Well, This Is Exhausting

by Sophia Benoit

  This replicates itself constantly where marginalized groups enjoy something that is looked down upon until rich white people, and especially rich white men, are ready to like it. And then they steal it. It happens with food, slang, music, dance, pretty much any culture after Christopher Marlowe.V

  It’s particularly easy to see how women’s taste is overlooked since we make up around half the population. This, of course, is not to say that women like one thing and men like others. Or that all women share the same tastes. Please don’t be a cabbagehead! There are stories, movies, shows, and even motifs that appeal especially to women, which are consumed by largely female audiences. We know that. And those things are dumb as shit, at least according to whoever is deciding on taste.

  My boyfriend’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of every basketball player’s stats from wingspan to rebounds never earns him a “Jesus, what a waste of brain space.” Meanwhile, my similarly useless memorization of the Kardashians’ exes, partners, and children is often lambasted by other people. Please keep in mind that he has to keep track of 450 people and how well they share a basketball with their friends and I simply know a twenty-five-person family tree. Arguably there is a lot less “brain space” being taken up by me knowing what a daughter is and what that daughter’s name is than someone having to learn what a point guard and power forward are. I love b-ball,VI but arguably knowing about family ties is more essential to being human than knowing that the Sixers require a deeper bench if they want to make it to the finals.

  If I somehow magically make my brain forget all the Kardashians it’s not like I’m all of a sudden going to be flooded with the info needed to solve the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. If the Kardashians go, all that’s going to fit in that tiny space is more anxiety about climate change. And why is everyone so worried about women’s “brain space” anyway? I never hear men get asked about their brain space. Never. Meanwhile, the men at my last job believed that pads went on with the sticky side up, stuck to the vagina.VII When I reminded them that we had hair there, which would be ripped out with each pad usage, one answered, “Yeah, that’s why I thought periods were so bad.” Let’s worry more about what men’s “brain space” is up to, okay? I think I’m doing just fine with enjoying Netflix Christmas movies where Vanessa Hudgens falls for the first guy she sees in whatever snowy locale she’s in.

  Women’s stories, interests, and desires simply aren’t taken as seriously as men’s. I recently got in trouble online (very common for me) because I pointed out that the top four Oscar-nominated movies of the year (2019 or 2020—I don’t know how the Oscars work) had almost no speaking roles for women. The movies were The Irishman, 1917, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, and Joker. I mean, there is no woman in any of those movies who has a groundbreaking role, or even a central one. You could mute your TV every time women spoke and most of the movies would remain pretty much the same. But more than that, the taste of the films—the themes, the shots, the point of view—was designed for men. All of those movies individually are fine—great, even, probably!—but when are we going to value stories by and for women and by and for people of color and by and for trans people and by and for people with disabilities? It’s not like they aren’t being written. It’s that they aren’t being produced, and when they are, the institutions that help “decide” what is worthy and unworthy don’t give them attention.VIII

  I went to a talk recently where film producer Lindsay Doran pointed out to the crowd that Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again together made over $1 billion. In just two films. That’s an ass-load of money, in case you didn’t know. Still, almost no one (in a room full of industry people) off the top of their head could name who directed either film. I’m not saying that the films are masterpieces,IX but it’s impossible to think of another billion-dollar movie franchise that the industry cared so little about. I’m sure everyone in the room could have named who directed the Incredibles movies, another two-film franchise, which also made about the same amount of money.X The Proposal made more money than Step Brothers and we got like five thousand more hilarious midlevel comedy films and very few more midlevel, well-written rom-coms. Why? Because no one in Hollywood fucking cares what anyone other than cis white men want to see on-screen. Stoner comedies are no more intellectually rigorous or prestigious than rom-coms or musicals. But men like those movies and men’s taste is taken seriously and therefore movies made by and for them are taken more seriously. Obviously—obviously—the numbers are even more bleak when you look at films made by and for Black people, by and for people with disabilities, by and for any number of marginalized people. It’s baked into our institutions, too. Every year the Academy tries to make a public push for more diverse films, but then the mostly old, mostly male, and mostly white voting body votes… otherwise. The reviewers, the newspapers they work for, the awards shows? They’re all overwhelmingly controlled by rich white men. It’s no wonder that taste gets “decided” by them.

