9
Damaged Goods
Though not new, self-injury gained more attention and close scrutiny in the 90s. Previously, psychologists had thought self-harm was an outcropping of other diseases and disorders, but during the 90s they began to believe that the act itself was worthy of further study. Research on self-harm still doesn’t necessarily reflect the full extent of the pathology, since respondents often must self-report, and self-injury behaviors are extremely stigmatized. But adolescents were the population most at risk, and in one 2005 study, 15 percent said they had engaged in self-harm. Boys were more likely to burn or hit themselves; girls tended to cut.
Mary Pipher said she never treated a girl who cut herself for the first decade she practiced psychology, but by the time she wrote Reviving Ophelia in 1994, self-mutilation was a common outlet for girls coping with pain. One of her clients, Tammy, covered her bed with newspaper, then cut her breasts with a razor after her boyfriend assaulted her. She began to do it whenever the pair fought. “Self-mutilation may well be a reaction to the stresses of the 1990s,” Pipher wrote. If eating disorders spread out of cultural pressures to be thin, then cutting represented women’s need to “carve themselves into culturally acceptable pieces.” Piercing and tattooing culture were also manifestations of this desire to mutilate the body, she said.
The depression driving these acts was being addressed in private offices like Pipher’s, but less so by society at large. As girls’ depression climbed, so did their suicide attempts. A 2001 report, Risky Behavior among Youths, dedicated an entire chapter to the rise in suicide among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. Using data from 1995, the authors showed that nearly 17 percent of girls said they had considered suicide, while nearly 6 percent had attempted it. More than twice the number of girls attempted suicide than boys, though boys succeeded more frequently. Girls were more likely to make a suicide attempt if they knew someone who had previously done so. Psychologists characterized self-harm as a coping mechanism for handling difficult emotions and a potential marker of low self-esteem and perfectionism that plagued girls in the 1990s. That girls’ anger and emotions were not validated, and were often outright mocked, didn’t help matters.
While the 1987 book Bodies under Siege calls itself the first to explain self-mutilation, it took nearly a decade for the act to lodge in cultural dramatizations. By the late 90s, cutting, as it was colloquially called, was represented and romanticized in pop culture. A 1996 film, Female Perversions, dramatized self-harm, as did Beverly Hills, 90210. Psychotherapist Steven Levenkron’s bestselling novel, The Luckiest Girl in the World, centered on a female self-mutilator. CosmoGirl! magazine founding editor Atoosa Rubenstein wrote about cutting herself while she was in college. Cutting was called “the new bulimia.”
Perhaps the watershed moment for self-harm was a 1995 interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, in which she admitted to cutting her wrists with a razor and her chest and thighs with a penknife during her unhappy marriage. She also discussed suffering from bulimia. These revelations from royalty shocked the millions who had watched her storybook wedding. In the US, the New York Times called cutting “a national obsession.” One author who spoke to dozens of cutters for a book called A Bright Red Scream referred to self-harm as “the addiction of the 90s.”
Breathless headlines and popular culture representations of girls’ drug use, eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, and self-injury conspired to create the “damaged girl” or “damaged goods” stereotype. The 90s damaged girl was often young and rail-thin—from drug abuse or disordered eating, or both. Usually, she was introduced to the public as an innocent girl-next-door who lost her way with sex, drugs, or psychological issues. She was thought to be immature—hence the tag “girl”—and overly emotional, and she lost her virginity or was sexualized before her time. Media narratives referred to her as dirty, broken, or in need of saving. Her fallen-ness was an excuse to savage her. The trope was easy to apply to any girl who didn’t seem sufficiently obsessed with perfection. The “damaged girl” or “damaged goods” was a motif related to the inculpated victim. She was at once ridiculed for her suffering and fetishized in countless films and television shows watched by 90s girls.
