservative figures into its orbit. In 2018,
Gina Haspel, the CIA official who oversaw torture at a black site in
Thailand and then destroyed the evidence, was nominated to be
director of the agency—the first woman to hold this office. Sarah
Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “Any Democrat who claims to support
women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her
nomination is a total hypocrite.” Many other conservatives echoed
this view, with varying degrees of sincerity. There’s a joke that’s
circulated for the past few years: leftists say abolish prisons, liberals
say hire more women guards. Now plenty of conservatives, having
clocked feminism’s palatability, say hire more women guards, too.
The Trump administration is so baldly anti-woman that the
women within it have been regularly scanned and criticized for their
complicity, as well as for their empty references to feminism. (It’s
arguable that we could understand the institution of celebrity itself
as similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of
Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance,
aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to
womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an
inherently conservative way.) But the Trump women have also been
defended and rewritten along difficult-women lines. Melania merely
wearing a black dress and a veil to the Vatican, looking vaguely
widowy, was enough to prompt an onslaught of yes-bitch jokes
about dressing for the job you want. The Times ran a column on
Melania’s “quiet radicalism,” in which the writer assessed Melania
as “defiant in her silence.” When Melania boarded a plane to
Houston in the middle of Hurricane Harvey wearing black stiletto
heels, she was immediately slammed for this tone-deaf choice, and
then defended on the terms of feminism: it was shallow and anti-
woman to comment on her choice of footwear—she has the right to
wear whatever sort of shoes she wants.
By 2018, the Trump administration was weaponizing this
predictable press cycle. In the midst of the outrage about family
separation at the southern border, Melania boarded a plane to visit
the caged children in Texas wearing a Zara jacket emblazoned with
the instantly infamous slogan “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” It was a
transparent act of trolling: a sociopathic message, delivered in the
hopes of drawing criticism of Melania, which could then be
identified as sexist criticism, so that the discussion about sexism
could distract from the far more important matters at hand.
And, because of the feminist cultural reflex to protect women
from criticism that invokes their bodies or choices or personal
presentation in any way, the Trump administration was also able to
rely on liberal women to defend them. In 2017, a jarring, loaded
image of Kellyanne Conway began making the rounds on the
internet: she appeared to be barefoot, with her legs spread apart,
kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office in a room full of men. This
was a gathering of administrators from historically black colleges—
black men in suits, conducting themselves with buttoned-up
propriety, while Conway acted as if the Oval Office were the family
TV room. There was an uproar about this general unseemliness,
which was immediately followed by full-throated defenses of
Conway, including a tweet by Chelsea Clinton. Vogue then wrote
that Chelsea’s gesture of support was “a model for how feminists
should respond to powerful women being demeaned and
diminished on the basis of their gender,” and that this was a “great
way to beat Conway and other ‘postfeminist’ political operatives at
their own game.” Conway “wins,” Vogue wrote, when people point
out that she looks tired, or haggard, or “when she’s belittled for
purportedly using her femininity as a tool.” Then the writer made an
about-face and looked right at the point. Conway “is using her
femininity against us. It’s not out of the realm of possibility—and is
in fact quite likely—that Conway has considered that no matter
what she says or does…she will be criticized in bluntly sexist terms
because she is a woman.” I’d add that she also likely knows that, on
the terms of contemporary feminism, she will be defended in
equally blunt terms, too.
Later on, Jennifer Palmieri, the director of communications for
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, lamented in the Times that
Steve Bannon was seen as an evil genius while Conway, equally
manipulative, was just seen as crazy. When Saturday Night Live
portrayed Conway like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction in a sketch,
that, too, was sexist, as were the memes that compared Conway to
Gollum and Skeletor. But if you stripped away the sexism, you
would still be left with Kellyanne Conway. Moreover, if you make
the self-presentation of a White House spokesperson off-limits on
principle, then you lose the ability to articulate the way she does her
job. Misogyny insists that a woman’s appearance is of paramount
value; these dogged, hyper-focused critiques of misogyny can have
an identical effect. Generic sexism is not meaningfully
disempowering to Kellyanne Conway in her current position as an
indestructible mouthpiece for the most transparently destructive
president in American history. In fact, through the discourse
established by feminism, she can siphon some amount of cultural
power from this sexism. SNL called her a needy psycho?
Nevertheless, Kellyanne persists.
—
Of all the Trump administration women, none have been defended
more staunchly and reflexively than Hope Hicks and Sarah
Huckabee Sanders. After Hicks resigned in early 2018, Laura
McGann wrote a piece at Vox arguing that “the media undermined
Hicks with sexist language right up until her last day.” News outlets
kept citing the fact that she was a model, McGann noted, and calling
her a neophyte—whereas, if Hicks were a man, she’d be a
wunderkind, and the media wouldn’t dwell on her teenage part-time
job. Journalists wrote too much about her “feminine” personality.
Outlets have “questioned her experience, doubted [her]
contributions to the campaign and inside the White House, and
implied her looks are relevant…to anything. It adds up to another
insidious narrative about a woman in power that is familiar to
successful women everywhere.” In order to scrutinize Hicks the way
she deserved to be scrutinized, McGann wrote, we needed to forget
about her “tweenage modeling career.”
The idea—impeccable in the abstract—was that we could and
should critique Hicks without invoking patriarchy. But women are
shaped by patriarchy: my own professional instincts are different
because I grew up in Texas, in the evangelical church, on a
cheerleading squad, in the Greek system. My approach to power has
been altered by the early power structures I knew. Hicks worked as
a model while growing up in bedroom-community Connecticut; she
attended Southern Methodist University, a private school outside
Dallas with an incredibly wealthy and conservative population; she
became a loyal, daughterly aide to an open misogynist. She seems to
have been shaped at a deep, true, essential level by conservative
gender politics, and she has consistently acted on this, as is her
right. Talking about Hicks without acknowledging the role of
patriarchy in her biography may be possible, but to say that it’s
politically necessary seems exactly off the point. In Vox, McGann
cited Times coverage of Hicks as implicitly sexist; after her
resignation, a Times piece cited me as implicitly sexist, in turn. I
was one of the members of the media dismissing Hicks “as a mere
factotum,” the Times wrote, quoting a tweet of mine: “Goodbye to
Hope Hicks, an object lesson in the quickest way a woman can
advance under misogyny: silence, beauty, and unconditional
deference to men.”
It is entirely possible that I’m wrong in assuming that these
attributes made Hicks valuable in Trump’s White House. Maybe she
wasn’t as deferential as reporters claimed. (She was certainly silent,
never speaking on the record to the media; she’s certainly
beautiful.) But it doesn’t seem coincidental that a president who has
married three models, was averse to his first wife’s professional
ambitions, and is upsettingly proud of his daughter’s good looks
picked a young, beautiful, conventionally socialized woman to be his
favored aide. Of course, Hicks was hardworking, and had legitimate
political instincts and abilities. But with Trump, a woman’s looks
and comportment are inseparable from her abilities. To him, Hicks’s
beauty and silence would have translated as rare skills. Her
experience as a model is, I think, incredibly relevant: the modeling
industry is one of the very few in which women are able to engage
misogyny to get ahead, to outearn men. A model has to figure out a
way to appeal to an unseen, changing audience; she has to
understand how to silently invite people to project their desires and
needs onto her; under pressure, she has to radiate perfect
composure and control. Modeling skills are distinct and particular,
and they would prepare a person well for a job working under
Trump. Nonetheless, perhaps this is another one of those situations
where identifying misogyny means ventriloquizing it; maybe I’m
extending sexism’s half-life now, too.
This sort of discursive ouroboros was most obvious, perhaps,
after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, when the
comedian Michelle Wolf poked fun—as was her task for the evening
—at Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “I love you as Aunt Lydia in The
Handmaid’s Tale,” Wolf said. She joked that, when Sanders walked
up to the lectern, you never knew what you were going to get—“a
press briefing, a bunch of lies, or divided into softball teams.”
Finally, she complimented Sanders for being resourceful. “Like, she
burns facts, and she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye.
Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.” The
blowback from these jokes swallowed a news cycle. MSNBC’s Mika
Brzezinski tweeted, “Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on
national television for her looks is deplorable. I have experienced
insults about my appearance from the president. All women have a
duty to unite when these attacks happen and the WHCA owes Sarah
an apology.” Maggie Haberman, the Times’s star Trump reporter,
tweeted, “That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her
physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of
walking out, on national television, was impressive.” In response to
Haberman, Wolf replied, “All these jokes were about her despicable
behavior. Sounds like you have some thoughts about her looks
though?” Feminists, and people eager to prove their feminist bona
fides, echoed Wolf’s point en masse: the jokes were not about
Sanders’s looks!
