Well, This Is Exhausting

by Sophia Benoit

  No one ever wanted to bring anything up that might topple the illusion that we were living in a post-racial, post-sexist utopian suburb. I grew up in a place that was big on the idea of tacit tolerance of people who were different. Anyone who spoke up violated the social contract of “niceness” that the (white) community had agreed upon; even people who were actually perpetrators of violence didn’t meet the same censure as those who complained about it. The deal was that we all pretended everything was good for everyone, even when it so clearly was not, even when wealth and success were hoarded by a very specific set of people: white, straight, cis, able-bodied US-born citizens.

  And I didn’t fully understand any of this, the sheer whiteness of how I’d been raised, until I got to college. I mean, I’m still the equivalent of a fish living in an aquarium: the world around me has been painstakingly designed for me. I’m not suggesting that any of that changed when I got to college, or that I was forced to surrender a single ounce of privilege. But no one in my hometown had ever even used the word privilege; they preferred the term blessed. You know, the idea that God gave you these things. Of course God wants you in a four-bedroom 3.5-bathroom house with a fenced-in backyard and finished basement. God wants you, but not the people living a mile away, to be able to afford to send your kids to seven-hundred-dollar-a-week summer camps. This is God’s doing, not the work of white supremacy. And when I did get to college and people were finally talking about privilege, I felt like I was at least four or five years behind. It felt like another thing that had maybe come in one of the forty-seven welcome packets that USC sent, maybe I lost that packet or it got lost in the mail. It really seemed like everyone else knew language about racism and sexism that I had never even heard. Even though I had heard plenty of microaggressions before, I didn’t know the term until I went to college. I was still operating under the very basic “racism = bad” model. An equation that white people often reverse, and because they don’t consider themselves bad, they therefore can’t be racist.

  I, as white people so often do, had the luxury—the privilege—of taking my time finding out just how much of America was built on racism, how many of our institutions were still deeply racist. I knew of course that the country was bad in the past. What I wasn’t fully aware of was just how much of that past informed and intentionally created the present. And I super wasn’t aware of how that present had shaped me. I’m ashamed looking back—not that my shame matters or does anything for anyone—at the ways in which I avoided learning more and learning better until I got to college.

  I of course did not magically become un-racist all at once,I but my sophomore year of college, my life changed in some ways that helped me learn better. First, I broke up with my piece-of-shit high-school boyfriend who was far more ignorant than I on almost every issue. His political stances were the things we fought about most often,II and ultimately part of the reason we broke up, although it’s pretty disgusting how long I stayed with a person who thought the things he thought; I thought my job was to teach him to be better. I thought that was the way to fix bigotry. But you can’t change one ignorant person’s perspective and act like it makes life better for marginalized people.

  At the same time as our breakup, I started taking general education classes that were required, which put me in classes I probably never would have taken. It’s not like I wouldn’t have wanted to take Intro to Islam, for example, which became perhaps my favorite class I ever took at USC, but that I don’t think I would have thought to look into the religion department at all as a theater major. Left to my own devices, I probably would have filled up my schedule with comedy writing and screenwriting classes, or more Shakespeare. That’s the thing about being a white person: at every turn you’re fed more self-interested shit to the point that it perhaps doesn’t occur to you to look outside of yourself because you’ve been told that there is nothing outside of yourself. Luckily for me, I was required to take classes outside of my major and required to take classes that were not Western-centric or only about white people and white history and white art. I ended up taking a class on African American theater, dance, and performance, for example, where I was the only white person in the room. I took a class on women’s involvement in revolutions in the Middle East. I took a class on money and capitalism. I took a class on the history of Judaism. I took multiple classes in the communication school about gender and race. I took all kinds of classes that I most likely never would have picked for myself, knowing what I know about the teenager I was. I would have likely picked the easy path, which was to focus on subjects I was already good at, to stay in classes that were mostly centered on white people’s views and the views of men—stuff I had already been taught. And thank God I didn’t.

