Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  But when the case for a woman’s worth is built partly on the unfairness of what’s leveled at her, things get slippery, especially as the internet expands the range and reach of hate and unfair scrutiny into infinity—a fact that holds even as feminist ideas become mainstream. Every woman faces backlash and criticism. Extraordinary women face a lot of it. And that criticism always exists in the context of sexism, just like everything else in a woman’s life. These three facts have collapsed into one another, creating the idea that harsh criticism of a woman is itself always sexist, and furthermore, more subtly, that receiving sexist criticism is in itself an indication of a woman’s worth.

  When the tools of pop-feminist celebrity discourse are applied to political figures like Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hope Hicks, and Melania Trump—as they are, increasingly—the limits of this type of analysis start to show. I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women from criticism categorically; if it’s become possible to praise a woman specifically because she is criticized—for that featureless fact alone.

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  The underlying situation is simple. We are all defined by our historical terms and conditions, and these terms and conditions have mostly been written by and for men. Any woman whose name has survived history has done so against a backdrop of male power. Until very recently, we were always introduced to women through a male perspective. There is always a way to recast a woman’s life on women’s terms.

  You could do this—and people have done this—with the entire Bible, starting with Eve, whom we might see not as a craven sinner but as a radical knowledge-seeker. Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt for daring to look back at burning Sodom and Gomorrah, could exemplify not disobedience but rather the disproportionate punishment of women. Lot, after all, was the one who offered up his two virgin daughters to be raped by a mob of strangers, and later impregnated both of them while living in a cave. My Sunday school teachers spoke kindly of Lot, as a man who had to make difficult choices; in art, he’s portrayed as an Everyman, overcome by the temptations of young female flesh. In contrast, all his wife did was crane her neck around, and she was smited forever, unglamorously. And the temptresses, of course, beg for a retelling: Delilah, portrayed as a lying prostitute who delivered her lover to the Philistines, seems today like just another woman seeking pleasure and survival in a compromised world. From the biblical perspective, these women are cautionary tales. From the feminist one, they demonstrate the limits of a moral standard that requires women to be subservient. Either way, their allure is baked right in. “Of course the bitch persona appeals to us. It is the illusion of liberation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel writes in her 1998 book Bitch, a precursor to the wave of feminist cultural criticism that has now become standard. Delilah, writes Wurtzel, “was a sign of life. I lived in a world of exhausted, taxed single mothers at the mercy of men who overworked and underpaid them….I had never in my life encountered a woman who’d brought a man down. Until Delilah.”

  Delilah is a useful example, as the power she seized was inextricable from the expectation that she would be powerless. Samson was a colossus: as a teenager, he ripped a lion apart limb from limb. He killed thirty Philistines and gave their clothing to his groomsmen. He killed a thousand men using just a donkey’s jawbone. And so Delilah seemed harmless to Samson, even as she badgered him for the truth about where his strength came from, and playfully tied him up at night with rope. Samson told her the truth—that his strength was in his hair, which had never been cut—and then fell asleep in her lap. Delilah, following instructions from the Philistines, grabbed her knife.

  It’s after this that Samson ascends to his true greatness. The Philistines capture him, gouge out his eyes, and chain him to a millstone, making him grind corn like a mule. Eventually, they drag him to a ritual sacrifice, and the weakened Samson prays to God, who gives him a last burst of divinity. He breaks the pillars at the temple, killing thousands of his captors and taking his own life. In this, he triumphs over evil, defying the cruelty of the Philistines and their dirty seductress, Delilah, whom Milton describes as “thorn intestine” in the poem Samson Agonistes. “Foul effeminacy held me yoked / Her bond-slave,” Milton’s Samson cries. The admission of hatred is an acknowledgment of her power. Wurtzel writes: “Delilah, to me, was clearly the star.”

  By nature, difficult women cause trouble, and that trouble can almost always be reinterpreted as good. Women claiming the power and agency that historically belonged to men is both the story of female evil and the story of female liberation. To work for the latter, you have to be willing to invoke the former: liberation is often mistaken for evil as it occurs. In 1905, Christabel Pankhurst kicked off the militant phase of the English suffrage movement when she spat at a police officer at a political meeting, knowing that this would lead to her arrest. From then on, the Women’s Social and Political Union got themselves dragged out of all-male rooms, imprisoned, force-fed. They smashed windows and set buildings on fire. The suffragettes were written about as if they were wild animals, which swiftly highlighted the injustice of their position. In 1906, the Daily Mirror wrote in sympathy: “By what means, but by screaming, knocking, and rioting, did men themselves ever gain what they were pleased to call their rights?”

  Condemnation historically accompanies most female actions that fall outside the lines of strict obedience. (Even the Virgin Mary, the most thoroughly venerated woman in history, faced it: according to the book of Matthew, Joseph found out about the pregnancy and asked for a divorce.) But praise comes to disobedient women, too. In 1429, seventeen-year-old Joan of Arc, high on spiritual visions, persuaded the dauphin Charles to place her at the head of the French army; she went into battle and helped clinch the throne in the Hundred Years’ War. In 1430, she was imprisoned, and in 1431, she was tried for heresy and cross-dressing, and burned at the stake. But Joan was also simultaneously celebrated. During her imprisonment, the theorist and poet Christine de Pizan—who authored The Book of the City of Ladies, a utopian fantasy about an imaginary city in which women were respected—wrote that Joan was an “honor for the feminine.” The man who executed her reported that he “greatly feared to be damned.”

