Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  By 2018, the Trump administration was weaponizing this predictable press cycle. In the midst of the outrage about family separation at the southern border, Melania boarded a plane to visit the caged children in Texas wearing a Zara jacket emblazoned with the instantly infamous slogan “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” It was a transparent act of trolling: a sociopathic message, delivered in the hopes of drawing criticism of Melania, which could then be identified as sexist criticism, so that the discussion about sexism could distract from the far more important matters at hand.

  And, because of the feminist cultural reflex to protect women from criticism that invokes their bodies or choices or personal presentation in any way, the Trump administration was also able to rely on liberal women to defend them. In 2017, a jarring, loaded image of Kellyanne Conway began making the rounds on the internet: she appeared to be barefoot, with her legs spread apart, kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office in a room full of men. This was a gathering of administrators from historically black colleges—black men in suits, conducting themselves with buttoned-up propriety, while Conway acted as if the Oval Office were the family TV room. There was an uproar about this general unseemliness, which was immediately followed by full-throated defenses of Conway, including a tweet by Chelsea Clinton. Vogue then wrote that Chelsea’s gesture of support was “a model for how feminists should respond to powerful women being demeaned and diminished on the basis of their gender,” and that this was a “great way to beat Conway and other ‘postfeminist’ political operatives at their own game.” Conway “wins,” Vogue wrote, when people point out that she looks tired, or haggard, or “when she’s belittled for purportedly using her femininity as a tool.” Then the writer made an about-face and looked right at the point. Conway “is using her femininity against us. It’s not out of the realm of possibility—and is in fact quite likely—that Conway has considered that no matter what she says or does…she will be criticized in bluntly sexist terms because she is a woman.” I’d add that she also likely knows that, on the terms of contemporary feminism, she will be defended in equally blunt terms, too.

  Later on, Jennifer Palmieri, the director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, lamented in the Times that Steve Bannon was seen as an evil genius while Conway, equally manipulative, was just seen as crazy. When Saturday Night Live portrayed Conway like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction in a sketch, that, too, was sexist, as were the memes that compared Conway to Gollum and Skeletor. But if you stripped away the sexism, you would still be left with Kellyanne Conway. Moreover, if you make the self-presentation of a White House spokesperson off-limits on principle, then you lose the ability to articulate the way she does her job. Misogyny insists that a woman’s appearance is of paramount value; these dogged, hyper-focused critiques of misogyny can have an identical effect. Generic sexism is not meaningfully disempowering to Kellyanne Conway in her current position as an indestructible mouthpiece for the most transparently destructive president in American history. In fact, through the discourse established by feminism, she can siphon some amount of cultural power from this sexism. SNL called her a needy psycho? Nevertheless, Kellyanne persists.

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  Of all the Trump administration women, none have been defended more staunchly and reflexively than Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. After Hicks resigned in early 2018, Laura McGann wrote a piece at Vox arguing that “the media undermined Hicks with sexist language right up until her last day.” News outlets kept citing the fact that she was a model, McGann noted, and calling her a neophyte—whereas, if Hicks were a man, she’d be a wunderkind, and the media wouldn’t dwell on her teenage part-time job. Journalists wrote too much about her “feminine” personality. Outlets have “questioned her experience, doubted [her] contributions to the campaign and inside the White House, and implied her looks are relevant…to anything. It adds up to another insidious narrative about a woman in power that is familiar to successful women everywhere.” In order to scrutinize Hicks the way she deserved to be scrutinized, McGann wrote, we needed to forget about her “tweenage modeling career.”

  The idea—impeccable in the abstract—was that we could and should critique Hicks without invoking patriarchy. But women are shaped by patriarchy: my own professional instincts are different because I grew up in Texas, in the evangelical church, on a cheerleading squad, in the Greek system. My approach to power has been altered by the early power structures I knew. Hicks worked as a model while growing up in bedroom-community Connecticut; she attended Southern Methodist University, a private school outside Dallas with an incredibly wealthy and conservative population; she became a loyal, daughterly aide to an open misogynist. She seems to have been shaped at a deep, true, essential level by conservative gender politics, and she has consistently acted on this, as is her right. Talking about Hicks without acknowledging the role of patriarchy in her biography may be possible, but to say that it’s politically necessary seems exactly off the point. In Vox, McGann cited Times coverage of Hicks as implicitly sexist; after her resignation, a Times piece cited me as implicitly sexist, in turn. I was one of the members of the media dismissing Hicks “as a mere factotum,” the Times wrote, quoting a tweet of mine: “Goodbye to Hope Hicks, an object lesson in the quickest way a woman can advance under misogyny: silence, beauty, and unconditional deference to men.”

