“The girl” was the adult version of “the princess.” As a kid, I’d believed the princess was the protagonist, because she’d seemed the most central to the story. The word protagonist comes from the Greek for “the leading actor in a contest or cause,” and a protagonist is a person who wants something and does something to get it. “The girl” doesn’t act, though—she behaves. She has no cause, but a plight. She doesn’t want anything, she is wanted. She isn’t a winner, she’s won. She doesn’t self-actualize but aids the hero in self-actualization. Sometimes, I’d sit in the theater and feel mounting despair and think, Why do you keep telling me this? Why are you talking to me this way?
Of course, there were good movies that reconnected me to myself and to the world, but most of the time I felt like some half-mad ethnographer lost in another dimension, frantically gathering field notes from inside this dark mirror in which I couldn’t for the life of me locate myself. I began to feel unreal, peripheral in my own life, trapped in a dream not my own. I felt like a canary in a coal mine, bearing traumatized witness to the inhumanity of the tent-pole threequel, chirping my tiny, impotent protests into the dark void. I felt, I guess, like Alice in Wonderland. It helped to take notes, for some reason. I wrote things down to assuage the bricked-in, bloodied-fingernail feeling of despair that sometimes came over me, to assert my existence, to remind myself to buy bananas on my way home. I filled notebook after notebook with loopy, illegible scrawls of outrage. I know everybody says their handwriting is loopy and illegible, but mine really was, because I wrote in the dark.
The writer Renata Adler once spent a year—the same year I was born, in fact—working as a movie critic for the New York Times. I know this because during my time as a movie critic, I felt so alienated from myself and my feelings that I went looking for evidence that I was not the first, or only, person in history ever to have felt this way. A Year in the Dark is a collection of Adler’s reviews from 1968. In the introduction, she talks about how she left her job reviewing books at The New Yorker when she realized that she did not believe in “professional criticism as a way of life.” When the New York Times offered her a movie job, however, she thought about how her favorite film critics used movies as a way into larger cultural conversations, “putting films idiosyncratically alongside things they cared about in other ways.” Writing about movies was a way to write “about an event, about anything”—which spoke to me, because it was how I felt when I first started to write about TV. I wrote about what interested me and reacted to whatever seemed to be worth reacting to in the moment. With movies, though, I was beholden to release schedules and to divvied-up assignments. There were no more random connections, no more jumping into the conversation as it got good. Instead, I drove, I sat, I watched, I processed, I did it again. I started to shut down. Adler, too, reached the point when she felt the movies “completely blotted out the content of much of my life yet filled the days, like dreaming,” so she quit.8 I felt the same way, but I didn’t quit. Craig would come upon me in a catatonic stupor, trying to find new ways to say the same things about the same things. “Just do it like a Mad Lib,” he’d say. “Write up a few templates and fill in the blanks.” I never took his advice, so he’d retaliate by reading my reviews aloud to me in a Gene Shalit voice. Sometimes, he’d fix me with a dead-eyed stare and deadpan the movie-critic words I’d forbidden him ever to utter in my presence:
“Razzle-dazzle,” he’d say. “Summer fare.”
One day, in 2007, I read something that snapped me out of my torpor. It was a throwaway line in an Isla Fisher interview. Asked how playing the breakout role in Wedding Crashers changed her career, she replied that, much to her initial surprise, it hadn’t. “I realized after Wedding Crashers there aren’t that many comic opportunities for women in Hollywood,” she said. “All the scripts are for men and you play ‘the girl’” in the hot rod.9 Following Wedding Crashers, Fisher was cast as the love interest in Hot Rod, an Andy Samberg vehicle about Andy Samberg in a vehicle. Her remark laid bare not only the reality—not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood—but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: “All the scripts are for men and you play ‘the girl’” suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished “the girl” to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. “Borat’s Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,”10 one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women’s experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations.
An old, familiar sense of unease started to take shape after that. It wasn’t just the movies. It was everything, everywhere. It was the sublimated sexism that mutated every experience but that we weren’t allowed to notice or acknowledge. It was the regressive subtext that seemed to undermine every progressive text. Between the time I was a curious little girl in the 1970s and the time I was an utterly confused and bewildered adult woman in the 2000s, I got lost in a nonsense world of double binds and mixed messages until I wasn’t sure who I was or what I was supposed to do. Yet it was clear that I was supposed to do something, because there was always someone there to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. Women’s ideas of themselves had changed, but the world’s idea of women, somehow, had not. The cognitive dissonance was palpable at all times.