  In 1451, twenty years after her death, Joan of Arc was retried posthumously, and deemed a virtuous martyr. The two stories—her disobedience, her virtue—continued to intertwine. “The people who came after her in the five centuries [following] her death tried to make everything of her,” writes Stephen Richey in his 2003 book Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint. “Demonic fanatic, spiritual mystic, naïve and tragically ill-used tool of the powerful, creator and icon of modern popular nationalism, adored heroine, saint.” Joan was loved and hated for the same actions, same traits. When she was canonized, in 1920, she joined a society of women—St. Lucy, St. Cecilia, St. Agatha—who were martyred because of their purity, the same way we now canonize pop-culture saints who were martyred over vice.

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  Rewriting a woman’s story inevitably means engaging with the male rules that previously defined it. To argue against an ideology, you have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.

  In 2016, the writer Sady Doyle published a book called Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why. It analyzed the lives and public narratives of famously troubled women: Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, Whitney Houston, Paris Hilton, as well as figures further back in history—Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Wollstonecraft, even Harrie
t Jacobs. The book was a “well-rounded, thoughtful analysis,” according to Kirkus, and a “fiercely brilliant, must-read exegesis,” according to Elle. Its subtitle indicated an underlying uncertainty, one that elucidates a central ambivalence in feminist discourse. Who is the “we” that loves to hate, mock, and fear these women? Is it Doyle’s audience? Or are feminist writers and readers duty bound to take personal ownership of the full extent of the hate, fear, and mockery that exists in other people’s brains?

  Doyle describes her book as an “attempt to reclaim the trainwreck, not only as the voice for every part of womanhood we’d prefer to keep quiet, but also as a girl who routinely colors outside the lines of her sexist society.” The “we” in that sentence almost necessarily excludes both Doyle and her reader, and it becomes, throughout the book, an impossible amalgamation of the misogynist and the feminist—both of whom are interested, for opposite reasons, in plumbing the depths of female degradation and pain. In a chapter about Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, and Marilyn Monroe, Doyle writes, “By dying, a trainwreck finally gives us the one statement we wanted to hear from her: that women like her really can’t make it, and shouldn’t be encouraged to try.” At the end of a chapter about sex—which takes on “good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband,” who are all “tied to the tracks and gleefully run over”—Doyle writes, “We keep women’s bodies controlled, and women themselves in fear, with the public immolation of any sexual person who is or seems feminine.” Do we really? Admittedly, it’s always tricky to generalize in the collective first person, but this use case is indicative: in our attempts to acknowledge the persistence of structural inequality, we sometimes end up unable to see the present popular culture for what it is.

  Trainwreck’s project is, explicitly, to identify mistreatment of famous women in the past and thus prevent it in the future; it hopes to obviate the harm done to ordinary women in a culture that loves to watch female celebrities melt down. Doyle wreaths this worthy cause in arch, fatalistic hyperbole, exemplifying a tone that was, for years, a mainstay of online feminist discourse. In a chapter about Fatal Attraction, she writes, “A woman who wants you to love her is dangerously close to becoming a woman who demands the world’s attention.” The trainwreck is “crazy because we’re all crazy—because, in a sexist culture, being female is an illness for which there is no cure.” Society makes Miley Cyrus into “a stripper, the devil, and the walking embodiment of predatory lust.” When we get on the internet, the “#1 trending topic is still a debate about whether Rihanna is a Bad Role Model for Women,” and “the verdict for Rihanna is never favorable.” Valerie Solanas is remembered as a “bogeyman” of the “dirty, angry, fucked-up, thrown-away women of the world,” while violent Norman Mailer is remembered as a genius. (I would guess that plenty of women in my millennial demographic semi-ironically venerate Solanas, and know Mailer mainly as the misogynist who stabbed his wife.) Doyle is motivated, she writes, by “a life spent watching the most beautiful, lucky, wealthy, successful women in the world reduced to deformed idiot hags in the media, and battered back into silence and obscurity through the sheer force of public disdain.”

  There is an argument to be made that this is what you have to do to counteract a force as old as patriarchy—that, in order to eradicate it, you have to fully reckon with its power, to verbalize and confront its worst insults and effects. But the result often verges on deliberate cynicism. “The leap from Paris Hilton to Mary Wollstonecraft may seem like a long one,” Doyle writes. “But in practice, it’s hardly even a bunny hop.” She’s referring to the fact that Wollstonecraft’s sex life overshadowed, for some time, her canonical work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and that William Godwin published Wollstonecraft’s salacious letters after her death. It’s possible to draw a bright line between this and Rick Salomon selling a sex tape without Hilton’s permission. But what changed between 1797 and 2004 shouldn’t be underestimated or undercomplicated—nor should what changed between 2004 and 2016. I’d venture that our reality is not actually one in which the most beautiful, lucky, successful women in the world are being turned into “deformed idiot hags.” Women are the drivers and rulers of the celebrity industry; they are rich; they have rights, if not as many as they ought to. The fact that women receive huge amounts of unfair criticism does not negate these facts but informs them, and in very complicated ways. Female celebrities are now venerated for their difficulty—their flaws, their complications, their humanity—with the idea that this will allow us, the ordinary women, to be flawed, and human, and possibly venerated, too.

