I lay my pink rubber gloves on the peeling Formica, sit down at the kitchen table, and have the out-of-body experience of reading a hit piece about my life in the paper of record, written by the Times’s parenting columnist, who has not called me either for comment or to fact-check. Rather, her story is an error-riddled reaction to the fact that her social media feed, too, has been clogged with my story, and she and her Facebook friends have a lot to say about this.
“It’s easy to imagine the few chunks of bad luck combined with poor judgment [emphasis added] that could land many of us in her shoes. But there was another reaction, about equally prevalent in my feed.” Some of her Facebook friends, she wrote, were calling me “entitled, whiny, and worse.” Then, conjecturing about the state of my mind and finances—again, without calling me to ask for a comment or even to spell-check my name—she continued, “One might even think that Ms. Kopaken [sic] did not actually want a job at The Container Store.” Some of her other Facebook friends, she wrote, “saw bad judgment [emphasis added again], a lack of savings and a sense of entitlement—and in some cases added that they suspected that her New York-apartment-dwelling, sold-a-television-pilot self might be feeling stretched, but couldn’t really feel the desperation she was laying claim to.”
The kitchen light, which has been wonky of late, shuts off again. I’ve sent several texts to the super and three emails to the landlord about this, to no avail. I wiggle the ancient light switch to try to get it to turn back on and feel a jolt of electricity surge through my fingers and into my body. It flattens me, cartoonlike. This, too, has happened multiple times. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say out loud, peeling myself up off the floor. With the light back on, a roach who was feeling cocky in the interim scurries anxiously up the kitchen wall back to safety. I start to cry. Again. Deeply but quietly, so as not to upset my kids who are doing homework in the other room.
I recognize this kind of woman-on-woman judgment journalism. I’ve been here before.
Like the journalist from Talk who, while interviewing me a few months before Shutterbabe’s publication, asked if I was worried others would call me a slut, then published her question and my horrified answer, thus appearing neutral over the issue of whether or not I am a slut while actually putting it out there—next to my smiling mug and a cleavage-revealing tank top chosen by the magazine’s editors—that I could, in fact, be a slut.
Or the journalist from Salon, who wrote in a review of Shutterbabe, a book about the pitfalls of being a woman in the nearly all-male field of photojournalism, “The oddest part of her book is the absence of women in almost any context….So what happened? ‘Maybe no one liked her,’ a friend of mine suggests.”
Talk magazine, January 2001 issue, photo of Deborah, © Oliviero Toscani
I have countless other examples, neatly collated into a scrapbook of tear sheets ripped from the pages of pre-digital magazines. These are not, I want to emphasize, bad reviews. Bad reviews I accept and can take, and they are an expected and necessary pitfall of putting a book out into the world. Rather, these are baseless character assassinations, often within the context of an otherwise good review, and misogyny hidden within rhetorical query. Like the review of Shutterbabe in Wellesley’s feminist publication, Women’s Review of Books, in which the female journalist praises the book while simultaneously insinuating, in the form of a rhetorical question, that I may be to blame for the unusual number of times I’ve been mugged and raped because that never happened to her as an undergrad: “Could there possibly be something about [Copaken] that invites these abuses?”
Or the journalist from Talk who blamed my rape on, you guessed it, “poor judgment”: the kind a guidance counselor might point out, not her. She would never call me a slut with poor judgment in a national magazine with a circulation of 670,000, thereby turning me into a person from whom hundreds of thousands of potential readers might think twice about buying a book. Thereby—and here’s the real crime of sexism and misogyny—depriving me of potential income. It’s a mythical guidance counselor who might deem my judgment poor for getting raped, not her.
Women’s Review of Books, Vol. XVIII, no. 7, April 2001, © Lorin Klaris
Women’s Review of Books, Vol. XVIII, no. 7, April 2001
Talk magazine, January 2001 issue
Philosopher Kate Manne calls misogyny sexism’s “law enforcement branch.” Or, as she writes, “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.” One of the main hallmarks of these specific kinds of punitive witch hunts is using the opinion of others—groupthink—as a plausible deniability stand-in for the journalist’s own unconscious biases: to punish “bad” women and reward “good” ones.
