by Lindy West
But even in the fun and the nostalgia, you could feel that it was a little different for the boys. There was a giddiness radiating from SNL’s male cast members, as though they were truly in Heaven—in one sketch, “Sandler Family Reunion,” one after another got to do his Sandler impression for Sandler, and of course they all had one. They were kids again for a night as well as the men those kids had dreamed of becoming, and it was something magic because Sandler was for them—in the worlds he constructed, comedy boys were king.
Girls deserved more than a glow reflected.
_____________________
1 Except for Opera Man. WHAT IS THE JOKE???
2 Once I was shopping at the downtown Seattle Nordstrom with my mother and noticed that hometown hero Mary Kay Letourneau was in line directly in front of us, so I took my phone and typed “Mary Kay Letourneau” and discreetly showed it to my mom, and she squinted at it and said, “MARY … KAY … LETOURNEAU?”
3 I did mind. Missing: the joke of Opera Man, $200,000,000 reward.
Ted Bundy Was Not Charming—Are You High?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been terrified that a man was going to sneak into my house and murder me. Actually, “convinced” might be a more accurate word than “terrified,” but I don’t want to say “convinced” because I am at the same time totally dismissive of the supernatural and extremely superstitious. I don’t think jinxing things is real, but I DO NOT jinx things. Why risk it? Just a few weeks ago I was sitting in my hotel lobby in New York City reading Jason Mantzoukas’s Wikipedia entry, and then Jason Mantzoukas walked by me! Who knows what’s possible! Plus, if you say things such as “I’m convinced I will get serial killed” and then by coincidence you do get serial killed, it becomes a whole thing in your Dateline. Keith Morrison is like “A beautiful young nymph. Haunted by visions. Of being? Serial killed. BuT ThEY wErE OnLy vIsIoNs … right? [plaintive glissando] WROOONG. One hot summer night. In a sleepy tooooooown! Deep in the heart … of Texas. Those visions! Became all too reeeeeeeeal.”
Three asides on Dateline real quick: (1) It was either the husband, the ex-husband, or someone who wanted to fuck her but she turned him down. White cops always want it to be someone’s possible ties to the Russian mob because their brother sold someone named Kazimir a boat in 1992, and it is never, ever that! It is never a global human trafficking ring! Eat it, white guys, you love weird sex murder. (2) The only foolproof way to murder your wife is to take her hiking and then VERY gently hip check her off a cliff. You can’t hip check her too hard because the scientists can tell the trajectory! The scientists always measure! (3) All Dateline correspondents are my children, but here is my ranking of them in order of how much I love my children: Keith Morrison, Josh Mankiewicz, Andrea Canning, Dennis Murphy.
I have to say it was a little annoying when, in January 2019, everyone on Earth suddenly became Ted Bundy experts because of Netflix’s four-part documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Like, excuse me, some of us have had the Wikipedia page “List of serial killers by number of victims” bookmarked since 2006, and it was only published in 2005. (Also a hot hot read: “List of fatal bear attacks in North America by decade.”) Likewise, the great true crime podcast boom of Trump’s America has been both an irritant and a boon. LIKE, YES, IT’S MY FOOD, FEED ME MY FOOD, BUT ALSO PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE AND HONOR MY LIFELONG INTEREST IN SEXUAL KNIFE CRIME.
Something just occurred to me. Do cisgender men not spend absolutely every moment of their lives obsessed with the possibility of home invasion? Do they sleep soundly all through the night, even if there is a noise? Do they notice if they get home and the porch light is off but they are certain they turned the porch light on before they left? Do they think about giving up their lovely house, their porch, their garden, for a high-rise apartment because there are fewer points of entry? Do they consider going home from work early because they can’t stop wondering if the wooden dowel in the basement window track has somehow come askew? Do they rehearse protocols for which heavy dresser they will shove in front of the bedroom door if they hear someone creaking up the hallway and lie awake at night wondering how thick particle board would need to be to stop bullets? What about particle board, a layer of folded sweaters, and then another piece of particle board with a faux wood-grain laminate? How easily and how far can one man shove one door, one fat woman, and one piece of an Ikea bedroom set? Could I survive a jump out of a second-story window? Should I aim for the tree or try to avoid the tree? Do fat people bounce better or hit harder?
I’m sure some men think of these things, of course. But is such vigilance, for them, as subconscious and involuntary as breathing? Is it constant, a processor whirring 24/7? Are they thinking about waking up with a man looming at the foot of the bed or pressing down on top of them? Or do they merely see a threat to their property, a territorial violation?
Does every day feel like a stay of execution?
Often, when I hear men speak about home invasion, it’s not in the context of what an intruder might do to them but rather, in an almost fetishistic way, what they might do to an intruder. These men yearn to stand their ground, to have an excuse to use their arsenal, to find out what it feels like to kill another human being (and you know, in this morally bereft country, what color human being they’re picturing).
