The spectacle continued to dominate headlines and nightly news broadcasts. Kerrigan’s parents pushed back in the press, which had an infantilizing effect, but they had good points. “What if she had been a man?” her mother asked in Sports Illustrated. “Would there have been any of this? If she had been a hockey player, she could have been in a fight, and no one would have said anything after the game. Do you think any of this would have happened to a man?” Her father added, “What if she had won by a tenth of a point instead of lost by a tenth of a point? There wouldn’t have been any of this.”
Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution in March. In June, the United States Figure Skating Association barred her from skating competitions for life and snatched back her national title. In fact, Skategate pandemonium didn’t relent until a new tabloid drama emerged to unseat it. That was when Harris’s Harding look-alike gigs dried up. “I lost my job to O. J.,” Harris said.
“NO ONE EVER WANTED TO LISTEN”
Today, Tonya is getting Nancy-ed. Sort of.
Like religious parables, Shakespeare, and Greek mythology, the folklore of Skategate is being reappropriated, in many cases by millennials who watched the attack on television as children, but now, more than two decades later, romanticize it as adults. Current retellings hinge on redeeming Harding, the 90s villainess, but also celebrating her kitsch. Tracy McDowell, the actress who portrayed Harding in the rock opera, dressed as Harding for Halloween. Maybe there were always Harding apologists, touched by the hardship she overcame, but they weren’t loud enough to stifle her detractors. Her new champions are drawn to her antihero qualities, as well as her tacky outfits and sassy mouth. “It’s amazing she didn’t kill anyone,” said Matt Harkins, one such self-selected custodian of Harding’s story. Today, Kerrigan lovers are harder to find.
Harkins and Viviana Olen are friends in their late twenties; for them Tonya and Nancy are no passing interest. The Tonya Harding Nancy Kerrigan 1994 Museum in Brooklyn is their creation. The permanent collection is an amalgam of photographs, memorabilia, and original artwork. Hawkins and Olen aren’t art historians, but rather comedians who became roommates and then creative partners. Museumgoers have included former figure skaters, an Olympic ice dancer, millennials and their parents who are in town, the cast of Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera, and swarms of journalists. “There’s so much you didn’t realize,” Olen said. “What a parody Tonya became. She is the first American to land the triple axel in competition and this is something that I have never heard before in my entire life and that’s insane to me, you know? It was all about her hair and she’s just like a thug or something.”
The museum contains news clippings from the incident, as well as pins, programs, and trinkets from competition. Harkins and Olen won’t feature anything that mocks the skaters or the incident—despite the cornucopia of that kind of thing—and they steer clear of Harding’s boxing career and the DIY pornographic film she and Gillooly sold to Penthouse. “We do feel a responsibility,” Olen says. “We don’t want to focus on the parody unless we’re talking about how insane it was.”
Often museumgoers are women who loved Kerrigan as girls, who closed ranks around her and bad-mouthed Harding. Olen tells about a visitor who mourned after the attack, covering her windows in Kerrigan pictures and refusing to go to school for two weeks. “I remember it was ‘Tonya’s bad, Nancy’s good,’” said twenty-nine-year-old Clara Elser, an actress who debuted the solo show The Love Song of Tonya Harding at the Calgary Fringe Festival. The plot is that Tonya Harding is hosting a viewing party during the Olympic figure skating ladies’ long program twenty years after she competed, giving her an opportunity to tell her story. Elser aims to treat Harding with sympathy, and notes the many people who erroneously think Harding did the whacking.
Most of the efforts to retell the epic of Nancy and Tonya focus on Harding. She is the central figure of the documentary The Price of Gold, perhaps in part because Kerrigan didn’t participate, but also for the same reasons filmmakers, playwrights, musicians, and comedians are drawn to Harding’s flaws. When I ask Harding what she thinks of the current retellings of the 1994 story—such as the museum and films, including a biopic starring Margot Robbie—that try to tell parts of her tale that were being left out at the time, she interjects, “No, actually nothing was ever left out. No one ever wanted to listen. That’s what’s hard.”
Plenty of people want to bend the story back to its 90s shape. When New York television station PIX11 filmed at the museum, producers asked Olen and Harkins to reenact the hit (they refused). A Fusion newscast used a Harding Barbie doll to strike a Kerrigan one. Even Barack Obama promised he wouldn’t pull “a Tonya Harding” and pummel his opponent, though he might want to, while campaigning for president. Stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race mocked Harding when they adapted Skategate for a comedic miniseries, Ice Queens. “Kerrigan is looking strong at practice while Tonya just ate a meat-lover’s pizza. How will the saga end?” a reporter asks as Tonya inspects her fingernails. Instead of sticking her “tricky combination,” Tonya “fell, farted, and barfed.”
Luckow thinks what’s preventing Harding from a real comeback, and redemption, is an apology. “Tonya never apologized or admitted to being a part of it. It’s not the act itself, it’s the denial that gets people really angry,” she told me. “If she had nothing to do with it, fine, but by not apologizing, that is what angers people.”
