Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  I recently talked to a young woman who I’ll call by her middle name, Frances—a preternaturally bright-eyed and indomitable character, the sort of person you’d expect to see riding a bicycle with tulips in the basket down a sunny street. Frances had started school at UVA in the fall of 2017, and a month into her first semester, she told me, she was sexually assaulted in her dorm room. The next morning, she asked a friend to take photos of the bruises on her neck, where her assailant had choked her. She reported the assault that day, and her assailant was suspended indefinitely within a week. “I felt so unilaterally supported by the student body,” she told me—as well as by the police department, which charged her assailant with sexual battery and strangulation and, later, perjury. (On the positivity of her police interactions, she acknowledged, matter-of-factly, “I’m also a white girl.”) In the months that followed her assault, she tried to keep busy with the bureaucracy of the reporting process; she got a therapist, whom she talked to about her recurring dreams about her assailant. In one of these dreams, she’d be alone in a room with him, unable to unlock her phone to call for help.

  Frances and I spent a long time talking about the way UVA sells itself. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and visited UVA for the first time in the fall of her junior year of high school. “I was in love immediately, from that first moment, stepping onto the Lawn at night,” she said. “It was perfect.” After that visit, she put photos of the Rotunda and Charlottesville on her computer and phone screens. “I wanted all of it, the carols on the Lawn by candlelight, this bastion of the ‘illimitable freedom of the human mind,’ ” she said, quoting Jefferson. She was thirteen when the Rolling Stone story came out, and she didn’t read it. She still hasn’t. She knew it was discredited. And maybe, she thought, UVA could still be all the things that it said it was.

  After months of investigation, UVA found Frances’s assailant not guilty. He was free to return to campus. (She wrote to me in the fall of her second year—he had, in fact, returned.) The school issued a 127-page report that effectively concludes that she is unreliable. “They painted me as some drunken party girl who was out to flirt, and things got a little out of control, and I was embarrassed and couldn’t handle the consequences,” she told me. I read the entire report, and by the end felt physically debilitated. In a written statement, her assailant agreed that there was a sexual encounter, and that Frances had physically struggled against him in her attempt to end the encounter. He asserted that he had stopped at an appropriate time. The report noted that—understandably enough—there were significant incongruities between Frances’s behavior toward her assailant before the incident and her statements after the incident occurred. Following from this, and from the school’s obligation to presume non-responsibility, the encounter was essentially deemed acceptable: the unspoken conclusion was that Frances was either lying, or deceiving herself, or rightfully to blame. It filled me with anesthetizing despair to remember that her experience was itself the product of enormous change. Frances had been taken seriously by her friends and by the police department. UVA had suspended her assailant and conducted a thorough and procedurally correct inquiry. But still, she had been assaulted after a party her first semester. Still, the school had decided it wouldn’t be fair to hold her assailant responsible. The things that defined her selfhood—her verve, her confidence, her eagerness—had been devastated just as they were reaching a peak. Everyone was technically doing what they were supposed to, and yet it felt like a glass structure was being constructed around some unfathomable rot.

  The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively manufactures. No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this. The world that we believe in, that we’re attempting to make real and tangible, is still not the world that exists.

  I’ve begun to think that there is no room for writing about sexual assault that relies on any sense of anomaly. The truth about rape is that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story.

  * * *

  —

  While writing this, I found Jackie’s long-dormant wedding registry on the internet. As I snooped through it, I pictured the house where she lives under a new last name—its cheerful kitchen, with red enamel apples on the paper-towel holder; the sign in the entryway that says, “Gratitude Turns What We Have into Enough.” I felt an awful contempt flooding through me. Earlier that day, I’d read her entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, the troll Wikipedia: “Does this mean lying whore Jackie…owes us a free gangbang now?” it asked. “How about Sabrina Rubin Erdely? SHE deserves a good chokefucking, no?” I had recoiled, partly because of the language and partly out of a shocking sense of recognition: I resent the two of them, too. There’s a part of me that feels as if Jackie and Erdely inadvertently sentenced me to a life of writing about sexual violence—as if I learned to report on a subject so personal that it imprinted on me, as if I will always feel some irrational compulsion to try to undo or redeem two strangers’ mistakes.

  But I know how easily anger is displaced on this particular topic. I know that what I really resent is sexual violence itself. I resent the boys who never thought for a second that they were doing anything wrong. I resent the men they’ve become, the power they’ve amassed through subordination, the self-interrogation they ostentatiously hold at bay. I hate the dirty river I’m standing in, not the journalist and the college student who capsized in it. I understand that we have all shared in the same project, in some way. Schambelan writes, in her n+1 essay:

  This is the story I’ve come up with, about the story Jackie told: she did it out of rage. She had no idea she was enraged, but she was. Something had happened, and she wanted to tell other people, so that they would know what happened and how she felt. But when she tried to tell it—maybe to somebody else, maybe to herself—the story had no power. It didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in the living. It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a million other women—but that wasn’t what it felt like to her.

