Trainwreck

by Sady Doyle

  And even if it doesn’t: Who cares? Ugly as these relationships may have been, human relationships, or the need to be loved, can look (and feel) a whole lot worse than this.

  There are relationships that are, yes, crazy: co-dependent, or abusive, or just plain toxic. But the cult of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does very little to keep these relationships from happening, let alone to educate people about how they work.

  Think of all the times high-profile rape or abuse cases are framed as the acts of “vindictive” women, looking for revenge or a financial pay-off from the men who’ve dumped them; think of the Julian Assange rape case, during which Naomi Wolf accused the two women who’d pressed charges of using the “dating police” to punish Assange for not becoming their boyfriend. Think about Anita Hill, reporting that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, and the infamous line of questioning pursued by Senator Howell Heflin: “Are you a scorned woman?” he asked. And: “Do you have a martyr complex?” Meanwhile, lawyer John Doggett testified that Hill was delusional, afflicted by “erotomania”; his evidence was a possibly fabricated story about how she had once accused him of “leading her on” after he canceled a date.

  All of this falls under the heading of what lawyers call the “nuts and sluts” defense. When women report men’s sexual misconduct, the standard tactic of a defense attorney is to discredit those women by painting them as either sexually promiscuous, afflicted by an excess of desire, or “unstable” and vindictive, driven to hurt men because they can’t control their own emotions. Sexual overabundance or emotional overabundance: Either one renders you less than a victim in the eyes of a jury.

  When we live in a climate of distrusting women’s voices, of viewing women as primarily obliged to service the relationship demands of men, their pain—pain that goes beyond hurt feelings or loneliness, pain that comes from actual abuse—is always suspect. We can blame them for not being good, not making their male partners happy. We can say, not that abuse has made them act angrily or strangely, but that they were abused because they were angry or strange. And this is true even when the abuse in question is incontrovertible and well documented.

  Not only do we make trainwrecks out of abuse victims, abuse has added to the ignominy of many of the most famous cases. Think of Whitney Houston, found bloodied at the site of a domestic-violence call. Think of Amy Winehouse, seen running into the street and pleading for help from passing cars, with a bruise in the shape of a man’s hand on her throat.

  Winehouse was open about the fact that she would die for Blake Fielder-Civil, the husband who introduced her to crack and heroin, and from whom she fled on the night in question. (When questioned, she covered for him, claiming that she was misbehaving and he “saved her life.”) At one point, a reporter who’d wandered into her house at 4:00 a.m. recorded Winehouse telling a friend that, if she’d ever really been in love, “you’d be dead because you weren’t together.” Fielder-Civil was in prison for charges related to an armed robbery by that time, and Winehouse was in fact a few years away from death. But that didn’t stop anyone from turning her shout-outs to “my Blake, incarcerated” into a running joke.

  Similarly, when Rihanna was beaten by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown in 2009, the fact of the abuse, and its severity, were factually established—photos of her bloodied face were leaked to the press. But, almost overnight, urban legends about what Rihanna had done to “provoke” Brown sprang up on the Internet. She had given him an STD! She had thrown his car keys through a window! A “Rihanna Deserved It” T-shirt was sold on CafePress. And in one survey of two hundred teenagers, 46 percent blamed Rihanna for the assault. The line of logic speaks for itself. Here’s a sample, from Yahoo! Answers:

  Im a women myself and I never want to get beat by a man, but I know if I ever do he’s going to be beating me for a good damn reason … suppose Rihanna was just going crazy and was hitting him, Im sure he could have shaked her or something but still, I know as a women sometimes we can get a little crazy with emotion[.]

  Yet, when Rihanna reconciled with Brown—“I decided it was more important for me to be happy … even if it’s a mistake, it’s my mistake,” she said at the time—she was hated for that, too, with an onslaught of blog posts labeling her a “bad role model” and a traitor to women everywhere. “Gone [are] the days where women and everyone around the globe praised her for leaving the destructive and violent relationship [she] had been in with Brown,” celebrity blog Tell Tales claimed, ignoring the fact that “everyone around the globe” absolutely had not done that. “Today, Rihanna is letting down her fans and friends by accepting the R&B artist back in her life.” HollywoodLife accused her of “telling young people everywhere that domestic abuse is healthy” and sending a “toxic message”; they quoted a self-help author who claimed that “She’s setting a terrible example because we know there is a high amount of abuse in teenage and adolescent relationships. They are going to follow her lead.”

  Yes, dating Chris Brown was a bad idea. But this is strikingly unfair. Rihanna was called crazy for leaving Chris Brown, and called crazy for staying with him; there was no way out of the condemnation, no matter which route she took, and the actual abusive man in question was let off the hook for his choices in both scenarios. Rather than Chris Brown having a responsibility not to abuse women, it was always Rihanna’s responsibility not to be abused—and, no matter what she did, she was always blamed for any abuse that did or could happen.

