Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  The bar is uniquely low with Kim Kardashian, who is frequently written about—much less in Petersen’s book than elsewhere—as some sort of deliciously twisted empowerment icon. Kim has benefited from the feminist tendency to frame female courage as maximally subversive, when, just as often, it’s minimally so. It is not “brave,” strictly speaking, for a woman to do the things that will make her rich and famous. For some women, it is difficult and indeed dangerous to live as themselves in the world, but for other women, like Kim and her sisters, it’s not just easy but extraordinarily profitable. It’s true that the world has told Kim Kardashian that she’s too pregnant, as well as “too fat, too superficial, too fake, too curvy, too sexual,” and that this policing, as Petersen notes, reflects a larger misogynist anxiety about Kim’s success and power. But Kim is successful and powerful not in spite of but because of these things. It actively behooves her to be superficial, fake, curvy, sexual. She is proof of a concept that is not very complicated or radical: today, it’s possible for a beautiful, wealthy woman with an uncanny talent for self-surveillance to make her own dreams of increased wealth and beauty come true.

  Petersen articulates this critical angle most clearly in the Madonna chapter, which focuses on the superstar in her fiftysomething biceps-and-sinew-and-corset iteration. In embracing and performing extreme fitness and sexuality, Madonna “may have outwardly refused the shame of age, but the effort she applied to fighting getting older stunk of it,” Petersen writes. Onstage, she jumped rope while singing; she attended the Met Ball in a breastless bodysuit and assless pants. She was asserting her right to be sexual past the age deemed socially appropriate, but this taboo-breaking operated on an extremely specific basis: Madonna wasn’t suggesting “that all women in their fifties and sixties should be relevant. Rather, she believes that women who look like her can be relevant.” The effective message was that women who exercise three hours each day and maintain a professionally directed diet can just barely wedge open the Venn diagram between “aging” and “sexy.” This type of rule-breaking operates, by definition, on the level of the extraordinary individual. It’s not built to translate to ordinary life.

  It’s true, of course, that women who become famous for pushing social boundaries do the work of demonstrating how outdated these boundaries are. But what happens once it becomes common knowledge that these boundaries are outdated? We’ve come into a new era, in which feminism isn’t always the antidote to conventional wisdom; feminism is suddenly conventional wisdom in many spheres. Women are not always—I’d argue that they’re now rarely—most interesting when breaking uninteresting restrictions. Melissa McCarthy’s genius is more odd and specific than the tedious, predictable criticism she’s gotten for being fat. Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Broad City are more complicated than the taboo on female grossness that they flouted on their show. Celebrities, again, do not always indicate the frontier of what people find appealing or even tolerable. Often, celebrity standards lag far behind what women make possible in their individual lives every day. Broad City and Girls—Lena Dunham is the subject of Petersen’s “too naked” chapter—were groundbreaking on television because they represented bodies and situations that, for many people, were already ordinary and good.

  There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle down to us. Beneath this assumption is another one—that the ultimate goal of this conversation is empowerment. But the difficult-woman discourse often seems to be leading somewhere else. Feminists have, to a significant degree, dismantled and rejected the traditional male definition of exemplary womanhood: the idea that women must be sweet, demure, controllable, and free of normal human flaws. But if men placed women on pedestals and delighted in watching them fall down, feminism has so far mostly succeeded in reversing the order of operations—taking toppled-over women and re-idolizing them. Famous women are still constantly tested against the idea that they should be maximally appealing, even if that appeal now involves “difficult” qualities. Feminists are still looking for idols—just ones who are idolized on our own complicated terms.

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  Elsewhere, outside the kingdom of the difficult woman, a different type of female celebrity reigns. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Petersen notes that unruly women “compete against a far more palatable—and, in many cases, more successful—form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom.” She goes on:

  Exemplified by Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake Lively, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ivanka Trump, these women rarely trend on Twitter, but they’ve built tremendously successful brands by embracing the “new domesticity,” defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first-century gentility. They have slim, disciplined bodies and adorable pregnancies; they never wear the wrong thing or speak negatively or make themselves abrasive in any way. Importantly, these celebrities are also all white—or, in the case of Jessica Alba, careful to elide any connotations of ethnicity—and straight.

  This type of woman—the woman who would never be difficult, kakistocratic political takeovers excepted—includes a wide variety of micro-celebrities: lifestyle bloggers, beauty and wellness types, generic influencers with long Instagram captions and predictable tastes. These women are so incredibly successful that a sort of countervailing feminist distaste for them has arisen—a displeasure at the lack of unruliness, at the disappointment of watching women adhere to the most predictable guidelines of what a woman should be.