But they were. Wolf didn’t insult Sanders’s appearance outright,
but the jokes were constructed in such a way that the first thing you
thought about was Sanders’s physical awkwardness. She does
conjure something of the stereotypical softball coach, inelegant and
broad-shouldered, the sort of person who doesn’t belong in shift
dresses and pearls. She does look older than she is, which is part of
the reason the Aunt Lydia reference hit. And the joke within that
perfect-smoky-eye joke is that Sanders’s eye makeup is in fact
messy, uneven, and usually pretty bad. All of this remained off-
limits, however, due to the unquestioned assumption that a
woman’s looks are so precious, due to sexism, that joking about
them would render Wolf’s set inadmissible by default.
A month later, another news cycle was swallowed when
Samantha Bee called Ivanka a cunt. She did this on her show, in a
segment about border separation, noting that, as news outlets
reported stories about migrant children who were being locked up
and abused in prisonlike detention centers, Ivanka had posted a
photo of herself doting on her youngest son, Teddy. “You know,
Ivanka,” Bee said, “that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child,
but let me just say, one mother to another: Do something about
your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt! He listens to
you!” A tidal wave of outrage descended from the right and the
center—not about the migrant families, but about the use of the
word “cunt.” Conservatives were once again weaponizing a
borrowed argument. The White House called for TBS to cancel her
show, and then Bee apologized, and I felt as if a feminist praxis was
turning to acid and eating through the floor. It’s as if what’s
signified—sexism itself—has remained so intractable that we’ve
mostly given up on rooting out its actual workings. Instead, to the
great benefit of people like Ivanka, we’ve been adjudicating
inequality through cultural criticism. We have taught people who
don’t even care about feminism how to do this—how to analyze
women and analyze the way people react to women, how to
endlessly read and interpret the signs.
—
Hovering over all of this is the loss of Hillary Clinton to Trump in
the 2016 election. Throughout her campaign, Clinton had been cast
—and had attempted to cast herself—as a difficult woman, a beloved
figure of the mainstream feminist zeitgeist. She fit the model. For
decades, her public narrative had been determined by sexist
criticism: she was viewed as too ambitious, too undomestic, too
ugly, too calculating, too cold. She had drawn unreasonable hatred
for pursuing her ambitions, and she had weathered this hatred to
become the first woman in American history to receive a major
party’s presidential nomination. As the election approached, she
was held to a terrible, compounded double standard, both as a
serious candidate going up against an openly corrupt salesman, and
as a woman facing off against a man. Clinton attempted to make the
most of this. She turned misogynist slights into marketing tactics,
selling “Nasty Woman” merchandise after Trump used the term to
disparage her during a debate. This merchandise was popular, as
was the reclaimed insult: on Twitter, rather embarrassingly,
feminists called themselves “nasty women” all day long. But if we
really loved nasty women so much, wouldn’t Clinton have won the
election? Or at least, if this sort of pop feminism was really so
ascendant, wouldn’t 53 percent of white women have voted for her
instead of for Trump?
Clinton was in fact celebrated for outlasting—until November, at
least—her sexist critics. Her strength and persistence in response to
misogyny were easily the things I liked most about her. I felt great
admiration for the Clinton who had once refused to change her
name, who couldn’t stand the idea of staying home and baking
cookies. I believed in the politician who sat patiently through eleven
hours of interrogation on Benghazi and was still called “emotional”
on CNN for choking up when she talked about the Americans who
had died. I was moved, watching Clinton white-knuckle herself into
stoicism, in 2016, as Trump stalked her around the debate stage. No
woman in recent history has been miscast and disrespected quite
like Clinton. Years after the election, at Trump rallies across the
country, angry crowds of men and women were still chanting, “Lock
her up!”
But the gauntlet of sexism that Clinton was forced to fight
through ultimately illuminated little about her other than the fact
that she was a woman. It did her—and us, eventually—the crippling
disservice of rendering her generic. Misogyny provided a terrible
external structure through which Clinton was able to demonstrate
commitment and tenacity and occasional grace; misogyny also
demanded that she pander and compromise in the interest of
survival, and that she sand down her personality until it could
hardly be shown in public at all. The real nature of Clinton’s
campaign and candidacy was obscured first and finally by sexism,
but also by the reflexive defense against sexism. She was attacked so
bluntly, so unfairly, and in turn she was often upheld and shielded
by equally blunt arguments—defenses that were about nasty
women, never really about her.
Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the
importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also
point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in
ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual,
particular self. Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the
truth that sexism is so much more mundane than the celebrities
who have been high-profile test cases for it. Sexism rears its head no
matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics
might be. And a woman doesn’t have to be a feminist icon to resist it
—she can just be self-interested, which is not always the same thing.
I Thee Dread
My boyfriend maintains a running Google spreadsheet to keep track
of the weddings we’ve been invited to together. There are columns
for the date of the event, the location, our relationship to the couple,
and—the ostensible reason for this record-keeping—whether or not
we’ve sent a present yet, and which of us sent the gift. The
spreadsheet was first a function of his personality: where I am
careless about most things outside my writing, Andrew, an architect,
is meticulous even about irrelevant details, a monster of capability
who rearranges the dishwasher with a fervor that borders on
organizational BDSM. But at some point, the Google spreadsheet
became a necessity. Over the past nine years, we’ve been invited to
forty-six weddings. I myself do not want to get married, and it’s
possible that all these weddings are why.
Andrew is thirty-three, and I’m thirty, and to some degree we are
having a demographically specific experience. Our high school
friends are mostly upper-middle class and on the conservative side,
the type to get married like clockwork and have big, traditional
weddings, and we both went to the University of Virginia, where
people tend to be convention-friendly, too. We also haven’t actually
attended all of these weddings. We used to split up some weekends
to cover two simultaneously—packing our formalwear, driving to
the airport, and waving goodbye in the terminal before boarding
separate flights. We’ve skipped maybe a dozen weddings altogether,
sometimes to save money that we would spend going to other
weddings, since for about five years one or both of us was on a grad
school budget, and we always seemed to live a plane ride away from
the event.
But we love our friends, and we almost always love the people
they marry, and like most wedding cynics—an expansive population
that includes most married people, who will happily bitch about
nuptial excess at weddings outside their own—Andrew and I love
every wedding once we’re physically present: tipsy and tearing up
and soaked in secondhand happiness, grooving to Montell Jordan
alongside the groom’s mom and dad. So we’ve done it, over and over
and over, booking hotel rooms and rental cars, writing checks and
perusing Williams-Sonoma registries, picking up tux shirts from the
cleaners, waking up at sunrise to call airport cabs. At this point the
weddings blend together, but the spreadsheet conjures a series of
flashes. In Charleston, a peacock wandering through a lush garden
at twilight, the damp seeping through the hem of my thrift-store
dress. In Houston, a ballroom leaping to its feet at the first beat of
Big Tymers. In Manhattan, stepping out onto a wide balcony at
night overlooking Central Park, everyone in crisp black-and-white,
the city twinkling. In rural Virginia, the bride walking down the aisle
in rain boots as the swollen gray sky held its breath. In rural
Maryland, the groom riding a white horse to the ceremony as Indian
music drifted through a golden field. In Austin, the couple bending
to receive Armenian crowns underneath a frame of roses. In New
Orleans, the bomb-pop lights of the cop car clearing the street for
the parasols and trumpets of the second line parade.
It’s easy for me to understand why a person would want to get
married. But, as these weddings consistently reminded me, the
understanding doesn’t often go both ways. Whenever someone
would ask me when Andrew and I might get married, I’d demur,
saying that I didn’t know, maybe never, I was lazy, I didn’t wear
jewelry, I loved weddings but didn’t want one of my own. I’d usually
try to change the subject, but it never worked. People would
immediately start probing, talking to me like I was hiding
something, suddenly certain that I was one of those girls who’d
spend years proclaiming that she was too down-to-earth for
anything but elopement until the second she thought she could get
someone to propose. Often people would launch into a series of
impassioned arguments, as if I’d just presented them with a
problem that needed fixing, as if I were wearing a sandwich board
with “Change My Mind” written on it—as if it were a citizen’s duty
to encourage betrothal the way we encourage people to vote.
