by Sady Doyle
And so Gjoni’s Gjrudge Match leapt past the bounds of the subculture, into the deep waters of general far-right sexual outrage. Quinn began to receive a torrent of rape and death threats: “Next time she shows up at a conference we … give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us,” ran one threat, quoted in The New Yorker. Other long-standing female targets of the “gamer” community, including Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu, began to receive credible death threats and cancel their public appearances. If a publication criticized “GamerGate,” its advertising sponsors soon received waves of threats and harassment that sometimes caused them to withdraw support from the publication. And even this wasn’t the worst manifestation of the backlash: Several of GamerGate’s enemies, including web developer Israel Galvez, strayed GamerGater Grace Lynn, and critic Randi Harper, were subject to “SWATing,” a uniquely horrific tactic in which harassers reported false incidents to the police and gave their victims’ address as the source, thereby causing armed SWAT teams to show up at the target’s door. Developer Caroline Sinders, another target, was not SWATed herself—but SWAT teams were sent to threaten her mother.
It would be tempting to conclude that society is moving away from the hysteria and unprocessed, raw sexism that defined the upskirt-crazed, sex-tape-centric turn of the century: When dozens of female celebrities had their private nude photos leaked in 2014, the response was largely angry and concerned for the women in question, rather than gleeful, with sites like Jezebel (a Gawker property) and Salon joining with victims like Jennifer Lawrence in calling it “a sex crime.” Twenty-three U.S. states have laws against revenge porn—the non-consensual leaking of sexual tapes or photos—and Google will now remove it from search results at the victims’ request. As my colleague Amanda Hess wrote, declaring the death of the celebrity sex tape, “the Internet masses [have] found a new vice, outrage, to replace our voyeurism.”
Not so fast. For one thing, outrage and voyeurism have never been distinct vices. The trainwreck lies straight in the center of the Venn diagram where the two overlap, converting hatred, anger, and scorn into an almost hypnotic fascination with the subject, an inability to look away from her, and an increasing need to see her exposed.
In fact, sex scandals are marvelous for their ability to turn the realities of prurience into the language of highflown morality or pseudo-progressive politics. Watching Hilton’s video, as Hess herself writes, was framed as a form of “class warfare,” a way to “knock the princess down a peg.” Making a TV episode that depicted the victim of a sex crime as constantly gagging on semen was more acceptable if you first took the trouble to call her “spoiled.”
Similarly, the cruelest commentary aimed at trainwrecks often takes on a veil of pro-woman, pro-girl righteousness. The revulsion at Cyrus’s real or (mostly) perceived sexuality was consistently framed in terms of high-toned objection to rape culture; Cyrus was accused of either “molesting” male pop stars or of giving actual child molesters ideas. The Daily Mail can justify calling Rihanna a “whore” in a headline by claiming that her videos’ “crudity and dancing, combined with money-focused lyrics, are telling Rihanna’s fans—many of them still children—that it is good for women and girls to sell their body.” One might even call them a scripture for propagating whores.
It’s not all trumped-up dudgeon, either. As with Wollstonecraft’s exile, even genuinely feminist women can participate in the cycle. Consider feminist Elinor Burkett, taking to the pages of The New York Times to kick Caitlyn Jenner out of cisgender feminism’s lunch table, citing Jenner’s “idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular ‘girls’ nights’ of banter about hair and makeup.” It ostensibly meant to reclaim feminist purity from mainstream beauty standards, but it sure did sound like she was calling Jenner a slut.
At times, leftist sexual critique and conservative prudery can be nearly identical. When Milo Yiannopolous mocked Beyoncé’s self-identification as a feminist in the UK Independent, declaring that “sexual titillation for men [is] … perhaps the least effective route to female empowerment imaginable” and calling Beyoncé “what men demand of her, less than the sum of her body parts,” it was hard to tell him apart from the feminist Ms. readers who were offended by the magazine’s Beyoncé endorsement, and who swarmed its Facebook page to complain about her “wearing these stripper outfits onstage while dancing like a stripper all for men.”