Notably, the damaged-girl trope mostly applied to straight white women. Their struggles with self-injury were studied and documented more than those of women of color and LGBTQ women. Thus, the damaged-goods stereotype in the media and culture came to reflect a limited view of the epidemic. A 2004 study of LGBTQ women who self-injured said they did so to cope, but that their sexuality and identity played a role. “Self-injury can be understood as a coping response that arises within a social context,” the journal authors wrote. Gabriela Sandoval writes about women of color cutting themselves at the Ivy League residence hall, where she served as director, in the essay “Cutting through Race and Class: Women of Color and Self-Injury.” She explains that Latina students from immigrant families cut themselves because of pressures, but also “as an expression of the disparity between their own and their parents’ experiences.” Research and media ignored this broader context when they prioritized straight white women who cut—yet another example of how white women were bitchified differently from women of color in the 90s.
A BAD, BAD GIRL
Pop star Fiona Apple released her first album, Tidal, in the summer of 1996, when she was nineteen years old. It was a truth bomb with unsettling chord progressions and attention-grabbing lyrics. What sparked controversy around the ingenue was the music video for her hit “Criminal.” The disheveled artist writhes on a carpet amid the remnants of a party. She sings, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl,” while sitting in a hot tub, men’s legs straddling her birdlike neck. The suggestive video enticed grade school boys to hunt for it on MTV and scandalized the music press.
Critics said Apple epitomized “heroin-chic” and looked “like an underfed Calvin Klein model,” like “Kate Moss with songs.” The New Yorker targeted her “teenager’s sense of drama.” “Apple has often seemed part banshee and part waif, an unstable cocktail of ferocity and fragility teetering on the edge of detonation,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel judged. Because she was wearing underwear in the video, many assumed she was prowling for sex—“slinking,” “flouncing,” and “writhing,” according to reviews. Time named the video among the top ten most controversial videos of all time fifteen years after its release. But the reason that the video is controversial is lost on most. Apple isn’t baiting men with sex or addled by drugs. In fact, she isn’t playing for the camera at all—she is telling men to fuck off.
Kristin Lieb, an associate professor of marketing at Emerson College and author of the book Gender, Branding and the Modern Music Industry, calls the video defiant. “It’s very different than the videos you see—I can think of a million—like Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl,’ where it’s all a performance for the camera, for the male gaze. The way Apple looks at the camera, she is defying, even shaming its gaze.”
“Criminal” seemed to infantilize and sexualize Apple at once with its “overtones of child porn.” But Apple was not a child when she made this video; she was a consenting adult. Still, she was shamed and called a tormented little girl. “Pop’s newest star is barely twenty, still lives with her parents and doesn’t have a driver’s license. So what is Fiona Apple doing half-naked all over MTV?” Spin asked. The article went on to describe her behavior as “generally acting like a sexy temperamental teenager, the kind of arty ravished girl you knew in junior high who wrote poems in all lowercase letters.” She was shot for the story by fashion photographer Terry Richardson, who has since been accused of sexual harassment and assault.
Thanks to her youth and emoting, Apple’s critics also labeled her a narcissist—“a self-obsessed drama queen exploiting her psychic wounds.” The Washington Post called Tidal “a tsunami of adolescent feelings in which Apple revealed far too much of herself” (ironic, considering popular music industry standards require female artists
to bare as much skin as possible). Apple was no struggling, troubled youth, her critics charged. Instead, she was a spoiled brat. Rolling Stone wondered if press coverage of her “might lead one to believe that Fiona Apple is either a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced, ungrateful freak.”
Critics pathologized her for not smiling, and for looking “emaciated” and “too thin.” Ever candid in her interviews, Apple confirmed to Rolling Stone that she did indeed have an eating disorder resulting from the trauma of being raped at a young age. “For me, it wasn’t about getting thin, it was about getting rid of the bait that was attached to my body. A lot of it came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness. I just thought that if you had a body and if you had anything on you that could be grabbed, it would be grabbed. So I did purposely get rid of it,” she told the music magazine in 1998.
