The journey has been a central framework for storytelling since the earliest works of Western literature. Homeric epics recount journeys as foundational myths that either reinforce or question cultural values, and the way heroism gets constructed around them. Reality shows borrow a documentary style to tell very deterministic stories that reinforce cultural values and make heroes out of the people who participate. The Bachelor naturalizes its beauty-pageant-as-courtship contest as an open-ended journey or “quest” for love. “Life” and “experience” may be random and chaotic, but a journey, in theory, has a purpose. It suggests destiny. It elevates the speaker from clueless bumbler to epic hero; it confers a mythic fate onto whoever uses it, turning ill-advised entanglements and poorly handled interpersonal conflicts into scenes from the foundational myths of a brave new culture.
But there is almost nothing open-ended about the doomed journeys on The Bachelor. There is travel involved, and an emotional trajectory, but the “journey” is as controlled and shaped by the show’s producers and editors as is the inclusion of a typecast group of women. There is the weepy one, the slutty one, the down-to-earth one (She is so nice and funny! Why do looks have to matter as much as they do?), the batshit crazy one, the tragic one, the backstabber—it goes on. It’s less about reality than about the removal of reality from the process of finding a mate; a kind of systematic decontextualization of love distilled to a luxury shopping experience. Audiences are trained to expect the “journey” to unfold along a well-worn path, and on a strict timeline, and they get upset when it doesn’t unfold exactly as it should. Then, in real life, non-reality-show people are allowed to use the “journey” to reframe dumb moves, selfish decisions, and other personal mistakes as externally imposed trials on the path to triumph.
The Bachelor presents itself as a show about beautiful young single people finding love, but the show is less a matchmaking service than a sporting event. The sport is femininity. Part human experiment, part longitudinal study of the effects of enculturation on the self-concept of the hot-girl cohort, The Bachelor games marriage—it is a game (where the prize, presumably, is all the housework) that is won by the woman who is best able to mold herself into the current ideal of “true womanhood.” The constructed ideal looms larger than ever. If you don’t believe me, watch all the seasons. Watch the red-carpet coverage of every awards show ever broadcast over the past fifteen years. Sometimes, it seems like popular media exists primarily to set impossible standards and then to shame people who don’t try their hardest to meet them. It is, after all, the greatest myth-making machine the world has ever known. And the purpose of myth, as Roland Barthes pointed out, is to turn culture into nature. You can’t argue with nature. Everybody submits.
In one season I followed, the bachelor on The Bachelor is an Iowa farm boy plucked from his Walmart-vanquished town and transported to a fantasy world of mansions, helicopters, Grand Canyon picnics, mink eyelashes, and bikini parades in downtown L.A. Temporarily recast as a savior prince, as the guy to take you away from it all, this guy, it turns out, really is the guy to take you away from it all. His town boasts a population of about four hundred people. It no longer has a restaurant or a grocery store. Why these women are torturing themselves to win him is unclear. One of the finalists is a fertility nurse in Chicago. She wants to give it all up for love. All of it: fertility nursing, income, independence, Chicago, purpose, life. I am not not romantic. I am, if anything, exceedingly romantic. I believe completely in the primacy of feeling. I lived my whole life in hot pursuit of the “unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals,” as Isaiah Berlin put it. But this is bullshit. The women on The Bachelor shows aren’t interested in marriage except as a certificate of completion; proof that they’ve become what a girl is still expected to become. What they’re looking for is the chance to embark on the singular adventure they’ve read about and seen acted in movie after movie their whole lives: the chance to be the heroine in a marriage plot on the grand, transcendently validating, superstar scale that is so tantalizingly within reach. Of course, the “journey” undertaken on The Bachelor is nothing like an actual journey. It’s an instructional guide for girls at home about what matters, what should be displayed, and what should remain hidden. The farm boy is their best shot at the fairy tale, a fairy tale that will conclude on the suggestion that a marriage is imminent. It’s not. Marriage is immanent. Judging by the show’s outcomes so far, the bachelor and his chosen bride will not marry each other. Maybe they will date for a while, then break up. Maybe they will eventually meet their spouses on Tinder, or stay single. Marriage is not the actual goal. The actual goal is to be shown to have the winning strategy, to be seen winning, to balance what should be displayed with what should be hidden—to understand how a girl can be a winner.
