by Meghan Daum
But it wasn’t the patriarchy that had yelled in my face. It was the mental health system, the homelessness problem, the drug war, the whole wounded city and wounded world. This wasn’t systemic misogyny. It was life in the big city. Except life in the city has changed dramatically since I was the age of these young men. New York wasn’t as rough in the 1990s as it was in the 1980s and 1970s. But even twenty-five years ago, that subway car could easily have been near empty at that time of night, especially as it passed Columbia University and approached Harlem. There could have been a mentally ill homeless guy in just about every subway car at all times. There would likely be people in that car with knives or guns or high on crack. The idea that giggling white girls from the suburbs would have been there at all, let alone invited a panhandler to sit down with them, would have been unthinkable.
The men went back to their conversation. They seemed a little baffled, maybe even disappointed, by my nonchalance. There had been so many things in play in that moment the man yelled in my face: class, race, gender, the changing economy of the city, the naïve hubris of a certain kind of white suburban girl, the low spark of smugness you see in a certain kind of aging person (this would be me) who clings to their toughness because they’ve lost hold of their youth. All of these things pushed and pulled against each other in a great mass of friction. The encounter played out on multiple planes. Yet it had been reduced to misogyny. It had been reduced to misogyny because those two scruffy-faced men had been educated about sexism in a way that handed them power that they didn’t have. They then used that supposed power to apologize for something they didn’t do. In the process, they literally—and quite inadvertently—patronized me. How funny, I thought. How unfortunate.
CHAPTER 4 You Are Lucky She’s Cool: Toughness, Toxicity, and the Fall of the Fall of Man
In 1996, in the same era I was having dinners with the older man in a powerful position, and my roommate and I were holding auditions for third roommates, the novel Primary Colors was published. It was a roman à clef about the Democratic primary race of a presidential candidate named Jack Stanton, an extremely thinly veiled Bill Clinton. Writing under the byline “Anonymous,” the author was later revealed to be the political journalist Joe Klein.
Primary Colors was a huge best seller. Just as I’d listened to Jagged Little Pill in 1995 along with everyone else, in 1996 I read Primary Colors along with everyone else. Bill Clinton at the time was campaigning for his second term. It was the year he signed the welfare reform act into law, the year JonBenét Ramsey was murdered, the year the Yankees won the World Series for the first time in nearly two decades. The death of Princess Diana was a year away, the discovery of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair two years away. The internet existed, but not really. I got my first e-mail account in 1996—AOL, naturally. Since there was hardly anything to do online, there was still plenty of time to read books.
I remember devouring Primary Colors. I do not remember thinking anything of the narrator being a black man even though the author was almost certainly a white man. Today this would be called out as an unforgivable act of racial appropriation (Michael Lewis’s review in the New York Times Book Review merely pointed out that the narrator “is black when it serves the author’s purpose but not when it doesn’t”), but at the time it struck me as a clever way of eliding the fact that the narrator was really supposed to be Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos. Another character, Richard Jemmons, was supposed to be James Carville, the brilliant if also reptilian and degenerate strategist who would be largely credited with winning Clinton the election. The young women working as press assistants on the campaign are affectionately referred to in the novel as “press muffins.” Richard, however, has taken to calling them all Winona thanks to his obsession with the actress Winona Ryder.
In an early scene, Richard approaches a press muffin at the copy machine and commences with some performative spasm of bravado before pulling out his penis.
Without flinching, the woman looks straight at it and says, “I’ve never seen one that . . . old before.”
Richard is lacerated. He turns fuchsia. He “zips up and dashes out of there.” There is applause in the office, and the woman curtsies.
“Man, you are lucky she’s cool,” the black George Stephanopoulos later says to Richard.
“I wouldna done it if she wasn’t cool.”
* * *
When I read this in 1996, I’m pretty sure I also thought the woman was cool. If the term “badass” had been in heavy rotation then, I probably would have thought she embodied that designation perfectly. Not that the stunt pulled in that scene was okay, but I remember thinking that if I ever had the misfortune of encountering such a situation at work, I’d hope I had the gumption to do something similar. Of course, I didn’t know then what had happened to my friend Eileen just a year or so earlier in real life. It’s also likely that in real life I probably wouldn’t have the gumption to pull it off. It was a slick move in theory but an unlikely proposition in practice.
When I reread the novel a few years ago (a neighbor had left it on the freebie shelf in my building’s laundry room, and I figured why not), I thought the scene was fine, but I was annoyed by the curtsy detail. It struck me as a man’s fantasy of what a cool woman would do, just as the entire sensibility of the narrator was clearly a white person’s fantasy of what a cool black person would be like. Cool would have been if the woman had just rolled her eyes and returned to her photocopying. The curtsy was totally uncool. In fact, it was worse than that. The curtsy was insulting. It was implying that the woman’s coolness existed for the entertainment of others, that it was a performance begging for applause.
Reading on, another false note hit me in the face. Susan Stanton, the thinly veiled Hillary Clinton character (or Hillary Rodham character, as Clinton was then called), hands the thinly veiled James Carville’s ass to him.
