An ingenue is a dramatic and literary archetype. She is defined not only by her age—that crepuscular moment between childhood and adolescence—but also by her doe-eyed innocence. Naive in a complex, urbane, foreign world, she is usually portrayed as a newcomer and a fish out of water. She moves through this world unaware of the hypocrisy, duplicity, and exploitation all around her. She is credulous and vulnerable and dependent on a protective paternal figure, and lives in constant peril of being exploited or corrupted by some lurking cad or villain. This threat is the central tension of her life. What makes her interesting is the question of how she will navigate this world, who she will become, and what will become of her.
“The ingénue symbolizes the mutable character par excellence, the blank slate in search of an identity,” the scholar Julia V. Douthwaite writes about the role of the ingenue in French literature.1 She sets out in the world as pure potential—changeable, malleable, and moldable. She’s an empty stage upon which to enact whatever it is that’s troubling us at the moment. For E. M. Forster, the ingenue was a transitional figure between the Victorian era and the modern one.
Girls of my generation were transitional, too. We were raised to inhabit a world that was at that very moment being willed into being by another generation; to step into the unknown. Not long after going to see Thelma and Louise, I went to a party with the Landowner, where I mentioned to a friend of his, visiting from home, that I’d just seen Thelma and Louise and loved it. What a great movie it was, I said. What a world-altering movie. He smiled at me. It was a stupid movie, he said. It was an embarrassingly sincere, irrelevant throwback of a movie. Nobody with any discernment thought it was anything but a cringe-inducing turd of a movie. And where had I been? Didn’t I know that even Betty Friedan had disavowed Betty Friedan? (I had no idea, of course. I’d heard of Betty Friedan, and had gleaned from the culture that I was supposed to have contempt for her, but beyond that, I didn’t know much. Who would have taught me?) Whatever I’d felt on seeing the movie, I was wrong to like it, to relate to it, to identify. I was especially wrong to find it revolutionary, world-changing. He knew it was wrong because his mother was active in the women’s movement. He had it on authority. He was also very rich. I stalked out of the party and walked home alone. I was furious, but also confident that soon, encounters of this sort would be a thing of the past. The movie itself was evidence that things were changing, and soon we could all dust ourselves off, shake hands, and live happily ever after. I had no doubt that we were entering a new, more enlightened age.
Julia Roberts was credited with bringing back the character of the ingenue, but Geena Davis in Thelma and Louise played one, too. Both Vivian (Roberts) and Thelma (Davis) start out childlike and cloistered—Thelma by her repressive marriage to the chauvinistic Daryl, Vivian by her rather alarming denial—and both embark on a journey of transformation. Thelma transitions into herself, whereas Vivian finds a way to be a wide-eyed child bride forever. What is remarkable about Pretty Woman is how it manages not just to erase the distinctions between the naive, innocent ingenue and the cynical, jaded streetwalker but also to merge them. It gets around the fact that its ingenue is also a whore by making everyone else in the movie an even bigger whore—by leveling the whore playing field. Sure, Vivian is for sale, but so is everyone else. At least she is friendly about it. At least she is grateful and maintains a cheerful, professional attitude about it, unlike Edward’s bitchy ex-girlfriend or the snooty Rodeo Drive salesgirls. At least she is comfortable in her role as a commodity. At one point, Vivian tells Edward flat out, “I want the fairy tale,” and, violating all narrative logic, she gets it. She goes back to the Rodeo Drive boutique that snubbed her and lets them know they made a “big mistake” in snubbing her. Because she’s expensive now. She got the highest bidder and didn’t even have to hold out. Everyone cheered for the once-shamed prostitute who got her chance to revenge-shame the sales associates. It was so ludicrous and absurd and brainlessly life-negating and deeply sad.
In high school, I decided that I would be a writer with a day job in advertising, because this seemed like a path to both art and money. My dad approved. He later gave me a copy of Bill Bernbach’s Book: A History of Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising, and David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. My senior year in college, I took a copywriting class at J. Walter Thompson in Chicago. A few months before I graduated, my uncle helped get me an interview at McCann Erickson in New York. It was 1990 and we were in a recession. The guy who interviewed me said, “I have guys who just graduated from NYU film school who can’t get an internship.” He did not add, “Why would I hire you?” but I did, in my head.
I’d tell my dad that when I walked into interviews, I could see the guy—it was always a guy—cock his head ever so slightly to the side and mentally pat me on the head. My dad would get angry. He’d say, “Bring it out in the open. Say, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Turn it around.” What he meant was “Let them know you’re not a girl,” which was both helpful and not. What he meant was, I should consider myself that enduring fictional type—the exceptional girl.
I moved to San Francisco and got a temp job stuffing envelopes and then a full-time job folding sweaters, and then when the store closed (the recession), a part-time job steaming milk at a café where my boss suggested that the scheduling conflicts I’d been having with the other twenty-year-old barista were the result of “women not having been in the workplace that long.” I remember thinking that the eighteen-year-old boy we worked with had also not been in the workforce that long. A year or two later, a TV writer friend opined that maybe the reason there weren’t many girls on TV writing staffs was that men still weren’t comfortable with the idea of women in the workplace. I thought, Wait. Weren’t we just in college together? What did I miss? Obviously, I’d missed something. I’d been absent on some very important day. What I remember about conversations like these was how stupid they made me feel. After my shift, I’d go home to eat burritos and watch the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings on TV.