Once, when Kira was two and I was in a bad place—depression, but also Texas—I took her with me on a visit to New York—a work journey. And one evening, we were walking back to my friend’s place in Brooklyn at dusk, and it was a beautiful night, and then suddenly in my memory, we were running—then, flying. I was carrying Kira like a koala pup, her arms and legs wrapped around me, and an impenetrable force field grew around us, a glowing energy shield of love and power. I felt invincible then, like nothing could ever hurt me again. It was the first time I’d felt not-afraid since she was four months old. Maybe it was the change of scenery, or feeling reconnected to the world again, or the depression lifting. Maybe it was a brief, psychotic break after months of cratering sadness and loss of hope. Whatever it was, it was transporting.
There’s a show I like called UnREAL, a scripted drama about a fictional reality show called Everlasting, modeled on The Bachelor. The main characters are two female producers: Rachel, who has a complicated emotional history; and her borderline sociopathic boss and mentor, Quinn. Rachel’s job is to produce the show’s dramatic story lines by “producing” the girls on the show. The producers typecast the contestants (wifey, villain, slut) and tell their stories accordingly. They probe their psychological pasts, exploit their insecurities, and feed them all sorts of fantasies and lies. Rachel has a gift for psychological manipulation, having been “produced” her whole life by her controlling psychiatrist mom. Reality is produced through storytelling is produced through framing; what’s in and what’s out.
UnREAL is about authorship and authority, speech and reality, fairy-tale romance and social control. Rachel is gifted at her job but lacks authority, because people think she’s crazy. Quinn has authority, but everyone hates and fears her, and she does all the work while getting none of the credit. Chet, her married boyfriend and the do-nothing, drug-addicted creator of the show, originally stole the idea from her and never gave her a controlling partnership. Moreover, the network executives feel comfortable dealing with Chet, not Quinn. If they can avoid dealing with Quinn, they do. In the second season, Quinn takes over the show and promotes Rachel to her former job. Then Chet returns, having completed a men’s paleosurvival course, and tries to take the job back. In a power play, Rachel goes over Quinn’s head and tries to gain control of the show, telling the head of the network that Quinn and Chet are making two different versions of the story: Quinn is producing the usual treacly fairy tale, and Chet is making a pornified “man version.” The head of the network listens but doesn’t put Rachel in charge. Instead, he brings in an award-winning, Ivy League–educated documentarian, Coleman, with an overall deal at the network. Coleman has no idea how the show is made, so Rachel shows him. She and Quinn convince a claustrophobic contestant with an abusive past to hurt another girl, then they lock her up in a basement cell as punishment, knowing she was locked up as a child. They tell her that her only shot of staying is by telling the “suitor,” Darius, all about her tragic childhood in foster care. She does, and then they bring in an actress to play her mother, to say she is lying. Darius cuts her from the show for being dishonest, and she goes crazy. Coleman worries that she’ll sue the show, but Rachel reassures him. They have t
he network, the lawyers. Who’s going to believe the girl?
Besides, doesn’t he get it? That’s how you make the story.
