The Problem with Everything

by Meghan Daum

In lieu of interviewing Joseph’s accuser, I could have interviewed dozens if not hundreds of women who’ve had similar experiences. They’re not hard to find. Whatever statistic you favor about the rate of sexual assault on campus, one in five or one in forty-one, that’s still an enormous number of women. But I didn’t feel it was the place or purview of this book to include survivors’ stories just for the sake of including them. Their stories are everywhere. They are in news reports, in online spaces, in Take Back the Night rallies, at your kitchen table when you’re sitting across from a female friend or family member (if you bother to ask her). Some are harrowing accounts involving fraternity rituals that aim to get women inebriated (or in some cases drugged without their knowledge) to the point of incapacitation so that they can be taken advantage of. In spring 2019, it was reported that Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a school typically regarded as a bastion of bookish eggheads, was home to a so-called “rape attic” in a fraternity house. This is to say nothing of the countless fraternity-related sexual assaults reported every year at large state universities, where student athletes sometimes get a free pass and a celebrated culture of hard partying masks a more insidious culture of objectifying and violating women.

  I could go on. And on. But that would only serve to repeat what we already know—that the social and sexual lives of college students can be profoundly vulnerable and any response to trouble therein is bound to be imperfect—sometimes in ways that only compound the harm already done. Parents themselves make tons of errors in judgment, and so do college administrations acting in loco parentis. What I will say about Joseph is that I’m inclined to think not that he did anything technically wrong—at least if his story is true—as much as he just didn’t do things quite right. Regardless of a guy’s virginity status or facility with a condom, ejaculating inside a woman (either by accident or out of indifference) who hasn’t given you explicit permission to do so is bad news. Any woman who’s had this happen to her (and my estimate would put that at roughly in the range of “many to most”) knows that it’s suboptimal at best and a catastrophe at worst. But it’s not assault, at least not in my mind.

  For some reason, the detail that stays with me most about Joseph’s story is the image of the young woman repeatedly craning her neck around and looking at him expectantly while they’re watching the movie. It stays with me because I’ve pulled that move, as no doubt many women have. It’s not one that belongs in the dignity column, but when you find yourself eager for physical intimacy from a guy who seems disinclined to make the first move, looking at him expectantly is practically an automatic reflex. The snapping shut of the laptop and subsequent nuclear option of saying “You don’t get it, do you?” would never have been in my arsenal, but I can imagine imagining that it was.

  I can imagine wondering what it would be like to be the kind of woman who can finesse such a move. I can imagine running through all the possible outcomes to such a move: he could recoil, he could get immediately turned on, he could fall in love with me by night’s end, he could dredge this story up while giving a drunken toast at our wedding while I feign mortification and also secretly congratulate myself on the badass move that started it all. I can imagine none of those outcomes coming to fruition but instead going home that night feeling awkward and embarrassed and suddenly worried about being pregnant. I can imagine feeling angry about this new worry, so angry in fact that I feel justified in asking the guy to pay for emergency contraception. What I cannot imagine is reporting him to the university administration for sexual misconduct.

  In parsing why that is, I realized that perhaps the starkest difference between Generation X and the generations that are now or were recently in college lies in the soul of our self-definition. We were obsessed with being tough. They are obsessed with being fair. Just as “life in the big city” loomed large in our imaginations, life in a better world looms in theirs. Which of these outlooks is more likely to end in disappointment I could not presume to say. If anything, they may be different paths to the same destination: regular old, complicated adulthood. We all get there one way or another.

  CHAPTER 6 On the Right Side of Things (Until I Wasn’t)

  My first taste of the sweet rewards of what would come to be known as virtue signaling came in 1994, when I wrote an essay about Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The essay emerged out of a workshop in my graduate-school writing program and was notable less for its subject matter than for its style, which was very much in the Joan Didion knockoff vein. In addition to having a lot of adverbs and run-on sentences, it was a little bit sanctimonious and a lot snarky—even though “snarky” wasn’t a word anyone used back then. It was the essay that made me realize I was an essayist (up until then I’d been a writer of unmemorable short stories in the Lorrie Moore knockoff vein). Even as I was writing the first draft, I knew it was a departure; I remember literally tingling as I sat at my Mac Quadra computer, the screen saver occasionally flipping on and displaying a galaxy of animated flying toasters.

  The essay wasn’t entirely coherent from a logic standpoint, but it had enough zing that it became my signature work for the better part of a year. I used it to enter contests and apply for various conferences, including a particularly prestigious one in Vermont that granted me a full scholarship. The conference included a daily workshop. Ideally I would have submitted new work for critique, but I recycled my same pages yet again.

  The opening scene of the essay was the first ever Take Our Daughters to Work Day, on April 22, 1993. Established by the Ms. Foundation for Women and changed in 2003 to Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, this initiative was all about making girls aware of the myriad professional opportunities available to them. It was about reminding them that they were more valuable than their looks and their homemaking skills. To that end, girls were taken on field trips to participating workplaces across the country (read: white-collar offices staffed by parents, relatives, and friends thereof) and shown what futures lay in store for them if only they did well in school and eschewed early marriage and motherhood for Anne Klein power suits and commuter Nikes.