  In other words, just like the difficult women, the lifestyle types fall short of an ideal. They, too, are admired and hated simultaneously. Feminist culture has, in many cases, drawn a line to exclude or disparage the Mormon mommy bloggers, the sponsored-content factories, the “basics,” the Gwyneths and Blakes. Sometimes—often—these women are openly hated: sprawling online forums like Get Off My Internets host large communities of women who love tearing into every last detail of an Instagram celebrity’s life. There’s an indicative line in Trainwreck, where Doyle writes, “Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own failings and flaws to be loved. The question, then, is choosing between the two.” But why would these ever be our only options? The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.

  In 2015, Alana Massey wrote a popular essay for BuzzFeed titled “Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths.” It began with an anecdote from her twenty-ninth birthday, when a guy she was seeing made the unnerving disclosure that his ideal celebrity sex partner would be Gwyneth Paltrow. “And in that moment,” Massey writes, “every thought or daydream I ever had about our potential future filled with broad-smiled children, adopted cats, and phenomenal sex evaporated. Because there is no future with a Gwyneth man when you’re a Winona woman, particularly a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths.” The essay that followed expanded the space between, as Massey put it, “two distinct categories of white women who are conventionally attractive but whose public images exemplify dramatically different lifestyles and worldviews.” Winona Ryder was “relatable and aspirational,” her life “more authentic…at once exciting and a little bit sad.” Gwyneth, on the other hand, “has always represented a collection of tasteful but safe consumer reflexes more than she’s reflected much of a real personality.” Her life was “so sufficiently figured out as to be both enviable and mundane.”

  For women, authenticity lies in difficulty: this feminist assumption has become dominant logic while still passing as rare. The Winonas of the world, Massey argues, are the ones with stories worth telling, even if the world is built to suit another type of girl. (The world, of course, is also built to suit Winonas: though Massey acknowledges the racial lim
itations of her argument, the fact that a wildly popular essay could be built on analyzing the spectrum of female identity represented between Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder indicates both the stranglehold of whiteness on celebrity discourse and the way celebrity irregularity is graded on an astonishing curve.) Later on, Massey wrote about the period of success that followed the publication of this essay, in which she bought a house, went platinum blond, and upgraded her wardrobe. She looked at herself in a mirror, seeing “the expertly blown out blonde hair and a designer handbag and a complexion made dewy by the expensive acids and oils that I now anoint myself with….I had become a total. fucking. Gwyneth.” The hyper-precise calibration of exemplary womanhood either mattered more than ever or didn’t matter at all.

  Massey included the Winona/Gwyneth piece in her 2017 book, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers, which took on a familiar set of female icons: Courtney Love, Anna Nicole Smith, Amber Rose, Sylvia Plath, Britney Spears. The operating concept seemed to be that the world under patriarchy had badly aestheticized the suffering of women—and that, perhaps, women could now aestheticize that suffering in a good way, an incandescent and oracular way, one that was deep and meaningful and affirming and real. As the title suggests, we could want their trouble, their difficulty. In this book, celebrity lives are configured as intimate symbols. Sylvia Plath is “an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly.” Britney Spears’s body is the Rosetta stone through which Massey decodes her own desire to be thin and sexually irresistible. Courtney Love, a “venomous witch,” is “the woman I aspire to be rather than the clumsy girl I have so often been.” Like a priestess, Massey spoke a language that conjured glory through persecution and deification through pain. Every bit of hardship these difficult women experienced was an indication of their worth and humanity. They were set apart—fully alive, fully realized—in a way the bland women could never be.

  As I read Massey’s book, I kept thinking: womanhood has been denied depth and meaning for so long that every inch of it is now almost impossibly freighted. Where female difficulty once seemed perverse, the refusal of difficulty now seems perverse. The entire interpretive framework is becoming untenable. We can analyze difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist point of view and find them controversial, too. We have a situation in which women reject conventional femininity in the interest of liberation, and then find themselves alternately despising and craving it—the pattern at work in Massey’s spiritual journey away from Gwyneth and then back to her, as well as in the message-board communities where random lifestyle bloggers are picked apart. Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin.

