You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  The Ms. Foundation released Marlo Thomas’s 1972 book and album Free to Be . . . You and Me, which featured celebrities singing songs about celebrating individuality, tolerance, and being happy with who you were. (I got the Free to Be . . . You and Me album in 1973, when I was in kindergarten in New Jersey, where I learned to read using Dick and Jane books.) In 1972, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was passed, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, making abortion legal, and Nixon endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, which later failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974. Before that, a single, widowed, or divorced woman couldn’t get a bank loan, credit card, or mortgage, regardless of income, unless a man cosigned the loan with her. The vice president of public relations for NOW testified before the National Association of Broadcasters Television Code Review Board and the Radio Code Review Board on the representation of women and the women’s movement in the media and advertising.

  I had no idea that any of these things were happening, or what they meant. I was listening to Free to Be . . . You and Me tell me I could do anything. It wasn’t true yet, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know how close to the edge I was, and have been all this time. It gives me vertigo to think about this now.

  It’s no coincidence that Mad Men ended when Joan and Peggy began, or that Joan and Peggy began when Mad Men ended. Don’s true secret identity—bigger than his Dick Whitman secret, which turned out not to be a big deal in the end—was that he was a girl, too. He was hiding inside a performance that he was able to pull off because of the way he looked. He knew he was lucky. He understood what it was like not to be seen, to live in the wrong story. Who had a better view of the disconnect between the feminine ideal of the happy homemaker and mother, and reality? Don lived with Betty for years. He helped make her into the woman she was: sad, lost, angry, and mean. He understood better than anyone what it was to be trapped in a story, and how a story could set you free. He knew that transforming oneself into a strict category prototype, into the platonic ideal of a happy housewife, a Playboy mad-man-about-town, a bombshell, or a single career girl in the big city, was not only impossible but undesirable, inhuman: that it was to turn yourself into a robot.

  As Roger’s African American secretary, Dawn, tells him when she quits to take another job, in insurance, “Advertising is not a very comfortable place for everyone.” And it’s not. This polarized, highly unequal, antagonistic, symbolic place where everybody is the opposite of somebody else is dangerous. And then the whole thing gets called art, or, worse, human nature, instead of being recognized as the capitalist glory hole it really is.

  21

  * * *

  Phantombusters; or, I Want a Feminist Dance Number

  A couple of years after publishing A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf was asked to give a speech at the National Society for Women’s Service on the topic of professions for women. The day before giving the speech, while taking a bath, she’d had an idea for a whole new book. It would be, she wrote in her journal, “a sequel to A Room of One’s Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women.”1

  Woolf started her speech by thanking the women writers who had come before her, and acknowledged that she’d had “very few material obstacles” to overcome in choosing writing as a profession. In fact, writing had historically been one of the few professions available to middle-class women. The reason for this, she said, was that writing as a woman posed few threats to the established order. It was “reputable and harmless,” and “the family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen.” It required no capital investments or costly equipment. Paper was cheap, so “no demand was made upon the family purse” by women writers. The fact that writers didn’t need “pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses” was probably the biggest reason that “women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.” In other words, writing was something a woman could do without raising eyebrows, ruffling feathers, making demands, taking up space, spending money, promoting herself, flaunting her success, or drawing any attention to herself. That’s what made it, on the one hand, a good profession for a woman.2

  What made it a difficult profession for women, on the other hand, was that it required a degree of candor and freedom to speak and behave as one liked. It required a level of disinhibition and unconscious privilege that few women in 1930s England possessed. Woolf herself had been unaware of her own internalized inhibitions until she sat down to write her second piece of journalism. She wrote her first piece on spec, sold it, and bought herself a Persian cat with the proceeds. What could be easier, she thought, than to keep selling pieces and buying cats? Then she got her first assignment: a review of a book by a male author, a great man of letters. As she sat down to write, she heard a rustle of skirts and noticed that a “phantom” had cast a shadow on her paper.3

  The “phantom” was a woman, but she was not a real woman. She was the Victorian ideal of femininity made famous by the poem “The Angel in the House.” Woolf recognized her at once:

  She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel.