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  I’ve been thinking about this argument since 2016—and specifically, since the week when, within a couple of days of each other, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint and Elena Ferrante was doxed. An online feminist outcry interpreted these two incidents as a single parable. Look at what happens to ambitious women, people wrote. Look how women are punished for daring to live the way they want. This was true, I thought, but in a different way than everyone seemed to be thinking. The problem seemed deeper—rooted in the fact that women have to slog through so many obstacles to become successful that their success is forever refracted through those obstacles. The problem seemed related to the way that the lives of famous women are constantly interpreted as crucial referenda on what we have to overcome to be women at all.

  There’s a limit, I think, to the utility of reading celebrity lives like tea leaves. The lives of famous women are determined by exponential leaps in visibility, money, and power, whereas the lives of ordinary women are mostly governed by mundane things: class, education, housing markets, labor practices. Female celebrities do indicate the rules of self-promotion—what’s palatable and marketable to a general public in terms of sexuality and looks and affect and race. In today’s world, this can seem like an essential question. But famous women do not always exist at the bleeding edge of what’s possible. Attention is in many respects constrictive. Female celebrities are dealing with approval and backlash at such high, constant levels that it can be significantly more complicated for them to win the thing we’re all ostensibly after—social permission for women to live the lives they want.

  In 2017, Anne Helen Petersen published Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, a book that took the double-edged sword of female difficulty as its thesis. Unruly women have taken on an “outsized importance in the American imagination,” Petersen writes. To be unruly is both profitable and risky; an unruly woman has to toe an ever-moving line of acceptability, but if she can do so, she can accrue enormous cultural cachet.

  Petersen’s book focuses on this sort of lauded unruliness—“unruliness that’s made its way into the mainstream.” She writes about, among others, Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Weiner, Serena Williams, Kim Kardashian—who bested society’s attempts to categorize them as (respectively) too fat, too loud, too strong, and too pregnant. “Does their stardom contribute to an actual sea change of ‘acceptable’ behaviors and bodies and ways of being for women today?” she asks. “…That answer is less dependent on the women themselves and more on the way we, as cultural consumers, decide to talk and think about them.” These women, in all their unruliness, “matter—and the best way to show their gravity and power and influence is to refuse to shut up about why they do.” Each chapter is dedicated to a woman who seems to possess some contested quality in excess, but who has nonetheless risen to the top of her field. These women are difficult and successful. Unruliness, Petersen writes, is “endlessly electric,” fascinating, cool.

  As a category, unruliness is also frustratingly large and amorphous. So many things are deemed unruly in women that a woman can seem unruly for simply existing without shame in her body—just for following her desires, no matter whether those desi
res are liberatory or compromising, or, more likely, a combination of the two. A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine. She’s unruly even if she is hypothetically criticized: for example, Caitlyn Jenner’s entire celebrity narrative exists in reference to a massive wave of mainstream backlash that never actually came. Trans women have some of the hardest and most dangerous lives in America by any metric, but Caitlyn was immediately, remarkably exceptional. She was insulated to an unprecedented degree by her wealth and whiteness and fame (and perhaps by her credentials as a former Olympian). She came out in a corset on the cover of Vanity Fair; she got her own TV show; her political opinions—including her support for a president who would soon roll back protections for the trans community—made headlines. That this was possible while states were simultaneously passing “bathroom bills,” while the murder rate for black trans women remained five times higher than the murder rate for the general population, is often presented as evidence for Caitlyn Jenner’s bravery. It should at least as often be framed as proof of the distance between celebrity narratives and ordinary life.

  In another chapter, Petersen writes about Caitlyn’s stepdaughter Kim Kardashian. Kim had wanted, as she said on her show, a “cute” pregnancy, one in which only her belly would broaden. Instead, she gained weight everywhere. She continued to wear tight clothing and heels, and in doing so, “she became the unlikely means by which the cracks in the ideology of ‘good’ maternity became visible.” Kim wore “outfits with see-through mesh strips, short dresses that showed off her legs, low-plunging necklines that revealed her substantial cleavage, high-waisted pencil skirts that broadened, rather than hid, her girth. She kept wearing heels, and full makeup…performing femininity and sexuality the same way she had her entire celebrity career.” In response, she was compared to a whale, a sofa; close-ups of her swollen ankles in Lucite heels were all over the news. Kim, while pregnant, faced cruel, sexist criticism. But what is either implicit or cast aside in the chapter is the fact that what illuminates Kim as unruly in this situation is less her actual size than her unflagging commitment to eroticizing and monetizing the body. Her adherence to the practice of self-objectification is the instinct that makes her, as Petersen puts it, an “accidental activist” but an “activist nonetheless.”