Many of their flaws are fatal, or at least self-destructive, and they seem designed to invite censure. Time and again, we, the audience, are cast in the role of morally superior observers to these nut jobs. At times we might relate to a flash of anger, a fit of tears, a sudden urge to seduce a stranger in a bar; but we’re constantly being warned that these behaviors aren’t normal or admirable. They render these women out of step with the sane world.
Even as women have taken the lead on countless television shows over the past decade, they don’t share the respect and dignity afforded their male counterparts. When Rebecca took an overdose on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, or Nancy Botwin of Weeds endangered her kids by marrying a Mexican drug boss, or Carrie on Homeland chugged a tumbler of white wine then left the house to search for a one-night stand, we were meant to shake our heads at their bad choices. Their personality flaws or mental health issues were something they needed to be cured of or freed from—unlike, say, Monk, whose psychological tics were always portrayed as the adorable kernel of his genius.
Why should instability in men and women be treated so differently? “If you don’t pull it together, no one will ever love you,” a talking Barbie doll told Mindy during a fantasy on The Mindy Project, reminding us exactly what was always on the line for her. Don’t act crazy, Mindy. Men don’t like crazy.
“Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience,” Adrienne Rich wrote. Women, with their tendency to “ask uncomfortable questions and make uncomfortable connections,” as Rich puts it, are pathologized for the very traits that make them so formidable. Or, as Emily Dickinson wrote:
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—
* * *
—
“All smart women are crazy,” I once told an ex-boyfriend in a heated moment, in an attempt to depict his future options as split down the middle between easygoing dimwits and sharp women who were basically just me with different hairstyles. By “crazy,” I only meant “opinionated” and “moody” and “not always as pliant as one might hope.” I was translating my personality into language he might understand—he who used “psycho-chick” as a stand-in for “noncompliant female” and whose idea of helpful counsel was “You’re too smart for your own good,” “my own good” presumably being a semi-vegetative state which precluded uncomfortable discussions about our relationship.
Over the years, “crazy” became my own reductive shorthand for every complicated, strong-willed woman I met. “Crazy” summed up the good and the bad in me and in all of my friends. Where I might have recognized that we were no crazier than anyone else in the world, instead I simply drew a larger and larger circle of crazy around us, lumping together anyone unafraid of confrontation, anyone who openly admitted her weaknesses, anyone who pursued agendas that might be out of step with the dominant cultural noise of the moment. “Crazy” became code for “interesting” and “courageous” and “worth knowing.” I was trying to have a sense of humor about myself and those around me, trying to make room for stubbornness and vulnerability and uncomfortable questions.
But I realize now, after watching these “crazy” characters parade across my TV screen, that there’s self-hatred in this act of self-subterfuge. “Our future depends on the sanity of each of us,” Rich writes, “and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.” Maybe this era of “crazy” women on TV was an unfortunate way station on the road from placid compliance to something more complex—something more like real life. Many so-called crazy women are smart women, that’s all. They’re not too smart for their own good, or for ours.
Ultimately, the challenges we face today are not unlike those Jackson faced as she began to speak publicly, embracing a wider community of writers in the years before her early death: to trust our senses, trust our instincts, trust that inside each of us is a “clean pure being made of radiant colors.” Then we have to search the faces of the mob for signs of the same.
bravado
In the middle of the night, my husband’s snores sometimes sound like a cell phone vibrating. Other times, they sound like waves crashing on a gravelly shore, or a minor chord being played a little tentatively on a church organ, one low note mixed with two wheezier, higher notes. Last night, they sounded like the carriage return on a typewriter, the heavy, industrial kind that’s electric, but still gives a kick when the carriage swings to the left side of the machine with a scratchy clatter.
I loved to listen to that sound when I visited my mother’s office as a kid. Listening to her type 120 words a minute on an IBM Selectric felt like an odd, percussive form of meditation. I would lean way back in the swivel chair in her office and marvel at that sound of no-nonsense efficiency and capability in action. She’d been a housewife since she married my dad, who was a professor. But after fifteen not-so-happy years together, she’d finally divorced him. Now she had three kids to feed, with no alimony and very little child support. Good thing she aced her typing class in high school.
Occasionally my mom would be interrupted by her boss, an older professor who wore tweedy English caps and argyle sweaters and pants that might best be described as jodhpurs. He would wander in with an unfocused look on his face and he’d ask where she’d put some papers he needed to send off. She’d stop and give him a strained smile that told me she’d taken care of these things days ago. The professor had giant shelves full of bound journal volumes in his office. Every few months, my mother would send away the flimsy-looking journals to the binder, and they’d return covered in leather, with gold lettering on the side. “Why does he do that?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she answered.