  Those classes, which I took at eighteen and nineteen years old, were the first to chip away at the outer layer I had around my brain that said, “I don’t need to do anything for anyone else; this society is clearly a meritocracy and all you can do is try hard and be nice.” Those classes challenged my preference for sitting on the sidelines, my aversion to activism or advocacy. They didn’t do all the work, though.

  What really un-taught me all the things I hadn’t even noticed I’d learned—white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, fatphobia, and on and on—was the internet.

  The Internet Made Me a Better Person

  I got a Twitter account in 2011 at the behest of my friend Devan Coggan, a brilliant entertainment writer now, who was then just a friend in my AP calc class who was sitting at the back table with me, ignoring Mr. Jonack’s explanation of vertical asymptotes, most likely. She, like all people on the Kirkwood High School newspaper staff, had been required to get a Twitter and she urged me to join as well. Twitter was relatively new then and still somewhat fun. Do you remember 2011? LMFAO had one of the biggest albums of the year and the Smurfs live-action movie came out;I things were bleak, but in a simpler way. No one could name the secretary of education off the top of their head.

  I knew my dad would be furious with me if he found out I got a Twitter, not for safety reasons like a normal parent or future-employment reasons like my ever-practical mother, but because it was another way to “talk too much” without saying anything.II Devan pressed me anyway. I told her my father would disown me and, worse, that no one would follow me. “I’ll follow you!” she insisted. To which I replied, “Great, I’ll have one follower and no dad.” Hence my Twitter handle.III

  I figured that my Twitter would be like my Facebook, inane and irrelevant to anyone outside of my own high school and also most people inside my high school. To me, the big advantage Twitter had was that none of my family members or teachers were on there; I could start with a clean, anonymous slate. In the beginning, I had no conception of what I wanted to get out of Twitter. I used it to follow an ass-load of accounts that were suggested to me. I mean hundreds, if not thousands. Accounts like Ellen DeGeneres and Ferrari. I had no idea what the hell Twitter was for, and so I did what the app recommended and I followed Rob Delaney and the Modern Family corporate account.

  At first, I didn’t use my real name; I was worried about future employers or college admissions counselors finding me on there, which was a thing every child in 2011 was told to fear above all else. We heard horror stories of people being fired after getting a lucrative job and students having their acceptance letters rescinded after a school uncovered their social media accounts. Perhaps ironically, every single job I’ve gotten post-college, I’ve gotten from people I know on Twitter. But, at the time, teenagers were told the site was a threat to our future livelihoods. So I mostly just used it to read what other people were posting.

  It wasn’t until I got into doing stand-up my first week at USC that I actually had any use for Twitter myself.IV In order to get better at stand-up, I planned on using my account to write as many jokes as possible, and the challenge was that they all had to be clean. This was a self-prescribed restriction, but I was still afraid of people I knew finding me. I wasn’t
, at the time, the type of person to put inappropriate language or thoughts online. Again, my parents and teachers had put the fear of God in me that someone would uncover a single instance of me saying “fuck” online and then… I don’t know… bar me from ever working???V

  The more time I spent on Twitter, the more I began to actually cultivate the experience into something I actually wanted. I went through and unfollowed every single account Twitter had suggested to me. I followed every comedian I could find. I went to a campus event once where Mike Birbiglia was performing and he called out Shelby Fero, who was my year at USC and who was sitting in the crowd; she had a big following at the time and he had her come up onstage and read her tweets out to the entire auditorium, which is, looking back, kind of an insane thing for him to do. But it made me seethe with envy and double down on my efforts to use Twitter to get to where I wanted to be in stand-up. I went home and followed her. I wanted Shelby Fero’s life, not that I knew almost anything about it.VI

