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Big Mouth Strikes Again
“Oh, Do Shut Up, Dear!” is the name of a talk by Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. It’s a rollicking tour through Western culture’s foundational tradition of silencing women who speak out in public, which Beard gave at the British Museum in 2014 after being harassed on Twitter for her vocal support of putting Jane Austen on the one-pound note. In the speech, she talked about how such harassment was nothing new, how it’s totally been a thing since antiquity. She explained that the deliberate, boastful, and even performative exclusion of women from public speech was considered, in ancient Greece, “an integral part of growing up as a man.” It was how a man took power. She traced the first recorded example of it to a passage in Homer’s Odyssey in which a bard is singing a song about the Greeks’ suffering on their return from Troy. The song upsets Penelope, so she tells the bard to stop, which triggers Telemachus, her young son, to berate her in front of his friends. “Speech will be the business of men,” he tells her. “For mine is the power in this household.” Then he sends her to her room, and she goes. After all, Penelope is Telemachus’s (temporarily single) mother. It’s her job to raise him not only as a man but as the king.
Not everyone is granted the power of authoritative speech. Even when it’s not expressly denied, the freedom to exercise it isn’t evenly distributed, or appreciated, or forgiven. It has always taken courage for women to speak up for themselves and to speak out against the way things are, especially against female oppression. Alice’s predicament in Wonderland is a familiar one to modern women: She’s a post-Enlightenment girl in a persistently feudal world. She perceives herself as a subject with inalienable rights, but she’s perceived, variously, as an interloper, a servant, a threat, an object, a bother, a girl. Alice believes this can be remedied with information. She believes that if she explains and asserts herself, if she reasonably points out the facts, then she will shift the perception. At the very least, she thinks, she can learn the rules and fit in. So, she tries. She takes others’ good faith for granted. She makes her case again and again. She tries to learn their rules. But she is eternally frustrated, because Wonderland is governed not by reason or rules but by ideology, faith, superstition, and fear. Something is real if you believe it’s real, if you continually affirm its existence. It disappears if you don’t, subsumed into a parallel universe.
I was in my teens the first time I jumped into a heated argument about a book or movie or band with a boy I liked, only to watch his face fall in dismay or harden instantly into anger. It baffled me. I liked boys who were attractive but also smart and funny and original. I assumed this was mutual, but it usually wasn’t. A tarot-card reader once told me that I was a ninja who looked like a geisha, so some boys might feel ambushed. I once had an argument with a boyfriend in college about Pearl Jam, and we both walked away crushed—I at the fact that he liked Pearl Jam, he at the fact that I hadn’t thought to hide my contempt. Another boyfriend told me that he didn’t want to know what I thought about Paul Auster—if I didn’t like the books he liked, then I didn’t like him. One boyfriend invited me to watch him play squash as we were leaving a museum where we’d argued about a painting. I went but ended up sitting out the whole game at the bar, furiously writing an essay about the painting on a napkin. The essay was a gift to him in the same way a dead mouse is a gift from a cat to its owner. He reacted accordingly. So many aesthetic impasses, so many relationships dashed against the rocks of critical variance. I come from a line of refractory women adept at dismantling male authority through underhanded mockery and satire, which is how my grandmother survived my grandfather. I believed that the days of telling girls to keep their opinions to themselves were over, because I’d been encouraged to speak up in class my whole life. When I started the movie-critic job, in 2004, I was warned by my predecessor, also a woman, to brace myself for nasty e-mails that would inevitably come—but they never did, at least not with the fury I’d expected. Maybe it was because when I had something not-nice to say, I made sure to be as funny about it as possible. I made sure to tuck it in the very best dead mouse I could find.
In December 2007, not long after Isla Fisher’s quote about playing the girl was repurposed as clickbait all over the Internet, Katherine Heigl, who had starred in Knocked Up earlier that year, was profiled in Vanity Fair. Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, which argued against women staying home to take care of kids full-time, wrote the profile. In it, Bennetts remarked that although many critics had liked Knocked Up, “quite a few discerned an underlying misogyny that made female characters into unappealing caricatures while romanticizing immature and irresponsible male behavior.” Heigl agreed that the movie felt “a little sexist” and that it painted “the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight,” and the men “as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” She admitted that the disparity bothered her. “I had a hard time with it, on some days,” she said. “I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”
It wasn’t the first time that Heigl was criticized for criticizing her employers in the media, but for some reason, this time she was sent to the corner for it. Nobody was scandalized when George Clooney called Batman and Robin “a difficult film to be good in,” but the backlash against Heigl was swift and merciless. Her comments were considered bitchy and traitorous. Even though in her next two movies, 27 Dresses and The Ugly Truth, she also played sad, lonely, uptight, insecure, workaholic, relationship-obsessed single girls, and even though she recanted her statements in People magazine almost immediately, calling Knocked Up “the best filming experience of my career,” it was too late. She’d become a cautionary tale, the abject poster child for what happens to ungrateful women who not only question their roles but also dare to point out that the story doesn’t match the reality.