In The Price of Gold, Harding’s emotions range from anger to tears. She is the one who lost her career and her life’s work after the incident, but many focus on her complaining. As Slate put it, Harding is “still bitter after all these years.” In the lead-up to the release of the major motion picture I, Tonya, Harding exercised to get in shape, “redoing her hair and looking over her wardrobe,” her agent, Mike Rosenberg, told me. He relays that Harding fears interviews because she’s been burned so many times. “The only way she can really get work is trading on her infamy,” Burstein said. There have been many comeback attempts. But this time could be different.
Harding still skates, sometimes a few days a week. She works with a coach, who tells her to show up on time since her presence motivates young hopefuls to skate harder. Her advice to young women is a dose of tough love. “Believe in yourself and trust yourself. Love yourself. Because the only person that has to love you is yourself.” She tells them to pursue their dreams but cautions that achievement is all-consuming. “It’s like me trying to do my triples or something. Pardon my language, but if you half-ass something, it’s not going to happen. It’s either all in or all out.”
After the attack, Kerrigan went on to more endorsement deals and continued skating at paid events like Skate America and Halloween on Ice. She is mostly out of public view, except for a recent stint on Dancing with the Stars and yearly performances in Nancy Kerrigan’s Halloween on Ice show, which tours midsize East Coast and Midwest cities each October. “She didn’t really skate that much and just sat in the chair as a princess,” remarked one attendee.
Not long ago, I was riding the subway reading a copy of Women on Ice, a 1995 collection of feminist essays about Harding and Kerrigan. I noticed that a guy, probably midthirties, was reading over my shoulder. “Oh, I remember that story,” he said. “That white trash girl beat up the ice princess. That story was everywhere.”
12
The Girl Power Myth
In the early 1990s, new research raised red flags about adolescent girls in America. The 1991 study Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America asked nearly 3,000 young people—2,400 girls and 600 boys in grades four to ten—about their attitudes toward the classroom, gender, self-esteem, and ambition. The result was that, for the first time, researchers directly linked girls’ poor self-esteem to what they learn and how they are treated in school.
Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America found that girls and boys had similarly high levels of self-esteem, achievement, and happiness in elementary school. But as they reached middle
and high school, girls reported declines in all these categories. Boys were nearly twice as likely as girls to argue with teachers when they believed that they were right, and to assert that they were “pretty good at a lot of things.” As girls and boys grew up, the achievement gap between them widened, and girls’ self-esteem plummeted further. These findings first set off alarm bells in 1991, when the study was published. Advocates for young women, not to mention their parents, wanted to know why. What caused girls’ happiness and confidence to nose-dive in the 90s?
Another major work that raised concerns about girlhood was the 1992 book Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, which probed the interior lives of adolescent girls. Harvard psychologists Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown spent four years interviewing nearly a hundred girls ages seven to eighteen at a Cleveland private school. They hoped to learn “what, on the way to womanhood, does a girl give up?” Quite a lot, it turned out. Gilligan and Brown found that the stuff of growing up—taking risks, acquiring independence, and expressing desire and voice—was diametrically opposed to the qualities the culture most celebrated in girls, such as niceness, selflessness, rule following, and conventional beauty. “The passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours,” the authors wrote.
These experiences led Gilligan and Brown to overhaul their traditional research model and devise a new one, which they called a Listener’s Guide. Interviewing girls over the course of years allowed them to see and hear girls lose their confidence and power, devolving into self-conscious people-pleasers over time. It also helped them compare the changes in girls’ speech by “following the pathways of girls’ thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it.”
Gilligan and Brown came to understand that when a girl switched from speaking in the first person to the second she was often disassociating herself from her own feelings. For instance, one of the girls in the study, Noura, wrestles with whether or not to confront friends who trash another friend behind her back. She knows it’s the “right thing” to do, but she fears disownment from the group. “I learned that it’s not nice [to talk about people] and I learned what it feels like to be—to be the person that everyone doesn’t like,” she tells the researchers. When they ask her how she learned that, she switches to the second person. “You learn that by just your feeling, what you feel was right or wrong . . . You learn because you know that you won’t like that to be happening to you.” Clearly this has happened to her, but she redirects and broadens the experience to off-load its pain.
Most notably, the researchers found that all of the girls in the study contended with the cipher of the perfect girl. They avoided speaking up or challenging the status quo because they believed doing so would deny them the possibility of being perfect. Even though they knew the perfect girl was neither achievable nor real, the idea that they could be perfect still tortured them.
SELF-ESTEEM FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
In the years following the publication of Crossroads and Shortchanging Girls, a host of other books and studies continued to investigate both the interior and public lives of adolescent girls. One such work that confirmed the initial research was Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, which indicted a 90s culture that “splits adolescent girls into true and false selves.” It argued that girls abandon their authentic selves to kowtow to warped cultural demands—thinness, beauty, and sexual availability.
Author and clinical psychologist Mary Pipher treated adolescent girls who cut themselves, acted out, suffered from eating disorders, and reported anxiety and depression, validating a whole range of experiences, including some of my own. I recall the sad blonde girl on the book’s cover because of the length of time it sat on my mother’s nightstand. I remember thinking that she was threateningly pretty.