  At the close of her piece, Schambelan guesses at what Jackie might have been trying to say. It “can’t be said reasonably,” she writes. “It must be said melodramatically. Something like: Look at this. Don’t you fucking dare not look….You’re going to know what we’ve decided is worth sacrificing, what price we’ve decided we’re willing to pay to maintain this league of men, and this time, you’re going to remember.”

  When I think about Jackie now, I think about the year that I came within striking distance of this fevered derangement—never at UVA, only after I graduated, when I moved to Kyrgyzstan, an obscure, beautiful, illogical post-Soviet republic, to serve in the Peace Corps. A week after our arrival in March, the government was overthrown in a conflict that killed eighty-eight people and injured almost five hundred. Later that summer, there was a rash of genocidal violence against the country’s Uzbek population: two thousand people were killed, and one hundred thousand people were displaced. I was evacuated twice to the now-closed American military base near the Kyrgyz capital, which staged air force missions to Afghanistan, and a third time to the border of Kazakhstan. Between these periods of upheaval, I lived in a mile-lo
ng village tucked deep in the snowy mountains, taught English to high school students, and completely lost my mind.

  Kyrgyzstan, by some official measures, was far ahead of the United States in terms of gender equality. The interim president after the 2010 revolution was a woman. Female politicians were introducing waves of progressive legislation in parliament. The country’s constitution, unlike ours, ensured equal rights. But in the texture of everyday living, the country was run on what seemed like astonishingly constrictive male terms. In public, I made sure my knees and shoulders were covered. Soon after I met my preteen host sister, she earnestly warned me to watch out for men who would grab me on the bus. There’s an old Kyrgyz tradition of “bride kidnapping,” in which men snatch up women in public and then hold them hostage until they agree to get married. Today this tradition is mostly staged, as a form of elopement, but it hasn’t disappeared. Domestic violence was ubiquitous. Women volunteers were harassed constantly—Asian women in particular, because we bore some plausible resemblance to the locals. I got used to cab drivers taking long detours and engaging me in extraordinarily invasive conversations before they finally relented and took me home. When Andrew came to visit, a local man asked him—jokingly, but repeatedly—if he had a gun, and if he would be willing to fight to keep his wife.

  A claustrophobia began to set in on the dusty streets, on long bus rides, under the wide, extraterrestrial sky. Tight security restrictions had been imposed on us because of the ambient conflict, but of course I broke them, because I was lonely, and I wanted to hang out and keep busy, and I felt I had the right to do what I wanted to do. As that was not strictly the case, I spent several months “grounded” to my village as punishment, where I started to feel even more skittish—looking over my shoulder when I took walks in the mountains, never sure if the men I saw were following me or if I was just going insane. One day, my host father, drunk and leaning in, I thought, for a cheek kiss, grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth. I sprinted away and called a friend, then called a Peace Corps administrator, asking if I could go stay in the capital city for a little while. He suggested that, given my reputation in the office, I was just looking for an excuse to go party with my friends. And in fact, I was hoping to go party with my friends, because I wanted to distract myself from the fact that my host father had kissed me. The entire incident confused me deeply. Worse things had happened to me in college, and a kiss is whatever, and I didn’t understand why this one suddenly felt like a big deal. I had always found it easy, even automatic, to dismiss sexual harassment as I had experienced it. I had always believed that unwanted sexual aggression was a sign of humiliating weakness in the aggressors; I’d always thought myself to be self-evidently better than anyone who would try to coerce or overpower me. But here, I was supposed to be humble. I wasn’t better than anyone. I was supposed to—I wanted to—adhere to other people’s norms.

  Later on, after I left Kyrgyzstan, a year early, it became clear to me that I had been depressed. I was twenty-one, and I was trying my hardest to be permeable, to be alive to other people’s suffering, but I didn’t know how to stop being permeable when it was pointless, when it was ultimately narcissistic, when it did no good. I felt, monstrously, that there was no boundary between my situation and the larger situation, between my tiny injustices and the injustices everyone faced. I was so naïve, and violence seemed to be everywhere: a bus thundering through my village at night hit a person and kept driving; a drunk man threw a child against a wall. It was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive—that women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that men were suffering because they were expected to perform this dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago, that there was very little I could do.

