I was praised by my peers for the final result but was so jaded by the process that I couldn’t tell if I had actually done anything for the greater good. And while the story ended up trafficking fairly well, several readers’ comments indicated they had picked up on what I had: that even though the content claimed to be promoting alternative beauty, it wasn’t really doing all that much to further the cause; the women featured didn’t actually deviate all too strongly from the norm. A few readers told me off-line that while they appreciated the concept, it felt like an obvious, cheap “get,” part of a larger plot to take advantage of how desperate women are to see themselves reflected in the media they consume and use it as a business growth strategy. That was, of course, my worst nightmare. I’d been so passionate about improving representation, and the fact that it was seen as anything other than earnest was a painful but important lesson: there are always ways to do better.
This story would have been easy to cast a few years later, thanks to the rise of alternative influencers on Instagram: beautiful teens with hundreds of thousands of followers started posting images of their cystic acne, or unibrow, or back rolls, with long captions about how scary and vulnerable it was to share those parts of themselves, inspiring others to do the same. But I’m not sure a roundup of them would make for appropriate content. If the goal is to embrace your uniqueness, putting people into categories—normatively attractive or, well, not—feels at odds.
But this was 2013, 2014. All kinds of brands were starting to adopt a similar tactic at the same time. Inclusivity and diversity became an aesthetic, and across the industry, people noticed that the top performing stories all dealt with some sort of outrage: on the heels of a social justice callout culture that originated on Tumblr, hot takes reigned supreme. Thanks to comment sections, readers were holding digital properties to a certain set of values that they’d never been accountable for before, and publishers who could fulfill those demands seemed to fare the best. It turned into a race to be the first to point out the problematic nature of a movie, show, commercial, ad campaign—you name it. It was equal parts thrilling and stressful: sometimes it felt like the more woke we were, the more people picked us apart, which was ultimately good—it meant we were constantly checking ourselves.
Behind the scenes, though, very few companies had staffs that reflected the values they pushed. At major magazines in the mainstream media, there was a definite shift to more diverse content, but the writers and editors remained, for the most part, white, cis, straight, and so, so thin. (Not to mention the fact that the owners of women’s media companies were usually men.)
In hindsight, it was a major problem indicative of something much larger that the most visible body-positive, diverse content was largely being touted by a group of people who weren’t really any of those things. It’s as if they were saying, “It’s okay for you, the reader, to be any size, to do whatever you want with your body hair, to style yourself in a way that makes you feel good; but we must maintain our standards.”
The implication, overall, is that diversity was just another trend, with media executives choosing to wait it out.
Of course, in reality, this disconnect was largely due to the fact that progressive editorial teams had little to no say in things like hiring, and most of them were doing the best they could with limited resources. And, culturally, we’re all products of the values of the generation that came before us, trying to function and succeed in a society that has, up until now, basically told women that we’re not good enough. Not thin enough, not cute enough. It’s hard to shake that messaging; when you grow up surrounded by it, it becomes part of your internal landscape.
The best that most of us can do is change the messaging for the next generation. We might never stop feeling as though if we just lost that ten pounds, or had that scar removed, or got rid of our gray hair / wrinkles / sun spots, we’d be happier, but maybe if we start leaving the discourse of physical flaws out of content entirely, it’ll die when we do.
2 Staying Out
I’d felt an attraction to other girls for as long as I could remember, but up until I was a teenager I thought that everyone did. At fifteen, I made out with my best friend on a dare, and she pulled away with a perfunctory “ew,” wiping her mouth, and it felt like my heart was being run over by a Mack truck.
She was definitely the coolest person in the entire world, and she’d picked me to be her best friend. She was punk before anyone else we knew, dying her curly black hair every color of the rainbow, arranging safety pins and aggressively political patches throughout all of her belongings. We had sleepovers almost every weekend. We’d get intentionally stuck in thunderstorms in the mall parking lot and then spend hours aimlessly walking through the aisles of Tower Records, documenting every moment on disposable cameras, however mundane, because everything—to me—felt like magic.