  The strange thing is, relationships like hers don’t go against the script about the woman who only exists to be related to, who disappears the moment a man isn’t interested: They’re a literal and faithful read. The romantic trope of the woman who only cares about her boyfriend and the horror-movie trope of the woman who only cares about her ex-boyfriend are more or less the same woman; she becomes wonderful or terrible depending on how the man in question feels about her. But that same script doesn’t give a woman any excuses for walking away. She’s supposed to stay until he’s done with her and die (or at least commit to invisibility) when he leaves. And it turns out that, when she does just that, she’s also turned into a punch line.

  Simply because we’ve been taught to value men’s voices over and above women’s, our natural response to a woman’s claims of violence is to see her as delusional (she can’t perceive the real story) or unstable (she can’t handle the real story) or just plain frightening (she knows the real story, but she’s out to get him). Which means that a tremendous number of female stories—perhaps the most urgent and enlightening ones, the stories we most need to hear—have been shut down or silenced. Or it means that women have silenced themselves, believing that if they ever truly admitted what they were going through, they would sound crazy.

  She did come out eventually, Charlotte. She let people know that she was a woman. She even let people know which woman she was; attended parties (Thackeray hosted a few), became a part of the literary scene. She waited until her sisters Anne and Emily had died, and eventually wrote a preface, letting people know their names, and how much she had loved them, and the conditions of their lives.

  “We did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice,” wrote the woman who’d once been told that literature could never be a woman’s profession. “We had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”

  It was then, nearly ten years into her career, that Charlotte Brontë published her final novel, Villette. It was the account of a young woman named Lucy—not particularly pretty, not particularly wealthy, socially awkward—who is forced to make her way by teaching at a girls’ school in a French-speaking country much like Belgium. She hates it there. She’s lonely, isolated, so desperate that she goes into a Catholic church and makes confession,
a sin in piety she cannot forgive herself. But, at this school, she meets a professor—a short, ugly, angry man; a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament—and they fall in love. Notwithstanding the interference of the vile headmistress, an evil woman who wants the professor all to herself, he loves her back, wholeheartedly, and they are engaged to be wed. Nevertheless, they are separated, when he must go across the sea. And yet, Brontë writes, the separation of this young woman and her adored professor does have one consolation:

  By every vessel he wrote; he wrote as he gave and he loved, in full-handed, full-hearted plenitude. He wrote because he liked to write; he did not abridge, because he liked not to abridge. He sat down, he took pen and paper, because he loved Lucy and had much to say to her; because he was faithful and thoughtful, tender and true.

  Well: Constantin didn’t write. He didn’t seem to give or love much, either. He was neither faithful nor thoughtful, not tender and not true. And he brought Charlotte Brontë to her knees.

  But when she finally gave up on the hope that he might write to her, something else began. Something far more important. We all know how Jane Eyre ends: Reader, I married him, etc. But what most people miss is the fact that the most important word of that sentence is not “married.” The real payoff comes far earlier. It feels so natural that most people miss it entirely. They don’t realize that it was the most impossible part of the sentence to imagine, or to achieve. So consider the triumph—the sheer, improbable triumph—in that one word. In the fact that, after everything that was torn up, tossed in the garbage, frozen out, laughed at, lectured against, she still got you. Look past him, married, look past I. Look to yourself: Reader.

  3

  MADNESS

  When I was twelve years old, I concocted a plan to win over the cool kids at my school by having the coolest, funniest Halloween costume at their party. Other girls were going as witches, or kitty cats. Boys would be zombies—a little fake blood, it was easy. Not me. I wanted to get creative with my monster.

  I wanted to be Courtney Love.

  Courtney was the bête noire of our suburban middle school clique. We all loved her husband—Kurt, poor Kurt, dead Kurt, Kurt who had struggled. We all understood that Nirvana was the greatest band that had ever existed. I have a distinct memory of sitting in a boy’s bedroom, staring at Kurt’s three-foot-tall head on a poster (MTV Unplugged, the one where he looked really upset to be there) and hearing the boy murmur, “It’s so weird that we got to be alive for him, you know?” Kurt was to be our Christ: We had trod the earth with him, and dipped our hands in his wounds, and would forever more witness his true gospel, untainted by the blasphemies of posers.

  But, before you could truly accept Kurt into your heart, you had to get that Courtney Love was Satan. She’d married him to get famous. She’d stolen his songs. She made fun of his suicide note; in fact, some people said, she probably killed him. She was rude, she was mean, she was loud, she said “feminist.” She punched people, and at concerts, you could always see her underpants. Sometimes even (we whispered, darkly and with fear) her boobs.

  So I got a pink dress and snipped at it with scissors until it was miniskirt length. I put on a pair of boots—I didn’t have Doc Martens, but old, scuffed-up winter boots worked—and a blond wig, and I fucked up its hair. I put on makeup: too much of it, and smeared to look wrong. My mother evaluated me to see if the overall look was too provocative (“you don’t actually want to be like this woman, do you?” “Mom, nobody wants that, that’s the point”) and I was out the door.