This new public flogging—which, like all public floggings these days, will live on long past my last breath—ends with a similar set of rhetorical questions, although now that we’re in the Digital Age these are not so much disingenuous Socratic flourishes as they are prompts to readers meant to sway the jury and garner multiple responses and pageviews to attract advertisers: “How about you? When you read Ms. Copaken’s story, or even the little I’ve shared here, do you identify with her or dismiss her—and more interestingly, why?”
My heart keeps snagging on this closing query—“do you identify with her or dismiss her”—which, I suddenly realize, contains within it the history of feminism. Not to mention the history of the labor movement. Women’s health. Slavery and racism. Age discrimination. Rape culture. Politics. War. As if identification with a person or situation beyond your own individual experience must result in an either/or corollary construct. If you identify with her, then her story, a priori, is therefore worthy of recitation. The corollary being that if you do not identify with her, because you—like the journalist, I note—have health insurance, a wage-earning lawyer husband, no potentially lethal diagnoses requiring expensive tests and procedures (for now…eventually we all die of something), ample savings, and zero need to seek emergency employment outside the home, either in the service industry or anywhere else that might have you, then you must dismiss this woman’s too-bad-to-be-true story outright. Identify or dismiss, those are your options.
The responses in The New York Times comments section, today’s Roman Colosseum, pour in almost immediately, each cruel reply another stab to my heart.
I call my friend Ayelet again, less than two weeks after calling to tell her about my successful first app date. I’m crying so hard at this point I’m unable to catch my breath. “Fuck her,” she says. “Kicking another woman when she’s down. It’s bad journalism, and it’s bad feminism.” Over the next three minutes, she simply listens to me as I sob, emitting an “It’s okay” or an “I love you” or “I know” during inhalation breaks in my lamentations.
Ayelet has had her fair share of factually inaccurate, unwarranted takedowns, too, like the time she wrote a Modern Love essay about loving her husband more than her kids. It was meant to be provocative: to define the difference between romantic love and maternal love; to say to her fellow mothers, who are so often shamed into trying to achieve the unachievable goal of maternal and feminine perfection, that this unrealistic, sexist paradigm is hurting us, our kids, and our marriages.
“I…I…whyyyyy?” I say, when I’m finally able to speak. “She even spelled my name wrong!”
“And,” says Ayelet, “she referred to being diagnosed with breast cancer as ‘possibly preventable-but-who-can-plan-for-everything.’ If I ever get breast cancer, I’m going to insist on the preventable kind.”
I burst out laughing. “I love you,” I say.
“I love you, too,” she says. “Just promise me you won’t read the comments.” Ayelet and I have half joked that when all the men are dead and gone, we’ll move into adjoining houses in one of those tiny-house colonies together.
“I’ll try,” I say, but of course I fail. I can’t help myself. I’ve never been
good at leaving scabs alone either. “The problem with Ms. Copaken’s story,” reads one comment, “is her tone…It [sic] so whiny and smug and that you wind up rooting against her.”
Tone. I slam my computer shut. There’s that fucking word again. Tech CEO Kieran Snyder became interested in the idea of tone, specifically of the gender bias in the critical language used to describe the way women communicate. She reached out to colleagues in her industry and collected 248 of their predominantly positive performance reviews (because those were the only reviews, she knew, people would be willing to share with her). The results of her study, “The abrasiveness trap: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews,” were startling. Seventy-one out of ninety-four women were criticized in these otherwise positive reviews for their tone, while only two of the eighty-three men were taken to task for it. That’s 76 percent of successful females versus 2 percent of successful males being told, in positive performance reviews, “Watch your tone.”