I had always flirted and been affectionate not just with her but all my friends, and they’d started to give me suspicious looks if I took it too far. At crew practice, a popular girl whispered in my ear that she wanted to hook up with me, and I was so convinced it was a trap that it made me cry. Someone I’d been friends with started an email chain saying, in lewd teenager terms, that I acted like I wanted to have a dick.
At sixteen, I started “dating” a close friend from childhood who lived four hours away (my family had moved from Rhode Island to New York when I was eleven, and we’d stayed in touch). He was sweet, shy, and artistic. We’d spend hours on the phone or chatting on AIM throughout middle school, and once we were teenagers, the feelings turned to something more. We started taking the train to see each other every couple of months. I genuinely liked him a lot, and hanging out every few weeks felt like just the right amount of commitment. Things got physical, and eventually we lost our virginities to each other, which was a tender moment but ultimately very anticlimactic for me, literally and emotionally. Being sexually active was confusing: I liked the attention and the affection, but it felt so… empty. Within a few months, I tumbled into a deep depression so overwhelming that I accidentally stopped speaking to him. He broke up with me over the landline apologetically, saying he assumed it was what I wanted based on my behavior. I cried a lot, but not really for the relationship. There was something bigger that I didn’t have words for. I remember that I kept thinking, on repeat, What the fuck is wrong with me?
After that I always had boys around, most of whom I think I did like, but I would become repulsed by them as soon as they actually became my boyfriend, which made my peers think I was kind of slutty—a safe, convenient reputation considering what was really going on with me. If they thought I was a slut, they wouldn’t think I was something else.
The public school I went to was wildly homophobic. Maybe it was a reflection of the times, but the few out gay kids—and the closeted ones, for that matter—were mercilessly bullied. I’d find out years later that a group of kids a few grades above me had a running bet about whether or not I was gay, which was undoubtedly the worst thing you could be, aside from unattractive. There was no such thing as learning about queer people and their contributions to society in a curriculum. So it’s no wonder that the word “lesbian” didn’t fully materialize for me, mostly because there were no other lesbians around me to look up to, in real life or in the media I consumed. I was well aware that I had major, intensely physical crushes on girls—I even talked about it with my older sister Miriam—but it felt totally separate from who I was, a subtext that I didn’t realize informed the plot. I thought maybe I was just bad at sex. Everyone else seemed to really like it.
By senior prom, there was basically no one left for me to date or even make out with, and I went alone. I remember sitting in the kitchen in my shiny satin pink dress while my parents took pictures of my twin sister, Julia, and her boyfriend in the front hallway, refusing to join them so that my solitude wouldn’t be documented.
Another girl without a date in my group of friends was Kat, who had grown up a
round the corner from me. We’d formed a punk band in seventh grade and since then she had always been a solid presence in my life, often coming over just to sit on my floor and quietly play guitar. Kat was always butch, but we didn’t talk about it until we were in our twenties. After prom, in the house we’d all rented together for the weekend, while everyone else was off having sex, she and I sat on the porch and she taught me how to smoke pot out of a three-foot bong. We were stoned when the sun came up, and I’m pretty sure I ate a whole bag of chips.
High school had been hard for me for a lot of different reasons. I was never what you might call an enthusiastic student. I wanted to paint and write and play my guitar and listen to music. Anything else felt, truly, like a waste of time. I didn’t understand why I had to do homework when I had already sat in class all day. I felt both smarter than everyone and like the dumbest person in the room, hopelessly failing chemistry and math tests but always impressing my English and history teachers. Eventually I realized that if I did absolutely zero studying, I could still get by in honors classes with A minuses and Bs, so I stopped trying, coasting along with medium success and often going to great lengths to hide my grades from my parents. Getting accepted into my first-choice college, NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, was probably thanks to my surprisingly high test scores and out-of-the-box extracurriculars, not my underwhelming academic accomplishments.