“Never?” they’d say, skeptically. “You know, there’s something
really amazing about a ritual, especially at a time when we have so
few rituals left in society. There’s really no other time when you can
get everyone you love together in the same room. My wedding was
super low-key—I just wanted everyone to have fun, you know? I just
wanted to have a really great party. You really get married for other
people. But also, in this really deep way, you do it for you.” At the
next wedding, the discussion would continue. “Is marriage still not
on the table?” people would ask, checking in. “You know you can get
married without having a wedding, right?” One man told me, at a
wedding, six years after I had attended his wedding, that I was
missing out on something amazing. “There’s something deeper
about our relationship now,” he said. “Trust me—when we got
married, something just changed.”
Andrew is asked about this less often than I am, as it is
presumed that marriage is more emotionally exciting for women:
within straight couples, weddings are frequently described as the
most special day of her life, if not necessarily his. (And of course the
questioning is similarly gender-slanted, and far more intrusive, for
people who don’t want to have kids.) But still, Andrew gets asked
about it often enough. “Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked him recently,
after he recounted a couple of phone calls with old friends, one male
and one female, both of whom seemed obliquely concerned about
our lack of legally binding commitment. “No,” he told me, switching
lanes on the Taconic Parkway.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I…don’t really care what people think,” he said.
“Yeah!” I said. “I normally don’t, either!”
“Sure,” he said, audibly bored with this already.
“I usually really don’t care what people think,” I said, getting
steamed.
Andrew nodded, his eyes on the road.
“It’s just this one thing,” I said. “It’s like the one thing people say
to me that I take personally. And I guess it’s a circular situation—
like, people shouldn’t take us not wanting to get married personally,
but they do take it personally; otherwise we wouldn’t have to
fucking talk about it so much. And it’s like the more I have to talk
about it, the more it creates this problem I didn’t have in the first
place—like I’ve constructed this spiderweb of answers about why I
don’t want to get married that’s probably concealing my actual
thoughts about, like, family structure and love. And then I resent
the question even more, because it’s stupid and predictable, and so
it makes me stupid and predictable, and I have all these, like, meta-
narratives in my head, when the fact of the matter is that the whole
thing is just transparently ridiculous, starting from the idea that a
man just proposes to a woman and she’s supposed to be just lying
in wait for the moment he decides he’s ready to commit to a
situation where he statistically benefits and she statistically
becomes less happy than she would be if she was single, and then
she’s the one who has to wear this tacky ring to signify male
ownership, and she’s supposed to be excited about it, this new life
where doubt becomes this thing you’re supposed to experience in
private and certainty becomes the default affect for the entire rest
of your life…”
I trailed off because I knew that Andrew had long ago stopped
listening to me and started thinking about which nineties wrestling
match he was going to watch that evening, and that he, unlike me,
had long ago made peace with the desires and decisions that I could
not stop explaining, because I, on the topic of weddings, like so
many women before me, had gone a little bit insane.
—
Here, according to the current advice of the wedding industry, is
what a newly engaged person is expected to do in preparation for
the event. (Within a straight couple, it is universally assumed—if
not actually true, as a rule—that the person who will invest the most
energy in this process is the bride-to-be.) Assuming a twelve-month
engagement, the affianced is supposed to immediately begin
planning an engagement party, looking for a wedding planner
(average cost $3,500), choosing a venue (average cost $13,000), and
fixing on a date. With eight months to go she’s expected to have
created a wedding website (average cost $100—a bargain) and
selected her vendors (florals: $2,000; catering: $12,000; music:
$2,000). She should have purchased presents to “propose” to her
bridesmaids (packages including custom sippy cups and notepads
run up to $80, but a “Will You Join My Bride Tribe?” note card is a
mere $3.99), assembled a wedding registry (here, thankfully, she
can expect to recoup around $4,800), chosen a photographer
($6,000), and shopped for a dress ($1,600, on average, though at
the iconic bridal mecca Kleinfeld, the average customer spends
$4,500).
With six months to go, the bride should have arranged for the
engagement photos ($500), designed invitations and programs and
place cards ($750), and figured out where they’ll go on their
honeymoon ($4,000). At four months out, she should have gotten
the wedding rings ($2,000), purchased gifts for her bridesmaids
($100 per bridesmaid), found gifts for the groomsmen ($100 per
groomsman), secured wedding favors ($275), dealt with her
wedding showers, and ordered a wedding cake ($450). As the
wedding draws near, she needs to apply for a marriage license
($40), do her final gown fittings, test out her wedding shoes, go
away for her bachelorette party, prepare the seating chart, send a
music list to her band or DJ, and do a final consultation with her
photographer. In the days before the wedding, she passes through
the final gauntlet of grooming processes. The night before, there’s
the rehearsal dinner. On her wedding day, a year of planning and
approximately $30,000 of spending are unleashed over the span of
about twelve hours. The next morning, she gets up for the brunch
send-off, then goes on her honeymoon, sends her thank-you notes,
orders the photo album, and, most likely, starts getting the
paperwork together to change her name.
All of this is conducted in the spirit of fun but the name of
tradition. There’s a vague idea that, when a woman walks down the
aisle wearing several thousand dollars’ worth of white satin, when
she pledges her fealty and kisses her new husband in front of 175
people, when her guests trickle back to the tent draped in twinkle
lights and find their seats at tables festooned with peonies and then
get up in the middle of their frisée salads to thrash around to a
Bruno Mars cover—that this joins the bride and groom to an endless
line of lovebirds, a golden chain of couples stretching back for
centuries, millions of dreamers who threw lavish open-bar
celebrations with calligraphy place cards to celebrate spending
together forever with their best friend.
But for centuries, weddings were entirely homemade
productions, brief and simple ceremonies conducted in private. The
vast majority of women in history have gotten married in front of a
handful of people, with no reception, in colored dresses that they
had worn before and would wear again. In ancient Greece, wealthy
brides wore violet or red. In Renaissance Europe, wedding dresses
were often blue. In nineteenth-century France and England, lower-
class and middle-class women got married in black silk. The white
wedding dress didn’t become popular until 1840, when twenty-year-
old Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, her cousin, in a formal
white gown trimmed with orange blossoms. The event was not
photographed—fourteen years later, after the appropriate
technology had developed, Victoria and Albert would pose for a
reenactment wedding portrait—but British newspapers provided
lengthy descriptions of Victoria’s wedding crinolines, her satin
slippers, her sapphire brooch, her golden carriage, and her three-
hundred-pound wedding cake. The symbolic link between “bride”
and “royalty” was forged with Victoria, and would eventually
intensify into the idea of a wedding as “a sort of Everywoman’s
coronation,” as Holly Brubach wrote in The New Yorker in 1989.
Very soon after Queen Victoria’s wedding, her nuptial decisions
were being enshrined as long-standing tradition. In 1849, Godey’s
Lady’s Book wrote, “Custom has decided, from the earliest age, that
white is the most fitting hue [for brides], whatever may be the
material.” The Victorian elite, copying their queen, solidified a
wedding template—formal invitations, a processional entrance,
flowers and music—with the help of new businesses dedicated
exclusively to selling wedding accessories and décor. The rapidly
developing consumer marketplace of the late nineteenth century
turned weddings into a staging ground for upper-class lifestyle: for a
day, you could purchase this lifestyle, even if you weren’t actually
upper-class. As middle-class women attempted to create an
impression of elite social standing through their weddings, white
dresses became more important. In All Dressed in White: The
Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding, Carol Wallace writes that
“a white dress in pristine condition implied its wearer’s employment
of an expert laundress, seamstress, and ladies’ maid.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class families were
spending so much money on weddings that there was a cultural
backlash. Critics warned against love’s commercialization, and
advice writers cautioned families against endangering their finances
for a party. In turn, elite women raised the bar in response to
middle-class social performances. In Brides, Inc.: American
Weddings and the Business of Tradition, Vicki Howard describes a
custom among wealthy families of displaying presents, allowing
guests to “peruse…long cloth-covered tables laden with silver, china,
jewels, and even furniture….Newspaper announcements recounted
society gift viewings, noting the designer or manufacturer of gifts.”
A Tennessee bride invited more than fifteen hundred people to her
1908 wedding, and received “seventy silver gifts, fifty-seven glass
and crystal items, thirty-one pieces of china, nine sets of linens, and
sixty miscellaneous items.”
The growing wedding industry figured out that the best way to
get people to accept the new, performative norms of nuptial excess
was to tell women—as Godey’s Lady’s Book had done in 1849 with
the white wedding dress—that all of this excess was extremely
traditional. “Jewelers, department stores, fashion designers, bridal
consultants, and many others became experts on inventing
tradition,” Howard writes, “creating their own versions of the past to
legitimize new rituals and help overcome cultural resistance to the
lavish affair.” In 1924, Marshall Field’s invented the wedding
registry. Retailers began issuing etiquette instructions, insisting
that purchasing fine china and engraved invitations was simply the
way that things had always been done.