Pipher identified numerous mixed messages that girls coming of age in the 90s contended with. “Be beautiful, but beauty is only skin deep. Be sexy, but not sexual. Be honest, but don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Be independent, but be nice. Be smart, but not so smart you threaten boys,” Pipher wrote. She concluded that America in the 90s was a “girl-destroying place,” even more so than earlier decades, like the 60s, which she romanticizes in comparison. “Many girls say they wish they had lived in those times,” she writes. “It’s much harder to be idealistic and optimistic in the 90s.” Pipher’s framing resonated. Reviving Ophelia spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
I now see echoes of the many girlhood struggles catalogued by researchers in my own adolescence. I, too, ricocheted between emotions, capitulated to girly urges, and slaved to placate others. Looking back, what’s most insidious is that I had little inkling of the boxes that had been drawn around me by society. Sexually available, yet virginal. Polite, and not too smart. Helpful, never harmful. In the 90s, I accepted the shape I was taking and didn’t often question why it wasn’t more malleable.
But Reviving Ophelia was written for parents, specifically mothers, and not for the adolescents of the 90s. Girls themselves turned to ever-popular teen magazines to make sense of their own struggles—magazines that Pipher blamed for girls losing their self-esteem in the first place. As explored in chapter 2, it’s no surprise that these magazines exploded in the 90s. An array of glossies dangling phantom perfect girls lined the lowest supermarket shelf and stoked girls’ insecurities. While Shortchanging Girls and Crossroads confirmed that girls were losing themselves on the path to adulthood, influential teen magazines only reinforced that girls should pursue unachievable perfection. The desperate desire to “cure” what was plaguing girls spurred seminars, school assemblies, more research, and lectures. The alleged antidote was something called “self-esteem.” It was peddled as a shield to gird against the dangers of sex, the lure of drugs, and attendant pressures from peers. The self-esteem panacea underscored an unquestioned binary: girls without it succumbed to these awful things; girls who had it did not. Thus, “self-esteem” became a buzzword, used in government health programs, elementary school curriculums, and homes. It was sold as elixir for the girl crisis.
We were told to “have” self-esteem and, if we didn’t have it, to “get” it. But nobody told us precisely how. Teachers and counselors enumerated the risks of not having self-esteem, or losing it, if you happened to believe you were one of the few who had it already. But it felt like something left to chance, something that you could catch—like a ball or a cold. The flip side of the self-esteem cure was that girls were discouraged from admitting that they didn’t have any. Whether or not you had self-esteem was a hard thing to know while straddling the line between childhood and adulthood. It seemed to be something adults could know about you before you knew it about yourself.
All this panic and confusion offered a fertile place for America’s favorite pastime: capitalism.
SELLING WHAT GIRLS WERE LOSING
Former schoolteacher and textbook author Pleasant Rowland conceived of American Girl dolls after she couldn’t find acceptable ones to buy her nieces. “There was nothing that really spoke to a little girl’s soul, that nourished her self-esteem, her sense of quality. There wasn’t something to treasure intellectually or physically,” she told an interviewer. Rowland put up $1 million that she had earned from textbook royalties to start the Pleasant Company in 1986. It would grow into a commercial empire that packaged and sold self-esteem as a consumer product.
Rowland’s playmates weren’t just dolls to dress, but characters with rich backstories emerging from American history. American Girls were sold in exclusive catalogues for more than eighty dollars each, but their educational books and era-appropriate accessories, costumes, and furniture ran families hundreds more. The company even manufactured real-girl versions of the historical doll clothes. I begged for years for Samantha, a Victorian-era orphan who lives with a wealthy aunt, but al
so for two versions of her red taffeta party dress trimmed with a lace neckerchief—one for her, the other for me. Samantha was the company’s bestselling doll, perhaps because many girls fantasized about a plush life sans parents. In 1992, the company added American Girl magazine, a “less fashion and boy-obsessed alternative” to other periodicals on store shelves that promised to “affirm self-esteem, celebrate achievements, and foster creativity in today’s girls.” It still calls itself the largest magazine for girls ages eight and up with a circulation of over 325,000.
What set these dolls apart, according to their creator, was the qualities she hoped they would transmit to girls: “confidence, honesty, innocence, and courage.” The premise was seductive. Experts agreed that dolls could act like real friends and role models to girl owners. Here was self-esteem the American way—for sale. And it was pricey. Total US doll sales hit $2.7 billion in 1992. The Pleasant Company recorded $150 million in sales in 1993 alone. At the time, American Girl HQ counted 350 employees to run this self-esteem farm and fielded some fifteen thousand calls a day from customers.
The original crop of American Girl dolls was all white, which not so subtly—and rather sinisterly—suggested that only Caucasian girls deserved the self-esteem Rowland was selling. Not coincidentally, white girls made up the majority of the Pleasant Company’s customer base. That Barbie creator Mattel had made a black doll as early as 1968 made American Girl’s exclusion even more glaring.
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