After The Ugly Truth came out, Judd Apatow, the director and writer of Knocked Up, and Seth Rogen, another of the movie’s stars, discussed the incident on Howard Stern’s radio show. “That looks like it really puts women on a pedestal in a beautiful way,” Rogen said. Apatow said he’d heard there was a scene in The Ugly Truth in which Heigl wore underwear with a vibrator inside, so he’d “have to see if that was uplifting for women.” The idea that Heigl had been calling for women to be “uplifted” or “put on a pedestal” was so bizarrely Victorian and off the mark that it made me doubt my perceptions. Even stranger was how Apatow and Rogen took Heigl’s comments personally, when she’d been careful to say the experience had been “98 percent” positive. In the Hollywood liege mentality, her criticism of the movie was construed as personal betrayal, punishable by exile.
“We never had a ‘fight,’” Apatow said. “Seth always says, it doesn’t make any sense . . . She improvised half her shit . . . She could not have been cooler.”
He wondered if maybe Heigl had just gotten tired after six straight hours of interviews and “slipped.” To which Rogen retorted, “I didn’t slip, and I was doing fucking interviews all day too! I didn’t say shit!”
Apatow said that he’d waited for the call to come saying, “Sorry, I was tired,” but it never came. Rogen was skeptical. “I gotta say, it’s not like we’re the only people she said some batshit crazy things about. That’s kind of her bag now.”
It was peak train-wreck coverage time in the media. Jeff Robinov, who was then the president of production at Warner Bros., had recently announced that his studio would no longer be making movies with female protagonists (I guess they aren’t called Bros. for nothing). Hillary Clinton was losing her lead in the polls against Barack Obama after having been subjected to a merciless double standard for months. The question of whether women are funny was being debated in earnest. For these and other reasons that all seemed to fit together in some way, the backlash against Heigl really
got under my skin. I’d hated Knocked Up with a passion, but I’d been afraid to say so, and I’d been afraid to say why. In fact, I’d gone back to see it a second time to make sure I hated it. And here, six months later, was the star of the movie proving that I’d been right to be afraid. The context in which this opinion could be expressed did not exist.
Nearly a decade later, Rogen regretted that Heigl was hurt by criticizing the film, while still objecting to the criticism. He told the Hollywood Reporter that he sympathized with Heigl and that he did not think that her comments should have affected her career; but all those years later, he still didn’t see the bigger picture. “I respect the fact that perhaps she realizes that it has hurt her career, and I don’t want that to have happened to her at all because I’ve said a thousand stupid things and I really like her,” he said. “The only people who in this situation should in any way take anything from it is me and Judd because we’re the ones she was talking about. For other people to not work with her because she didn’t like her experience with us is—I think is crazy.”
In his book Fearless Speech, Michel Foucault traced the Western tradition of criticism to the Greek idea of parrhesia. Parrhesia can be translated as “free speech,” “frank speech,” or “truth” that is both grounded in personal experience and expressed with conviction. The word parrhesia is derived from a word that means “to say everything,” so it implies risk, because there’s always risk involved in spilling your guts. The parrhesiastes, or “one who speaks the truth,” is, according to Foucault, “always less powerful than the one with whom he speaks.” The word is also “linked to courage in the face of danger,” and it “demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger.” Parrhesia is fundamentally antiauthoritarian, so it’s always a bit of a risky stance. It’s heroic, because it’s dangerous. It can cost you your head. “In its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the ‘game’ of life or death,” Foucault writes. People take it on in the cause of justice.
Foucault writes, “In parrhesia, telling the truth is regarded as a duty.” Who is responsible for telling the truth in the cause of justice? If the civilized world is built on injustice, who is allowed to call it out? Who has a duty to call it out? What does that person risk? Greek philosophy, he went on, “problematized” truth telling as an activity. It asked,
Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller? About what topics is it important to tell the truth? (About the world? About nature? About the city? About behavior? About man?) What are the consequences of telling the truth? What are its anticipated positive effects for the city, for the city’s rulers, for the individual, etc.? And finally: What is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power? Should truth-telling be brought into coincidence with the exercise of power, or should these activities be completely independent and kept separate? Are they separable, or do they require one another?1
In other words, who gets to say who should be believed? When and why, in a civilized society, does truth telling become a target for social regulation that eventually becomes so cultural? The backlash against Heigl looks like nothing compared to the backlash against women who speak out online now. “It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman,” Beard told The New Yorker. “If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it—it’s the fact that you are saying it.” The British journalist Laurie Penny compared a woman’s opinion to “the short skirt of the Internet” for the same reason. Women who express their views, especially their critical views, are construed as “somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you.” Telemachus would have loved Twitter.
