You Play the Girl
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Doll and Em get off to a slightly bumpy start, because Em has vertigo and the lighthouse is one hundred feet high, but she recovers and they have an incredible time writing a surreal, allegorical play that “holds up a mirror to their lives.” At first, they are exhilarated. “It’s just so cool to finally be saying something for ourselves!” Em enthuses. The play is called Joanna’s Gift (although there is no Joanna) and is inspired by the comedies of Shakespeare, so it is full of cross-dressing and mistaken identities and people falling in love with the wrong people. It’s about them, but also not about them. Back in New York, where Em lives with her family, they pitch the play to Harvey Weinstein as being about “tiny moments that we don’t feel other people see”; it is also “a metaphor . . . for . . . women . . . at this time.” The pitch is so bad, so meandering and diffuse, that Weinstein gets up and walks out in the middle of it without a word.
Not long after that, Em gets an audition for a big-budget movie set in space (it sounds a lot like Gravity) starring Ewan McGregor, and directed by a first-timer (a Belgian chef) who has been given a budget of $60 million. They decide that if a Belgian chef can make a $60 million movie, then certainly they can direct their own play. Buddy, the English producer Dolly hooked up with in season 1, introduces them to his godfather, Mikhail Baryshnikov, who owns a theater and lets his friends use it for free. Because Em’s movie schedule might conflict with the play, they decide to cast two younger, American actors—Olivia Wilde and Evan Rachel Wood, as themselves. Olivia is Lily, who is sort of Em, and Evan is Grace, who is sort of Doll, though they both insist they are not writing about themselves or each other.
Tensions escalate. The more Doll uses Em’s real life as material, making Em feel hurt, resentful, and exposed, the more Em withdraws from Doll into her family and her movie career, making Doll feel abandoned, lost, and alone. Em gets cast in the Ewan McGregor movie, but then Doll meets McGregor in a bar and tells him that his character sounds “kind of like a giant iPhone charger,” because he transfers his powers to his wife at the end so that she can save the world. Doll then proceeds to have sex with Ewan McGregor in the bathroom. Meanwhile, Em and her husband, Noah, are at a standoff. He has grown an Old Testament beard to protest her controlling nature, and she feels like Olivia is horning in on her actual life. Ewan drops out of the movie after thinking about what Doll said, and never calls her back. The movie financing falls apart.
Meanwhile, Evan and Olivia don’t get the play. They don’t understand what Doll and Em are trying to say, or it doesn’t ring true. Doll and Em’s stereotypically feminine traits—their vulnerability, openness to showing their feelings and sharing their thoughts, no matter how insensitive, insecure, or crazy-sounding—are what make them artists, and brave. They are also what make people impatient with them. Doll and Em can’t stop rewriting the play, using it as a way to comment on each other and each other’s lives without saying so directly. Evan and Olivia feel like they are caught in the middle of a private psychodrama, which they are. Evan and Olivia are ten years younger than Doll and Em, and American, and confident in that American way that equates self-deprecation with low self-esteem.
Evan and Olivia appear to live entirely inside the bubble of what things are supposed to be like. They are so committed to the narrative of the “strong female character” that they pretend not to know what Doll and Em are talking about when they say women have a harder time saying how they really feel and stating what they want—and that they aren’t entirely free.
“This is set in 2015, right?” Evan asks with a note of contempt, as if to say, Haven’t we moved on? Haven’t you moved on? Because we have, old ladies.
So they say.
Yet Evan and Olivia’s slick, impenetrable emotional carapace makes them better suited for Hollywood, where self-deprecating humor is met with horror. When the four of them have dinner at Em’s house one night and Em says something about the disappointing way her dessert turned out, Evan and Olivia are amazed.
“You don’t give a shit, do you?” Evan exclaims in delighted shock. What she means is, You don’t give a shit about what people think of you. You don’t manage your image. You don’t perform your self for others to admire and envy and long for. You are a liability to your own brand. The inversion is strange. Evan and Olivia are enslaved to appearances, aggressively performing their freedom to say and be anything. As long as it’s not, you know, old, weak, indecisive, afraid.
Olivia gets into it, though. She studies Em’s life, slips on her robe, tests out her bed, chats with her husband, takes her kids to dinner. She’s the younger, easier, less neurotic version, the version with the kinks worked out—she’s the Stepford Wife.
In an interview, the real Emily Mortimer told a story about meeting a producer at a party once. When he asked what she did for a living, she found herself in the clichéd scenario of having to tell him that she was an actress. So she tacked on, “Not a very good one,” and he looked at her like she’d just admitted she ate out of Dumpsters.