Five years later, Emily Khazan, a graduate student at the University of Florida, will conduct a similar study on gender bias in evaluations of university TAs (teaching assistants). Posing online as a female TA for half the class and a male TA for the other half of an asynchronous online course—meaning, some students saw a photo of their female TA, the others saw a photo of a male, but they never met the TA in person—Khazan performed her normal TA duties the same for both groups: grading papers, answering emails, etc. By the end of the semester, the “male” TA received much higher evaluations than the “female” TA. More critically, the “female” TA received five times as many negative reviews as the male, who received…none. Even though the “male” TA and the “female” TA were the same person: Emily.
I finish the dishes, put my little one to bed, fold the laundry, walk the dog, take out the trash, help my daughter edit her college essay, kill some roaches, answer several work emails seeking immediate answers, and crawl into bed, which feels emptier and colder than usual tonight, like being the lone penguin on a dark ice floe. I don a wool cap and a sweatshirt, pull out my laptop and read the takedown once more, hoping for some different interpretation, but no. It’s just heartless and hateful.
But then, as I’m wiping new tears, a miracle occurs, in real time, as I refresh my browser. The ratio of cruel comments to kind ones flips: compassion, for once, is winning out. “The Wicked Stepmomster” from Philadelphia writes, “Are we really vilifying a person who tried to get a job? This recession has taken more than our money if that’s the case.” Amon from Texas writes, “When I read the piece, I rooted for her. As I hope others would for me.” Another writes, “What happened to this author could literally happen to any one of us who is not in the hallowed 1%. Be smug at your own risk.” And Anon from New York writes, “If we find fault in her, her fault explains the problem, and we can free ourselves from having to contemplate the very real possibility that this could be any of us.”
I try to find compassion, both for the blogger and for her projection. Clearly something about my story must have personally triggered her, and I bet I know what it is. One of the dirty little secrets of human nature is that, while on the surface most of us are charitable or at least consider ourselves to be, subconsciously we judge or in some cases abhor misfortune’s victims. This is a form of psychic protection against the very real possibility of our own downward spiral: Blame the person falling off the ladder, not the system that sent them plunging.
I find the blogger on Facebook and block her.
Skip Notes
* The name of this blog, Motherlode, was rightfully deemed offensive enough that it was changed two years later to Well: Family, as the former name left out half of the population who should be shouldering the parenting load.
NINETEEN
Unrequited
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2014
The rest of my first month at Cafe, including the Friday after Thanksgiving, I write, shoot, and report one story a day after another, often struggling to make it to after-school pickup by 6 p.m. I also take on freelance work after hours, during lunch, and on the weekends to make ends meet. I shoot CEO and author headshots and bar mitzvahs, dragging my son along to the shoots. (“So boring,” he deems them, but he knows this is what we have to do if we want to eat.) I write book reviews and moonlight articles for other magazines. Nevertheless, I am elated with my Cafe job itself, despite its daily trials. “I love my job!” I tell everyone who asks, because I do, even though my heart’s PVCs are back in full force and small red dots called petechiae have started to appear all over my legs and torso, which doctors originally diagnose as leukemia—those are a fun three days—until they finally decide no, the burst blood vessels beneath my skin must be stress- and/or cardiovascular-related, because there’s no other medically viable reason for the thin tubes carrying my blood to be bursting and leaking.
After confirming (via a skin biopsy of one of the larger groups of spots on my thigh, which leaves a permanent scar) that I am not suffering from any other form of known disease, I choose to ignore the bleeding vessels and soldier on because rent is due, and my spots are more ugly than bothersome. So I visit the set of Younger and interview Darren before rushing back to the office to tap out my story. I interview Justin McLeod, the CEO of Hinge, the dating app I used to meet Gio, and I ask him what I consider to be a throwaway question: “Have you ever been in love?” His moving and surprising response will stretch far into the future for both of us, but not yet. I write a story about the role of art in healing pain and about my cousin Jeremy’s avoidable death from undiagnosed diabetes and about Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn.