  Woolf recognized the phantom as her internalized Angel, the Angel she was brought up to be, who often came between her and her paper when she sat down to write. The Angel whispered to Woolf to remember her place: she was a young woman writing a review of a book by a famous man. The Angel cautioned her to be tender, to flatter and deceive her subject, to watch what she said. The Angel so bothered her, wasted her time, and tormented her that at last, in her imagination, Woolf attacked: “I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her.” Her excuse in a court of law would be that she acted in self-defense: “Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.” Because you can’t write, you can’t even review a novel, without a mind of your own, she explained, “without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex . . . freely and openly”—and the Angel said women couldn’t do this. Women must charm, conciliate, and lie to succeed. “Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”4

  If this doesn’t prove unequivocally that Virginia Woolf predicted not just the all-female Ghostbusters reboot but also the insane prebacklash—forelash?—against it, then I don’t know what does. The woman was an incandescent (her favorite word) genius. The speech dramatized the internal conflicts and problems that women who are women artists confront. It reworked the conflict between the Victorian “angel in the house,” or the internalized voice of her mother and Mrs. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse, and herself and Lily Briscoe, as artists. Woolf wrote her death-match with the Angel as a comic battle between the author-heroine and the invisible forces that haunted her, as Julia Briggs wrote, “to show how the Victorian idealization of motherhood had also been a source of restraint and oppression, and, in particular, of sexual repression.”5 A woman who writes (or speaks, or directs, or makes anything, or leads) “has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome,” Woolf said. “Indeed, it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashe
d against.”6

  Since the moment director Paul Feig announced his all-girl remake of Ghostbusters in the summer of 2014, he and the movie’s leads were subjected to a sustained campaign of abuse. Feig called it “some of the most vile, misogynistic shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” Rabid middle-age fanboys accused Feig of ruining their childhoods, threatened to boycott the movie, and tweeted sexist and racist abuse at the cast. Trolls banded together to make the movie trailer the most disliked video in the history of YouTube. They insisted, demanded, that the film not exist. When it stubbornly came into being despite their objections, they did their best to sabotage it.

  This is not a new phenomenon, but in its current form it’s not that old, either. When I was growing up, the assumption was that as older generations were replaced by younger generations, sexism would fade. This narrative was not only rarely challenged but remains popular to this day. It is hard to reconcile where we are with these obsessive, persistent, psychotically virulent attacks on anyone who refuses to conform to gender stereotypes, this insistence that certain fondly held ideas not be sullied by empirical reality.

  Trolls are made, not born. Men in groups—like Telemachus and his buddies sending Penelope to her room, like the husbands of Stepford—bond by excluding women from power, by silencing them and policing their speech. Men who would never act this way individually change their behavior in a dominant group. This is what patriarchy is—a virtual Stepford.

  A Room of One’s Own was written a decade after women gained the vote. A backlash was in full swing. Woolf anticipated the criticism she would get in the essay, guessing that readers would object to the fact that she failed to compare the relative merits of men and women as writers. Even if it were possible to quantify talent in this way, if talent could be weighed “like sugar and butter,” it would be counterproductive or, worse, would persist in framing the desire to redress pernicious and systemic gender inequality as a competition. In this, as in most things, she was prescient. For some reason, all these years later, the arguments are still essentialist, still personal. We still talk about what women can and can’t have, or how much of it they can have. “All this pitting of sex against sex,” Woolf wrote, “of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to the platform and receive from the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.”

  Just as Katharine Hepburn would later, Woolf attributed her freedom to pursue her art to family money and to the independence it gave her. She did not need to live by her charm, so she didn’t. Even so, a writer must tell the truth about her own experiences as a body, and the obstacles against women doing this “are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define.” They are not obvious, or even visible to most. They are invisible forces, social conditioning, unspoken interdictions, ectoplasmic pop-culture slime. Woolf worried that people would object to her money, but “500 [pounds] a year stands for the power to contemplate, [and] a lock on the door stands for the power to think for oneself.” She was prepared for even her intimate friends to dislike the “shrill feminine tone” of A Room of One’s Own, and sure she would be “attacked for a feminist” and “hinted at for a sapphist” in the press. And this was decades before Fox & Friends and Twitter trolls.

  I saw Ghostbusters with Kira, Darby, and Sydney. The girls loved it. They talked about it for hours and acted out scenes. Abby (Melissa McCarthy) and Erin (Kristen Wiig) are reunited after confronting the ghost of a Victorian lady, an “angel in the house” with the face and annihilating force of a demon. Sydney said it wasn’t scary except for the anticipation before the first ghost appeared. Darby said she knew how Sydney felt: it reminded her of the dread she’d felt as a little girl in Connecticut in the seventies, terrified of growing up to be trapped in a beautiful house. Kira decided to be Kate McKinnon’s Jillian for Halloween, and asked if it was too soon to start working on a costume. (It was July.)