In 1929, the financial crash put a damper on wedding spending.
But then, retailers picked up the pitch that “love knows no
depression.” Throughout the thirties, newspapers ramped up their
wedding coverage, describing gowns and reception menus, giving
their readership vicarious thrills. Wallace writes that, by the thirties,
brides had become “momentary celebrities.” When the socialite
Nancy Beaton married Sir Hugh Smiley in 1933 at Westminster, the
dreamy photographs taken by her brother Cecil were all over the
papers—shots of Nancy looking slouchy and alluring, her eight
bridesmaids linked by one long floral garland, two boys in white
satin holding up her veil. “There was so much poverty that we all
craved glamour,” an eighty-seven-year-old former dressmaker told
the Mirror in 2017, producing her own Beaton-inspired wedding
portrait. “It was our chance to feel like a star for the day.” In 1938, a
De Beers representative wrote to the ad agency N. W. Ayer & Son,
asking if “the use of propaganda in various forms” could juice the
engagement-ring market. In 1947, the N. W. Ayer copywriter
Frances Gerety coined the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever,” and ever
since then, diamond engagement rings have been all but mandatory
—an $11 billion industry in America as of 2012.
In the forties, getting married “went from a transition to a kind
of apotheosis,” Wallace writes. A wedding no longer marked a
woman’s shift from single to married, but rather, it indicated her
ascension from ordinary woman to bride and wife. As this
glorification was demarcated mainly through purchases, a
publishing industry sprang up to tell women what they should buy.
In 1934, the first American bridal magazine was founded, under the
title So You’re Going to Be Married. (It was later renamed Brides
and purchased by Condé Nast.) In 1948, the first weddings-only
advice book, The Bride’s Book of Etiquette, gave women guidance
that would persist through decades: “It’s your privilege to look as
lovely as you know how,” and “You are privileged to make your
wedding anything you want it to be,” and “You are privileged to have
all eyes center on you.”
Against the backdrop of World War II, weddings took on a new,
fierce importance. In 1942, nearly two million Americans got
married—an 83 percent increase from a decade before, with two
thirds of those brides marrying men who had newly enlisted in the
military. The wedding industry capitalized on wartime ceremonies
as a symbol of all that was precious about America. “A bride could
be forgiven for believing that it was her patriotic duty to insist on a
formal wedding, white satin and all,” Wallace writes. The war also
gave jewelry companies a lasting boon. Attempts to market
engagement rings for men had previously flopped, as such rings
were incompatible with the still-prevalent idea that engagement is a
thing that men do to women. But in a war context, the male
wedding band started to seem logical: with a wedding band, men
could cross the ocean wearing a reminder of wife, country, and
home. A tradition of bride and groom exchanging rings at the
ceremony was rapidly invented. By the fifties, it was as if the
double-ring ceremony had existed since the beginning of time.
After the war was over—and along with it, wartime fabric
rationing—American wedding dresses grew more elaborate.
Synthetic fabrics had become widely available, and full skirts of
tulle and organza bloomed. Brides, already young, got even younger.
(The average age of first marriage for women was twenty-two at the
turn of the twentieth century, but by 1950 it had dropped to 20.3.)
By the late fifties, three quarters of women between twenty and
twenty-four were married. As the two-decade slump of depression
and wartime gave way to peace, prosperity, and a brand-new mass
consumer economy, weddings symbolized the beginning of a
couple’s catalog-perfect future—the house in the suburbs, the
brand-new washing machine, the living room TV.
In the sixties, with social upheaval on the horizon, weddings
continued to provide a vision of domestic tradition and stability.
Brides adopted a Jackie Kennedy look, wearing pillbox hats, empire
waists, and three-quarter sleeves. In the seventies, the wedding
industry adapted to accommodate the counterculture, catering to a
new wave of young couples who wished to avoid the previous
generation’s aesthetic. It was in this decade—with the so-called
narcissism epidemic and the rise of what Tom Wolfe called the “Me
Generation”—that the idea of the wedding as a form of deeply
individual expression took hold. Men wore colored tuxes. Bianca
Jagger got married in an Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket.
“Extremely quirky weddings got publicity,” writes Wallace, “like the
couples who married on skis or underwater or stark naked in Times
Square.”
Then, in the eighties, the pendulum swung back. “For many of us
who stood on the beach in the nineteen-seventies and looked on
while the maid of honor sang ‘Both Sides Now’ and the barefoot
couple plighted its troth with excerpts from Kahlil Gibran’s The
Prophet,” Holly Brubach wrote in The New Yorker, “the news that in
the eighties weddings seemed to be taking a turn for the more
traditional came as a relief. Who could have foreseen that the
results would often be, in their way, no less preposterous?” She
noted the odd “pastiche of elements from Dior’s New Look and
Victorian fashion” that had taken over bridal attire in the years
following Diana Spencer’s televised royal wedding bonanza. Like
Diana’s dress, the eighties wedding look ran counter to fashion,
with full skirts, mutton sleeves, bustles and bows.
In the nineties, with the rise of Vera Wang and the ascendancy of
Calvin Klein minimalism, wedding dresses realigned with trends.
Brides wore white slip dresses with spaghetti straps, à la Carolyn
Bessette-Kennedy—a Calvin Klein publicist before her marriage, and
a silky blond exemplar of East Coast good taste. From the West
Coast, a Playboy Mansion licentiousness entered the bridal
aesthetic. Cindy Crawford got married on the beach in a minidress
that resembled lingerie. Consumerist raunch—Girls Gone Wild,
MTV Spring Break—came crashing into the industry. Brides-to-be
insisted on bachelorette parties involving hot-cop strippers and
penis straws.
In the aughts, weddings took on the high-res bloat of reality
television. Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? aired,
disastrously, in February 2000. Betrothal was the end goal of the
Bachelor franchise, the raw material for the assembly line of Say
Yes to the Dress. The aerial-scale wedding celebration—the type so
preposterous that it required subsidization by the TV network that
would broadcast it—entered the realm with Trista Rehn and Ryan
Sutter’s 2003 Bachelorette wedding, which cost $3.77 million and
attracted 17 million viewers on ABC. (Rehn and Sutter were paid $1
million for the TV rights.) And then, in the 2010s, came the
elaborate monoculture of Pinterest, the image-sharing social
network that produced a new, ubiquitous, “traditional” wedding
aesthetic, teaching couples to manufacture a sense of authenticity
through rented barns, wildflowers in mason jars, old convertibles or
rusty pickup trucks.
The industry churns on today, riding high and manic in the wake
of two recent bride coronations: Kate Middleton, rigorously thin in
her Alexander McQueen princess gown ($434,000), and Meghan
Markle, doe-eyed in boatneck Givenchy ($265,000). Despite the
economic precarity that has threatened the American population
since the 2008 recession, weddings have only been getting more
expensive. They remain an industry-dictated “theme park of upward
mobility,” as Naomi Wolf put it: a world defined by the illusion that
everyone within it is upper-middle class.
This illusion is formalized further by the social media era, in
which clothes and backdrops are routinely sought out and paid for
in large part to broadcast the impression of cachet. Weddings have
long existed in this sort of performative ecosystem: “A great set of
wedding photographs can be called upon to justify all the expense
that preceded them, and the anticipation of acquiring a good set of
photographs can also encourage that expense in the first place,”
Rebecca Mead writes in One Perfect Day: The Selling of the
American Wedding. Today, Instagram encourages people to treat
life itself like a wedding—like a production engineered to be
witnessed and admired by an audience. It has become common for
people, especially women, to interact with themselves as if they
were famous all the time. Under these circumstances, the vision of
the bride as celebrity princess has hardened into something like a
rule. Expectations of bridal beauty have collided with the wellness
industry and produced a massive dark star of obligation. Brides
recommends that its affianced readers take healing naps in salt
chambers and cleanse themselves with crystals. Martha Stewart
Weddings prices out a fireworks show at your reception ($5,000 for
three to seven minutes). The Knot recommends underarm Botox
($1,500 per session). A friend of mine was recently quoted $27,000
for a single day of wedding photography. There are social media
consultants for weddings; there are “bridal boot camp” fitness
programs all over the nation; there is a growing industry for highly
staged, professionally photographed engagements. One day these
will probably seem traditional, too.