15
* * *
A Modest Proposal for More Backstabbing in Preschool
A few years ago, I was driving Kira to her play-based, shoe-optional, sugar-free Arcadia of a preschool—a magical place where chickens roam free and grow fat off the spilled Pirate’s Booty of the land, and where the major areas of academic focus seem to revolve around turn-taking, problem solving, and Rosa Parks—when suddenly I experienced a moment of self-doubt so paralyzing I almost had to pull over. The radio was tuned to an NPR show where callers were debating the decision by Yahoo!’s then new CEO Marissa Mayer to ban employees from working from home. I’d been thinking about Mayer since early that morning, having accidentally fallen into an Internet rabbit hole and spent half an hour scurrying frantically around her contemporary art collection, her standing Saturday-morning salon appointments, her Oscar de la Renta addiction, her $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons in San Francisco, her Craftsman in Palo Alto, her $117 million annual compensation package, and her estimated $300 million net worth before managing to claw myself out. I was thinking about the way she’d rather high-handedly dismissed her need for maternity leave as if unaware that having built a nursery next to her office elided her need for it. The boast suggested a lack of self-awareness and insulation from reality so egregious they would make Marie Antoinette roll her eyes. The suggestion that people who didn’t like it go elsewhere added insult to injury. In the only industrialized country without family leave, where else was there to go?
I was in a bleak and self-censorious mood by the time I got in the car and was visited suddenly by an apocalyptic vision of the future. I saw my daughter, once a bright sunbeam of pure potential, as a frustrated former liberal-arts major stuck in bonded servitude to a midlevel job at a company where employees were required to “live from work” and occasionally to beam themselves home for some cursory family face time, despite the easy availability of 3-D holographic telepresence software that allows people all over the galaxy to interface with each other in real time, surround sound, and smell-o-vision from the comfort of their own brain implants. I saw with blinding clarity that I was to blame for this dismal state of affairs, that it was all my fault, all mine, because I’d accidentally gone and raised a hothouse serf.
Oops.
It’s hard to find your bearings in the middle of a cataclysm. That’s what I tell myself when I get confused, anyway. Do you fight or surrender? Beat ’em or join ’em? How can you be sure which way is up? During Kira’s last year at preschool, I was consumed by the question of where she would go to school. In the process, I toured at least half a dozen schools of every possible description. I visited public, private, progressive, academic, bilingual, charter, and magnet schools. I inventoried my values and checked my privilege and confronted my low self-esteem and insufficient feelings of entitlement. After touring one particular bastion of privilege (I don’t even know why anymore; I was obsessed) with a parking structure so gleaming and immaculate I thought I was at Barneys for a second, I had fever dreams all night of having consigned my child to being a nameless cog on a Matrix power grid through my own selfishness and stubbornness. How could I have been so stupid as to not have joined the corporate world or at least married into it? How profligate did I have to be to have blithely chucked my shot (the good college! the brass ring!) out the window? Who did I think I was to get away with anything? What did I even think I was doing?
I had fevered dreams about that parking structure, too, about how it would never be ours to park in. I felt so bereft, and so relieved not to belong there.
A friend told me about a mother at her daughter’s school who, when asked about her work, looked at her sadly and said, “I’m lucky. I don’t have to work.” We thought a good product would be a punching bag with a chip in it that says that every time you smack it.
For a word as dominant as choice in the contemporary woman’s life narrative, I am struck by how rarely I have heard people in my acquaintance actually use it to describe what happens after they have children. Most of my friends are journalists, writers, and other creative people with unconventional careers, but the narrative of “choice”—the idea that women reach a fork in the road and freely choose between two distinct but equally valid and available paths, each with its own moral implications—has always bothered me. It isn’t just that the idea of choice assumes a privilege most people don’t have (though it does) but also that there is a choice to be made, that motherhood is a job one chooses over a host of other jobs, like firefighter or ballerina. But it wasn’t until I made my Goldilocks tour of schools that I was struck by how pernicious and illusory the notion of choice really is. Stress over choosing a child’s school—even when you don’t have much of a choice—comes down to anxiety over the child’s future. What will give the child the best chance in life? And when the child is a girl, the question becomes more fraught. We don’t live in an equitable society, we just pretend we do and are punished when we suggest otherwise. We force women into a false choice that isn’t a choice, really. Then we make them feel bad no matter which option they “choose.”