Like Telemachus, sexist online trolls “become men” by actively excluding women from public speech. When women speak out against social constructs that are easily mistaken for reality, their words are construed as revolt. Whenever I wrote a critical review of a mainstream movie and someone took the time to write me an e-mail telling me to “relax” and reminding me it’s “just a movie,” that person was not only invalidating my interpretation but also questioning my sanity. Male reviewers were subjected to abuse as well, but “relax” was gendered advice, advice that felt intimately familiar. Sometimes, I’d get an e-mail like this and I’d wish I could just take the advice; that I could write “It’s just a movie,” file it, and go to the beach. But alas. I’d have to find a way to be opinionated without being too opinionated, authoritative without being a bitch about it, smart without being elitist, fair without being a pushover. If the boyfriends of my youth found me too authoritative when I should have been cheering on the sidelines as they kicked and tossed and smacked balls toward the vanguard, the male colleagues of my adulthood kept reminding me of my lack of authority as they unconsciously displayed theirs. I was always failing someone’s standards of legitimacy, as a girlfriend, as a producer of opinions. It was an eternal no-win. I was always too big or too small, like Alice, and forever being told, in one way or another, “Eat me.”
It just so happens that at the time that Knocked Up came out, I was trying to get knocked up myself. I was spending a lot of time worrying about how I would manage my job after having a baby, even though I wasn’t pregnant yet. I was also simultaneously thinking about and trying not to think about how I would be able to afford to raise a baby. My job paid well, but Los Angeles was getting more expensive by the day. I worked very long hours; Craig had only recently started working in TV production, and his hours were long and irregular. On the days he worked, he left at the crack of dawn and came home late at night. I wrote and edited and did administrative stuff from home, and sometimes went to meetings or screenings during the day. I drove to screenings across town at rush hour two or three evenings a week and got home at ten. My once-a-week cleaning lady wanted to become a full-time nanny, and she used to joke that I should have a baby for her. I’d laugh, then I’d crunch the numbers and panic. There was no way I could afford her full-time.
Meanwhile, the “mommy wars” raged—mostly in the pages of the New York Times, the Atlantic, books, and other magazines—the ad-supported bards sang of an epic battle between mommies who cleaved to the private sphere (angels in their walled gardens) and mommies who struck out into the public sphere, “paying other people to raise their kids,” as it was often tendentiously put. In this narrative, the choice was made out to be moral: between selfishness and selflessness. Dig deeper and the choice was actually between what kind of woman you chose to be: Were you a “true woman,” born to nurture and give yourself over to others (the kind of person for whom, as Virginia Woolf once put it, “if there was chicken, she took the leg”), or a woman who remained a person first? The mommy wars were presented as a debate about practical modes of living, but they weren’t that at all. They were entirely ideological, and as divorced from practical reality as it was possible to be. The argument wasn’t what is best for women and children so much as what and whom are women for. It’s an argument that is ongoing today. A “mommy” was understood to be financially dependent on a husband of decent means. The word did not refer to women who had had children while single or poor. Money and husbands were never mentioned as factors in the decision, which was always framed as a choice between selfless motherhood and selfish careerism. The argument also assumed that the responsibility of caring for children naturally fell to mothers, and that business could not be expected to accommodate parents’ schedules. Finally, because working women, especially working mothers, tended to make less than men, especially fathers, it “made sense” for mothers to eventually drop out of the workforce and stay home. Rarely did the debate take a macro view of the system. Instead, it pitted the self-sacrificing mommies, who were “giving it all up” to get up at 5:00 a.m. to pack bento-box lunches, pu
t them on Tumblr, drive the kids to school, and still make it to Pilates by 9:00, against the bitchy, aggressive ones in heels, who felt guilty about missing recitals to fly to Singapore. These were the mommies people made movies about and wrote novels about.
As a kid, I’d worried about what would happen when I grew up and had children of my own. I imagined it would be like a Twilight Zone episode in which I studied and studied and prepared and prepared and then, just as I was entering adulthood (my mom had me at twenty-three, and her mom had her at twenty-three), I’d have a daughter, and I’d have to shut down operations as myself and divert all my energy to making sure she studied and prepared until the day she became a mother, and so on. It reminded me of a recurring nightmare I had in which a cop pulled me over and whipped off his mirrored aviator glasses to reveal another identical pair of mirrored aviator glasses, then another, then another. Needless to say, I didn’t dream of this day when I would give myself over to my uncanny double, I lived in fear of it. I didn’t quite understand how it would work without my making a conscious choice to marry for lifelong support. My goals for myself had varied over time, but I’d always known I never wanted that. There was something mercenary about wanting to become “a mother” that nobody ever talked about; an economic aspect that was unspeakable. I feared that a strategic middle-class marriage would be the very thing that would make a creative life impossible. If I didn’t have to write to survive, my writing would lack urgency. If it wasn’t urgent, it wouldn’t be relevant. If it wasn’t relevant, it wouldn’t be necessary. If it wasn’t necessary, it wouldn’t be worth the money it would cost to pay for child care. I’d always wanted to marry an artist. I’d always wanted a daughter. I’d always wanted to write. I’d always been terrified of disappearing.
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