The professor didn’t know how to type. He appeared not to know his own schedule, or even what day of the week it was. He could place a call, but sometimes he got confused if he had to put someone on hold and then take them off again. He would often stand in the doorway between his office and hers, his eyes watering slightly, his back a little stooped, and he’d hesitate to admit what bit of information he was struggling to retrieve. Even though he had all of the necessary levels of arrogance and condescension to have become a world-renowned neurobiologist with an endowed position, he didn’t seem very capable of handling the mundane challenges of his life.
My mother would fight against this distracting presence for as long as she could stand, and then the suspense would be too great, and she’d interrupt her virtuoso typing solo, mid-measure.
A pause, maybe four quarter notes of silence. “Well?” she’d say, a half note of whispery restraint, with an exasperated edge to it. My mother had been a straight-A math major in college. She was first chair clarinet in her high school band. She had all of the arrogance and condescension to have become a world-renowned neurobiologist, too. But she was a secretary instead, so she had a lot of shit to do.
* * *
—
Being capable isn’t celebrated or embraced or rewarded handsomely or, often, even noticed these days. We prefer to celebrate the valiant, charismatic leader who speaks confidently of his vision of what should come next. We don’t always care who is doing the concrete work to which his grand gestures allude. We don’t demand that he demonstrate a clear understanding of the practical tasks and hurdles that lie in the path he’s laid out. “Just make it happen” is what he tells anyone who asks, and that sounds bold and brave to us. Somehow, daring to insist that someone else do the work is admirable and just. Because he seems entitled to his visionary position, we are inclined to believe that he deserves it.
It’s
not surprising, I guess, that we coo and fawn over little boys who behave audaciously, while little girls armed with such arrogance often strike us as troublesome. And if a girl stubbornly holds fast to her strong sense of herself, the world is sure to chip away at it, day after day. “You sure think the world of yourself, young lady. Who do you think you are?”
For black girls and white girls and black boys and Asian girls and gay boys and anyone else not viewed as a so-called natural leader, confidence and swagger become leavened by self-doubt. We feel conflicted about speaking up or placing ourselves in the spotlight. When we talk, our statements can come out sounding slightly defensive, as if we’re steeling ourselves against a blow: “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to say it anyway.”
But there’s something else at work here, beyond direct rewards and punishments. There is also the pride of the capable, handed down as a kind of anticipatory salve for the marginalization to come. This is what my mom inculcated in me without necessarily knowing it. She had a different kind of arrogance than her boss did. Her arrogance said: I’m the one who handles everything here, and you, boss, are our bloviating, flaccid cover story. I am the journal article. You are the gold lettering on the side. I am the motor. You are the unreliable steering wheel. I am the gears of this machine. You are the pretty sparks that distract from the true industry.
I inherited this flavor of self-regard from her: the superior attitude of the supposedly inferior. Playing this role with pride, though, means sustaining contempt for the sounds that the bloviating, flaccid figurehead might make along the way to the conference, the gala, the speaking engagement. So I have spent most of my life rolling my eyes at the sound of bravado.
Bravado, if it made a noise, might sound like a major chord being played with great force on a chapel organ. That’s the sound I think of when my husband is working on a talk “for the Chinese,” or Skyping with one of his graduate students about how their work needs more work. My husband is not a blowhard, but he knows how to sound like one. He’s not allergic to that sound. It’s the sound of a throat being cleared for a little too long. It’s the sound that a certain kind of facial expression makes, an expression that forms when encountering someone lower on the academic totem pole, speaking imprecisely. It’s a kind of “Ehrrrm” that accompanies one side of his mouth dipping down slightly, in a look that says “Not quite,” or “Not really.” It’s the sound jodhpurs would make, if they made a sound.
Like my mother, I did have some bravado on board, but I never felt completely comfortable deploying it in an official setting. It seemed a little embarrassing, to take yourself seriously in public the way men did. Who would preen and flaunt their talents like that? As a woman, you could only use your swagger in playful, nonserious contexts, or in private. So my bravado mostly gave me a solid quarters game in college, or it made me prone to break into terrible dance moves when no one was watching. Sometimes my bravado attracted men, but only those sorts of men who were impressed by brash women. My bravado always felt more comfortable with a drink in its hand. My bravado always felt more at home on the printed page than it did live and in person.