  Recently, in my office, many of the male executives were complaining about how in Hustlers the women stole from “innocent” men and how the movie glorified that—in their words—“because girl power.” Please keep in mind that at the time of their complaints none of them had actually seen the film (which does not glorify this nearly enough for my tastes, if at all). Please also keep in mind that this is exactly the fucking plot of like half of male movies. I would bet every dollar I had that these men thought The Wolf of Wall Street was brilliant. What I think was actually happening was that these men I worked for, who were rich and also likely patrons of strip clubs, were for perhaps the first time in their lives seeing themselves as the target of a threat in a movie. Any of them could have been one of the people getting hurt and it was uncomfortable—a stripper could possibly drug and steal from one of them. Do you know how many times I’ve watched people who look like me, whose lives are like mine, get hurt on-screen? Get raped and assaulted and slapped and hit and killed on-screen? And even less violently but more commonly: be demeaned, humiliated, treated like an idiot, presented as a caricature, used as set dressing? And it’s glorified? God forbid one time that cis straight white men (and rich ones at that!) are harmed on film by women. These executives were simply that unused to, and therefore uncomfortable with, stories that centered on women.

  When we do tell stories for women, they’re seen as frivolous or dumb. There is nothing inherently worse or less worthwhile about The Bachelor than there is about watching the NFL. Actually, since fewer people in Bachelor Nation are getting CTE, probably The Bachelor is more worthwhile. I love sports, please don’t cancel me!!! Sports are incredibly fun to watch and highly socially valuable. The point is that The Bachelor is, too, and yet women who watch The Bachelor get shit on all the time for it. No one who watches The Bachelor thinks that it’s a fucking Ken Burns documentary. For years, I didn’t tell people—especially men—about watching The Bachelor. Every single time I’ve ever talked or tweeted about it, I’ve gotten shit for my enjoyment of the show. Meanwhile, when my boyfriend says that he watches it, and that the show is actually pretty good (WHICH IT IS), no one—no one!—ever treats him like a vapid airhead.

  For many years, and to some extent still, I had a preoccupation with not seeming stupid. Now I’m much more aware of the ableist issues at play there—the horrid but prevailing idea that people who aren’t as intelligent aren’t as valuable. And the fact that we manufactured the idea of intelligence around who and what we already valued as a society. But as a former valedictorian and know-it-all who grew up in a house with four other really smart siblings, I was very used to the social dynamic of having to prove yourself. One of the most difficult things for me to handle well to this day is people assuming I don’t know something, which, if you’ve ever been not a white man, happens all the time. There is something profoundly offensive to me about being treated like I need things explained to me—especially obvious facts, or subjects I know a lot about. It makes my skin get hot and itchy.
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  It is this fear of being seen as stupid or foolish—and therefore dismissed—that led me to hiding my romance novels behind the other books on my shelf. I love romance novels. Each year I read fifty books at least. Last year I read 109. I released a list of the books I read in the year, and I included only forty-one because I didn’t want people to know how many romance novels I read, or the content of them. I don’t even like checking the physical books out from the library for fear that I will seem like a big airhead for reading books about love, books whose target demographic is… women. And I’m not alone in my embarrassment in reading these books; the ebook market for romance novels is off the charts, because despite them being one of the bestselling genres, people don’t want to be seen reading them in public. No dad is concerned about someone seeing him read a Jack Reacher book on a plane!

