Shrewed

by Elizabeth Renzetti

Most importantly, she and other female politicians in the UK have formed a non-partisan alliance to stand up for each other online called Reclaim the Internet. The fact that she was flooded with thousands of rape threats the day after the initiative was announced is perhaps the best advertisement for its necessity (see Lewis’s Law, page 36).

  It’s thrilling and uplifting to see women refuse to be driven away. Leslie Jones’s return to Twitter was so triumphant and brash that her live-tweets of the Olympics earned her a job as an official commentator for NBC. Zoe Quinn, the game designer who was targeted and doxxed during the hateful Gamergate scandal, turned the tables by reclaiming the experience in a new memoir and by creating an advocacy group to help other women who are the victims of online harassment.

  Quinn’s memoir shares a title with the advocacy group she cofounded: Crash Override. The group’s website offers a wide range of advice and protection for people who have been the victims of harassment. There’s advice on protecting passwords, preventing doxxing, dealing with cops. The group’s main advice, which I hope is some kind of balm to people who are being harassed, is: It’s not your fault. It’s never your fault.

  Research shows that young women are disproportionately hassled online, whether it’s the posting of “revenge porn” pictures or cyberstalking. LGBTQ women and women of colour are abused from every angle, and their struggle should be all of ours. Anyone can be targeted, though. Anyone can be threatened for the crime of being female and alive and free.

  As women demand more space, the backlash will continue. Enemies of our freedom will attempt to drive us inside; enemies of our power will attempt to silence our voices. We can answer the threat any way we choose. We can answer the threat with more freedom.

  FEARLESSNESS

  ON THE MORNING of March 7, 2017, the expensively suited money lords arrived in lower Manhattan to find they had a guest. A little bronze guest called “Fearless Girl.”

  She stood about the height of an average ten-year-old, her feet planted firmly apart, her chin lifted in defiance, her hands planted on her hips. Her metal face wore a look of no-bull seriousness, which was useful since she was facing down a bull. Directly in front of Fearless Girl, across a couple of yards of the Bowling Green park, stood one of the most famous pieces of public art in New York, Charging Bull. Its horns were lowered, its front hoof raised in terrible readiness for the charge.

  Fearless Girl had arrived on the morning before International Women’s Day to face down the rampaging bull-god of American capitalism. Well, not really. Fearless Girl, it soon transpired, was not so much a critique of capitalism as a product of it. She was created by sculptor Kirsten Visbal at the behest of an investment firm called State Street Global Advisors and its advertising partner, McCann New York. State Street wanted to call attention to the lack of women in leadership roles in American corporate life; coincidentally, it had a gender-diversity investment fund just waiting for dollars to be pumped into it.

  “Know the power of women in leadership,” read a plaque planted near Fearless Girl’s sensibly shod feet. The State Street logo was inscribed underneath.

  Feminism has long been co-opted for capitalism’s gain, but even by the standards of the game this was brazen cheek. The scent of hypocrisy was reminiscent of the product of the bull’s back end.

  “This statue . . . is an exercise in corporate imaging,” wrote columnist Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. “The point of ‘Fearless Girl’ was to advertise a State Street initiative pushing companies to include more women on their boards. Although the firm has said it is working to improve the number of female executives in its own ranks, it hasn’t been close to exemplary in this regard: Of its 28-person leadership team, only five are women, according to the company website.”

  Despite this, Fearless Girl was an enormous hit from the moment she landed. Tourists lined up to take their pictures with her, copying her plucky stance. Parents brought their little girls to stand next to the statue, probably whispering exhortations of fearlessness into their ears. Instagram filled with photos. For $19.99, you could buy a T-shirt on Amazon that showed the girl and the bull, frozen in bronze showdown, next to the words “Be Fearless.”