Straight, white, cisgender men love to file serial killers under some darker subcategory of white male genius. It’s easier to be titillated when fear is an abstraction. Ooh, BTK installed security systems so he could disarm them later. Isn’t that smart? Gary Ridgway eluded the cops for twenty years. Bundy wore a fake cast! Diabolical! No, you dick lickers, they were fucking pathetic, opportunistic, incel losers who leveraged the staggering confidence that our society confers upon bare-minimum white men in order to get away with obliterating the lives of sexual objects they despised because they could not own them. Much like Ada Lovelace, the inventor of the fucking computer.
It was interesting to observe the renewed national conversation about Bundy in light of another national obsession incubating at the time: the early stirrings of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Watching otherwise rational human beings rhapsodize about Bundy’s “charm” and “brilliance” while furrowing their brows over Elizabeth Warren’s dubious “likability” creates a particularly American kind of whiplash. The prevailing Bundy narrative has always hammered away at how “handsome” and “charismatic” the man was, but one would think that in 2019—if #MeToo brownshirts truly have the death grip on pop culture and justice that the whingeing class claims we do—someone might have red-flagged the canonization of a shitty rapist failure who murdered at least thirty women?
Ted Bundy was a mediocre student whom no one liked who failed at everything he ever tried to do except for exploiting women’s socialization as caregivers in order to put them into vulnerable situations so he could take away their one single precious exquisite life.
Elizabeth Warren put herself through Rutgers Law School with a toddler at home, held endowed professorships at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and Harvard Law School, became perhaps the most influential expert on bankruptcy law in the country, has been a US senator since 2012, and is now arguably the most principled and policy-driven candidate in the fight to wrest power from a profligate dictator and lead Americans to help save our dying planet. Ugh, off-putting! I hate it when my mommy makes me brush my teeth! Far more likeably, Ted Bundy pretended to have a broken arm so he could rape, bludgeon, shoot, and stab women.
Things that DON’T make a (white) man unlikable:
Murdering
Stealing everyone’s money
Grabbing women by the pussy
Cult leading
Making everyone in your cult commit suicide with you
Genocide
Being a DJ
Things that DO make a woman unlikable:
Voice
Body
Hair
Shoes
/>
Kids
No kids
Sex
No sex
Money
No money
Inhale
Exhale
Metabolize food
Shed skin cells
Use muscles to move bones around
Do anything
Die
Likability is a con, and we’re all falling for it. I watched Netflix and Hulu’s dueling documentaries on the social media megascam Fyre Festival the same week that I got that Ted Bundy documentary in my craw. And, look, I am not saying that Fyre Festival CEO Billy McFarland is like a serial killer because he lured hundreds of nubile young influencers to a remote island with no food or shelter and then tooted off on a golden Jet Ski and left them to be eaten by wild pigs. (The lawyer says I have to clarify that he didn’t LITERALLY do this.) I am saying that McFarland is like a serial killer because he is exactly as likable as Ted Bundy, yet somehow I had to watch two entire documentaries about how “charming” and “charismatic” he is.
I’m sorry. Is everyone on MDMA? And can I please have some?
Billy McFarland is the most obvious bumbling con-artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe. He’s the guy who never helps on the group project. He’s the bully’s least memorable henchman. He’s that kind of American rich kid who doesn’t bother to learn more than one vowel. He looks like the producers spread peanut butter on his tongue and then had his audio dubbed by a frat guy halfway through dying of alcohol poisoning. He seems to be, to put it charitably, barely alive. If we’re all made of star stuff, he’s from the butt part of the star.
Sorry to be a mean bitch, but I am so fucking sick—FUCKING VIOLENTLY ILL—of having to watch good people be conned by smug simpletons who couldn’t beat a dog at Candyland. Ted Bundy and Billy McFarland are both more charming than Donald Trump, and that boner pratfalled his way into becoming the most powerful man on earth. That guy? That guy is who brought us down?
One malicious side effect of Americans’ bootstrap ethos (itself just a massive grift to empower the snickering rich) is that it conditions people to cheer at deregulation, to beg and plead for the removal of consumer protections. We are literally asking to be conned; we are a smorgasbord for the most unscrupulous and the least deserving. Being a giant fucking sucker is as American as school shootings.
The past few decades have been a tug-of-war over the benefit of the doubt. Black Lives Matter demands that white America adjust its assumptions about the inherent goodness of cops, about who looks like a criminal and who looks like a fine boy having a bad mental health day. #MeToo demands we reexamine what credibility looks like—who gets to define it and mete it out, who gets to stride through the world assuming that they have it.
Institutional benefit of the doubt is monstrously powerful: any lie becomes an incantation, conjuring itself into truth. This is the foundation of Donald Trump’s power.
“I am a handsome law student!”
“The Fyre Festival is real, and Kendall Jenner will be there!”
“I’m the least racist person you’ll ever meet!”
To fund Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland called people and asked for millions of dollars, and people were like “Sure!” To not get caught, Ted Bundy just had to exist—multiple acquaintances reported him based on the police sketch, his brown Volkswagen, and his shitty personality, but cops thought that a “handsome” (no) “law student” (he got bored and stopped going) couldn’t possibly be a murderer. I mean, you guys! The Michael Scott Paper Company was just a supply closet filled with cheese balls and it got a multimillion-dollar buyout from Dunder Mifflin! Men, would it kill you to say thank you once in a while?