Near the end of the episode, as Emily is walking down the street, Virginia Woolf shows up and gives Emily permission to be herself, to say what she wants.
The next day, Em tells Doll: “I want a feminist dance number.”
Evan and Olivia quit, so Doll and Em take the stage.
When I was a kid, I assumed I could be anything, because I was everything, and anything could happen. When we learn, in ambient, subconscious ways, that some people belong to categories that are more important than others, we start to apply these values to ourselves. As girls, we’re born into a world that directs our subjectivity away from us all the time, that tells us not to trust our own eyes, that tells us to deny our feelings, that makes it nearly impossible to know who we are. What makes you feel seen? How much of your self-concept have you absorbed from the world around you? Is it possible to remove that self-concept from your mind? To remove all of that information from your brain and re-create a self and walk around in it? Women do this work daily. Before the heroine can set out on her journey, she has to free herself from the tower like Rapunzel, or from the lunatic reverend’s suburban-backyard bunker. She has to liberate herself from the oppressive fairy tale, the fearmongering tabloid story. She has to refuse and to write her own way out. She can do it, because she’s unbreakable, like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme song says. She’s alive, dammit.
Near the start of The Heroine’s Text, Nancy K. Miller observes that the orphaned ingenue heroine—the young princess—is not “a sophisticated decoder” of the story she has grown up in. None of us are experienced decoders at first. It takes a long time to wake up. And even then, the snooze button is always at hand. Sleeping Beauty wakes up and is delivered by her prince into the house of her father and her nameless mother. Alice wakes up, runs home for tea, and is dreamed again by her sleeping sister as a young mother, telling stories to children about adventures that never happened.
Six months later, when Alice steps through the looking glass, she finds the countryside is laid out in squares like a chessboard, and her moves are determined by rigid rules that guide her toward one conclusion. Alice starts out as a pawn with very little control over the direction of her life or even where she is headed. Her choices and movements are constrained by a bigger system, and her actions are not really free. She becomes a queen despite herself, involuntarily. She has no power to influence outcomes. Even as she moves toward her goals, she senses that she’s being acted upon, that the story is happening to her, including her rescue by the White Knight. Language, meanwhile, has the power to make things happen.
For me, the experience of going back through the looking glass of pop culture was transformative. It remade my relationship with myself. It changed my understanding of my marriage, of marriage in general. It helped me renegotiate it, like Tracy and Dexter did, though a series of long, open-ended conversations, and try again, with clearer eyes. The heroine’s journey starts with the realization that she is trapped inside the illusion o
f a perfect world where she has no power. She employs coping strategies at first, or tries to deny reality, but eventually she is betrayed, or loses everything, and can no longer lie to herself. She wakes up. She gathers her courage. She finds the willingness to go it alone. She faces her own symbolic death. (The hero, conversely, chooses outer exploration over inner exploration, questions authority, and becomes his true self. Neither journey is gender-specific.) The heroine’s journey is circular. It moves forward in spirals and burrows inward, to understanding. It can be undertaken by anyone, male or female, who is ready to move past the illusion of a perfect world and a straight shot to selfhood. The path is treacherous. The territory is hostile. But the heroine is brave. She knows what she wants. She’s determined to get it. Isn’t that how all good stories start?
Acknowledgments
I thank my agent, the incomparable Sarah Burnes, for her friendship, encouragement, enthusiasm, and support. I’m grateful to have had not one but two of my brilliant, funny, insightful, and patient editors, Jenna Johnson and Pilar Garcia-Brown, the latter of whom shepherded the book to completion with such humor and spot-on instincts. Thanks so much to Rachael DeShano, Tammy Zambo, and the production team for putting up with last-minute changes. A million thanks to Kathy Daneman, Lori Glazer, Stephanie Kim, and everyone on the marketing and publicity team for their enthusiasm and great ideas. I’m also so grateful to Logan Garrison, Rebecca Gardner, and everyone at the Gernert Company for being unfailingly great at all times.
I could not have written this book without the overwhelming love, free therapy, wire transfers, plane tickets, hot meals, impromptu retreats, feedback, and emotional, domestic, tech, and all-around life support of my amazing family and friends. I’m especially grateful to my mom, Olga María Penny; my parents-in-law, Linda and Ken Wadlin; my siblings, Gonzalo Chocano and Magaly Chocano; my brother-in-law, Tirso Sigg; my friends, Darby Maloney, Janelle Brown, Dawn MacKeen, Erica Rothschild, Annabelle Gurwitch, and Christine Beebe; and my husband, Craig Wadlin, for their generosity, patience, and perseverance in keeping me alive.