—
Despite my personality, or what you might guess if you’ve ever
talked to me after I’ve had a single drink of alcohol, I have been in
straight and monogamous relationships for more than twelve out of
the past thirteen years. But my apathy toward weddings—the
apparent culmination of these relationships—is lifelong. Girls are
trained in childhood to take an interest in bridal matters, through
Barbies (which I didn’t care about) and make-believe (I mostly
fantasized through reading) and feature-length Disney musicals, in
which a series of beautiful princesses enchant a series of
interchangeable men. I loved these movies except for the love
interests. I fantasized about being Belle, swinging around ladders in
the library; Ariel, swimming around the deep ocean with a fork;
Jasmine, alone in the starlight with her phenomenal tiger;
Cinderella, getting a makeover from the mice and the birds. Toward
the end of these movies, when things got real with the princes, I
would get bored and eject my VHS tapes. While I was writing this, I
pulled up the weddings from Cinderella and The Little Mermaid on
YouTube, and felt like I was watching deleted scenes.
It’s not that I was averse to the bridal building blocks. I was girly
as a kid, and I loved attention. I had pink sheets, pink curtains, pink
walls in my room. I pored over descriptions of fancy dresses in
books, feeling deeply pained in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett
couldn’t wear her favorite one, “the green plaid taffeta, frothing with
flounces and each flounce edged in green velvet ribbon,” because,
relatably, there was “unmistakably a grease spot on the basque.”
Sometimes, at family gatherings, I would demand an audience and
sing “Colors of the Wind,” in honor of the Disney princess that I felt
most connected to—Pocahontas, with her neon sunrises and
raccoon friend and bare feet. I was only four years old when I
started writing impassioned notes to my mother to persuade her to
take me to Glamour Shots, the iconically tacky mall photo studio
where you could take a portrait of yourself in sequins. When she
acquiesced, I wrote a thank-you note to God. (“Thank you for the
chance to go to Glammer Shots,” I scrawled, “and for making me
sneaky.”) For the photo, I proudly wore a white dress with puffy
sleeves and flowers in my hair.
In middle school, I went on my first “date,” dropped off at the
mall for a romantic matinee showing of the Adam Sandler vehicle
Big Daddy. Around then I started to desperately want guys to like
me; at the same time, I was repulsed by the predictability of that
desire. In high school, I carried on a series of intense male
friendships and odd secretive dalliances, and mostly, within a
graduating class of ninety people who had all gone to school
together for a decade, I didn’t date. In college, I fell in love very
quickly with a guy who all but moved into my apartment in the fall
of my second year, when I was seventeen. Around then, I recounted
one of our conversations in my LiveJournal:
He was telling me what scares him—that he’s just fulfilling
the part of, you know, like the left-wing existentialist college
boyfriend after which I settle down with the Marriage
Type….What I told him, and what I really think, is that what
are we all ever doing except playing a part that fulfills a role at
its appropriate time?
This is the only time the word “marriage” occurs in the entire
archive, which covers my whole adolescence. Watching myself
obliviously shift a personal tension into an abstract social inquiry, I
can glimpse, for a second, a shadow of all the things I have
neglected to admit to myself in the elaborate project of justifying
what I want.
Anyway, I broke up with that boyfriend my fourth year of college,
suddenly confused as to why I had ever voluntarily done someone
else’s laundry. When I moved home after graduation, I got bored
and messaged Andrew, whom I had met the year before at a
Halloween party. He’d been dressed as the wrestler Rowdy Roddy
Piper. (I was dressed, politically incorrectly, as Pocahontas, and my
date was draped in feather boas—the Colors of the Wind.) At the
time, he was dating a pint-size brunette in my sorority, who later
broke up with him before he moved to Houston for grad school.
Andrew was new to Texas, and I thought I was leaving for Peace
Corps any minute. Freed by the mutual acknowledgment that this
would be temporary, we glued ourselves to each other, and then six
months passed in this way. One morning we woke up on a deflated
air mattress in my friend Walt’s apartment, hungover, with light
filtering through the dust like magic, and when I looked at him I felt
that if I couldn’t do this forever I would die. A few days later, we
went to DC for, of all things, a black-tie fraternity reunion. I got
wasted and went outside to savor the taste of several delicious
menthols, and then came back inside reeking of smoke, which
Andrew hated. “I’d quit for you,” I told him, “but…” My departure
for Central Asia was, by then, just two weeks away. Andrew, who is a
sweet boy, started crying. We went back to our hotel room and
admitted that we loved each other. I woke up surrounded by cans of
Budweiser, which I had drunkenly used as cold compresses for my
tear-swollen face.
We decided to try to stay together, even though I was leaving. I
boarded a plane to Kyrgyzstan, where, several months into my
volunteer service, I reached my single peak of wedding ideation to
date. My friend Elizabeth had sent me a care package full of
wonderful, frivolous things—an issue of Martha Stewart Weddings
among them. Everything in the magazine was pristine, useless,
beautiful, predictable. I loved it, and I reread it all the time. One
night, after climbing halfway up a mountain to try to get cell service
on my tiny Nokia, after failing to reach Andrew and sinking into a
wormhole of dread that I was ruining something irreplaceable, I fell
asleep reading my wedding magazine and got married to him in a
dream. It was an intense, vivid, realistic vision, soundtracked by
2011. There was a vast, open green plain, with flowers drifting in the
air, the guitar loop from José González’s cover of “Heartbeats”
playing, a sense of shattering freedom and security, like an
ascension, or possibly like a death; then, a dark room that glittered
like a disco, and Robyn’s “Hang with Me” thudding through the air.
I woke up shocked, and then curled into a ball, my eyes smarting.
For weeks afterward I nursed that fantasy, even though I was never
able to imagine anything but light and music and weather. I could
never see myself, could never imagine bridesmaids, a dress, a cake.
I left Peace Corps early. On the plane back from Kyrgyzstan, I
was a raw nerve, fragile in a way that I had never been before—
flattened out by the awful juxtaposition between my obscene power
as an American and my obscene powerlessness as a woman, and by
an undiagnosed case of tuberculosis, and by my own humiliating
inability to live comfortably in a situation where I couldn’t achieve
or explain my way out of every bind. I went straight from the airport
to Andrew’s apartment in Houston and never left. He was, at the
time, oppressively busy, coming home from his grad school studio
to catch five hours of sleep a night. I occupied myself with my two
Peace Corps hobbies: doing yoga and cooking elaborate meals.
Alone in the kitchen, rolling out pastry crusts and checking vinyasa
schedules, I started to feel uncomfortable flashbacks to college, as if
I had once again, at a freakishly young age, found myself playing the
role of wife.
At the time, I didn’t technically need a job right away. Andrew
had gotten a full scholarship to Rice, and so his parents paid his—
now our—$500 rent, giving him the money they had saved to
subsidize grad school tuition. This year of free rent was
transformative, as free rent tends to be. But I was terrified of what it
meant to depend on someone else’s money. I was afraid of making
myself useful through sex and dinner. I spent hours every day on
Craigslist looking for work and, in the process, discovered lifestyle
blogs, wedding blogs—websites that overwhelmed me with despair.
I stopped cobbling together grant-writing gigs and started “helping”
rich kids with their college application essays, which effectively
meant writing them. Propping up the class system paid terrifically,
and with this ill-gotten cash, I bought myself a sense of permission.
I wrote some short stories and got into Michigan’s MFA program. In
2012, we moved to Ann Arbor. We were invited to eighteen
weddings over the course of the next year.
By that point Andrew and I were a team, fully. We had a dog, we
split the housework and our credit card statement, and we had
never spent a holiday apart. When I curled up to him in the
mornings I felt like a baby sea lion climbing on a sunlit rock. One
weekend in 2013 we flew back to Texas for a wedding in Marfa,
where the whole thing was a vision of heaven: a mournful Led
Zeppelin riff thrumming through a church, the heat of the desert,
the supernatural happiness of the young couple, the sunset gradient
fading away as they danced. That night I sat under the stars in a
black dress, drinking tequila, wondering if my heart was as incorrect
as it seemed to me in that moment—thudding with the certainty
that I didn’t want any of this at all.
The pressure of this thought intensified until my ears seemed to
be ringing. I told Andrew what I was thinking, and his face
crumpled. He had been thinking the exact opposite, he told me. This
was the first wedding where he’d really understood what all of this
was for.
—
Half a decade has gone by since then. Andrew has long ago forgiven
me for making him cry in Marfa; he has also, possibly due to a lack
of desirable alternatives, lost interest in making anything official.