  She proved so popular that she got invited to stay. Fearless Girl was supposed to stand for just a few weeks on Bowling Green, but New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that she would remain in place, drawing tourists and investors, for the next year, until International Women’s Day 2018. In that time, she would remain a symbol of “standing up to fear, standing up to power, being able to find in yourself to do what’s right.” This was before the news arrived, in October 2017, that State Street would pay $5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by female employees who claimed they were paid less than men at the firm. Maybe they should have called our friend Fearlessly Asking for a Raise Girl.

  I’m not sure that women need a bronze statue paid for by an investment firm planted in the money-mining centre of one of the world’s richest cities to remind them to be brave. Women are brave, all over the world, every minute of every day, in far more challenging circumstances. Worse is the very idea of fearlessness: What a useless concept to drill into the heads of young women everywhere. No human being is without fear, except perhaps psychopaths and people high on acid, and neither of those should be taken as role models.

  Run, I wanted to whisper to Fearless Girl every time I saw her picture posted on Facebook. Run, plucky girl. That’s a goddamn charging bull, and you’re armed with a ponytail. It’s not a fair fight. Go home, read about how to take down a bull, and come back with a rifle or a lasso. “Gored Girl” isn’t nearly as appealing as “Fearless Girl.”

  There is no shame in running, when running is what’s called for. Standing your ground is the correct response in some situations, but sometimes you have to know when to live to fight another day. This is not a popular slogan for a T-shirt, nor will it receive many likes on Instagram. Instead, Instagram is filled with posts like this: “Once you become fearless life becomes limitless.” Or, written in a bold cursive, “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.”

  Not just overcoming fear, but denying its existence: this is what young women are supposed to aspire to. In 2012, the Women in the World Summit launched with the promise of “150 Fearless Women.” Arianna Huffington, high priestess at the temple of earthly aspiration, wrote a book called On Becoming Fearless: . . . In Love, Work and Life. I considered writing a rebuttal called Scared Shitless Most of the Time, Faking It the Rest, but it seemed unlikely to be adapted for a Netflix series. I could “conquer my training regime” in Nike’s Fearless Flyknit women’s training shoe, were I not already afraid of running. Also, the shoe looks remarkably like the crocheted toilet-paper covers that my grandmother produced endlessly during my childhood. Now those were frightening.

  Surely it’s more useful to take the approach of Toronto media executive Denise Donlon, as reflected in the title of her memoir Fearless as Possible (Under the Circumstances). Because circumstance, and your neural network, will sometimes tell you that fear is precisely what you should be feeling at a particular moment. Fear, like pain, is one of nature’s great red lights: Beware, all who pass this way. That’s a tiger. That’s a runaway train. That’s a man who has no respect for your person. To suggest that young women should be fearless, that they should neither contain nor admit to fear, is to place yet another unattainable goal tantalizingly out of their reach. It becomes one more thin, painful switch for self-flagellation, more ammunition for the contemptuous inner critics. (See “The Voice in Your Head Is an Asshole,” page 15.)

  In the 2017 smash-hit live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, Belle, played by Emma Watson, begs her father (Kevin Kline) to tell her something about her late mother. The father, his voice full of wonder, says, “Your mother was fearless. Fearless.”

  Was she, though? Or is he viewing her through the lens of his idealized love? W
as she perhaps terrified much of the time, but unable to show it? Her clever and brave daughter, as we see in the course of the movie, is properly alarmed about things that are alarming: Belle is afraid that she’ll lose her father, the one person she loves; she is afraid that she will have to give up her independence and marry the hulking meat-puppet, Gaston. The other villagers fear her because she is independent, unorthodox, and lettered; in return, she fears her estrangement from them. Belle is not fearless. Instead — and this is much more inspiring — she recognizes her fears and decides not to act on them. As a rational and resourceful young woman, she realizes her future depends on her not abandoning her soul to fear.