The individualized educational route was not an accident; by then I knew my learning style could best be defined as fueled by passion—I simply couldn’t wrap my head around things that felt irrelevant, like calculus. I didn’t feel like failing any more math or science classes, so instead I chose the option where I never had to take them again. I was desperate for intellectual freedom, which I got, but that meant there were no guidelines. In the absence of a curriculum, I spent my freshman year floundering. I took classes simply because they sounded cool, on topics like ethnomusicology and semantics, without any real plan. Every time someone asked me what I’d mold my major into, I made up a different answer. I was learning a lot, to be sure, but about so many different things at once that it felt nearly impossible to imagine a career. I figured maybe I’d be a professor, if anything.
My social life was floundering, too. As much as I’d longed for independence, as it turned out, I was also terrified of new people. For the first month of college I clung to my high school friends who were also at NYU (a popular choice for Long Islanders), and Miriam, who had moved to Manhattan after her own undergraduate experience. I didn’t want to go home, though. Even though my parents were only an hour away, it was hard to reconcile my newfound freedom with the boundaries of my childhood home, and being there made me moody and anxious. I think I didn’t want to be reminded that at eighteen, I was still very much a kid.
One night I came home to find a girl I hadn’t seen before sitting outside of my dorm room, eating cereal from the box. She had wild curly red ringlets framing a sweet, freckled face. Next to her, a little too close, was a stony-looking boy wearing a drug rug who she clearly had no interest in talking to. I introduced myself and we discovered we had similar names, though she went by Gabby, and we exchanged numbers on our flip phones, making a plan to hang out the next day. We quickly became best, best, BEST friends, spending all of our time together, eschewing any sort of social networking imposed by the school in order to have NYC adventures on our own. Being friends with Gabby was the easiest thing I’d ever done. We were so similar it felt like hanging out with an additional sister. She taught me how to smoke pot from a bowl (I never wanted to see a three-foot bong again), often lighting the weed for me because I was scared of getting burned. Eventually we each made a few separate acquaintances, but generally we were a package deal.
I was also clinging tightly to heterosexuality, because I had a very specific idea of what my life should look like in college, and it involved a boyfriend. There was no real reasoning behind that idea other than I was convinced it was what I should do. I was hooking up with guys constantly, waiting for it to feel like something, but instead I just felt more and more empty. I was drinking a lot, too, and many of those encounters I barely remembered. I became increasingly out of control, a rapid downward spiral of booze and strange boys. My friendship with Gabby and the proximity of my sister were my lifelines. We kept track of each other.
At the end of our freshman year I decided to stay in the city for the summer. I was acting like a feral cat; going home to Long Island after two semesters of total freedom was unimaginable. Plus, I was busy: I’d gotten an internship at an indie record label in Williamsburg and a night gig working the door at a music venue in Alphabet City. The internship, like most, was unpaid. But at night, the aging, mullet-haired venue manager was often so coked out that he’d toss several stacks of twenties at me, laughing and saying, “How much am I supposed to pay you? Whatever, here!” I’d get home at three a.m. and show up puffy and greasy to the office at nine the next morning, where my intern supervisor—who had hooked me up with the venue gig—would tease, “You’re the hardest-working teenager in the music industry.”
I moved to the NYU summer dorms a few blocks east, into a suite with three bedrooms and six girls total. My new roommate was a psychology major who blushed when she laughed, named Lucy. She had short, wheat-blonde hair; huge, doleful pale-blue eyes; and an oversize labret piercing. She was very feminine but wore no makeup, so she had kind of an earthy vibe. She was shy and spoke softly with a subtle Tennessee twang. She was, frankly, the first out lesbian I’d ever gotten to know. After a few days of intense, manic friendship, during which we ate dumplings and watched Buffy on my laptop, I nervously told her I thought maybe I was bi.