I was in my mid-twenties when I first started hearing about how women fell behind men in the workplace because they “chose” to take time off to have kids, and then had a hard time reentering the workforce. And I was in my early thirties when the “mommy wars” really took off. I remember feeling very suspicious of this narrative. After Harvard Business School published a survey that showed how motherhood impacted its graduates’ careers, New York magazine’s Lisa Miller mused,
Perhaps it is a uniquely American desire to uphold the myth of the meritocracy, the ideal of the level playing field. If we can pin a woman’s stalled trajectory on the fact that she took too much maternity leave, or she was devoted to the point of obsession to her progeny and took her eye off the ball at work, or she conceived and bore too many children, or she can’t or won’t do the hours or the face time needed to succeed, or she didn’t find the right mentor, or she couldn’t figure out the rules of the game, or she didn’t try hard enough—then at least we preserve the possibility that some women, if they play their cards exactly right, can succeed.
That’s what it was: the feeling that it was your fault, that you had nobody to blame but yourself.
Once, I was having a drink in San Francisco with a friend who’d gotten pregnant as a teenager and kept the baby, even took her with her to college. At the bar, we ran into a guy she knew. He asked about her daughter and then asked me if I had kids. I said I didn’t. He smiled at me sadly and said, “Didn’t you want any?” Didn’t I? I was barely thirty.
The culture pushes women to “become moms,” but it’s not until you have a child that you understand what the culture thinks becoming a mom is. It comes as a shock, after a lifetime of Hallmark commercials and the constant idealization of motherhood, to realize just how socially devalued mothers really are. Becoming a mother is bad for your career. It’s also bad for your image. The functional role of “mom” as portrayed in media is all-consuming. It eradicates personhood. No more fun, sex, fashion, music, tech, or autonomous existence for you! Everything you do, own, think, and wear will be devalued by its association with you, becoming the most degraded version of itself. Your jeans will become “mom jeans.” Your dinner out with a friend will become a “moms’ night out.” Your technology will be deemed simple enough for you to use it. If somebody wants to fuck you, it will be as a “mom”—which is to say, in defiance of all known rules governing human behavior, kinkily, and with a sense of humor (but it will beat what people think of you if you are “childless,” of course). A friend of mine, a mother of two who has a big media job, told me that her younger, single boss kept using the expression “cool mom” whenever he wanted to describe something that he thought was cool, but wasn’t. Like, my friend would ask his opinion on a video, and h
e’d say, “I don’t know, that’s so cool mom.”
She waited for him to realize that he was saying this to her, and that it was denigrating. He never did.
Even today, a “mom” is a person for whom the need for an income—forget about the need for meaningful, productive work—is strangely obviated, as though babies filled their diapers with hundred-dollar bills. Echoing Charlotte Perkins Gilman a century later, Alison Gopnik wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the problem of thinking of parenting as a job rather than as a function of being human. A job is either a project undertaken with a specific goal in mind or paid labor—the place where you go to exchange your time for wages. It’s weird that we even use the lowly word job to refer to the exalted task of child rearing; if we’re going to go with employment-related metaphors, doesn’t career seem more appropriate? “Job” implies we have a specific outcome in mind, we expect something from the product of our labor. But a child is not a book you are writing or a cake you are baking or a PowerPoint deck you are assembling. “Working to achieve a particular outcome is a good model for many crucial human enterprises. It’s the right model for carpenters or writers or businessmen. You can judge whether you are a good carpenter or writer or CEO by the quality of your chairs, your books or your bottom line. In the ‘parenting’ picture, a parent is a kind of carpenter; the goal, however, is not to produce a particular kind of product, like a chair, but a particular kind of person.” Gopnik reminded us that there are a few years when combining motherhood and work is difficult but that it gets easier as children grow up, and that having children and work should not be mutually exclusive for anyone.
You Play the Girl Page 21