Our lives are full of pleasure but almost completely stripped of mass
ritual: we don’t do anything for Valentine’s Day, or celebrate an
“anniversary,” or give each other Christmas presents, or put up a
tree. For my part, I have stopped feeling guilty about not wanting to
marry such a marriageable person. I now understand that it is an
extremely ordinary and unremarkable thing to feel overwhelmed by
weddings, or even averse to them. As a society we do not lack for
evidence that weddings are often superficial, performative,
excessive, and annoying. There is a strong strain of wedding hatred
in our culture underneath all the fanaticism. The hatred and
fanaticism are, of course, intertwined.
This tension crops up in many wedding movies, which tend to
depict weddings as a site of simultaneous love and resentment. (Or,
in the case of the soothing and relatable Melancholia, a site of
impending comet apocalypse.) Often, in wedding movies, it is the
romantic partner who is loved and the family who generates the
resentment, as in Father of the Bride or My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
But more recently, these movies have been about how women love
and resent the wedding itself. The 2011 Paul Feig blockbuster
Bridesmaids played this tension for slapstick comedy and
sweetness. The 2012 Leslye Headland movie Bachelorette did it
again, on a dark, acidic palette.
Before that, there was 27 Dresses, released in 2008, starring
Katherine Heigl, and 2009’s Bride Wars, starring Kate Hudson and
Anne Hathaway. These deeply upsetting rom-coms were supposed
to be about women who love weddings and for women who love
weddings. But both movies seemed to really hate weddings, and to
hate those women, too. 27 Dresses was about Jane, an uptight,
sentimental, perpetually exhausted bridesmaid-handmaiden who
became obsessed with weddings after she fixed a rip in a bride’s
dress when she was a kid. “I knew I had helped someone on the
most important day of her life,” Jane says breathily, in the opening
sequence, “and I just couldn’t wait for my special day.” Throughout
the movie, she compulsively denies herself self-worth and
happiness, hoarding both things for her imaginary future wedding,
planning other people’s rehearsal dinners and accruing huge piles of
resentment in her soul.
Bride Wars is worse. Hathaway’s Emma and Hudson’s Liv are
best friends who have also been obsessed with weddings since
childhood. They get engaged simultaneously and accidentally plan
their weddings at the Plaza for the same day. An all-out battle erupts
as a result of this preposterously fixable situation. Emma, a public-
school teacher who pays the $25,000 venue fee from the wedding
nest egg that she’s been building since she was a teenager, sends Liv
chocolates every day so that she’ll get fat. Liv, a lawyer with a
treadmill in her office, sneaks into a spray-tan salon to turn Emma
bright orange. Both women are essentially friendless, and they treat
their husbands-to-be like crash-test dummies. Just before she walks
down the aisle, Emma snaps at the coworker whom she’s forced to
be maid of honor:
Deb, I’ve been dealing with versions of you my whole life, and
I’m gonna tell you something that I should’ve told myself a
long time ago. Sometimes it’s about me, okay? Not all the
time, but every once in a while it’s my time. Like today. If
you’re not okay with that, feel free to go. But if you stay, you
have to do your job, and that means smiling and talking about
my bridal beauty, and most importantly, not making it about
you…Okay? Can you do that?
Like Jane, Emma has been broken by the cultural psychosis that
tells women to cram a lifetime’s supply of open self-interest into a
single, incredibly expensive day.
In 2018, Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss published the
humor book Hey Ladies!, a series of hellish fictional emails sent
among a group of female friends in New York City who are
constantly sentencing one another to elaborate social obligations—a
problem that worsens once members of the group start getting
engaged. A sample email, from when the bride-to-be’s mother
chimes in on the bridal shower:
Since we all know Jen has always loved flowers, I’m thinking
we do a garden luncheon bridal shower at our country club in
Virginia at the turn of the season. I know Virginia is a trek
from New York City and Brooklyn, but I already checked
Amtrak train tickets for the last weekend in April, and it looks
like it will only be ~$450 per person round trip (a deal!).
Ali, since you’re the Maid of Honor I’ll let you handle dress
code, but please, ladies, be prepared to wear a pastel or muted
shade that goes well with your skin tone. If you’re not sure,
google! Or go to a high-end luxury clothing store and make a
consultation appointment with a stylist. As for shoes, just
because this will be outside doesn’t mean you should sacrifice
looking good for being comfortable. I am going to have a
photographer on site, so keep that in mind! As for hair and
makeup, please call Meegan at Hair Today in VA for
consecutive day-of appointments so we can have consistency
in looks.
It’s satire, of course, and perfectly exaggerated. But real emails like
this frequently go viral on Twitter. And, although until 2014 I never
made more than $35,000 annually, I have spent, at a bare
minimum, at least $35,000 on weddings to date.
So: the expense, the trouble, the intensity. And then there are the
predictable feminist things, too. Historically, marriage has mostly
been bad for women and fantastic for men. Confucius defined a wife
as “someone who submits to another.” Assyrian law declared, “A
man may flog his wife, pluck her hair, strike her and mutilate her
ears. There is no guilt.” In early modern Europe, writes Stephanie
Coontz, in Marriage, a History, a husband “could force sex upon
[his wife], beat her, and imprison her in the family home, while it
was she who endowed him with all her worldly goods. The minute
he placed that ring upon her finger he controlled any land she
brought to the marriage and he owned outright all her movable
property as well as any income she later earned.” The legal doctrine
of coverture, which held that, as Sir William Blackstone put it in
1753, “the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage or at least is incorporated or consolidated into
that of her husband,” was implemented in the Middle Ages and was
not fully dismantled in America until the late twentieth century.
Until 1974, women were frequently required to bring their husbands
with them while applying for a credit card. Until the eighties, legal
codes in many states specified that husbands could not be held
responsible for raping their wives.
Part of my aversion to getting married is my sense of
incompatibility with the word “wife,” which—outside the Borat
context, which is perfect, and will be perfect forever—feels
inseparable from this dismal history to me. At the same time, I
understand that people have been objecting to inequality in
marriage for centuries, from both the inside and the outside of the
institution, and that, in recent years, what it means to be a wife, a
married partner, has changed. In the summer of 2015, in Obergefell
v. Hodges, the Supreme Court guaranteed same-sex couples the
right to marry each other—a decision that validated the relatively
recent conception of marriage as a mutual affirmation of love and
commitment, and also reconfigured it as an institution that could be
entered into on gender-equal terms. “No union is more profound
than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity,
devotion, sacrifice, and family,” reads the final paragraph of the
decision. “In forming a marital union, two people become
something greater than once they were….It would misunderstand
these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage.
Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they
seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be
condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s
oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the
law.” On the Friday that the decision was handed down, I’d planned
on staying in, but then the news electrified me with such happiness
that I went out, and ended up at the club on mushrooms. I
remember standing still, people dancing all around me, my heart
like Funfetti cake, reading the decision’s final paragraph on my
phone screen over and over as I cried.
The constitutional right to gay marriage brings the institution
into its viable future. To many people at the tail end of my
generation, and to much of the generation that follows, it may
already seem incomprehensible that gay couples once did not have
the right to marry—as incomprehensible as it feels to me when I
imagine not being able to apply for a credit card on my own. This is
an era in which marriage is generally understood not as the
beginning of a partnership but as the avowal of that partnership. It’s
an era in which women graduate from college in greater numbers
than men, and often outearn men in their twenties; an era in which
women are no longer expected to get married to have sex or to build
a stable adulthood, and are consequently delaying marriage,
sometimes forgoing it altogether. Today, only around 20 percent of
Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly 60
percent in 1960. Marriage is becoming more equal on every front.
“In part, that’s because when we delay marriage, it’s not just women
who become independent,” Rebecca Traister writes in All the Single
Ladies. “It’s also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed
themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their
own suitcases.”
Many of the weddings I’ve been to have reflected this shift. The
fetishization of virginal purity has been largely removed from the
picture: even in Texas, among religious conservatives, it is often
implicitly acknowledged that the engaged couple has prepared for a
life together in ways that include having sex. Thankfully, I can’t
remember the last time I saw a bouquet toss. Often, both parents
walk the bride down the aisle. One ceremony featured the bride and
groom’s daughters as flower girls. One of my Peace Corps friends
proposed to her male partner on a beach in Senegal. While writing
this, I went to a wedding in Cincinnati where, post-kiss, the officiant
proudly announced the couple as “Dr. Katherine Lennard and Mr.