I started film school and made a friend. I was twenty-three and he was thirty, and he’d worked in advertising for years. He made a lot of money and thought it was funny that I couldn’t afford a vacuum cleaner. But I really couldn’t afford a vacuum cleaner. I helped him write his short film, and I asked him to help me get an interview at an ad agency, and he told me I was too cool for advertising. Also, girls didn’t make good copywriters unless it was for feminine products. He didn’t mean only feminine-hygiene products, though he did mean those, but also girly stuff in general, the kind that was popular then, shortly after the discovery of the “women’s market.” Suddenly, the marketplace was full of products that “celebrated” women, offering us pink, indulgent, usually creamy respite from the cross to bear of being a princess and a goddess, domestic and otherwise. Eventually, I wrote to a creative director at the same agency, where my friend used to work, and got an interview. The guy who interviewed me complimented my work but had no job to offer. When I told my friend about the interview, he laughed and said that the guy was infamous for using informational interviews as a way to meet girls.
Nowadays, when people describe something as “a Cinderella story,” they are almost always referring to a story about a girl lifted from obscurity, mediocrity, or worse by a rich and powerful man who re-creates her to make her worthy of his love—forgetting that Cinderella, in the original story, was robbed. The modern-day Cinderella is raw material from which the highly discerning woman connoisseur may fashion his ideal. The man—and we’ve seen him a lot, from Richard Gere’s corporate raider to Jamie Dornan’s avid spanker in 50 Shades of Grey—is not satisfied with the women he knows. His tastes are peculiar. He needs someone he can mold and control. We call this “rescue.” What’s interesting about this is how different this story is from the actual Cinderella, in which a young bourgeois girl, following the death of her father, is cheated out of her rightful inheritance and forced to wo
rk as her stepmother’s maid. Marrying the prince is a political move—it’s a way to reclaim her property and restore her position and, of course, get revenge.
The Cinderella story that interested me was the one I heard about a year after Pretty Woman came out—the one about the waitress whose feminist script was made into a major motion picture by Ridley Scott. Both Pretty Woman and Thelma and Louise tapped into something current and served up fantasies of escape from the condition of being broke, powerless, underestimated, and objectified. As far as I could tell, it was Vivian, not Thelma and Louise, who ceased to exist at the close of each of their stories. For the few years that followed Thelma and Louise, the culture would be unusually and strangely receptive to the howls of a generation of girls who felt exiled from a culture. The Riot Grrrl scene would explode, and once again, just as I’d felt in the early eighties, around the time that Desperately Seeking Susan came out, I’d think, This is it. From now on, progress will move forward. Yet within a few more years, the whole thing would be played out and supplanted by a far more chipper, far more palatable, far more marketable version of itself. It was a pretty quick traverse from “revolution grrrl-style now” to “girl power,” from Riot Grrrls to Spice Girls. The commodification of “girl power” would be swift and total. Ultimately, Pretty Woman wasn’t a love story; it was a money story.
When Thelma and Louise came out, I’d been living in San Francisco for a year, with a boyfriend about whom, when making the case for my sanity and clearheadedness, I found myself saying things like, “Well, it’s not like I’m going to marry him.” The prospect of finding a job that didn’t involve foaming milk seemed about as likely as discovering a magical portal to Narnia inside one of the envelopes I was stuffing (temporarily) for a large financial institution. Not only did I feel powerless and lost but I kept having to read about how powerlessness and lost my generation was in the New York Times.