I’d like to thank Meghan Daum, Heather Havrilesky, Tula Jeng, Adam Sternbergh, Rachel Abramowitz, Rachel Samuels, Lisa Hamilton-Daly, Kimberly Burns, Andy Young, Kathleen A. Laughlin, Billy Mernit, Martha Lauzen, Titia Vermeer, Dana Simmons, Jillian Lauren, Keshni Kashyap, Marian Belgray, Emily Ryan Lerner, Tracy McMillan, Gina Fattore, Strawberry Saroyan, Ramune Nagisetty, Anne-Marie O’Connor, Jade Chang, Stella Oh, Miranda Thompson, Danielle Parsons, Kristina Lear, Josh Zetumer, Tim Kirkman, and everyone at Suite 8 for their input, feedback, advice, support, and political inspiration.
Special thanks to Jill Soloway for magically appearing to douse the flame with lighter fluid just when it was down to a flicker and in imminent danger of being extinguished by a discreet, ladylike yawn. Thank you for the conflagration.
And to my amazing daughter, Kira, for being ever curious, always insisting on presenting her evidence, and never holding her tongue.
And to Hillary Clinton, for inspiring us both.
My maternal great-grandmother, Rosa María Montenegro de la Fuente, age six. Chiclayo, Peru, 1906.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Notes
Introduction
1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2011), 120.
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2. Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).
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3. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
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4. Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 21.
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5. “Notes on New Womanhood,” Professor Catherine Lavender, prepared for students in HST 386: Women in the City, 1998, https://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/history/files/lavender/386/newwoman.pdf.
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6. Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy.
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7. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly18, no. 2, part 1 (Summer 1966): 151–74.
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8. Renata Adler, A Year in the Dark: A Year in the Life of a Film Critic, 1968–1969 (New York: Berkeley, 1971).
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9. “Borat’s Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,” New Zealand Herald, October 9, 2007, http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/25788/Borats-babe-Isla-plans-sex-revolution.
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10. Ibid.
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1. Bunnies
1. “Hugh Hefner: ‘I Am in the Center of the World,’” interview by Oriana Fallaci, Look, January 10, 1967.
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2. Carlye Adler, “Hugh Hefner Playboy Enterprises: ‘In 1953 I Didn’t Fully Appreciate What I Had Created. It Was the First Successful Magazine for Young, Single Men,’” CNNMoney.com, September 1, 2003.
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3. Susan Braudy, “Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969,” Pictorial, March 18, 2016, posted on Jezebel, accessed January 29, 2017.
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4. Hefner, interview by Fallaci.
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5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006).
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6. Katha Pollitt, “Hers; The Smurfette Principle,” New York Times Magazine, April 7, 1991.
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2. Can This Marriage Be Saved?
1. Judy Klemesrud, “Feminists Recoil at Film Designed to Relate to Them,” New York Times, February 26, 1975, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9f04e2d71e3de034bc4e51dfb466838e669ede.
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2. Ibid.
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3. Jane Elliott, “Stepford U.S.A.: Second-Wave Feminism, Domestic Labor, and the Representation of National Time,”Cultural Critique70, no. 1 (2008): 32–62, doi:10.1353/cul.0.0022.
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4. Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1999), 84.
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5. Roger Ebert, review of The Stepford Wives, screenplay by William Goldman, directed by Bryan Forbes, RogerEbert.com, January 1, 1975, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-stepford-wives-1975.
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6. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).
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7. Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: “The Feminine Mystique” and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
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8. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.
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9. Ibid.
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10. Kathleen A. Laughlin, Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Eileen Boris, Premilla Nadasen, Stephanie Gilmore, and Leandra Zarnow, “Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor,” Feminist Formations 22, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 76–135.
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11. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
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12. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), x.
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13. Elliott, “Stepford U.S.A.”
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14. Ibid.
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15. Coontz, A Strange Stirring.
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16. Ibid., xxii.
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17. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
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18. Wednesday Martin, “Poor Little Rich Women,” New York Times, May 16, 2015.
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19. Rebecca Onion, “Lock Up Your Wives!,” Aeon, September 8, 2014, https://aeon.co/essays/the-warped-world-
of-marriage-advice-before-feminism.
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20. Ibid.
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21. Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 189–90.
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22. Onion, “Lock Up Your Wives!”
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23. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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3. The Bronze Statue of the Virgin Slut Ice Queen Bitch Goddess
1. Ana Salzberg, Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 35–53.
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2. Oliver O. Jensen, “The Hepburns,” Life, January 22, 1940, 48.
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4. What a Feeling
1. Mick LaSalle, “Replay: ‘Flashdance,’” SFGate (blog), March 22, 2014, http://blog.sfgate.com/mlasalle/2014/03/22/replay-flashdance.
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2. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
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3. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).