Jonathon Jones.” A few weeks later, I attended another wedding,
this one in Brooklyn, where the couple entered the ceremony
together, and the bride, the writer Joanna Rothkopf, delivered her
vows in two sentences, one of which was a Sopranos joke. (“I love
you more than Bobby Bacala loves Karen, and luckily I can’t cook so
you’ll never have to eat my last ziti.”) A few weeks after that, I drove
upstate for another wedding, where my friend Bobby was preceded
down the aisle by the four women in his wedding party, and he and
his husband, Josh, walked to the altar holding hands.
On the whole, though, the “traditional” wedding—meaning the
traditional straight wedding—remains one of the most significant
re-invocations of gender inequality that we have. There is still a
drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in
which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a
diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get
better and women’s lives often get worse. Married men report better
mental health and live longer than single men; in contrast, married
women report worse mental health, and die earlier, than single
women. (These statistics do not suggest that the act of getting
married is some sort of gendered hex: rather, they reflect the way
that, when a man and a woman combine their unpaid domestic
obligations under the aegis of tradition, the woman usually ends up
doing most of the work—a fact that is greatly exacerbated by the
advent of kids.) There’s an idea that women get to Scrooge-dive in
heaps of money after divorce proceedings, but in fact, women who
worked while married see their incomes go down by 20 percent on
average after a divorce, whereas men’s incomes go up by more than
that.
Gender inequality is so entrenched in straight marriage that it
persists in the face of cultural change as well as personal intentions.
A 2014 study of Harvard Business School alumni—a group of people
primed for high ambitions and flexibility—showed that more than
half of men from their thirties to their sixties expected that their
careers would take priority over their spouses’ careers: three
quarters of these men had their expectations fulfilled. In contrast,
less than a quarter of their female peers expected their spouses’
careers to take precedence over theirs, but this nonetheless
happened 40 percent of the time. Biology plays a role here,
obviously—we have not yet cracked the situation in which people
whose bodies are consistent with female biology have to have the
children, if children are to be had—but social convention and public
policy produce a thicket of unforced problems. The study of Harvard
Business School graduates showed that the younger female
respondents, in their twenties and early thirties, were on track for a
similar mismatch between outcome and desire.
—
There is a harbinger of this inequality in marriage, and a symbol, in
the way that straight women are still often expected to formally
adopt the identities of their husbands. In Jane Eyre, which
Charlotte Brontë published in 1847, the narrator feels a sense of
dislocation when, on the eve of her wedding, she sees “Mrs.
Rochester” on her luggage tags. “I could not persuade myself to affix
them, or have them affixed. Mrs. Rochester! she did not exist,” Jane
thinks. “…It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my
dressing-table, garments said to be hers had already displaced my
black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me
appertained that suit of wedding raiment….I shut my closet to
conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained.” In Daphne du
Maurier’s Rebecca, published in 1938, Rebecca feels the same sense
of self-estrangement at the prospect of marriage. “Mrs. de Winter. I
would be Mrs. de Winter. I considered my name, and the signature
on cheques, to tradesmen, and in letters asking people to dinner.”
She repeats the name, dissociating. “Mrs. de Winter. I would be
Mrs. de Winter.” After a few minutes, she realizes that she has been
eating a sour tangerine, and that she has “a sharp, bitter taste in my
mouth, and I had only just noticed it.” Mrs. Rochester and Mrs. de
Winter both end up near-fatally embroiled in their husbands’
previous problems, which themselves stem from marriage; it’s
notable that Brontë and du Maurier restore a sort of balance in
these novels by burning both husbands’ estates to the ground.
The first woman in America to keep her birth name after
marriage was the feminist Lucy Stone, who wed Henry Blackwell in
1855. The two of them published their vows, which doubled as a
protest against marriage laws that “refuse[d] to recognize the wife
as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the
husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with
legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no
man should possess.” (Stone was later barred from voting in a
school board election under her maiden name.) Nearly seven
decades later, a group of feminists formed the Lucy Stone League,
agitating for the right of married women to check into a hotel, or
open a bank account, or get a passport, in their own names. This
fight for name equality dragged on until fairly recently: the oldest
women in that Harvard Business School study would have been
required, in some states, to take their husbands’ last names if they
wanted to vote. It took until the 1975 Tennessee State Supreme
Court case Dunn v. Palermo for the final law to this effect to be
struck down. “Married women,” wrote Justice Joe Henry, “have
labored under a form of societal compulsion and economic coercion
which has not been conducive to the assertion of some rights and
privileges of citizenship.” A requirement that a woman take her
husband’s name “would stifle and chill virtually all progress in the
rapidly expanding field of human liberties. We live in a new day. We
cannot create and continue conditions and then defend their
existence by reliance on the custom thus created.”
Women began keeping their names in the seventies, when it
became broadly possible to do so. In 1986, The New York Times
began using the honorific “Ms.” to refer to women whose marital
status was unknown, as well as to married women who wished to
use their birth names. The trend of name independence peaked in
the nineties, at a rather paltry 23 percent of married women, and
today less than 20 percent keep their names. The decision “is one of
convenience,” Katie Roiphe wrote at Slate in 2004. “The politics are
almost incidental. Our fundamental independence is not so
imperiled that we need to keep our names….At this point—apologies
to Lucy Stone, and her pioneering work in name keeping—our
attitude is: Whatever works.”
Roiphe’s laissez-faire postfeminist view remains common.
Women believe that their names are personal, not political—in large
part because the decision-making around them remains so
culturally restricted and curtailed. A woman keeping her name is
making a choice that is expected to be limited and futile. She will
not pass the name down to her children, or bestow it upon her
husband. At most—or so people tend to think—her last name will be
crammed into the middle of her children’s names, or packed around
a hyphen, and then later dropped for space reasons. (And in fact, a
Louisiana law still requires the child of a married couple to bear the
husband’s last name in order for a birth certificate to be issued.) We
find it inappropriate for women to treat their names the way that
men, by default, feel entitled to. On this front, as on so many others,
a woman is allowed to assert her independence as long as it doesn’t
affect anyone else.
Of course, there are no clear-cut ways to navigate family names
even with a presumption of gender equality: hyphenated names
dissolve after a single generation, and generally speaking, one name
has got to go. But there’s a flexibility with which queer couples
approach the issue of naming children—as well as wedding-related
conventions in general, particularly proposals—that is
conspicuously absent from the heterosexual scene. In marriage, too,
gay couples divide household work more equally than straight
couples do, and when they adopt “traditional” gender roles, they
“tend to reject the notion that their labor arrangements are
imitative or derivative of those of heterosexual couples,” as Abbie
Goldberg writes in a 2013 study. Instead, “they interpret their
arrangements as pragmatic and chosen.” Gay couples are also more
likely to find their division of labor to be fair than straight couples—
a statistic that holds, crucially, even when the work is not divided
evenly. (In other words, their hopes and their outcomes are more
closely aligned.) The institution works differently without the power
imbalance that historically defined it. Like any social construct,
marriage is most flexible when it is new.
—
How is it possible that so much of contemporary life feels so
arbitrary and so inescapable? Thinking about weddings has not been
very useful to me: developing an understanding of the material
conditions that produced the wedding ritual, its basis in inequality
and its role in perpetuating that inequality, hasn’t really meant a
thing. It doesn’t remove me from a culture that is organized through
marriage and weddings; it certainly doesn’t make it any less sensible
to do what all the affianced of the past, present, and future have
done and are doing, which is taking these opportunities for ritual
pleasure and sweetness whenever they can.
And still I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight
women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first
presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today
would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their
independence without their sense of self-importance being
overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is
still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its
most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only
period in a woman’s life where she is universally and
unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms.
The conventional vision of a woman’s life, in which the wedding
plays a starring role, seems to be offering an unspoken trade-off.
Here, our culture says, is an event that will center you absolutely—
that will crystallize your image when you were young and gorgeous,
admired and beloved, with the whole world rolling out in front of
you like an endless meadow, like a plush red carpet, sparklers
lighting up your irises and petals drifting through your lavish,
elegant hair. In exchange, from that point forward, in the eyes of the
state and everyone around you, your needs will slowly cease to exist.
This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women,
becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being
prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-
resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and,
later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be
systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband
and kids.