The nasty but unavoidable truth is that political outrage and the good old-fashioned desire to punish “bad” women are not disconnected. The field for one has been fertilized (or, if you prefer, salted) by the other. Complex, deep, and necessary critiques—like the feminist critique of mainstream beauty standards, in Jenner’s or Beyoncé’s case, or the critique of class privilege, in Hilton’s case, or the antiracist critique of Cyrus’s appropriation of black aesthetics and the industry’s simultaneous dismissal of black artists (Nicki Minaj wound up having to make a few)—are appropriated and imitated by the mainstream to rationalize our culture’s underlying pattern of demolishing sexually unruly women. And even socially conscious women (myself very much included, I must admit) can easily fall into age-old and socially encouraged habits of punishing sinners, unaware of which patterns have taken hold until it’s too late. Exposure and punishment, sexual transgression and murderous rage: The cycle holds, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. We keep women’s bodies controlled, and women themselves in fear, with the public immolation of any sexual person who is or seems feminine, keeping even “private” women inhibited by reminding them of the catastrophe that will ensue if they live out their desires too freely.
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: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they’ve done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women’s bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it’s only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you’ve told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.
2
NEED
The sex in the Wollstonecraft (or GamerGate) scandal was only half the story. The story of a woman happily fucking her way across the world stage would, no doubt, enrage a large portion of the population. But half the point of creating a villainess is being able to witness her downfall. It’s in the breakdown—the messy, pleading letters, the self-loathing chat transcript, the suicide attempt, the broken relationship, the vision of a woman being punished with total emotional collapse—that the appeal of the trainwreck narrative really lies.
The big sales pitch for ideals of feminine purity, after all, is that they make women happy. If a woman keeps it together and plays by the rules, she supposedly gains safety, approval, love, and the glowing sense of well-being that only comes from not being chased down the street by people who think she’s an unholy bitch. If a woman strays from the path, however, she pays for it. And not just because we make her. Her lack of virtue makes her unlovable and corrodes her from within.
The truthfulness of this is, well—what’s the most polite way to say this?—horseshit. There are plenty of well-behaved women living lives of quiet desperation, just as there are no doubt plenty of reckless women having the time of their lives. But trainwreck narratives seize on the stories that serve the sales pitch: the one where the bad girl gets hurt in the end.
If sex is one of the easiest ways for a woman to invite hatred and mockery in our culture—to be labeled a slut, a deviant, or any one of the many unprintable slurs that we use to mean “transgender woman”—then ceasing
to have sex with someone should be a reliable solution to the problem. And yet, it is not so. Breakups, you see, lead to sadness, and also to anger. And, instead of admitting that women feel unpleasant emotions when they’re in unpleasant situations, we have a tendency to label any public display as bitter, vindictive, obsessive, pathetic, desperate or, yes, “crazy.”
If there were any one woman who could elude the media’s hunger for celebrity carnage through sheer force of good behavior, it would be Taylor Swift, the woman PopEater once crowned “The Teen Anti–‘Train Wreck.’ ”
Swift’s persona played perfectly to the ideals of feminine purity and innocence that her unlucky peers had been caught violating. The press marveled that her lyrics were “wholly unlike the banal sexual come-ons that crowd the music of most of her contemporaries.” She did everything right and took all the right stances: against casual sex (“Where’s the romance? Where’s the magic in that? I’m just not that girl”), against revealing costumes (“ ‘I wouldn’t wear tiny amounts of clothing in my real life so I don’t think it’s necessary to wear that stuff in photo-shoots”), against sexting (her phone contained only text messages; “You wouldn’t find any naked pictures”), against premarital virginity loss (one single, “Fifteen,” bemoaned the fate of a friend who “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind”). She did not drink, did not use drugs, and told interviewers her idea of fun was spending time with her parents. Just to drive the point home, a few of Swift’s songs pitted her against overtly sexual harlots—“Better Than Revenge” concerned “an actress / [who’s] better known for the things that she does on the mattress”—whom Swift demolished with the sheer rhetorical force of her righteousness.