My bravado became jittery and indifferent in an office environment. I could do concrete, measurable work, but I didn’t want to represent myself in any official way. I was always checking in with my bosses, to make sure that they saw me as capable. I wanted them to measure the amount of concrete work I did. I wanted them to notice that my work was better than other people’s work. I wanted them to see how much effort I put in.
Generally speaking, bosses are not fired up to do a careful accounting of their underlings’ work. If they were, they wouldn’t be bosses in the first place. Most of the time, what bosses respond to is what bosses themselves value the most: bravado. But I never felt right clearing my throat, or telling anyone that their work needed more work. I didn’t like to pretend—that I knew more than I actually did, or that I was on board with something that seemed ill-considered. Being a professional seemed to require a lot of pretending. I only wanted to barter in the concrete.
This attitude might’ve led me down a path to administrative work. But even with administrative jobs, few bosses rewarded the number of concrete tasks you completed each day. Writing, on the other hand, couldn’t be more concrete. You write something and turn it in. You make the widgets. Someone pays you for them. Everyone knows exactly how productive you are.
At my first real job as a staff writer, I disdained all of the vague tasks that were impossible to measure: Meetings went on too long, and I felt anxious if I didn’t offer any insights that were treated as valuable. I didn’t want to simply show my face in the office and punch my time card. I wanted to produce measurable, unimpeachable widgets. So I asked to work remotely, from another city. That way, I could manage my own time. I could be more productive than ever, without a single minute of pointless hot air emanating from me or anyone else.
I’ve worked from home ever since: twenty years and counting. My husband flies all over the world to give talks and go to academic conferences. I have all of the arrogance and condescension to have become a world-renowned expert, too. But I am a freelance writer instead, so I have a lot of shit to do.
* * *
—
Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you’re popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you’re unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves.
“Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?” my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things—all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.
* * *
—
My daughter once asked me, “Who is more famous, you or Daddy?” “Neither of us is famous,” I replied. I thought about the four copies of my memoir, the one that now costs $6.00 on Amazon, sitting on the bookshelf gathering dust in our bedroom. I thought about my husband’s last weeklong trip away from home, the way the kids kept asking me why I never fly anywhere for work like he does. I remembered how my younger daughter used to think I worked at the Coffee Bean, because I always left the house saying I was going to the Coffee Bean “to work.” I wished that my daughters had some sense of how hard I work (or at least try to work) every single day. I set the bar high for myself. My work always needs more work. Work that needs more work sounds like one high, thin note that stretches on and on forever.
Thinking about this made me a little peeved at all those swaggering heroes with their trips and their bravado and their fucking jodhpurs. Maybe I limited myself by assuming that men are the ones who are suited to flying around and bloviating, while women are the ones who silently work behind the scenes, hidden from view. Why have I always kept my bravado on the written page or in a glass rattling with ice cubes? Maybe if I could stand in the doorway between my office and the office of a very fast typist who was paid to contribute to my successes, I might be more productive, more imaginative, more willing to reach beyond the safe and familiar, in my work and in my life. I would proceed with direction and purpose, guided
by the certainty that this world is mine as much as anyone else’s.
My mood shifted. Imagine a dramatic key change, a half step up the scale. Imagine the sound of the shift bar engaging, that sound a typewriter makes when the whole carriage moves up a quarter of an inch and stays there, IN ALL CAPS.
“SURE, DADDY HAS A GREAT JOB,” I explained, trying to take the all-caps out of my voice. “HE IS, UM…very important in his field. But there are only about three hundred academics around the country who do what he does.” I pictured them all, reading and studying each other’s work, then flying to conferences to reassure each other of their collective importance. “But when my column comes out, at least fifty thousand people read it. Fifty thousand is a lot more than three hundred.”
“That’s so many!” my daughter says. “That’s like everyone in the world.”
“Not really. There are seven billion people in the world. That’s a hundred thousand times more than the number of people who read my column.”
“Oh. So you’re just a little bit famous.”
“The word ‘famous’ doesn’t really apply,” I said.
Silence. Suspense building.
“But I am more famous than Daddy. Most people would agree with me about that.”
The sound of pointless competitiveness, an awkward grab for glory, is a little bit like a major chord being played sloppily but with great force on a church organ, by a small, angry child.
* * *
—
As attention and popularity start to feel more important than ever but also, somehow, cheaper and emptier than ever, maybe it’s time for more of us to savor the luxury of remaining mysterious, of staying hidden. Sometimes when I get offered an important-seeming job or speaking gig, I feel like the true gift is not the opportunity itself but the freedom to say no. In a world filthy with flashers, I have trouble grasping the concrete gains of increased exposure.
What If This Were Enough? Page 14