  At the same time that I was putting every single passing thought that came into my brain onto my Twitter,VII in the real world I was getting very into doing stand-up. My parents aren’t really fans of stand-up comedy; my mother loves Paula Poundstone, my father loves Robin Williams, and that’s about it. I didn’t even know stand-up was a thing until I was about fifteen years old. I had, however, been basically doing stand-up routines for my peers from a very young age. The summer before I was about to become a kindergartner, I used to sit on the tire swing at my preschool with the other almost-kindergartners and do a whole routine about how we couldn’t be kindergartners and how we weren’t tall enough. After doing it one day just off-the-cuff, the next day at lunch I had kids asking me to “yell again” at the tire swing. I was a mostly quiet kid, and I wasn’t really yelling. I was… doing stand-up, although no other four- or five-year-old knew what to call it. Whatever the name, that became my whole personality in school going forward: I was the person making fun of everything.

  So stand-up was a good fit for me. At USC, I joined a group of five to ten students (depending on the semester) who performed for groups of four to eight audience members in terrible venues around campus. One time, we got asked to perform during the honors dorm special monthly dinner where all the suck-up kids are trying to hook one of the professors who just came to get a free meal into being their mentor. We stood next to the serving line as people spooned dining-hall tortellini onto their plates and tried their best to ignore us.

  I was usually one of only two women in the club, occasionally the only one—a demographic imbalance common in comedy. Junior year, my third year being in the group, we all went to the Laugh Factory to try out for the Laugh Bowl, which was a college comedy competition between USC and UCLA. After your audition set, the host would give you notes. There were probably twenty-five or thirty guys and about five women. After my set, in front of everyone, the host told me that I shouldn’t make too-inappropriate jokes because when I go onstage as a woman, everyone is already going to be thinking about having sex with me, and therefore I shouldn’t mention sex because it would be distracting. Every other guy in the group I was with got notes on how to make punch lines more precise, how to make premises more creative, or where there was opportunity for a callback. Meanwhile, I was told not to talk about sex. On the walk back to the car, I was livid, and every single guy in the group—all friends of mine—was like, “Get over it.”

  I had been, for the first few years of college, going along with almost everything these guys said. I mean, I disagreed on occasion, but about things like whether Jon Hamm was actually as hot as Don Draper and which house beer pong rules we should instate. Never about my being treated differently as a woman. This felt like the first time I was asking them to have my back and agree with a simple “Yeah, that was bullshit,” and instead they claimed they didn’t see it. Maybe they really didn’t! Honestly, I probably would have missed the sexism myself only a few months before. I had been the person who didn’t see that women were often given short shrift in subtle, nonexplicit ways. I had been the person who thought people’s sensitivity was perhaps turned up a little too high.

  But something had shifted and that something was… Twitter.VIII

  I was—and still am—on Twitter near constantly, partially because I have anxiety and use Twitter as an outlet despite clear evidence that it only makes my anxiety worse and partly because I’ve always had jobs that let me be on my phone and jobs are boring. Mostly, at the beginning, I was following funny people. Again, my goal early on was to use my account for comedy, which is why I sought out who I did. Also, at the time—before the 2016 election—Twitter was mostly comedy with a little breaking news mixed in. (Now it’s the opposite.) At that time, around 2012, most big “funny” accounts were a mixture of stand-up comedians and TV writers in LA or regular people from small towns in Canada who had full-time jobs as something like an accountant or a teenager. Most of the very popular accounts were men, and almost all the men were white. Perhaps in an attempt to balance things out, outlets like HuffPo, Esquire, and Someecards started rounding up lists of the funniest women on Twitter. The lists were full of white women—and occasionally a white man who had an avatar that looked like a woman. Despite that most of the actually creative comedy being created on the site was made by Black people, almost everyone who got any attention from a media outlet for being funny was white. Lists of “funniest accounts to follow” leaned heavily in favor of guys in zip-up hoodies who were depressed and smoked a lot of weed. My point in all of this is to say that the Twitter I was reading from ages nineteen to twenty-two or so was bleak, and certainly not the place that you might think to introduce second-wave feminismIX to someone.