  I was working at the beauty magazine at the time, where makeup samples choked the cubicles the way legal briefs pile up at law firms. When, around midmorning on April 22, a group of girls showed up in our midst (I had no idea who they belonged to, since practically no one on staff had children), they were not given a tour of the art department or explained the magic of the fax machine but instead shepherded directly into the conference room. There, piles of lip-gloss tubes and foundation compacts lay in wait along with a handful of low-level assistants who’d been tasked with “making over” the young guests. It seemed that any time spent observing their fellow females hard at work in wage-earning, high-skilled jobs (which in my case required calling the Frédéric Fekkai hair salon multiple times a day to reschedule my boss’s appointments) would be literally overshadowed by MAC glitter shadow.

  My essay, which I’d entitled, in a nod to Henny Youngman, “Take Our Daughters,” explored the irony of all of this. It talked about the interworkings of the magazine and its place within a large and powerful family of other glossy magazines, most aimed at women. It talked about what it was like to work in the female-dominated environment of this big company. It talked about the Seven Sisters college from which I had graduated just weeks before starting my job and (this is where the logic began to founder) the ways the Seven Sisters and this magazine company shared a contrasting but also oddly similar feminist legacy. I think I tried to say something about how “female empowerment” (thanks to my Didion thievery, I put a lot of things in quotes) had been turned into a brand. I talked about the hypocrisy of a women’s movement that was willing to perpetuate oppressive beauty rituals as long as those rituals were being presented under the mantle of “feminism,” i.e., girls getting makeovers on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. I wrote “i.e.” a lot.

  The prestigious writers conference to which this essay had gained me entry included the chanc
e to give a reading before all the attendees. Up until the time of this reading, I had been known to most of the attendees as nothing more than one of the ten scholarship holders whose duty it was to wait tables in exchange for room and board. But when I joined my fellow waiters in a presentation of our work and read a five-minute excerpt from “Take Our Daughters,” my profile soared in the space of those five minutes.

  In its simplified and shortened form, the essay sounded like an easily digestible, automatically respectable feminist tract: Beauty magazines, bad! Girl power, good! With shaky hands but a strong voice, I stood at a podium in a converted barn and delivered my righteous prose. That is to say, I read seven hundred or so words that, thanks to the abbreviated context, sounded a lot more righteous than they really were. In spite of the choking heat inside the rustic performance space, the audience applauded vigorously. The next day, as I waited my tables, I for once was met not with complaints about the undercooked vegetables but with praise for my politics.

  “You’re really on the right side of things,” a man with floppy, silver-flecked hair said to me. “Important stuff you’re doing.”

  “Amazing work,” said a woman wearing jangly silver bracelets. “So essential. So brave.”

  An agent gave me his card. A book editor said to call her if I ever had any book ideas. Someone told me I sounded like Joan Didion.

  I lapped up the compliments. I also knew deep down that they were rote responses to what, in the five minutes’ worth of material I’d presented, amounted to extremely obvious ideas. I’d spooned up a serving of highly legible liberalism and been rewarded accordingly. It was the intellectual version of a cheap high.

  Almost twenty years later, Twitter would make this sort of conditioned response transaction available on a moment-to-moment basis. But back then, it felt like a special occasion, albeit one I knew not to trust, like being invited to the birthday party of someone you know doesn’t like you all that much. Sometimes I wonder if my resistance was to my detriment. I probably could have written an entire book saying Beauty magazines, bad! Girl power, good! and made a more lucrative career for myself than the one I ended up making. But doing so would have felt as counterfeit as that five-minute reading at the conference, the journalistic version of never coming out of the closet.

  For what it’s worth, Didion herself had no truck with ideologies that were fashionable for fashion’s sake. Few seem to remember it now, but back in 1972 Didion pretty much declared herself a conscientious objector in the feminist wars. “To make an omelet, you need not only those broken eggs but somebody ‘oppressed’ to break them,” she wrote in the New York Times Book Review. The essay, called, simply, “The Women’s Movement” (and which was later included in her collection The White Album), drew from some fifteen books dealing with the fraught sexual politics of the era; authors ranged from Simone de Beauvoir to Shulamith Firestone to Germaine Greer to Norman Mailer. Didion resisted “the invention of women as a class” and, moreover, chafed at the way “this ubiquitous construct” had been assigned a narrative rooted chiefly in victimology.

  She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped, finally, on the abortionist’s table. During the fashion for shoes with pointed toes she, like “many women,” had her toes amputated . . .

  The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves. The bitter fancies assumed their own logic. To ask the obvious—why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set, or why, the most eccentric detail, she stayed in hotels where only doughnuts could be obtained from room service—was to join this argument at its own spooky level, a level which had only the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman.