In 1992, Rebecca Walker coined the term third wave in an essay in Ms. magazine that she wrote when she was twenty-two and I read when I was twenty-three. She was inspired by the 1991 Senate hearings before Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation, after a report of an FBI interview with Anita Hill was leaked to the press. Hill had testified that Thomas had repeatedly asked her out, told her about movies he’d watched about women having sex with animals, with group-sex and rape scenes, that he’d measured his penis and told her its name, that he’d picked up a can of Coke on his desk and asked who had put a pubic hair on it. The more she was grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the more obvious it became that Hill’s character had been put on trial. Like Walker and every other person I knew, I was riveted by the spectacle of Hill being humiliated by an all-male Judiciary Committee. We believed Anita Hill. And yet, there it was. Reading Walker’s essay, I felt as if she’d reached into my soul, scooped out my rage, and sprayed it in lacerating shards in every direction. She had articulated the relationship between women and the establishment culture perfectly, and exposed the workings of a system that pretended to include us but didn’t; that pretended to care about us, but only so long as we stuck to its guidelines of behavior; that pretended to hear us unless we spoke out against it, at which point it would turn on us with no mercy. In a contest between Hill’s reputation and Thomas’s, there was no contest. No matter how credible, how exemplary in any other context, in the framework of the confirmation hearings Anita Hill was a threat to the power structure, and she was shot down with prejudice. You couldn’t watch this as a young woman and not come away with this lesson. For Walker, the takeaway was the panicked reaction to the threat of Hill’s word undermining Thomas’s career. If she stood up to him and was vindicated, would the system crumble? Hill’s testimony was more than a threat to Thomas’s confirmation, it was a threat to the patriarchal order. To watch as a young woman was to anxiously await a verdict on whether we were equal or whether male privilege always won out. She wrote:
While some may laud the whole spectacle for the consciousness it raised around sexual harassment, its very real outcome is more informative. He was promoted. She was repudiated. Men were assured of the inviolability of their penis/power. Women were admonished to keep their experiences to themselves. The backlash against U.S. women is real. As the misconception of equality between the sexes becomes more ubiquitous, so does the attempt to restrict the boundaries of women’s personal and political power. Thomas’ confirmation, the ultimate rally of support for the male paradigm of harassment, sends a clear message to women: “Shut up! Even if you speak, we will not listen.”2
Walker asked her boyfriend what he thought of the hearings, and she was shocked that his main concern was Thomas’s dismal record on civil rights and opportunities for people of color. “I launch into a tirade,” she wrote. “When will progressive black men prioritize my rights and well-being? When will they stop talking so damn much about ‘the race’ as if it revolved exclusively around them? He tells me I wear my emotions on my sleeve. I scream ‘I need to know, are you with me or are you going to help them try to destroy me?’”
When Walker declared herself part of the “third wave,” what she was saying was that she no longer considered herself part of the so-called postfeminist generation. She was repudiating the idea that the “second wave” had both succeeded (so move on) and failed (so shut up), which was just one of the many crazy-making paradoxes our generation was raised on. What Walker was articulating made perfect sense to me. Nothing in my experience contradicted it. She was taking up the mantle after a long period of backlash and dormancy. Things would be different now.
Several years later, I was working at a start-up in Silicon Valley. My job consisted mostly of managing hundreds upon thousands of tiny digital files, which I rotoscoped, compressed, named, logged, stored, and cataloged in dozens of one-gigabyte drives the size of cinder blocks. (It’s true. That’s how big they were in the late nineties.) I worked from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on weekdays, and at least one full day per weekend. I made so little money that I went into debt buying sandwiches from the café in the lobby. I did it because when I first interviewed for the job, somebody told me that the previous year, they’d all gotten $30,000 in bonuses at Christmas.
When the day of the salary-review meeting finally arrived, my manager escorted me to my boss’s office and we sat down.
“So, you want a raise,” my boss said with a grin. I said I did. He asked me what kind of guys I dated. I knew he thought he was being funny. When a certain type of guy (like, say, your fun boss) in a certain type of situation (like, say, your much-delayed salary review) thinks he’s being funny, there’s not much you can do to disabuse him of this notion, and even if you could, even if you did take it to the human-resources lady (isn’t she always a lady?), your victory would be Pyrrhic and it would probably cost you more than it netted you. So, I did what I always did in these situations. I shut down and let my eyes go dead. I smirked and cocked my head and went into my go-to “I see what you are doing and I will raise you not only by not registering the insult but also by insulting you back while pretending not to and then we can laugh at you together” stance. I thought this is how you play.
“I date artists,” I said. I’d meant for it to be ironic, just not so cutting that he’d fire me before I’d had a chance to square away my sandwich debt. But it came out sounding dumb.
“Really?” he said. He seemed genuinely concerned. “I could introduce you to rich guys.”
It was a joke, of course. We all laughed. He laughed the hardest. I was given a nominal cost-of-living raise that was several months overdue.
There was no bonus that year, after all, but we did get Christmas gifts—we each received a remaindered copy of The Hot Zone, the Ebola-virus book; and a book about Anita Hill. I quit a few months later. I somehow managed to pay off all the ham.
It felt at once both enormously significant and like no big deal. It was nothing. It was funny. It was just a little piece of absurdity to be saved and turned into art later, when I
wasn’t working all the time. I’d always had a Goth streak, was attracted to rot, ruin, and decadence for the interplay between truth and its corrosive effect on beauty. It was future-art, as-yet-not-contextualized art. At some later point, when I finally became myself, I would fashion my true self from these stories. I would tell these stories and find a way to make myself the hero.
But it was harder than I’d expected, because there’s so much fear that arises. You fear looking bitter, vindictive, overly sensitive. You fear looking like you’re blaming others for your shortcomings or settling scores. You worry that somebody will feel bad or attempt to discredit you. “Did you leave the room when your parents fought?” a screenwriting professor once asked me. (Then he said, “We should get a drink. I’d probably get arrested. How old are you, anyway?”) He was right about my aversion to conflict. It immediately made me feel guilty. That’s how your experience becomes unspeakable and the things that are done to you become your fault, your terrible, guilty secret. The rules of the game as I understood them were just to play along with the game—just do the best you could with the flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls, like Alice did in the Queen’s walled garden. You know you’ll never win, but at least you wouldn’t lose everything.
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