“Richard, you will not do that again . . . You will not even wink at a muffin. You will not call any person who works for us Winona, even if her name is Winona. If you do, the best you can hope for is that we’ll can your butt. A more likely scenario is that I’ll come after your scrawny little ding-a-ling with a pair of garden shears.”
This is of course supposed to be loaded and symbolic and tragically prescient, since the thinly veiled Bill Clinton ends up getting caught sleeping with the hairdresser of the thinly veiled Hillary Clinton. But as a passage of dialogue it’s prudish and corny and, from everything I’ve heard about Hillary Clinton, doesn’t remotely capture how pissed she can get in the face of ill-behaving men. (In a later scene in Primary Colors, the Hillary character slaps the Bill character when she is presented with evidence of his cheating. Soap operatic as that is, it’s also more like it.)
The scene at the copy machine may, in the span of a few short paragraphs, be as good a summation of the 1990s attitude around workplace gender relations as any of the myriad books written on the subject at the time. Here we have a young woman rising above the indignities of deplorable male behavior by cutting him down with a single word—“old”—delivered coyly and unflinchingly. There is no crying, getting angry, or calling the HR department.
There is no thought that, in twenty years’ time, this woman formerly known as press muffin/Winona could conceivably go public about this moment, ending the career of this man who is not really James Carville with something like a single tweet. Instead, there is a constant ether of free-floating Darwinism. As on television series like The West Wing and, later, Veep, which clearly took certain tonal cues from Primary Colors even if they weren’t specifically based on the book, you had the feeling the major job requirement for this workplace was stoicism. You had the feeling that everyone came to this workplace not just in spite of knowing they’d get roughed up a little but because they knew they’d get roughed up a little.
Again, the press muffin/Winona moment at the copy machine is a male writer’s fantasy of how a young woman would respond to such an inc
ident. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a whole genre of male heterosexual porn labeled “I wouldna done it if she wasn’t cool.” Still, for whatever reason (maybe the influence of 1980s movies like Desperately Seeking Susan, where Madonna’s character might have made such a move), when I read it as a young woman, it was my fantasy as well. Today I would be told that such a reaction is nothing more or less than a steaming hot plate of internalized misogyny. I would be told that such a fantasy was just a spunkier version of fantasizing about becoming Don Draper’s secretary and giggling while he pinches your ass all day. At the time, however, I was deeply invested in the idea of growing tougher with age.
My own first job out of college (not my beloved Film Society but a glossy magazine that was concerned primarily with skin exfoliation and that rudely awakened me to what it meant to have a real job) had been spiked with venomous personalities. The office was made up almost entirely of women and gay men, so sexual misconduct wasn’t a major work hazard. Still, there was a spirit of hazing about the place, a kind of offhand abusiveness you sometimes see in creative people who have been sentenced to day jobs putting out a commercial product.
My boss scared the hell out of me in the beginning, screaming at me for miswriting numbers on phone messages when in fact she’d misdialed the numbers, threatening to have me fired after I’d followed her orders to make reservations at one restaurant but she’d forgotten and showed up at another (the humiliation of standing there at Orso with no table ready!). The term “gaslighting” wasn’t really in use back then, but my boss was a power gaslighter. I was miserable and desperate to quit until one day something changed. I yelled back at her. I can’t remember what our dispute was over, just that for some reason I was compelled to match her tone. I said something sarcastic, something like “Why don’t you learn to dial a phone?”
I don’t recommend anyone try this at home. As far as boss/employee dynamics go, this is the exception that would prove all the norms that say it’s better not to yell at your boss. But suffice it to say that my sudden burst of insubordination put a smirk on my boss’s face that was quite clearly a strenuous effort to hold back a genuine smile. She said something like, “You think you’re quite clever, don’t you?” There was something charming about her use of the word “clever”; it had a cartoon villain quality to it that momentarily made me feel like I worked someplace more interesting than a beauty magazine. I responded along the lines of “I’m too clever for this job.” It turned out my boss related to this sentiment deeply. She, also, was too clever for her job. From there, and in a perverse way, she became one of the best mentors I ever had. We continued to yell at each other for as long as I worked there. She continued to blame me when she showed up at the wrong restaurants. But something else happened, too. As soon as she figured out I had fledgling but promising editorial skills, she essentially let me do half her job while she spent much of the day at lunch. I came out of there, oddly enough, with skin that was at once better exfoliated and thicker than when I went in.
The rap on Gen Xers was always that we were politically apathetic, professionally unambitious, and cynical about relationships, family life, and the state of the world in general. There is truth to that, just as there is truth to the idea that we were—and perhaps still are—infused with irony, allergic to sentimentality, and committed to our detachment in ways that are fundamentally self-defeating. We were wary of the naïve utopianism of the 1960s generation, yet also frustrated that we never really had anything on offer to replace it. Even the Time cover story that announced our demographic existence in 1990 placed us firmly under the thumb of the baby boomers. The headline went: Twentysomething: Laid back? Late blooming or just lost? America’s next generation has a hard act to follow.