The paradox at the heart of the wedding comes from the two
versions of a woman that it conjures. There’s the glorified bride,
looming large and resplendent and almost monstrously powerful,
and there’s her nullified twin and opposite, the woman who
vanishes underneath the name change and the veil. These two
selves are opposites, bound together by male power. The advice
book chirping “You are privileged to have all eyes center on you”
and Anne Hathaway snapping “Sometimes it’s about me, okay?” at
her maid of honor are inextricable from the laws that required
women to take their husband’s name if they wanted to vote in
elections and the fact that the post-marriage benefit package of
health, wealth, and happiness is still mostly distributed to men.
Underneath the confectionary spectacle of the wedding is a case
study in how inequality bestows outsize affirmation on women as
compensation for making us disappear.
It is easy, so easy, to find all of this beautiful. I recently pulled up
an archive of Martha Stewart Weddings to see if I could find the
issue that I pored over in Kyrgyzstan almost a decade ago. I spotted
the cover immediately: the peach backdrop, the redhead with a huge
smile and bright lipstick—like a Disney princess, with butterflies
alighting on the tulle skirt of her strapless white dress. “Make It
Yours,” the cover commands. I bought it, and read through it one
more time, remembering the tea-length skirts, the bouquets of
anemones and ranunculus, the apricot champagne sparklers, these
things I had mentally surrounded myself with when all I wanted
was for something good to last.
The woman on the cover reminded me of Anne of Green Gables,
L. M. Montgomery’s thoughtful, talkative, carrot-headed heroine. I
couldn’t remember when in the series she got married, or how, or
what it looked like—even though I had, of course, nurtured a crush
on her boy-next-door sweetheart Gilbert Blythe. I looked up Anne’s
House of Dreams, the fifth book in the series, and found the
wedding scene. It’s a September day, full of sunshine, and the
chapter opens with Anne in her old room at Green Gables, thinking
about cherry trees and wifehood. Then she descends the stairs in
her wedding dress, “slender and shining-eyed,” her arms full of
roses. In this pivotal moment, she does not think or speak. The
narration passes to Gilbert. “She was his at last,” he thinks, “this
evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was
to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride.”
It’s such a natural scene. It’s lovely. It’s so perversely familiar. It
occurs to me that I crave independence, that I demand and expect it,
but never enough, since I was a teenager, to actually be alone. It’s
possible that, just as marriage conceals its true nature through the
elaborate ritual of the wedding, I have been staging this entire
production to hide from myself some reality about my life. If I
object to the wife’s diminishment for the same reason that I object
to the bride’s glorification, maybe this reason is much simpler and
more obvious than I’ve imagined: I don’t want to be diminished,
and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but
whenever I want.
This seems true, but I still feel that I can’t trust it. Here, the
more I try to uncover whatever I’m looking for, the more I feel that
I’m too far gone. I can feel the low, uneasy hum of self-delusion
whenever I think about all of this—a tone that gets louder the more
I try to write and cancel it out. I can feel the tug of my deep and
recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must
be, somehow, necessarily wrong.
In the end, the safest conclusions may not actually be
conclusions. We are asked to understand our lives under such
impossibly convoluted conditions. I have always accommodated
everything I wish I were opposed to. Here, as in so many other
things, the “thee” that I dread may have been the “I” all along.
For my parents
Acknowledgments
Though all of these essays were written for this book, several of
them influenced my work at The New Yorker, and vice versa. A few
of them build on things I wrote at Jezebel and The Hairpin. I am
thankful to have started writing inside the Awl family: thank you to
Logan Sachon and Mike Dang, the first editors to publish me; to
Jane Marie, my dreamy first Hairpin editor; to Choire Sicha and
Alex Balk, who used to confuse me when they would bitch about the
internet—lol.
I’m thankful to the Repentagon for the lasting education, and for
the friends, too—Lauren, Rachel, Annabel, Lara, thanks for seeing it
all. Robert, I’m as glad for you now as I was when we saw the
construction angels.
At my beloved University of Virginia: thank you to the Jefferson
Scholars Foundation for the lifetime of student debt freedom, to
Michael Joseph Smith, to Caroline Rody, to Walt Hunter, to Rachel
Gendreau. Kevin, Jamie, Ryan, Tory, Baxa, Juli, and Buster Baxter:
thank you for the permanent spiritual home.
It was during my short time in the Peace Corps that I started
considering the unlikely possibility of writing for a living. Lola, Yan,
Kyle, thank you for letting me cry when my laptop was stolen, and
Akash, thank you forever for lending me yours so that I could start
writing again. David, you’re the best kuya. Dinara Sultanova, you’re
the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met.
I owe so much to the funding and space provided by the
University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Thank you to
Nicholas Delbanco for encouraging me immediately, and to Brit
Bennett, Maya West, Chris McCormick, and Mairead Small Staid for
your easygoing brilliance. Rebecca Scherm, Barbara Linhardt, Katie
Lennard: see you at the barre, etc.
My friendships in New York have kept a little part of the world
warm and steady: thank you to Help Group, to 2018, and to the
opera cunts. I’m grateful to Amy Rose Spiegel, a guardian angel; to
Derek Davies, for so much musical ecstasy; to Frannie Stabile, the
patron saint of butt optimization. Puja Patel, I’m sorry that I never
filed that one time at SXSW. Luce de Palchi, I’ll never forget being
at a loss for words, on deadline, the night after the election, and you
told me that I didn’t need to do anything other than be honest—that
what I thought would be enough.
At Gawker Media: Tom Scocca, thank you for your excruciating
edits. To my beloved freaks at Jezebel, please come over for a bottle
of rosé each.
To Rebecca Mead, Rebecca Solnit, and Rebecca Traister—Andrew
would always ask me which Rebecca I was going on about this time
—I admire all of you and your work so much, and I felt crushed by
happiness when you looked out for me early on. Thank you to Jeff
Bennett, who gave me invaluable notes on this manuscript, and to
the genius Marlon James for introducing us. To Gideon Lewis-
Kraus, thank you for X-raying this book and my personhood.
Thanks to the remarkable Mackenzie Williams, who provided
research assistance on several essays, most notably “We Come from
Old Virginia” and “I Thee Dread.” My dear wife Haley Mlotek, thank
you for handing me the subtitle of this book on the day it was due.
And to Emma Carmichael: thank you for giving me a career, and a
close-up look at how to bring the best out of people, and above all a
friendship that I really can’t imagine my life without.
I am so grateful to the MacDowell Colony for giving me a month
in paradise. To my incredible agent, Amy Williams, thank you for
every last thing you do. Thank you to Jenny Meyer, and to Anna
Kelly at Fourth Estate. I still find it laughable that I am employed at
The New Yorker—my brilliant colleagues, you fill me with awe.
Emily Greenhouse, thanks for adopting me in London. Jeanie Riess,
thank you for fact-checking this book. Bruce Diones, thank you for
keeping it all running. Nick Thompson, thank you for hiring me.
Thank you to Dorothy Wickenden and Pam McCarthy. To David
Haglund, my editor, you are the very best—thank you for making
me better. Thank you to David Remnick for not firing me (yet)
when I tweet about my bong.
Carrie Frye, you are the most generous reader, the most
supernatural editor, the loveliest person—thank you for guiding me
with such meticulous grace and insight through the entire process
of turning this proposal into a manuscript. I couldn’t have written
this book without you. I’m grateful to everyone at Random House
for taking such good care of me—especially to Andy Ward, Susan
Kamil, Molly Turpin, and Dhara Parikh. To my editor, Ben
Greenberg, thank you for making this book a reality—for
championing it, sharpening it, and always making me feel that I was
in great hands.
Finally: to Lynn Stekas and John Daley, thank you for being
family to me since 2010, for the values you passed down to your
children, and for your example of mutual love and respect. Clare
and Matt and CJ and Quinn, I’m so glad you guys are in my life. To
my brother, Martin, I’m sorry I made you pretend to be my dog
before we got Gretzky. To my actual dog, Luna, thank you for being
the best fluffy pal—with you, I could never be lonely. To Aida Adia,
my beautiful grandmother, I know that I’m a reader because of you.
To my mom and dad, I’m in your debt forever: your sacrifices made
me tough and capable and alive to the world’s strangeness, and
taught me about unconditional love. And to Andrew Daley, my
partner-in-everything: thank you for growing up with me, for
building me a desk and a life, and for being so attractive. In truth,
I’ve felt married to you for a long time.
Background Reading
The I in the Internet
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton,
2010.
Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909.
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About the Author
JIA TOLENTINO is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Raised
in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before
serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving
her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She
was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy
editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New
York Times Magazine, Grantland, Pitchfork, and other
publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
jia.blog
Twitter: @jiatolentino
Instagram: @jiatortellini