Lucy replied with an eye roll and a sigh. She said, “Straight girls always say that to lesbians,” shutting down the conversation before it even started.
Sometimes I’d catch her smiling at me across our small kitchen table while we smoked pot out of a hookah and ate takeout with our other roommates, everyone in tank tops and cutoff shorts, barefoot and high and sweating, the air thick with our teenage summer smells. One night, a couple of weeks after I’d moved in, she texted me to come meet her at a nearby party because she was too drunk to walk home alone. I picked her up around two a.m., and we held hands on the way back to the dorm. I was wearing a short black dress, combat boots, and oversize black plastic glasses with no lenses. It was drizzling lightly. When we got back, I turned the lights out, and we got into our separate beds. A few minutes later she wordlessly got into mine. My heart was pounding so hard I thought maybe she could hear it. I wasn’t sure if she was just making an alcohol-induced decision, and I certainly didn’t want to cross any boundaries, so I lay as still as possible. Eventually, she kissed me.
Time slowed down and then it sped up. Within a matter of days, I was telling everyone I knew that I had a girlfriend. It all happened so quickly, the previous two semesters of drunken hookups immediately fading into the background, with my new gay life and all of its possibilities shimmering all around me.
I had just turned nineteen and for the first time was catching a glimpse of what it might feel like to live on my own terms. Gabby was one of the first people I told. I called her from a bench in Washington Square Park on a warm afternoon toward the end of May, and I remember her saying, “I’m so jealous! I want to like a girl, too!” I knew it wasn’t just about liking one girl, though. There was an ancient yearning just waiting to break free. I think that if I had met a woman I was attracted to who liked me back any sooner, I would have come out then; it really was just a matter of my feelings being validated by someone else.
I immediately cut off all my hair.
Coming out felt like waking up from a bad dream. I was thrilled to finally have a reason why I’d spent most of my life lonely and unhappy. As a lesbian, I was no longer doomed to always be an outsider. There were people who I was attracted to who would also be attracted to me.
It felt like the best news of my life—there
was nothing wrong with me; I was just super fucking gay, and there were others out there like me. But when I told my parents, they were shocked. Turns out all the work I’d done to bury my true self—my fixation on having a boyfriend, for starters—was very convincing. They questioned my political motivation, asking me if it was because I hated men. They expressed concern at what seemed to be a choice that would make my life harder. They were worried about me, which I now know came from a place of love, but all I could see at the time was how incredibly painful it was to be met with disbelief when I was, for the first time in my whole life, actually sure of something.
My highs and lows became extreme: euphoria with my new girlfriend in our East Village dorm room, and phone calls with my parents during which we’d all sob. I worried about not being lovable, and I felt I needed to be perfect in order to keep the attention of another woman. I was so used to unrequited feelings that I couldn’t quite believe she was attracted to me, and I was determined to make myself into the ideal person. But what was an “ideal” lesbian, really? The only lesbians on television were so impossibly thin and chic. Desperate for friends who would fully understand what I was going through, I showed up to an event put on by the university’s LGBTQ organization but left in tears; absolutely no one talked to me. They didn’t even make eye contact. They also seemed to all already know one another, and stood in clusters, their tattoos and undercuts and piercings standing out in stark contrast to my boring brown pixie cut. Did I need to be more like them? What was I supposed to look like? How was I supposed to act? I’d never felt so uncool in my life.
The stress of coming out at nineteen in 2008 was a convenient excuse to turn down solids for long enough to achieve the sort of androgynously emaciated silhouette that all the dykes were going for in the aughts, special thanks to The L Word. I regularly had to buy smaller and smaller pants. I had no other reference for how to be attractive. I remember Lucy saying, “You’re disappearing,” while touching my ribs, her eyebrows furrowed with worry. But it felt like a compliment: I wanted to disappear, though I was unable to separate the metaphor from the reality of it.
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 2