The rap was that the Gen X identity was built around indifference. The iconic pop cultural images of our cohort—the Breakfast Club kids hanging out in detention, Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder looking sexily bedraggled in Reality Bites—featured a lot of smirks, defiantly crossed arms, and expressions that fall somewhere between blank and fuck you. The idea was that the divorced parents and latchkeys around our necks and constant threat of nuclear annihilation had left us emotionally dampened. Before the age of “don’t give a fuck,” we were kicking it old school by not giving a shit.
I think that misses the mark. Our identities weren’t built around indifference. They were built around toughness. Or at least the simulation of toughness.
Even as small children, there was nothing cooler than having a cast on your arm. As we grew up, the toughness landscape broadened to include emotional toughness. It was obvious, by age eight or nine, that resilience was where it was at. There was no greater gift of temperament than being able to laugh something off. There was no greater indignity than needing adult assistance or supervision. If both parents worked and we came home to an empty house, that could be as much a point of pride as of anxiety. We hated to be driven around by our parents, seen with them in restaurants, enabled by them in any way. We would no sooner tell our parents we were having sex than tell them we’d shoplifted half the inventory of Spencer Gifts. We got our driver’s licenses the day we turned old enough. When we moved into our freshmen dorms at college, everyone knew that the coolest kids were the ones who’d made the trip by themselves.
As we got older, the toughness instinct built up in us like muscle mass. When we got dumped by romantic partners, Job One was to keep it together and not cry until we were safely alone. When we got harassed at work, we would no sooner call human resources than call our parents. When we got mugged on the subway, we’d be terrified and shaken. But we’d also know that this was part of the cost of doing business. This was an occupational hazard of occupying a territory larger and wilder than the one we probably had grown up in. (Unless we had grown up in big cities in the 1970s and ’80s, in which case we one-upped our suburban friends by bragging about how we routinely got mugged on the way to school.) And we didn’t even have to live in a big city to know what that meant. For us—for many of us—adulthood was analogous to a big city we had dreamt of moving to. We showed up hoping it would all work out. But like the press muffins in Primary Colors, we also showed up expecting to get tossed around a bit. That was, in some ways, part of the excitement.
This brings me (is it possible that it’s taken me this many pages to get here?) to the curious, spurious, all-around horrendous case of Brett Kavanaugh and his road to the Supreme Court of the United States. If the fall of 2017 was the Fall of the Fall of Man, the fall of 2018 was, to borrow from Gabriel García Márquez, the Autumn of the Patriarch. But unlike the deceased dictator in Marquez’s 1975 novel, whose story is told in discursive, sometimes impenetrable flashbacks, the patriarchs of this season were both many in number and very much alive.
In the early weeks of October of 2018, women wearing Handmaid’s Tale costumes gathered outside the Supreme Court holding signs that read “We the People Do Not Consent” and “Believe Survivors.” Women on my social media feeds talked about how they couldn’t sleep at night, how they couldn’t stop crying during the day, how they didn’t know how they could raise daughters in a country as violently woman-hating as this one. They exchanged tips on primal-scream techniques and other forms of self-care during this time of national crisis: aromatherapy, massage, driving to the recycling lot and hurling empty glass bottles into the bins with the force of Serena Williams’s tennis serve. They fulminated about the toxic, clueless, antediluvian uselessness of men. They called for these men—white men, namely—to step back and be quiet for a year or two or ten and let women run things for a change. They issued the usual dictums about how the world would be a better place if women were in charge.
The occasion for this was not just Kavanaugh’s conservative judicial record, but also—and overwhelmingly—the statements of Christine Ford, the woman brought forth by Senate Democrats to testify about Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her thirty-six years earlier, when they were in high school.
As Ford told it, she and Kavanaugh were among a small group of teenagers partying at a suburban Maryland house sometime during the summer of 1982 (being 1982 and all, there was no adult supervision at this party). In Ford’s memory, she went upstairs to use the bathroom and two boys pushed her into a bedroom, wherein one of them jumped on top of her, grinded his body against hers, and clamped his hand down on her mouth to keep her from making any noise. Asked how certain she was that this boy was Brett Kavanaugh, Ford said, “I am one hundred percent certain.”
I believed Ford and still do. That’s not the same thing as knowing for sure what happened in that room all those decades ago. But having sat through just about every minute of the two-day proceedings I came away pretty much subscribing to the theory that things went pretty much as Ford described. I also believed, based on nothing more than my own conjecture, that Kavanaugh was blackout drunk and had no memory of it. Moreover, even though there was no one to corroborate Ford’s account, there was still plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh was lying under oath about his history of excessive drinking. If that did not disqualify him from the job, not to mention his emotionally unhinged tirade following Ford’s testimony (he sobbed and blamed the accusations on the Clintons), apparently nothing would. In the end, nothing did.
More germane to this discussion, though, is the way the entire saga became a twisted, tortured parable of the #MeToo movement and of identity politics in general. Both sides of the political aisle used the occasion to win points among constituents who hate the other side. Republican senator Lindsey Graham invoked the language of the white man silenced and aggrieved by the woke mob: “I know I’m a white man from South Carolina and I’m told I should shut up, but I will not shut up.” Meanwhile, the moment Ford raised her right hand to be sworn in, the media turned her from a human being into a cultural and political symbol.