There’s a famous moment from the Bundy trial in 1979—a trial in which Bundy disrupted the proceedings repeatedly with outlandish disrespect to the court and to his victims—when judge Edward D. Cowart of Dade County, Florida, delivered Bundy’s death sentence:
The court finds that both of these killings were indeed heinous, atrocious, and cruel. And that they were extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain and utter indifference to human life. This court, independent of, but in agreement with the advisory sentence rendered by the jury does hereby impose the death penalty upon the defendant Theodore Robert Bundy. It is further ordered that on such scheduled date that you be put to death by a current of electricity, sufficient to cause your immediate death, and such current of electricity shall continue to pass through your body until you are dead.
I don’t believe in the death penalty, but otherwise that seems pretty on point. Then Cowart went on:
Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I’ve experienced in this courtroom.
(Wow, um, okay, J-Cow, maybe time to wrap it u—)
You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don’t feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself.
To recap:
Women: Just livin’ life, going to college, having brown hair, swimming, helping the injured.
Ted Bundy: Murders thirty women (at least) because his peepee scrunched from being a massive shitty failure.
The legal system: BUNDY YOU ARE A GREAT MAN AND A GREAT LAWYER AND COULD BE OUR GREATEST PRESIDENT IF I’M BEING HONEST BUT UNFORTCH I GOTTA SENTENCE YOU TO DEATH ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE MURDER AND WHATNOT SORRY BUDDY DANG I WISH I COULD HIRE YOU AS MY SON AND HECK YOU SHOULD BE DOING MY JOB, PARTNER! PS U MY HERO.
I wonder how many of the women Bundy murdered would have made good lawyers. I wonder how many female and minority lawyers Judge Cowart mentored in his lifetime.
This anecdote is often held up as evidence of Bundy’s charisma—even the judge sentencing him to death was seduced by that smirk, that finger wave. But it is the most blatant, overwhelming evidence we have for the opposite. Men don’t need charisma to succeed. It doesn’t matter if men are likable, because men are people who do things, who don’t have to ask first, whose potential has value even after it is squandered.
On the other hand, women.
Is there such a thing as a likable woman? Can you think of one?
And if she exists, could she be anything but the ultimate manifestation of everything we hate about the water we swim in, everything we’re forced to be? Likability in a sexist, racist culture is not objective—it’s compulsory femininity, the gender binary, invisible labor, whiteness, smallness, sweetness. It’s letting them do it.
If someone is universally likable, I don’t trust that person. That’s the opposite of politics. I don’t want a candidate that the alt-right likes. I don’t want to have anything in common with George Zimmerman. A person’s standard of likability is a reflection of his beliefs, and unfortunately, in this country, a whole lot of people believe that Donald Trump is not a racist shart in an eight-foot tie who is unqualified for literally every job except “lie down.”
So no, excuse me, we will not play likability anymore. It’s an endless runner—a game with no progress and no finish line—that women are expected to chase, that keeps us from doing the real work, accruing the real power. Chasing likability has been one of women’s biggest setbacks, by design. I don’t know that rejecting likability will get us anywhere, but I know that embracing it has gotten us nowhere.
“Witch” is something we call a woman who demands the benefit of the doubt, who speaks the truth, who punctures the con, who kills your joy if your joy is killing. A witch has power and power in women isn’t likable, it’s ugly, cartoonish. But to not assert our power—even if we fail—is to let them do it. This new truth telling, this witchcraft of ours, by definition cannot be likable. We cannot pander or wait for consensus; the world is too big and complicated and rigged. We are saying the things that people don’t like, t
he only truly “edgy” things; that is the point.
Someone will always pop up to say, “You would be more effective if you were nicer.” “You would have a more receptive audience if you adjusted your tone.” “You catch more flies with honey.” Well, I don’t want flies. The most likable woman in the world is crawling with fucking flies.
How to Be a Girl
It’s become a national sport to stereotype millennials1—we’re lazy, we’re entitled, instead of saving for retirement we’re forever getting trampled by bison while trying to take selfies—because, sure, when you’ve set the world on complete fucking fire, why not spend your twilight years roasting your own grandchildren over the smoldering debris of their dreams?
But people always miss the number one most typical classic one weird trick about millennials, which is that older millennials like me, people who were born during Ronald Reagan’s first term, have a singular great, passionate love above all else. Greater than avocado toast, greater than the DuckTales theme, greater than gender-swapped Game of Thrones characters reimagined as Disney princesses, greater than never owning property, greater than selling our plasma so we can make our student loan payments, greater even than being called a special snowflake for asking not to be raped by future Supreme Court justices.
Millennials. LOVE. Board game–based Cold War murder mystery sex farces chockablock with J. Edgar Hoover references. Bing bang bong! If you don’t know that, then you don’t know millennials, sweetie!
My best friend and I watched the movie Clue on VHS probably twice a week, every week, between 1987 and 1990, when I moved from Thousand Oaks to Seattle to teach a new city’s children to accuse their grandmothers of being in flagrante delicto. Even then I knew that my love was weird. Clue did not feel like a kids’ movie, and I did not even really like the board game Clue that much! It’s so boring!