Unfortunately, Apple’s disclosure that she was a rape survivor didn’t stop the press and fans from treating her as a piece of meat. “Imagine if you do have rape or sexual assault in your background and now everybody is focusing on your body and whether you’re sexy enough, it has to be a nightmare—and she’s one of the only ones who really takes that head-on,” Lieb said. Instead of commending Apple for shaming men who leered at her, critics accused her of using her youth and her sex for fame. And perhaps she was. But to say her artistic efforts were largely misunderstood is a gross understatement. Even twenty years later, “Criminal” is cheered as controversial, not for this, but because Apple was an artist who looked like a damaged girl—a child singing in her underwear.
Today, fans hunger for artists to call bullshit on the entertainment industry. To post makeup-free selfies, to shirk Photoshop in modeling contracts, to be a few pounds heavier than perfect—all these acts are applauded like a triple axel. Years later, Rolling Stone would call Tidal—which sold three million copies upon its release—one of the best albums of the decade. But at the time, it sounded like nothing else on the radio, which was both intriguing and confusing. Apple was so ahead of her time, in so many ways, that not only was she smeared for not falling in line, but her protest went practically unnoticed. “It would probably make her brand Britney Spears big now, but at the time she was called crazy,” said Lieb.
The damaged-girl critique of Apple culminated when she received a moonman for Best New Artist at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. I watched in real time with tremendous discomfort. Apple used her speech to censure the music industry—the very folks who put the astronaut in her hand. “This world is bullshit,” Apple said. “You shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself . . . It’s just stupid that I’m in this world but you’re all very cool to me.”
I was Apple’s target demographic, yet I absorbed the critiques of her and parroted them myself. Why didn’t she say thank you and smile sweetly? She did look like the cocaine-snorting starved model who so frequently appeared in my YM and Teen magazines, selling an androgynous fragrance or diet pills. I couldn’t stand that her look was popular, mostly because my shape was the exact opposite—breasts, flesh, and curvy hips that my chemistry teacher once called “childbearing” in front of my class. I was never an Apple fan because I was scared of her and threatened by her intensity. What she was trying to do was completely lost on me. As a teenager, I was sold and bought into what Apple was rejecting—beauty, sexuality, and even personality shaped and policed by men. Apple’s attempt to undermine the “perfect girl” aesthetic—shaming the gaze, spilling her guts, and starving the flesh from her frame—threatened the affable, obedient, perfect-girl archetype that my peers and I were trying so hard to mirror. I didn’t buy her record. I skipped right past it in my friends’ CD changers. When her video came on, I changed the channel. I couldn’t look at her body writhing on the carpet. All it took was a few notes of the moaning piano intro to “Criminal” or a glance at the video’s sepia tones, and I felt sick. Apple was “damaged goods”—something I longed not to be. She upset me. Now I realize that was exactly the point.
THE FALLEN PRINCESS
ABC World News Tonight executive producer Kathy O’Hearn learned from a colleague that Princess Diana had been in a car crash. “They kept saying she hurt her thigh. Right away, it smelled much worse,” O’Hearn told me. She sped to work, where she found her colleagues—“all dudes with crossed arms standing around”—trying to decide how to cover the story. Should they cut into regular programming? Wait to make a special report? “I said, ‘This is fucking huge. This is a princess and an accident. You don’t know how people are attached to her.’” Finally, the staff decided Peter Jennings, the face of the network, should report the story. But he was vacationing in the Hamptons.
“I had to say, ‘Peter, I want you to come in. The princess was in a car crash,’” O’Hearn recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t understand this. Why are we making such a big deal of this? She was not a head of state. She did not command an army. She was not the head of a corporation.’” O’Hearn made her pitch, that Diana was a princess at once relatable and real, and that her struggle mattered to people. She stirred emotions—particularly in women—with her stoicism in the face of disease, humiliation, and rejection. Jennings did the story, of course, but “he was just livid that he had to come in that night,” she said.