Petechiae, © Deborah Copaken
Mostly I’ve been tasked with writing personal stories, so I write about wearing the black Zara sweater Nora gave me as a protective shield against the sadness of facing my first Thanksgiving, her favorite holiday, as a solo parent. I create a series called A Day in the Life of My Instagram Feed, which is essentially an examination of the differences between the public face we show the world and our private selves. I write about not being able to zip my own up-the-back zipper on the day I’m supposed to meet my ex-husband on neutral ground, to talk about tackling our divorce. I write about the comfort of holding hands in a church with Dan, an old friend from college, at a Roches Christmas concert, both of us reeling from heartache, and what it feels like to be a Jew on Christmas. I write about selling my engagement ring and postmarital app dating and being invisible as a middle-aged woman and having a spouse on the spectrum. I pour all of my pain and shame into my writing, and this daily reckoning with the catastrophe of my life along with my morning walks in Inwood Hill forest saves me. It also, apparently, has begun to save others: “Thank you,” strangers write. “I thought I was the only one dealing with ____.”
In a few years, Cafe will transition into a political site, and nearly every single one of these essays will be erased from the company’s servers. This will not pain me as much as I thought it might. I think of it as my sand mandala, blown away with a gust of wind. Writing my way through this period while having adequate health insurance is the point. That it temporarily feeds me and others is the gravy.
Meanwhile Eddie, my Shutterbabe pilot co-writer, has been flying in and out of Manhattan for four-day weekends, so we can write the pilot together in the same city. He leaves his wife and son behind in Los Angeles and rents a room at the Standard hotel, with stunning views of downtown Manhattan, to use as our office, and I take off personal days and vacation days from work—I can’t afford to go anywhere on vacation anyway—to give us four consecutive days of writing. We work long hours at the desk in his room, with the L-shaped bench around it, then I go home and feed my kids. Mostly my seventeen-year-old daughter takes care of her eight-year-old brother during the daytime hours on these weekends, but when it’s college application crunch time for her, my friends Meg and Richard volunteer to watch him at their
place.
“This room must be a huge expense every time you come out here,” I say to Eddie. It’s a nice room. We haven’t been paid yet. He’s investing a lot of his own money in this project, including round-trip business class tickets. He literally cannot fit his six-foot, seven-inch frame into a coach seat.
Eddie shrugs. Because he was a showrunner on many of the most popular TV shows, which still generate millions in residuals, he doesn’t think about the cost of the hotel or expensive meals or really any price of anything for that matter. “I couldn’t spend all of my money if I tried,” he tells me one day, which feels like an unbridgeable disconnect between us.
I like Eddie. He’s slightly arrogant, in the way that many of the boy nerds who landed in Hollywood in the late ’80s and early ’90s and hit it big in TV comedy tend to be, but he’s funny and adept at script structure. Plus he loves photography, so we’ll often visit one of the nearby Chelsea galleries on our way back from lunch. Sometimes I get the middle school Spidey-Sense that Eddie likes me likes me. That maybe he’s telling me about all the money he has and reached out over social media six years earlier not just because he was interested in acquiring the rights to my book but because he was interested in acquiring the rights to me, and now that I’m spouseless, my option’s up for renewal.
One day, during our lunch break, he admits that his marriage has been in the toilet for years. I make it clear that I’m in love with Gio, to draw a strict boundary, and though this is a factually correct statement on my end, it is not on Gio’s. In fact, my love for the artist has become increasingly unhealthy and one-sided. Unrequited, one might even call it, which is ironically the name of a book that Ron Charles, the editor of the Washington Post book section, sends me to review at the darkest moment of my self-abasement. With this new man, I write in the review, I am turning into a woman I no longer recognize. “She was needy, this new version of me, and overbearing. She sent epic texts and indulged in unearned sentiments. This wasn’t healthy. For either of us. And at 48, I’m old enough to know better.”
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