  This resulted in a state of mind that felt delusional and paranoid and underwater, so much so that I’m still not sure what exactly happened, whether I was overestimating or underestimating the danger I was in in any given situation, whether I was imagining the boys at the market who grabbed me as I walked past them on a side road, or the extra twenty minutes I spent in the cab begging the driver to take me home—or if, in the fifteen seconds that elapsed between my host father kissing me and me calling my friend, I had somehow simply imagined, or, worse, somehow instigated, the whole encounter. I was furious when my administrator blew me off, and I buried my anger because I understood that I was being entitled: I could terminate my service anytime I wanted to; I had it so easy compared to every local woman I knew. But even the suggestion that I was making something out of nothing made me wonder if I was, in fact, making something out of nothing. I started wanting things to happen to me, as if to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy, wasn’t hallucinating. Spiky with resentment, I glared at men who looked at me too closely, daring them to give me another event to write down in my little secret file of incidents, daring them to make visible the dawning sense I had of women living in a continual state of violation, daring them to help me realize that I wasn’t making any of this up. I wish I had known—then, in Peace Corps, or in college—that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.

  The Cult of the Difficult Woman

  Over the past decade, there’s been a sea change that feels both epochal and underrecognized: it is now completely normal for women to understand their lives, and the lives of other women, on feminist terms. Where it was once standard to call any unmanageable woman crazy or abrasive, “crazy” and “abrasive” now scan as sexist dog whistles. Where media outlets used to scrutinize women’s appearances, they still do—but in a feminist way. Slut-shaming went from a popular practice in the early 2000s to a what-not-to-do buzzword in the late 2000s to a hard cultural taboo by 2018. The ride from Britney Spears getting upskirted on tabloid covers to Stormy Daniels as likable political hero has been so bumpy, so dizzying, that it can be easy to miss the profundity of this shift.

  The reframing of female difficulty as an asset rather than a liability is the result of decades and decades of feminist thought coming to bear—suddenly, floridly, and very persuasively—in the open ideological space of the internet. It’s been solidified by a sort of narrative engineering conducted both retrospectively and in real time: the rewriting of celebrity lives as feminist texts. Feminist celebrity discourse operates the way most cultural criticism does in the social media era, along lines of “ideological pattern-recognition,” as Hua Hsu put it in The New Yorker. Writers take a celebrity’s life and her public narrative, shine the black light on it, and point to the sexism as it starts to glow.

  Celebrities have been the primary teaching tools through which online feminism has identified and resisted the warping force of patriarchal judgment. Britney Spears, initially glossed as a vapid, oversexed ingénue-turned-psycho, now seems perfectly sympathetic: the public required her to be seductive, innocent, flawless, and bankable, and she crumbled under the impossibility of these competing demands. In life, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston were often depicted as strung-out monsters; in death, they are understood to have been geniuses all along. Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a dumb slut, she was an ordinary twentysomething caught in an exploitative affair with the most powerful boss in America. Hillary Clinton wasn’t a shrill charisma vacuum incapable of winning the trust of ordinary people, but rather an overqualified public servant whose ambitions were thwarted by her opponents’ bigotry and rage.

  Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political import. It’s also a personal matter, because when we reclaim the stories that surround female celebrities, stories surrounding ordinary women are reclaimed, too. Within the past few years, feminist coverage—fair coverage, in other words—ha
s increasingly become standard across the media. The Harvey Weinstein story, and everything that followed, was possible in no small part because women were finally able to count upon a baseline of feminist narrative interpretation. Women knew their stories of victimization would be understood—not by everyone, but by many people—on their terms. Annabella Sciorra could acknowledge that rape had led to her effective banishment from the industry; Asia Argento could acknowledge that she dated Weinstein after he raped her. Both women could trust that these facts would not, in this new climate, render them suspicious or pathetic. (The coverage of the awful coda to Argento’s story—the allegation that she had later sexually assaulted a much younger co-star—was also relatively complex and measured, with outlets condemning her behavior and acknowledging that abuse begets abuse.)

  In turn, when presented with stories about famous women as subjects, not objects, massive numbers of ordinary women recognized themselves in what they saw. Women were able to articulate facts that often previously went unspoken: that entering a relationship with someone doesn’t preclude being victimized by them, but sometimes follows it, and that being sexually harassed or assaulted can ruin your career. Women could see, through Hillary Clinton, how much this country despises a woman who wants power; through Monica Lewinsky, sold out by both Clintons, how easily we become casualties of other people’s ambition; through the coverage of Britney Spears’s breakdown, how female suffering is turned into a joke. Any woman whose story has been altered and twisted by the force of male power—so, any woman—can be framed as a complicated hero, entombed by patriarchy and then raised by feminists from the dead.