Obviously, Jennings’s instinct was wrong. Diana’s death was one of the biggest news stories of the decade, inspiring weeks of wall-to-wall coverage that included countless hours of retrospectives on her life, live coverage of the memorial of littered flowers at Buckingham Palace, and her funeral itself. The fixation on her death was a throwback to the event that launched the global obsession with her royal life: seven hundred fifty million people watched Diana Spencer’s wedding to Charles, Prince of Wales, in 1981.
Early stereotypes ascribed to Diana included that she was unsophisticated, girlish, and stupid. Her education halted when she married at twenty years old. Her lack of refinement was proved by her look—she dressed in “frilly modest-maiden dresses” and wore an unflattering “modified bowl haircut.” Diana recalled being “always pitched out front” to appease press when she traveled as an ambassador with her husband, which led to intense scrutiny on “my clothes, what I said, what my hair was doing, which is a pretty dull subject,” she said at the time. Needless to say, her husband’s appearance wasn’t given the same treatment.
While the prince’s interests were serious, hers were vapid. Charles relished discussing philosophy, and doted on horses and his garden. Diana “adored fancy clothes, listening to pop music on her Walkman and telephone gossip,” said one report. When she told a sick child at a London hospital that she was “thick as a plank” to ease his nervousness around her, it became a global story.
But over time, the icon and vacuous girl-next-door became the troubled woman. Reports of Diana’s mental illness, bulimia, and suicide attempts emerged around 1992, when journalist Andrew Morton published the biography Diana. (Morton covered the princess before Lewinsky.) He charged that the royal family deprived Diana of resources and support to cope with her sickness, constant media scrutiny, and invasions of privacy, while mocking her suffering. Charles once pointed to her plate of food and asked, “Is that going to reappear later?”
In her 1995 soul-baring sit-down interview with Martin Bashir on the British news show Panorama, Diana revealed her marital struggles and battles with postpartum depression, bulimia, and suicide in rare detail. These subjects were incredibly taboo at the time and not often discussed in public, let alone by a royal. Many called her a master manipulator of the media, and saw the interview as a ploy for public sympathy. But as the princess explained to Bashir, her honesty sprang from desperation, and because she was “fed up” with being seen as a “basket case.” She told Bashir that her suffering was ammunition for the royal family. It “gave everybody a wonderful new label. Diana’
s unstable. Diana’s mentally unbalanced.”
Her family and the press seemed to believe that she could control her binging and purging, and that her five alleged suicide attempts were not the product of a disease, but a mind-set she could change. She told Bashir that her family called her an “embarrassment” who was “sick and should be put in a home.” Her suicide attempts were described as “half-hearted” or “widely seen as cries for help.” The queen believed her bulimia to be “the cause of the marriage problems and not a symptom,” and later the reason for the royal couple’s split, Diana said. In fact, the princess was part of an epidemic. From 1988 to 1993 bulimia rates tripled in the UK, and kept climbing until 2000.
Meanwhile, perhaps because she intimately understood what it felt like to be stigmatized, Diana was an early preeminent face of the AIDS crisis. She was photographed shaking hands with those diagnosed with HIV in the 80s, when it was still widely believed that any contact could transmit the disease. Back then, politicians in America and England were distancing themselves from HIV/AIDS, if not outright ignoring the epidemic and those suffering. But Diana took her young sons to homeless shelters to meet those dying of AIDS, exhibiting a radical empathy.
Diana was a great force in destigmatizing the disease, but the attention this effort won her displeased the palace. Her work to connect with regular people diverged from previous monarchs’ behavior, and the press accused her of using her advocacy work to steal attention from her husband. Charles and Diana were immersed in a “rivalry for public attention and approval” that “continued until her death,” reported her obituary in the New York Times. She took “highly publicized trips to former war zones like Angola to conduct her high-profile campaign against landmines,” as if she were gunning for an Oscar instead of striving to prevent the loss of life and limbs. Diana “posed knowingly on Mediterranean holidays” with her friend Dodi Fayed, who died in the same car wreck that took her own life, in an “apparent effort to show the world that the once-troubled young woman had found personal happiness.”
90s Bitch Page 20