Swift’s image struck some as sanctimonious, or at least, a little too dependent on trashing other women. But it worked: The CEO of her record label, Scott Borchetta, crowed to The New York Times that “[Swift] isn’t a person who’s going to wake up half-naked, drunk in a car somewhere in Hollywood”; Swift herself took to Seventeen magazine to “defend her good girl image”: “Honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!”
Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy. No matter how well behaved Swift was, she couldn’t avoid the non-stop, invasive media coverage that comes with her level of celebrity, and the public indignities that are its more-or-less invariable result. One of the key selling points for Swift, in that “Teen Anti–‘Train wreck’ ” piece, ran as follows: “She’s never really been tabloid fodder—we don’t know who she dates.”
That … well, that changed. By 2014, thanks to a few high-profile relationships and a few breakup songs, most of Swift’s album press was devoted to figuring out which song was about which boyfriend. And most of Swift’s media and/or songwriting strategy was focused on convincing the world that she was not “some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend.” TMZ’s head honcho, Harvey Levin, had released a video calling her a “nutcase” and “BATBLEEP CRAZY.” Levin made his point with his typical subtlety; the video’s title on YouTube was “Taylor Swift—HAS SHE LOST HER MIND?!?” Still, the allegation resonated even among writers with a healthier relationship to the caps-lock key. Thought Catalog ran a piece entitled “Taylor Swift Is a Psycho”; The Frisky provided a list of “Seven Crazy Taylor Swift Girlfriend Moves”; DListed responded to the news that her latest single was about a breakup by dubbing her the “Bad Seed of music” and a “crazy bitch.”
The allegation was always the same: Taylor Swift dated men, and got dumped by men, specifically so that she could write cruel songs about them and harm their careers: “[Swift’s] career depends on her getting laid and having her heart broken,” wrote Ryan O’Connell in the Thought Catalog piece. “That’s what 99 percent of her songs are about. If we don’t know who she’s sleeping with, what else is there to really know about her?”
The coverage, slowly but inevitably, turned inside-out, until she was receiving the exact inverse of the praise she’d gotten for having no visible love life. Even if you had been a Swift skeptic, this was bizarre. She had written and performed breakup ballads since the start of her career; in this, she was much like every musician to step within twenty yards of a microphone. But the same behaviors that had gotten critics and moral guardians gushing in 2009 were, by 2012 at the latest, considered to be symptoms of lunacy and promiscuity. She’d played the game exactly right, and she still hadn’t won it—not completely, not without incurring penalties. Which is what happens, when games are designed so that no one can win.
If Swift has been cast as the scary, angry Psycho Ex—out on a rampage of peppy, blond, Max-Martin-enabled revenge—at least she can thank her lucky stars that she’s not Jennifer Aniston. (Star Magazine report on Taylor Swift, 2014: “Why can’t I keep a guy? I feel like I’m turning into Jennifer Aniston.”) Aniston, once crowned “America’s Favorite Spinster,” has spent ten years and counting stuck on the pathetic-and-needy end of the spectrum.
Following her 2004 divorce from Brad Pitt, Aniston reportedly became so desperate for the touch of a man that she drained his very life force: In 2008, CelebrityFix warned us that “the ex-Friends star has a habit of being a bit too much in relationships—a characteristic that pissed off her ex-husband Brad Pitt,” and that “she’s back to her ‘clingy’ ways now that things are getting serious with new man John Mayer.” Once the saintly Mayer had managed to extricate himself from Aniston’s iron grip, she reportedly went about looking for new men to throttle: In 2011, Hollywood Life reported that “Jennifer Aniston’s latest romance with actor and writer Justin Theroux may be over almost as quickly as it started,” and that Theroux was “already complaining how Jen is suffocating him.”