In 2012, about four years after I left the paper, I went to see a movie called Ruby Sparks, written by Zoe Kazan, who also starred. The film was about a nerdy prodigal novelist named Calvin who wrote a literary blockbuster in his youth but has been blocked and paralyzed by the anxiety of his own influence ever since. One day, he dreams a girl. Her name is Ruby. She is quirky and devoted, and he loves her. She’s the kind of girl he’d love to meet—the girl of his dreams. He shows the manuscript to his brother Harry, who tells him, “Quirky, messy women whose problems only make them more endearing are not real . . . You haven’t written a person, you’ve written a girl.” But the next morning, he wakes up to find Ruby in his kitchen, eating breakfast. Somehow, not only has he manifested his dream girl, but it turns out he can write her any way he wants. He can literally control her story from his typewriter. (He uses a typewriter, because that’s the kind of guy he is.) Calvin calls Harry to come over and confirm that he hasn’t gone crazy. He hasn’t. Not only is Ruby real, but also, as Harry observes, “You could, like, tweak things if you wanted.” He begs Calvin, “for men everywhere,” not to let the opportunity go to waste. But Calvin takes the high road. He puts away the manuscript and vows never, ever to attempt to control Ruby or in any way determine her fate through his writing ever again.
Ruby, of course, just thinks she’s a person. She doesn’t know she’s been conjured from Calvin’s imagination, that she is just an avatar. All she knows is that Calvin is squarely the center of her life, the only point of her existence, and she feels empty and rudderless. She’s stuck at home all day, isolated, with nothing to do while he writes. She starts to get depressed and clingy, which drives Calvin crazy. Finally, he pulls out the manuscript and begins to subtly adjust her. What if she were just a little less needy, a little more independent? It works. Soon, Ruby enrolls in a class and makes new friends. She makes plans with them after class, and Calvin gets jealous. Ruby and Calvin visit his family, and much to his displeasure, she loves them and they love her back. Then one night, at a party, she jumps in the pool with a rival author, and Calvin freaks out. Back home, they fight, and Ruby accuses him of expecting her to live up to his “platon
ic ideal of a girlfriend.” She says he doesn’t control her, and he begs to differ. He sits down at the typewriter and starts to type, first making her bark like a dog, then crawl on all fours, and finally jump up and down like a cheerleader, yelling, “You’re a genius! You’re a genius!” over and over until she collapses, then scrambles to her feet and runs away.
I once read in an interview with Kazan that she was interested in writing about the violence inherent in reducing a person to an idea. Watching Ruby Sparks, it occurred to me that the movie was a perfect metaphor for how popular culture labors to reduce us to ideas every day, and how as girls we grow up in a kind of inverted media Wonderland that works diligently to erase and replace us with uncanny fantasy versions of ourselves. The character of Ruby is doubled. She’s both a modern patriarchal ideal and an actual person struggling to emerge from under the oppressive veil of this ideal. Ruby Sparks is about what it feels like to grow up obscured by this phantom doppelganger, which is both the central conflict of the movie and the central thesis of this book. Also this: extreme power differentials are extremely bad for human relationships. And this: I’m not convinced that love is a job. And this: perspective matters; to the girl of your dreams, your dream is a nightmare if she’s trapped in it.
Near the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice befriends a couple of misfits, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. They feel more or less the way she feels about the mad people of Wonderland, and come the closest to validating her feelings. The Mock Turtle tells her about his education, about the lessons he learned in school that “lessened” him every day. He helps Alice realize that she’s neither mad nor alone. The validation gives her the confidence to return to the garden and challenge the authority of the Queen of Hearts, which, of course, makes the Queen turn purple with rage. “Hold your tongue!” she commands. And when Alice refuses, she yells, “Off with her head!” But Alice has stopped being afraid. She’s started once again to grow back to her full size. She reaches out and waves the Queen away. “Who cares for you?” she says. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” And at this, the Queen comes apart, and the cards scatter in all directions, and Alice wakes up from her dream and runs home.
Despite having refused to listen to the rest of Alice, Kira kept it in mind. She peeked at it here and there when I wasn’t looking. One day, she spotted a vintage dress at the flea market. It was a smocked, light-blue flannel with a Peter Pan collar, puffed sleeves, and a bow in the back. It looked like Alice’s dress. She asked me to buy it for her, and I did. She wore it often with her fancy headband with the huge gold-lamé bow on top that she picked out at H&M. On Read Across America day at school, she added a white pinafore and black patent-leather Mary Janes, and went as Alice. She was five then, and seven when I started writing this—the same age as Alice. At seven, a girl is on the cusp of falling down the rabbit hole into an artificial garden where she’ll be taught to submit to the nonsense rules of an unwinnable game—croquet with hedgehogs for balls and flamingos for mallets—under constant threat of annihilation.
Kira has since outgrown the dress and lost the gold headband, but I hope she’ll also outgrow all the limiting, oppressive, infantilizing stories—all the fairy tales designed to keep her small, and cowering, and afraid—long before I did. I hope that, like Alice, she wakes up and sees them for what they are: nothing but a pack of lies. I hope she swats them away without a second thought and writes her own fairy tale, one that reflects her own experience as her own person in this nonsensical world.
In the meantime, this book is for her.