  When I first came to Twitter I was scared. I’m still scared a lot—shout-out to generalized anxiety—but when I was eighteen I was terrified of being wrong. I was virtually immobilized by it. Respect in my families, both at my mom and my dad’s houses, was usually predicated on being right. My mom always referred to herself and my older sister Lena as “right fighters,” people who want to be correct and will needle you until you get on their side. My dad doesn’t even have words for his deep conviction that he is always right. Look, not to dunk on my dad, who is a gem, but the dude has been wrong many, many times. He’s the kind of person who decides to put IKEA furniture together without looking at the instructions because he should be able to figure it out, which is just not the case. (The Swedes running IKEA are trying to fuck us over and make us look stupid. You can’t fight that.) Everyone around me thought being right was good, important, and achievable.

  Unlike the rest of my family, I was not all that interested in being right—at least until I left for college. Most of the time growing up, I just sat on the sidelines and watched debates unfold. I felt genuinely confused as to where everyone was getting their deep convictions, their statistics, their anecdotes. My parents are both well-read and well-informed. And Lena liked fighting about things. I was none of the above. Conflict, even minor debates, made me want to crawl into a hole. I wanted everyone to get along. Everyone else in my family believed that you could argue with people and nothing would change, but I was less sure. The family had already split up once (divorce) and I had seen my parents argue with their respective spouses and partners quite a lot over the years, and how different are debates from arguments, really? It was much easier to feel calm when everyone was just agreeing. I liked keeping the peace. I certainly wasn’t going to try to win a debate. It seemed like a small, simple favor to just let anyone else in my family “win” when they disagreed with me. I also genuinely had very few convictions. I was mostly interested in getting to college and getting out of Missouri. I wasn’t political. I wasn’t reading news. Through my privilege, I had the option to be completely uninformed as a teenager, to simply not know and therefore not care what was happening to other people.

  I no doubt would have remained that way had I not gotten on Twitter.

  Embarrassing as this is
to admit, the white female comedians I followed gave me my first look at standing up for yourself, or any kind of advocacy. I’m not suggesting that they were all being feminists or anything, but following them and reading their tweets helped unfurl the idea in my mind that you could maybe, perhaps, possibly say things that men didn’t like and not die from it. Or—and this was a massive shift in my worldview—you could even not care at all what men thought. A lot of these women were loud and combative and they weren’t afraid of losing men’s approval, or at least not as afraid as I was. And it felt revolutionary to me. Of course, as I look at it now I can see that these women—almost all white and fairly well-off—were in the safest position possible to not give a fuck about the opinions of men, especially the men in their industry. I also know, with the benefit of hindsight, that there was still a lot they weren’t tweeting, that they couldn’t tweet for fear of losing jobs and connections and friends and money. But seeing them tweet angrily, to see them speak up about how they’d been treated, to see them talk about what they desired or were owed, opened my eyes.

  On top of seeing them talk about their own various instances of mistreatment—both off- and online—I started to get hateful, weird, and creepy messages. Of course, of course, of course ideally a person would not need something to happen to them to care about it. I wish I had cared more earlier. I wish I had cared more and listened more to people who had encountered this before me. I’m not saying that I didn’t understand that the world was tilted in favor of men; I got the general idea that women globally weren’t doing as well as men. But I certainly didn’t get intersectional feminism, or even the burden of dealing with sexism day in and day out. Part of this, again, is because as a white, well-off, able-bodied teenager, I was about as protected as possible. I wasn’t losing jobs because of my gender, I wasn’t being assaulted or harassed,X I wasn’t being relied upon to care for my ailing parents due to my gender; I simply hadn’t faced much writ-large sexism, and when I did, it was infrequent enough for me to write off or not question. But Twitter helped change that—at least, the men on there did.