  It is entirely possible that I’m wrong in assuming that these attributes made Hicks valuable in Trump’s White House. Maybe she wasn’t as deferential as reporters claimed. (She was certainly silent, never speaking on the record to the media; she’s certainly beautiful.) But it doesn’t seem coincidental that a president who has married three models, was averse to his first wife’s professional ambitions, and is upsettingly proud of his daughter’s good looks picked a young, beautiful, conventionally socialized woman to be his favored aide. Of course, Hicks was hardworking, and had legitimate political instincts and abilities. But with Trump, a woman’s looks and comportment are inseparable from her abilities. To him, Hicks’s beauty and silence would have translated as rare skills. Her experience as a model is, I think, incredibly relevant: the modeling industry is one of the very few in which women are able to engage misogyny to get ahead, to outearn men. A model has to figure out a way to appeal to an unseen, changing audience; she has to understand how to silently invite people to project their desires and needs onto her; under pressure, she has to radiate perfect composure and control. Modeling skills are distinct and particular, and they would prepare a person well for a job working under Trump. Nonetheless, perhaps this is another one of those situations where identifying misogyny means ventriloquizing it; maybe I’m extending sexism’s half-life now, too.

  This sort of discursive ouroboros was most obvious, perhaps, after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, when the comedian Michelle Wolf poked fun—as was her task for the evening—at Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale,” Wolf said. She joked that, when Sanders walked up to the lectern, you never knew what you were going to get—“a press briefing, a bunch of lies, or divided into softball teams.” Finally, she complimented Sanders for being resourceful. “Like, she burns facts, and she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.” The blowback from these jokes swallowed a news cycle. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski tweeted, “Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable. I have experienced insults about my appearance from the president. All women have a duty to unite when these attacks happen and the WHCA owes Sarah an apology.” Maggie Haberman, the Times’s star Trump reporter, tweeted, “That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.” In response to Haberman, Wolf replied, “All these jokes were about her despicable behavior. Sounds like y
ou have some thoughts about her looks though?” Feminists, and people eager to prove their feminist bona fides, echoed Wolf’s point en masse: the jokes were not about Sanders’s looks!

  But they were. Wolf didn’t insult Sanders’s appearance outright, but the jokes were constructed in such a way that the first thing you thought about was Sanders’s physical awkwardness. She does conjure something of the stereotypical softball coach, inelegant and broad-shouldered, the sort of person who doesn’t belong in shift dresses and pearls. She does look older than she is, which is part of the reason the Aunt Lydia reference hit. And the joke within that perfect-smoky-eye joke is that Sanders’s eye makeup is in fact messy, uneven, and usually pretty bad. All of this remained off-limits, however, due to the unquestioned assumption that a woman’s looks are so precious, due to sexism, that joking about them would render Wolf’s set inadmissible by default.

  A month later, another news cycle was swallowed when Samantha Bee called Ivanka a cunt. She did this on her show, in a segment about border separation, noting that, as news outlets reported stories about migrant children who were being locked up and abused in prisonlike detention centers, Ivanka had posted a photo of herself doting on her youngest son, Teddy. “You know, Ivanka,” Bee said, “that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another: Do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt! He listens to you!” A tidal wave of outrage descended from the right and the center—not about the migrant families, but about the use of the word “cunt.” Conservatives were once again weaponizing a borrowed argument. The White House called for TBS to cancel her show, and then Bee apologized, and I felt as if a feminist praxis was turning to acid and eating through the floor. It’s as if what’s signified—sexism itself—has remained so intractable that we’ve mostly given up on rooting out its actual workings. Instead, to the great benefit of people like Ivanka, we’ve been adjudicating inequality through cultural criticism. We have taught people who don’t even care about feminism how to do this—how to analyze women and analyze the way people react to women, how to endlessly read and interpret the signs.

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  Hovering over all of this is the loss of Hillary Clinton to Trump in the 2016 election. Throughout her campaign, Clinton had been cast—and had attempted to cast herself—as a difficult woman, a beloved figure of the mainstream feminist zeitgeist. She fit the model. For decades, her public narrative had been determined by sexist criticism: she was viewed as too ambitious, too undomestic, too ugly, too calculating, too cold. She had drawn unreasonable hatred for pursuing her ambitions, and she had weathered this hatred to become the first woman in American history to receive a major party’s presidential nomination. As the election approached, she was held to a terrible, compounded double standard, both as a serious candidate going up against an openly corrupt salesman, and as a woman facing off against a man. Clinton attempted to make the most of this. She turned misogynist slights into marketing tactics, selling “Nasty Woman” merchandise after Trump used the term to disparage her during a debate. This merchandise was popular, as was the reclaimed insult: on Twitter, rather embarrassingly, feminists called themselves “nasty women” all day long. But if we really loved nasty women so much, wouldn’t Clinton have won the election? Or at least, if this sort of pop feminism was really so ascendant, wouldn’t 53 percent of white women have voted for her instead of for Trump?

  Clinton was in fact celebrated for outlasting—until November, at least—her sexist critics. Her strength and persistence in response to misogyny were easily the things I liked most about her. I felt great admiration for the Clinton who had once refused to change her name, who couldn’t stand the idea of staying home and baking cookies. I believed in the politician who sat patiently through eleven hours of interrogation on Benghazi and was still called “emotional” on CNN for choking up when she talked about the Americans who had died. I was moved, watching Clinton white-knuckle herself into stoicism, in 2016, as Trump stalked her around the debate stage. No woman in recent history has been miscast and disrespected quite like Clinton. Years after the election, at Trump rallies across the country, angry crowds of men and women were still chanting, “Lock her up!”