  Whoa there, Saint Joan! Can you even begin to imagine what would happen if such words were published today? Can you imagine the outrage that would ensue if some vigilante tweeter dug up the Times archive of this article and posted a link to it along with an incredulous “WTF” or “I Can’t Even”—or, better yet, some GIF of Betty White looking perplexed? (The term for this practice is now “outrage archaeology.”) Get another gynecologist? Get another job? What kind of bullshit internalized misogyny is this? What kind of problematic privileged white critique of problematic privileged white feminism are you peddling here? Amiright?

  Back in the day, the usual suspects got their noses out of joint. Ms. magazine, which at the time single-handedly did the job that Jezebel, Dame, Bustle, Teen Vogue, Everyday Feminism, and a thousand Tumblr accounts do today, rushed in with a critique as readily as firefighters holding a life net outside the window of a burning building. Didion’s “attitudes pose a problem to all of us,” wrote the feminist scholar Catharine Stimpson in a Ms. article titled “The Case of Miss Joan Didion” (note the cheeky honorific). Stimpson attacked the premise that feminism, at least in its current iteration, was a fundamentally adolescent expression, “a familiar anti-feminist strategy.” This premise, Stimpson wrote, was “too inaccurate, too obvious when it was accurate, and too smug to be taken seriously.”

  Nearly half a century later, Didion is a goddess among not just second-wave but also third- and fourth-wave feminists. Her name appears reliably on lists like “Badass Women of History” and “11 Times Joan Didion Was the Coolest Writer of All Time.” In 2015, just months after two pairs of sunglasses Didion had owned were offered up for $2,500 each as part of a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about her life, Didion appeared in an ad for the fashion company Celine’s spring collection.

  But young people who first encountered Didion as a stunned and grieving widow in The Year of Magical Thinking, and, digging a little deeper, discovered crowd-pleasers like her signature essay “Goodbye to All That,” might be surprised to know that in 1962 a twenty-eight-year-old Didion said that California gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon was “too liberal” for her taste. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Barry Goldwater when he was the Republican nominee for president in 1964 and she wrote for theNational Review throughout much of that decade. Though Didion became more liberal as time went on, her feminism was more implicit than it was overt; it was certainly never performative. She dismissed political activism among Hollywood liberals as a “kind of dictatorship of good intentions” characterized by a “vacant fervor.” She called out virtue signaling before there was a name for it.

  For the last few years, I don’t think a single day has passed when I haven’t wondered what Joan Didion at the height of her powers would have to say about the political and intellectual state of America today. What could she do with twelve thousand words in the New York Review of Books on white privilege, on rape culture, on campus speech issues, on #MeToo? What would she make of the ways in which the vacant fervor of glamorous activism has only grown more vacant and fervent over the decades? What would she say about Robert De Niro shouting “Fuck Trump” at the Tony Awards ceremony in 2018? Of the #OscarsSoWhite movement in 2016? Of Patricia Arquette, in 2015, accepting the Oscar for best supporting actress and making some platitudinous remarks about wage equality that had Meryl Streep (a Vassar grad and one of my personal heroes) practically leaping from her seat as she pointed to Arquette in “you go, girl” approval? (This image has become a hugely popular GIF, frequently deployed as a signal of approval among badass feminists on social media.)

  What would Didion have thought when, two years after Arquette’s battle cry on the Oscars stage, the actress was part of a chorus of social media outrage over what came to be known as “leggingsgate”?

  In case you’ve forgotten—or missed it the first time—#leggingsgate refers to a minor atrocity committed by a United Airlines gate agent who refused to let a pair of teenage girls board a flight in Denver because they were wearing leggings in lieu of pants. The reason was that the girls were traveling with their parents o
n employee buddy passes. Employee buddy passes allow passengers who have friends or family who work for the airline to fly for free or at a deep discount. In exchange, these passengers are asked to adhere to a dress code. (There was a time when that meant coat and tie for men.) United’s dress code for buddy passes prohibited a range of commonly worn street clothes, including “form-fitting lycra/spandex tops, pants, and dresses.”

  According to reports (by which I mean official news reports as well as the random tweets of random people), a gate agent in Denver informed the family of the buddy-pass dress policy. By all appearances, the family was cooperative and attempted some sort of improvisatory wardrobe change (a younger girl, also in leggings, was allowed to wear them if she put a dress on over them). But a woman named Shannon Watts happened to be standing nearby and watching it all go down, at least as far as she could see from her place in line for another flight.

  Apparently unaware of the full details of the situation, Watts took the liberty of firing off a string of tweets offering her interpretation as she saw it from some distance away. Her interpretation was that the airline was “policing the clothing of women and girls.” United’s public relations department responded with some tweets about proper attire, not making it sufficiently clear they were talking about the very specific dress code associated with a little-known travel perk. This—and the fact that Watts happened to be a prominent anti-gun activist with a fairly large Twitter following—stirred up enough foment that a number of celebrities entered the fray, among them Arquette.

  “The highest standard of any culture corporate or not is to allow children to be children and dress in accordance,” Arquette tweeted.

  A short time later, Arquette added, “Leggings are business attire for 10 year olds. Their business is being children.”

  The model Chrissy Teigen soon joined in. “I have flown united before with literally no pants on. Just a top as a dress. Next time I will only wear jeans and a scarf.”