Aniston and Theroux got married. But this has done nothing to cure Aniston’s essential dumped-ness, nor slow her descent into madness: “Jennifer Aniston is apparently suffering from PTSD,” warns Celeb Dirty Laundry in 2014. “It seems she can’t be reminded that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt exist without some sort of dramatic episode.” The site goes on to relate one such “dramatic” incident, in which Aniston attended a party where the hosts were showing Mr. & Mrs. Smith—the movie on which Pitt and Jolie reportedly began dating—and … well, “and” nothing. CDL notes that Aniston “ultimately tried to act as if it were no big thing,” no doubt restraining her natural impulse to throw herself through a window.
Of course, these gossip sites are just trying to manufacture a story that will interest their readers. No one is going to click on a headline that reads JENNIFER ANISTON WENT TO A PARTY AND NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED, after all. But it’s still instructive to note who the story is about. No one is writing blog posts about the massive relational trauma of Brad Pitt; it’s women, specifically, that we like to see disintegrating or overreacting.
Plenty of men get rejected by their partners. Plenty of men react in over-the-top, unflattering, or just plain dangerous ways to that rejection. Eighty-seven percent of stalkers are male, and, in the case of specifically female victims, 62 percent are former husbands or boyfriends. In 2008, 45 percent of all female murder victims were killed by a partner, as compared to 4.98 percent of male victims. In a terrifyingly high number of cases, women’s ex-boyfriends have turned out to be Eron Gjoni. (Well, okay, there’s only one of him. Still, it should terrify all of us that he’s still walking around, free to ask women out on dates—and that there are other men out there who are just as frightening.) Yet not all the 4Chan-based temper tantrums and filed restraining orders in the world have been enough to make “crazy ex-boyfriend” a pervasive stereotype.
In fact, men are remarkably free to be publicly sad and lonely. It’s romantic: Think of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, parked outside of his ex-girlfriend’s house with his boom box hoisted high. We see those men as fragile, sensitive, or wounded. We don’t see them as crazy. Yet the most well-known movie about a woman who stands outside a former lover’s house and refuses to leave is Fatal Attraction, in which the female lead’s stubborn
romantic longing quickly escalates into home invasions and/or murdering the household pets.
And this legacy gets handed down to the rest of us civilians, for whom the Crazy Girlfriend—the girl who calls too much, texts too much, cries too hard, gets too angry, takes revenge, holds a torch, won’t let go—is the subject of countless advice columns and listicles. Everyone knows the character, in one way or another. Men are counseled on how to avoid her. Women are counseled on how to avoid being her.
On xoJane, for example, you can find the by-now-notorious piece “I Slept With a Crazy Woman,” in which the male writer details his horrifying encounter with a woman who did such insane things as (a) text him, (b) drink, (c) text him while drinking, and, finally, this: “Crazy D asked if I wanted her to blow me again. It felt like an odd move—too much, too soon and slightly desperate. Who blows someone twice on the first date, I thought.” So add “too sexually generous” to the list of crazy-woman signifiers—although that shouldn’t be too surprising.
The association of emotional instability and sexual openness—“crazy in the head, crazy in the bed,” to quote an old proverb of the Bro-American community—is no accident. The crime of a slut is physical, and the crime of the crazy girlfriend is emotional, but both are crimes of overabundance; the rules against being “crazy” are more or less the same as the rules against being “slutty,” played out on another, deeper level of control.
The other half of desire is wanting to be desired—wanting other people to find you attractive, or fascinating, or likable, so that you can have the amount and kind of sex you really want. In some instances, desire is wanting to be loved. Naturally, if your society is already stomping out female desire on the level of sheer physical impulse, this weightier, more personal need—to be actually important, in the eyes of at least one other person; to be seen as good, and valuable, and worth listening to and respecting—is even more taboo. A woman who wants you to love her is dangerously close to becoming a woman who demands the world’s attention. Whether your girlfriend wants you to stop going to strip clubs or stop passing legislation that bars her access to safe and legal abortion, the scary thing is that she’s started wanting things, and you might have to actually do them. The relationship is not one-sided any more. She’s started acting as if she can write the rules.