  And then, when I was safely out of my mother’s sight, I whipped out my pièce de résistance. I took a safety pin, and scraped it down my arms, to give myself track marks. I had no idea what “track marks” were, really: how they got there, what they said about your health, why they were shameful. But I knew Courtney Love had them. And I knew that, because Courtney Love had them, they were funny.

  “When Kurt died, I just fell into this endless spiral,” Courtney Love told addiction and recovery website The Fix in 2012. “I was doing drugs from the moment I woke up till the time I went to bed.” Her album came out four days after he died. Her bassist overdosed a few months later. She hid in her house—“there were people outside her house every day. People in the trees, people throwing microphones in the yard,” a friend said later—and in her first concert, she went through the set sobbing, changing lyrics so that they alluded to her own impending death, and collapsed on stage.

  So that was my monster costume. Dressed as a grieving mother whose husband had blown his head off, giving myself track marks to sell the gag. It was cool. It was funny. I was twelve years old.

  It’s easy to say that you shouldn’t despise women for having sex, or getting naked. Nearly everyone has sex, or at least human genitalia that might show up in a photograph. It’s also easy to say that you shouldn’t punish women for being sad or angry about a failed or abusive relationship, since loss is one of those things that tends to make most humans feel sad. These are crimes that even “nice girls” can commit, albeit inadvertently. It’s not hard to rally sympathy to their cause.

  But the full trainwreck treatment doesn’t begin until you’ve passed beyond the preliminaries. Check off one or two boxes on the list, and you might come off fine, if slightly worse for wear. The women we truly despise don’t just make common mistakes. They aren’t flawed in everyday ways; they aren’t just whiny, or clingy, or slutty, or loud. These are the true spectacles, the ones we remember, not in incidents, but in images: Amy Winehouse, walking down a London street without her shirt or her shoes. Lindsay Lohan, posing with a butcher knife between her teeth. Amanda Bynes and her tattered Halloween wig, Sinead O’Connor ripping a photo of the Pope in half, Britney hammering at a car with an umbrella. They’re where sexual overabundance and emotional overabundance collide and merge into something that is both, and neither, and worse than either. They are addicted, delusional, suicidal, violent; they are mad.

  This is a story about images. So flip the pages backward, for the moment—to before gossip blogs, before tabloids, before photography, even—to one painting, done in 1876. It depicts the legendary Paris hospital of La Salpêtrière.

  La Salpêtrière was an institution in the heart of Paris that housed women who had gone wrong. It held thousands. Though it was originally intended to be a warehouse for the homeless, in time, more and more women found their way in: They drank too much, or had sexually transmitted diseases. They were developmentally disabled, or epileptic. They were old. They were prostitutes. They saw things, or heard voices, or refused to eat. The crimes were many, in La Salpêtrière, but the punishment was always the same: Here, in what Georges-Didi Huberman called “the city of incurable women,” you were chained to the walls and left to die.

  Getting from La Salpêtrière to TMZ is a quick trip: We can do it in three doctors and two paintings. Here is Pinel, our first doctor, and the hero of Painting Number One: Tony Robert-Fleury’s Pinel Liberating the Madwomen of La Salpêtrière. Pinel has bold new ideas about how to run La Salpêtrière. He thinks the chains are a bad idea, for one thing. He thinks these women may be basically rational creatures afflicted by deformations in their thought processes—illnesses of the mind, if you will—that a doctor could resolve by speaking with them.

  So Pinel comes to take the chains off the madwomen. Yet the funny thing about Pinel, in Fleury’s painting, is that he’s hardly visible. You have to look to spot him: a sober, respectable, middle-aged man in a nice suit, so dark he nearly fades into the background. What this image concerns, chiefly, is what he’s “liberating”: a landscape of writhing, white, exposed female flesh.

  One girl, her flimsy white gown slipping down her shoulder to show her cleavage, smiles hazily as men grip her by the arms. An angry-looking woman in a low-cut shirt lunges at the viewer from her knees, mouth agape. Another woman lies on the ground, back arched, gasping. She’s torn her gown away to expose one naked breast.

>   Oh, sure, there are a few old hags around the edges. Sure, we’re meant to focus on what the doctor did. But we all know what we’re here to see. These girls—these pretty girls, these crazy girls, unable to control themselves, unable to even keep their clothes on—my, oh, my, how awful. My, oh, my, how shameful.

  My, oh, my. Isn’t it strange, these crazy girls. You just can’t look away.

  Fleury’s choice to turn a human-rights violation into a soft-porn showcase might be more shocking, were it not for the fact that it was an approved psychiatric practice at the time.

  Enter Doctor Number Two.

  Pinel Liberating the Madwomen hung in the lecture hall of Jean-Martin Charcot, the neurologist who gave La Salpêtrière its other great historical distinction: as the cradle of “hysteria.” The word had been around for quite some time—it was what happened when a woman’s uterus got out of place and made her act badly, or when she was sexually frustrated, or when she was too promiscuous; whatever it was, doctors theorized that up to 75 percent of women were afflicted—but Charcot was the first to codify it as a disease of the mind. He even theorized that some men could have it, though it was rare.