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  By 2018, as the boundary between celebrity and politics dissolved into nothing, the difficult-woman discourse, perfected on celebrities, had grown powerful enough to move into the mainstream political realm. The women in the Trump administration manifest many of the qualities that are celebrated in feminist icons: they are selfish, shameless, unapologetic, ambitious, artificial, et cetera. Their treatment as celebrities illuminates something odd about the current moment, something that is greatly exacerbated by the dynamics of the internet. On the one hand, sexism is still so ubiquitous that it touches all corners of a woman’s life; on the other, it seems incorrect to criticize women about anything—their demeanor, even their behavior—that might intersect with sexism. What this means, for the women of the Trump administration, is that they can hardly be criticized without sexism becoming the story. Fortuitously for them, the difficult-woman discourse intercepts the conversation every time.

  Every female figure in Trump’s orbit is difficult in a way that could serve as the basis for a bullshit celebratory hagiography. There’s Kellyanne Conway, mocked for visibly aging, for how she dresses, slut-shamed for sitting carelessly on the sofa—a tough-as-nails fighter, emerging triumphant from every snafu. There’s Melania, written off because she was a model, because she was uninterested in pretending to be a happy Easter-egg-rolling First Lady, who rejected conventional expectations of White House domesticity and redefined an outdated office on her own terms. There’s Hope Hicks, also written off because she was a model, viewed as weak because she was young and quiet and loyal, who nonetheless became one of the few people the president really trusted. There’s Ivanka, also written off because she was a model, criticized as unserious because she designed shoes and wore bows to political meetings, who transcended the liberal public’s hatred of her and worked quietly behind the scenes. And there’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, mocked for her frumpiness and prickly attitude, who reminded us that you don’t need to be bone-thin or cheerful to be a public-facing woman at the top of your field. The pattern—woman is criticized for something related to her being a woman; her continued existence is interpreted as politically meaningful—is so ridiculously loose that almost anything can fit inside it. There, look at the Trump women, proving that female power doesn’t always come the way we want it to. Look at them carrying on in the face of so much public disapproval, refusing to apologize for who they are, for the unlikely seat of power they’ve carved out for themselves, for the expectations they’ve refused.

  This narrative is in fact alive to some degree. It’s just not often written by feminists, although some pieces have come fairly close. Olivia Nuzzi’s March 2017 cover story for New York was titled “Kellyanne Conway Is a Star,” and it detailed how Conway had become the subject of endless “armchair psychoanalysis, outrage, and exuberant ridicule. But rather than buckling, she absorbed all of it, coming out the other side so aware of how the world perceives her that she could probably write this article herself.” She projected “blue-collar authenticity,” had a fighter’s instinct; she had a “loose relationship to the truth” and a “very evident love of the game.” This had propelled her, despite the constant criticism about her unmanageable looks and demeanor, to the position of being the “functional First Lady of the United States.” Nuzzi also wrote about Hope Hicks twice: the first piece, for GQ in 2016, was called “The Mystifying Triumph of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s Right-Hand Woman,” and detailed how a “person who’d never worked in politics had nonetheless become the most improbably important operative in this election.” The second piece came out in New York after Hicks resigned in early 2018. Nuzzi painted her both as a woman utterly in charge of her own destiny and a sweet, innocent, vulnerable handmaiden to an institution that was falling apart.

  The media conversation around the women of the Trump administration has been conflicted to the point of meaninglessness. They have benefited from the pop-feminist reflex of honoring women for achieving visibility and power, no matter how they did so. (The situation was perfectly encapsulated by Reductress’s 2015 blog post “New Movie Has Women in It.”) What began as a liberal tendency now brings conservative figures into its orbit. In 2018, Gina Haspel, the CIA official who oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand and then destroyed the evidence, was nominated to be director of the agency—the first woman to hold this office. Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.” Many other conservatives echoed this view, with varying degrees of sincerity. There’s a joke that’s circulated for the past few years: leftists say abolish prisons, liberals say hire more women guards. Now plenty of conservatives, having clocked feminism’s palatability, say hire more women guards, too.

  The Trump administration is so baldly anti-woman that the women within it have been regularly scanned and criticized for their complicity, as wel
l as for their empty references to feminism. (It’s arguable that we could understand the institution of celebrity itself as similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.) But the Trump women have also been defended and rewritten along difficult-women lines. Melania merely wearing a black dress and a veil to the Vatican, looking vaguely widowy, was enough to prompt an onslaught of yes-bitch jokes about dressing for the job you want. The Times ran a column on Melania’s “quiet radicalism,” in which the writer assessed Melania as “defiant in her silence.” When Melania boarded a plane to Houston in the middle of Hurricane Harvey wearing black stiletto heels, she was immediately slammed for this tone-deaf choice, and then defended on the terms of feminism: it was shallow and anti-woman to comment on her choice of footwear—she has the right to wear whatever sort of shoes she wants.