  One of my favourite books of the past decade is Joanna Bourke’s majestic Fear: A Cultural History. First, because it’s fascinating. Second, because it is comforting. The progression of terror throughout human history is humbling and puts our plight in perspective. Paleolithic man was afraid of fanged creatures, and drew pictures on the cave wall as a way of keeping those fears at bay; medieval peasant feared famine, and made obeisance to the church and king as a path to a full belly; a Victorian lady dreaded being buried alive (a surprisingly common fear), and asked that her throat be cut before she was boxed and placed in the grave. Historically, the extremely pious were often near-paralyzed with scrupulosity, “the fear of having sinned or offended God in some way.” That is as incomprehensible to us as the fear of swiping right when we meant to swipe left would have been to them.

  And what do we fear now, in a time when we have never been safer? We fear failure, and loss of status, and lingering death. Adolescent girls, famously, fear being humiliated in front of their peers, which is why girls’ magazines are filled with deliciously cringey scenarios: “I tripped in front of my crush and the whole school LOLed!”

  Bourke distinguishes between fear, the terror of something immediate and present, and anxiety, the swamp water of dread that creeps in at our ankles and rises higher till it drowns us in nameless, formless trepidation — of what? Something out there. We fear terrorism, when a North American is more likely to be killed by a fall in the bathtub than a terrorist’s bomb, and ignore the threat of climate change, which will soon bake us like so many cookies forgotten in the oven.

  Of course young women will fear, and should not be ashamed of it. The structures of the world were not built for their comfort. The law and economics are still tilted against them. Divorce is an economic bombshell. While young women shouldn’t be consumed by fear, to suggest a hollow, macho posturing as a starting point does no one any good.

  As Bourke points out, a little fear is more useful than its absence:

  A world without fear would be a dull world indeed . . . A world without fear would be a world without love. Fear has been one of the most significant driving forces in history, encouraging individuals to reflect more deeply and prompting them to action. Indeed, much of the human urge to creativity depends upon fear — fear of “being struck down in our prime,” of being rejected, of not understanding how one’s lover will respond and of self-consciousness.

  To elevate fearlessness as moral exemplar, to suggest a girl bursts into the world with a Ronda Rousey kick to the head, is to lose the humanity of fear’s progression throughout a lifetime. That is, the terrors that plague you at twelve, or seventeen, or twenty-eight, are entirely different from the ones that wake you up at forty-five, in the hour of the wolf, the darkest part of the night, while your partner snores blithely beside you. A life can be traced in the evolution of its anxieties: the ones overcome, the ones shelved, the ones that remain monsters always, never fully caged or killed.

  I am, for example, quite shocked when I look back on my childhood fears. I was claustrophobic. Spiders sent me running. For years I had suffered an irrational, panicky terror that a nuclear war would break out, shattering my glasses — the precise sequence of events was unclear — and then, rendered near-blind and useless, I’d be abandoned and left for dead.

  Once, I was terrified of public speaking: The very thought made my bladder ache. Silent screams filled my head for weeks before I had to give a speech, or moderate a panel, or interview someone on stage. Slowly I learned that the way to cope with the fear was a) to over-prepare, and b) to recognize that the consequences of even a failed public appearance were not very dire after all. Perhaps people would yawn. Perhaps they wouldn’t laugh. These things were temporarily painful but inconsequential in the long run. Now I’m terrified of driving on the highway: This is not a fear I can talk myself out of, using the above method. What’s the worst thing that could happen on a highway? Oh yes, fiery death. Limbs strewn across the asphalt. I’m still working my way through that one.

  Age alters our fears even as it alters our bodies. I’m no longer afraid of public speaking, but I also have no strength in my pelvic floor. I don’t pee myself out of fear; I just pee myself. This is what is known in middle age as “a fair trade-off.”

  From this vantage, I sometimes look back on the macho idiot I once was. I think about the men I drunkenly went home with, not knowing their names and barely remembering my own, fully trusting my ability to get out of any situation, no matter how sticky.

  One morning many years ago, I woke to the sound of the phone ringing in the apartment I shared with two friends. The phone frequently failed to work because it was sodden with beer or, if we were flush, vodka. But on this morning it functioned. My roommate was on the other end, hungover and confused.