  The second-best thing about Ghostbusters, for me, was that it was good but not great; an enjoyable summer comedy. The best thing about it was that the four main characters were women playing people, not people playing “girls.” The ordinariness of the characters was what made it thrilling.

  If the Ghostbusters backlash proved anything, it’s that the phantom that Virginia Woolf thought she killed is still alive. That Victorian lady ghost still needs to be busted.

  Strange things happened to me while I was working on this book: fortuitous encounters, bizarre coincidences, unexpected turns of events, happy reunions, unlucky breaks that turned into lucky ones. Themes and motifs and patterns appeared in stories and in real life. For a while, I felt like I was writing in circles. Then, one day, I ran into a friend at the farmers’ market who asked how it was going, and I told her I was writing in circles. She said I was not, I was writing in spirals, which is how the heroine’s journey progresses. If the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell’s oversimplified myth, the bane of folklorists’ existence, is a money-shot parabola, then the heroine’s journey is a corkscrew, a recursive journey inward to discover the authentic self.

  She told me not to judge my spirals.

  The next day, I went to the bookstore where I’d bought the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to buy a book she had recommended. While there, I was overcome with the urge to buy a copy of A Room of One’s Own, which I hadn’t read since college. I barely remembered anything about it except that I loved it. All I recalled was something about how a woman needs an income of five hundred pounds a year and her own room if she is ever going to be a serious writer of fiction or poetry. Woolf was being literal about the money and the room with a door that locked, but she was also talking symbolically.

  A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s semifictional quest to prepare a lecture on the subject of women and fiction. At first, it seems simple enough, but the more she thinks about it, the more complicated it seems: “The title women and fiction might mean . . . women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.”

  Woolf decides to walk along the river at the fictional Oxbridge College to ponder the topic, but when she sits on the grass, she is shooed off by the beadle, who tells her the grass is for men only. Women must stay on the gravel path. She enjoys a sumptuous lunch as a guest at King’s College, then a sad one with no wine at the women’s college, Newnham. She wonders why women are so poor in relation to men, and decides to go to the British Museum to find out the truth about women—because where but the British Museum, she wonders drily, could such a truth be found?

  Looking under the letter W in the catalog, she finds hundreds of books written by men about “women and their effect on whatever it may be”—about their character, their natural inclinations, their relative weakness, their moral, intellectual, and physical inferiority—a number of books so overwhelming that she can’t bring herself to open them. The titles feel so hostile and dismissive and dehumanizing that it makes her cheeks flush and her pulse quicken. They all seem to be written in anger. This puzzles her—compared to women, men have everything. What are they so angry about? Why are they so determined to write about women, to make it hard for them to write, and then to refuse to read them?

  She reads a fictional novel by a fictional contemporary woman novelist, and is amazed to encounter two female characters who like each other. “Chloe liked Olivia,” she reads. And then it strikes her that it is perhaps the first time in literature that such a thing has happened. Until now, she’s come across only fictional women who were jealous of each other or otherwise shown in relation to men. “Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of women in fiction;” she wrote, “the astonishing extreme
s of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity.”

  Not to mention that every time she reads the newspaper, she is reminded “that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word?”

  I was still reading A Room of One’s Own when the second season of Doll and Em premiered. The first shot of the first episode of the second season is a shot of a lighthouse. I thought, That’s weird, because I’d forgotten that in the last scene of the first season, Em suggested to Doll that they go someplace to write something together as equals. They wind up in a lighthouse by the sea writing a play loosely based on themselves, and their friendship, and how they see each other’s lives. The creators and stars of Doll and Em use their own lives and real families to produce a metanarrative that explores “their place,” as artists and as women, in the world and in the entertainment industry. Wells’s real-life husband and two kids play Em’s husband and kids on the show. Mortimer’s actual husband, Alessandro Nivola (who also produces), and her real-life son play husband and son to the character based on her, Lily, in the play. Doll and Em are loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s characters in To the Lighthouse, the married Mrs. Ramsay and the single artist Lily Briscoe. The whole thing is a hall of mirrors in which it becomes impossible to tell when life is imitating art, and when art is shaping life. In fact, it’s pointless to make the distinction. It’s an eternally recurring loop; a infinite echo of diminishing—not ever-biggering—scale.