  But the gauntlet of sexism that Clinton was forced to fight through ultimately illuminated little about her other than the fact that she was a woman. It did her—and us, eventually—the crippling disservice of rendering her generic. Misogyny provided a terrible external structure through which Clinton was able to demonstrate commitment and tenacity and occasional grace; misogyny also demanded that she pander and compromise in the interest of survival, and that she sand down her personality until it could hardly be shown in public at all. The real nature of Clinton’s campaign and candidacy was obscured first and finally by sexism, but also by the reflexive defense against sexism. She was attacked so bluntly, so unfairly, and in turn she was often upheld and shielded by equally blunt arguments—defenses that were about nasty women, never really about her.

  Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self. Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the truth that sexism is so much more mundane than the celebrities who have been high-profile test cases for it. Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be. And a woman doesn’t have to be a feminist icon to resist it—she can just be self-interested, which is not always the same thing.

  I Thee Dread

  My boyfriend maintains a running Google spreadsheet to keep track of the weddings we’ve been invited to together. There are columns for the date of the event, the location, our relationship to the couple, and—the ostensible reason for this record-keeping—whether or not we’ve sent a present yet, and which of us sent the gift. The spreadsheet was first a function of his personality: where I am careless about most things outside my writing, Andrew, an architect, is meticulous even about irrelevant details, a monster of capability who rearranges the dishwasher with a fervor that borders on organizational BDSM. But at some point, the Google spreadsheet became a necessity. Over the past nine years, we’ve been invited to forty-six weddings. I myself do not want to get married, and it’s possible that all these weddings are why.

  Andrew is thirty-three, and I’m thirty, and to some degree we are having a demographically specific experience. Our high school friends are mostly upper-middle class and on the conservative side, the type to get married like clockwork and have big, traditional weddings, and we both went to the University of Virginia, where people tend to be convention-friendly, too. We also haven’t actually attended all of these weddings. We used to split up some weekends to cover two simultaneously—packing our formalwear, driving to the airport, and waving goodbye in the terminal before boarding separate flights. We’ve skipped maybe a dozen weddings altogether, sometimes to save money that we would spend going to other weddings, since for about five years one or both of us was on a grad school budget, and we always seemed to live a plane ride away from the event.

  But we love our friends, and we almost always love the people they marry, and like most wedding cynics—an expansive population that includes most married people, who will happily bitch about nuptial excess at weddings outside their own—Andrew and I love every wedding once we’re physically present: tipsy and tearing up and soaked in secondhand happiness, grooving to Montell Jordan alongside the groom’s mom and dad. So we’ve done it, over and over and over, booking hotel rooms and rental cars, writing checks and perusing Williams-Sonoma registries, picking up tux shirts from the cleaners, waking up at sunrise to call airport cabs. At this point the weddings blend together, but the spreadsheet conjures a series of flashes. In Charleston, a peacock wandering through a lush gard
en at twilight, the damp seeping through the hem of my thrift-store dress. In Houston, a ballroom leaping to its feet at the first beat of Big Tymers. In Manhattan, stepping out onto a wide balcony at night overlooking Central Park, everyone in crisp black-and-white, the city twinkling. In rural Virginia, the bride walking down the aisle in rain boots as the swollen gray sky held its breath. In rural Maryland, the groom riding a white horse to the ceremony as Indian music drifted through a golden field. In Austin, the couple bending to receive Armenian crowns underneath a frame of roses. In New Orleans, the bomb-pop lights of the cop car clearing the street for the parasols and trumpets of the second line parade.

  It’s easy for me to understand why a person would want to get married. But, as these weddings consistently reminded me, the understanding doesn’t often go both ways. Whenever someone would ask me when Andrew and I might get married, I’d demur, saying that I didn’t know, maybe never, I was lazy, I didn’t wear jewelry, I loved weddings but didn’t want one of my own. I’d usually try to change the subject, but it never worked. People would immediately start probing, talking to me like I was hiding something, suddenly certain that I was one of those girls who’d spend years proclaiming that she was too down-to-earth for anything but elopement until the second she thought she could get someone to propose. Often people would launch into a series of impassioned arguments, as if I’d just presented them with a problem that needed fixing, as if I were wearing a sandwich board with “Change My Mind” written on it—as if it were a citizen’s duty to encourage betrothal the way we encourage people to vote.

  “Never?” they’d say, skeptically. “You know, there’s something really amazing about a ritual, especially at a time when we have so few rituals left in society. There’s really no other time when you can get everyone you love together in the same room. My wedding was super low-key—I just wanted everyone to have fun, you know? I just wanted to have a really great party. You really get married for other people. But also, in this really deep way, you do it for you.” At the next wedding, the discussion would continue. “Is marriage still not on the table?” people would ask, checking in. “You know you can get married without having a wedding, right?” One man told me, at a wedding, six years after I had attended his wedding, that I was missing out on something amazing. “There’s something deeper about our relationship now,” he said. “Trust me—when we got married, something just changed.”