  It took me a lot to get over the idea that everything needs to be proof that I was—that I am—smart and capable. Intelligent women constantly have to prove themselves, and that of course, like everything, is compounded by other marginalized identities a person might have, which makes it hard to want to cop to reading frivolous books or knowing all the names of the royals or loving Dancing with the Stars. If you’re a smart woman, you’re under pressure to not ever slip up, lest the boulder you’re pushing up the hill each day roll back down even farther. You feel like you always have to be on the lookout for the thing that’s going to get you dismissed as not serious. I used to hate UGGs—loathe them—because I thought they were basic. I had been assured they were the shoe of the brainless Midwestern housewife and her four hair-bow-matching daughters. To some extent, yes, I’m sure the shoe appeals to busy moms living in Kansas City. But guess what I found out this year when I stopped giving a fuck and asked for a pair for my birthday? They’re just really comfortable, warm shoes. That’s all. Shocking! They have changed nothing about me other than how quickly I’m ready to take my dog out to shit.

  The lesson smart women get is that if they want to be taken seriously intellectually, they need to cultivate their taste meticulously, and ultimately—completely by coincidence, I’m sure—align their preferences with cis white men’s. To like the things men like is synonymous with refinement, virtue, intelligence. To enjoy something feminine is to admit weakness. Women’s taste simply will never be good like that; it will never be dominant. It will always be vapid and juvenile. It won’t be Oscar- or center-of-the-bookshelf–worthy. The books we like will be beach reads and the shows we watch will be trashy and the movies predictable.

  And that, my friends, is why I’ll never care about liking good coffee. I’ll never have good taste and I’m fine with—proud, even—of that.

  I’m Pretty Sure My Insatiable Capacity for Desire Stems from the Scholastic Book Fair

  I was reading a magazine recently and there was an article on sustainable beauty brands. Great news for me because I love buying things and hate climate change and this lets me pretend those two things aren’t at odds. One of the brands was selling a vagina oil, a pink serum in a beautiful clear vial. If you saw the graphic design on this bottle—the font!—you’d want it too. It was perfectly imagined to light up all the circuits in the brain of a woman like me.

  I ripped the page out of the magazine and put it to the side, something I do quite often as I read magazines. Later in the week, when I was culling my many magazine rip-outs like a neurotic decoupage enthusiast, I saw the vagina oil and I went right to the website to get some. They actually had two products—a cleanser and the oil. I read reviews and calculated the price if I were to buy them as a bundle. I put them in my cart and then took the cleanser out. I just need the vagina oil, I thought.

  And here is where you may be asking: What on God’s green earth do you need vagina oil for? What does it… do? Do vaginas need oiling like the Tin Man? No, not that I’m aware of! All of a sudden, I realized that I could not articulate to you what problem I was even addressing with the vagina oil. I was about to spend FORTY-SIX DOLLARS plus shipping and handling (money I do not have to spend on vagina oil), for a problem I didn’t even understand, let alone experience.

  Per the website, their oil “smooths, brightens, and moisturizes vulva and labial skin.” Is my labia not bright enough? What does that mean? Is my vulva meant to shine like a bat signal in the night? Am I supposed to have a smoother vulva than what I’ve got? The magazine, via its glossy trickster pages, had presented me with both the problem and the solution simultaneously. Burdened with dull, dry labia? This is a game changer! And I’d believed. I had believed that I had a bad, un-oiled vagina. That the good vaginas of this world were oiled up and that I was failing to put my best labia forward.

  We are the targets of this conscripted envy, wherein the only possible solution is consumption, even as we’re derided for it. Selling things is all about making people feel like they’re lacking, and women make especially easy prey for this. For instance, rumor has it that the reason women shave their armpits is because marketers at Gillette wanted to sell more razors. No one was even asking for hairless armpits, but if you make a woman feel bad about a body part and then present her with a product as a solution, voilà! You’ve got sales, baby. While certain commercials for men use similar tactics, often ads for men assume they’re already powerful and beloved and that the product being sold will only aid in them maintaining manliness. Ads aimed at women present a problem to be solved or an image to be managed, while men are told they’re already doing amazing. And then when we do consume, we’re ridiculed for it. See: every single straight cis man ever picking up an eyelash curler and being like, “What does this even do?” Dude, read one book and find out!I