PART ONE
Down the Rabbit Hole
If you drink from a bottle called poison, it is almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
1
* * *
Bunnies
I learned about sex from Where Did I Come From? but I learned about sexiness from my grandfather’s Playboys and Bugs Bunny in drag. I gathered, from the book, that sex was an awkward thing that happened when a lumpy man was feeling “very loving” toward a lumpy lady and wanted to “get as close to her as possible.” From Playboy, I learned that sexiness was naked ladies and weird, invisible men.
My grandparents’ house was built in the mid-1950s and looked like the set of a Pink Panther movie. The den, in particular, showcased the kind of rakish, cosmopolitan masculinity that was cool at the time. Perhaps there was a time when my grandfather hosted regular poker games with other guayabera-wearing, Brylcreemed, sun-damaged men in white socks with sandals gathered around the green-felted card table, but by the time I came along, he was down to one. Tío César was a retired navy admiral whose gentle mien, bulbous nose, and severe vision impairment recalled a beatific Mr. Magoo. Another interesting thing about him was that he had lost his vocal cords to cancer and relearned to speak by gulping down air and burping out words. (It’s called esophageal speech. He taught us to do it.) By the time I came along, the den was not a social space so much as a shrine to the persona my grandfather had created for himself, with Playboy as his guide.
My grandfather collected Playboy magazines. I don’t mean he saved every issue; I mean he saved every issue, had them bound by the dozen into leather-bound annuals with gold-embossed spines, and arrayed them on a low shelf behind the poker table like a set of handsome encyclopedias. They imparted a pervy yet learned vibe to the room that offset the lowbrow ribaldry of the framed cartoons by the mirror-backed bar, featuring scenes of sexy nurses and sexy secretaries being sexually harassed. There was also—my former favorite—a cartoon of a man flushing himself down the toilet over a caption that read, “Goodbye, cruel world.” The nurses and doctors in the framed cartoons in my grandfather’s den looked like creatures from two different planets (Toad Mars and Bimbo Venus), but it was the pink, chubby, bald, and frizzy-haired illustrated couple in Where Did I Come From?, slotted together like a hippie yin-yang with little red hearts floating up from their naked embrace, that struck us kids as strange and unfamiliar; a little too fraternally similar for comfort.
This is how, in elementary school, I came to be sentimental about my grandfather’s nudie magazines. Every year at Christmas, my family traveled to Lima to visit my grandparents. Because we lived so far away (first in São Paulo, then New York, then Chicago, then Madrid, then back to Chicago, then back to New York, then back to Madrid again) and our visits were brief and far between, I tried very hard to hold on to everything. I committed every detail to memory and heaped everything with significance. I adored my grandfather. A dashing, retired air-force colonel with an Errol Flynn mustache, he was a character straight out of a 1960s sitcom: uptight, high-strung, and hilarious; a Peruvian Major Nelson. (Flight was a recurring theme: his Irish great-grandfather, who was born in New York, went to Peru in the 1860s to work as a railroad engineer, likely for Henry Meiggs, the famous California railroad tycoon and fugitive from the law.) My love for him was metonymical, spilling over into the objects that represented him in my mind. He was whiskey, medals, cigarettes, racetracks, card tricks, toffee, Brylcreem, white socks with sandals, Saturday-night Mass, Playboys, gun.
When my cousin Christie and I were in first or second grade and my brother Gonzalo was in the grade behind us, we started stealing Playboys while the adults were distracted with cocktails and arguments. We would sneak into the maid’s room to check them out. This became our holiday prelunch tradition. Once, I laughed until I peed myself on Rosa’s bed, which is how we got caught. A few days later, my mom produced a copy of Where Did I Come From? Written by adman Peter Mayle, of eventual A Year in Provence fame, it was a frank and friendly attempt to demystify sex for kids. The book was interesting but in no way related to my curiosity, because I wasn’t in it for the mammalian science. I was in it for the mystification.
Playboy pictorials were all culture, no nature. All those gauzy photos of naked girls, alone in their kitschy rooms with their props and their yarn-ribbon pigtails (li
ke mine!), had a strangely static and hermetic quality that made the girls’ nakedness look somehow artificial. They made me think of the taxidermied animals at the natural-history museums in Chicago and New York. It was like they were specimens, more lifelike than alive. That they were stripped of their clothes didn’t bother me as much as that they were stripped of all context. They were isolated and frozen in time. Even the outdoor shots seemed to be taken behind glass. The girls’ accompanying biographical squibs only added to this impression, resembling the plaques next to museum dioramas detailing an extinct animal’s name, geographic provenance, “statistics” (height, weight, bust, waist, and hip measurements), and dietary patterns and mating behaviors, or “turn-ons” and “turn-offs.” The Playboy collection was a museum of girls, a taxonomy of girls. The pictures fascinated me and filled me with ontological terror at the same time. I knew, because everybody knew, that only girls were “sexy,” that “sexiness” was girls—it was exclusively female. This confused me, so I kept going back to the magazines, trying to figure it out. It made me uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t begin to express.
You Play the Girl Page 2