  I’d last seen her in the bar the night before. Vaguely, I remembered that she’d left with a man she’d just met. He had been wearing gold slippers, which for my friend was the mating equivalent of a peacock’s spread tail. Now she was awake, with no money and no memory of how she’d arrived wherever she was. Gold slipper man snored on, oblivious.

  “I have no idea where I am,” she whispered.

  “Go and look out the window,” I said. “Look for a street sign.”

  She put down the phone and came back a minute later, hysterical with giggles: “I can’t see any street signs. But I do have my eye on the gold slippers.”

  It turned out all right in the end: She’s still alive, and still one of my best friends. But the thought of it now makes my heart clench. The thought of my daughter, being so careless, so fearless, fills me with a dread I can’t name. I shake my head to remove even the picture of it. (You notice I don’t worry about my son being spirited away to a stranger’s apartment. My conditioning is strong. My fears for him are completely different, and equally seismic.)

  Obviously, I don’t walk around in a constant state of panic, or I would need a Costco-sized bottle of Valium to get me through the day, but there is a steady hum of anxiety for my children at the back of my brain. I worry that robots will take their jobs. I worry that a plague will take their health. I worry that they will not find comfort, or peace, or the love that I have with their father.

  This business of living takes effort. It takes resourcefulness. And sometimes it will be terrifying. To pretend otherwise, to glibly pretend fearlessness, is to provide platitudes where tools should be. Fear can provide a light. It should not be everything; that would be a paralyzed life. But it’s not nothing, either. It exists, we live with it, and we can bend it to our will.

  WEDDINGS ARE SATAN’S PLAYGROUND: A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER

  Dear Maud,

  My most cherished hope for you and your brother is that you will each find someone to love, and be loved by that person in return. Otherwise, your ambitions are your own to determine. Take care of your heart, and the rest will follow.

  Once, when you were four years old, you were playing with your friend Martha at our house in London, and the two of you came up to me, holding hands. You tugged my sleeve.

  “Mum?”

  “Yes?”

  You looked at Martha, who was, if I remember correctly, eating a Jammy Dodger. “Mans can marry mans, right?”

&nb
sp; I debated whether to get into the whole question of global human rights, but settled for a local answer: “Yes, they can.”

  “And ladies can marry ladies?”

  “Absolutely.”

  You looked over at Martha again, clearly imagining your future nuptials, the two of you dressed in matching Peppa Pig gowns. You looked puzzled. Finally, you said, “Then why did you marry Dad?”

  I immediately went to tell your father that story, of course. I hope to be telling that story forever, unless you tell me it’s too embarrassing, in which case — sorry, too late. There’s only one place I hope not to tell that story, and that’s at your wedding, because I hope you don’t have one. At least not a traditional one, where the bride is received as if she has won the greatest of life’s prizes: a man to marry. I mean, get married if you want — I did. Be joyful and bountiful in your love. Have a party, dance, laugh. But don’t feel you have to engage in the Olympics of one-upmanship that is the modern wedding.

  I know, it may seem slightly hypocritical, given the amount of wedding-related television we watch. There’s Four Weddings and Say Yes to the Dress and those artificial twin peaks of showmance, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. But I feel that each episode is actually a tiny vaccine against the virus. We lie sprawled on the couch in the basement watching four women compete to see whose wedding deserves the free honeymoon — the lady who got married in the shark tank? the woman who made all the food for two hundred guests? — and I feel that I’m ensuring your shots are up to date.

  We watch Say Yes to the Dress and recoil in horror and delight at the bridal shoppers at Kleinfeld, as family dysfunction unspools against a backdrop of satin fit-and-flares and $20,000 princess ball gowns containing more crystals than an entire chorus line at the Bellagio. “Not enough bling,” whispers the bride, crushed. “It makes you look like a linebacker,” says a sister, mining a vein of sibling resentment that lies an inch below the surface. And I look at you, Maud, and think, Please, let’s never do this. Please have a paintball wedding instead.