  One of the most iconic catchphrases in terms of making fun of women is the Nutty Professor line “Women be shoppin’.” Of course, the line was intentionally written to be an oversimplification of gendered stereotypes, and it is not literal. But people do look down on women for their consumption, while also presenting consumption as the solution to the many problems inherent to being a woman. In how many movies and TV shows has a straight cis guy gone into a woman’s bathroom and made fun of all the beauty products she has? How many guys have complained about having to go to stores with their partners? One of the clearest examples of our disdain for the female consumer is in shoe purchasing. While it’s certainly an outdated joke, women used to get a lot of shit for buying and owning so many pairs of shoes. Guess what? There are men who stand in line for hours for sneakers. I’m not saying male sneakerheads are entirely free from scorn, but rather that there is a space for them in the pantheon of coolness that is not there for women who buy non-sneaker shoes. Women’s material desires—like their hobbies, like their ambitions, like their boundaries—are simply not taken as seriously as men’s, even as women have been set up to be desirous, to be competitive, even as we sell women on the idea of scarcity. There are only a few spots for women: you better show up with your eyelashes curled.

  * * *

  Consumption is about wanting material items, but ultimately, it’s really about wanting another life. And I’m an expert at that. The more I gained weight as a kid, the more I wanted to remain inside my own head, inside a pretend land where I lived another life. And when youth turned to adolescence and I was actually left out of things because of my size, my envy fully blossomed. I believed most ardently that I would one day live a life better than my peers; I had a full imaginary other existence, one that was going to happen one day, but that was also, in a way, happening for me internally. In my head, I imagined that I would lose weight, my acne would clear up, I’d look good wearing sweaterdresses, I would date more people, make more money, have a cooler job. I would be beloved.

  I wanted. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. I’m very good at wanting things, at wanting lives. I still often find myself wanting to make up for all the time I felt like I missed out, all the parties I didn’t go to because I was scared everyone didn’t really want me and all the parties I didn’t go to because people really didn�
��t want me. I want to make up for all the sex I didn’t have, the fun I missed, the cities I didn’t get to live in.

  I know that virtually no one is living the exact life they always dreamed of. I also know that when I find myself flush with bitterness, I am usually envious of only a small part of another person’s life: their most recent career achievement, how thick their hair is, that they can afford a house. Envy is easy if you take someone’s life piecemeal and covet the brightest, shiniest parts. If you forget about their arthritis, their shitty husband, that time they got fired. Regardless of logically knowing this, I still often want.

  Truly almost all the most thrilling moments in my life have involved wanting something. Very few have involved actually receiving what I wanted. The very act of wanting has become the reward for me; I think I got so used to cycles of unfulfilled desire as a child that I didn’t learn how to be content. My favorite night of the entire year is Christmas Eve. If I could re-create one day of my life to live again, it would be Christmas Eve from anytime when I was under, say, eight years old. Anytime when the magic was still real, when, in the parlance of The Polar Express, the bell still rang for me. The night is all about desire, anticipation, longing. It’s an entire night devoted to what comes next. Christmas morning can never match Christmas Eve. Because as soon as you get something—presents, your Amazon order, a new haircut—you find something else to want. Inevitably, getting something doesn’t make you fit in, doesn’t make you happy, doesn’t change your personality. I desperately wanted to own Nike Shox in fifth grade, because everyone was getting them. I begged my mother for them, but I already had tennis shoes and I did not need more in her estimation. Finally, after months and months of begging, she relented and I got a pair. And they… were fine, but they didn’t make me fit in with the kids who had popularized them at our school. They didn’t change me, which was ultimately my dream. The fantasy I’d had while wanting them had been so much more fruitful than the reality. Also, by the time I got them, the excitement of the fad had worn off.