Trainwreck

by Sady Doyle

  Where Hillary was presumed to be cold and emotionless, Monica was all emotion, a throbbing mess of tears and needs. Where Hillary was seen as purely political, happy to accept a loveless marriage if it helped her make national policy, Monica returned to “love,” over and over again, as her justification, even when it made her seem clueless about the political context: In her interview with Barbara Walters, given in March 1999, while Clinton was facing impeachment, Monica called him her “soulmate.” Where Hillary was perceived as being sexless, Monica was all sex, a “blow-job queen” whose proclivities and underwear preferences were smeared all over every newspaper, magazine, and late-night talk-show monologue in the nation. And where Hillary was presumed to be calculating, all brain and no heart, Monica could seem, at times, crushingly naive—not stupid, precisely, but not tremendously rational, either, led by her heart to the exclusion of even basic common sense. Long after the relationship ended, when he’d been avoiding her for months, and just after a screaming fight in which she threatened to tell her parents about the affair and he said he wished he’d never gotten involved with her, Bill Clinton made a joke about maybe being single one day. She chose to interpret all this as a sign that he wanted to leave his wife for her: “I just knew he was in love with me,” she said.

  These women had nothing in common. Well, one thing: They were both blamed for Bill Clinton’s cheating. In her 2014 Vanity Fair essay about how the scandal had ruined her life, Monica made sure to remind her readers of an Observer round-table (NEW YORK SUPERGALS LOVE THAT NAUGHTY PREZ) in which various women writers discussed the affair. She mentioned her pain at hearing herself described as “not pretty” and “not brilliant” (“My first job out of college was at the White House,” she noted), and her horror when it was suggested that she could “rent out her mouth.” What Lewinsky did not mention was what those same women said about Hillary Clinton.

  She was unattractive, first of all. “Isn’t it interesting that Bill doesn’t go for women that look like Hillary?” Francine Prose noted. Patricia Marx tut-tutted the fact that “Hillary Clinton changed her hairstyle one million times, and the one way she didn’t try was the one way that works.” All were agreed that Hillary was probably not loving or vulnerable enough to be truly hurt by the affair: “I think [Hillary] would actually be more effective if she showed a little weakness,” Katie Roiphe said. “There’s something a little steely, and people are suspicious because she seems very political.” As always, Hillary was all brain and ambition, without bodily desire or human emotion: Erica Jong advanced the idea that “she has so much power over his mind that she almost doesn’t care who has power temporarily over his cock.”

  Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, predictably, disliked each other. Hillary privately told her friend Diane Blair that Monica was a “narcissistic Loony-Toon,” which became public when Blair’s papers were published after her death. A few months later, Monica objected to the fact that “Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress.” In other words, Hillary called Monica crazy and Monica called Hillary calculating, each woman throwing the other’s existing media narrative back into her face. Yet they were also mirror images of each other. They were the Betty and Veronica of sexism: The icy blonde and the overheated brunette, the prude and the slut, the shrewish wife and the trashy mistress, the sexless middle-aged woman and the trampy young one, the frigid, man-hating intellectual and the needy, man-hungry ditz.

  But neither woman was acceptable. Neither woman was deemed worthy of love, or even of being liked. While their media narratives were crafted to portray them as opposites in every respect, neither of the two models of womanhood they represented courted anything but scorn, disdain, or vilification. Trainwrecks are, often, photo negatives of acceptable femininity—the opposite of what a woman is meant to be—but, when you turned Hillary inside out, you got Monica, and when you turned Monica the other way around, Hillary emerged. No matter which side of the coin you found your own face on, you were a wreck. There was no way to win the game; no “good” woman left to be.

  Well: There was, potentially, one good woman. But finding her would be nearly impossible. She would have to be young, to avoid the stigma of ’70s feminism and middle-aged unfuckability that had tarred Hillary. But she couldn’t be “young” in the way that Monica was, which had involved adventure and experimentation; her youth would have to be clear of youthful folly. She’d have to be hot, and comfortable with getting men hot—she couldn’t be cold or frigid, like Hillary—but she couldn’t actually have sex, as Monica had, because that would taint her with the stigma of sluttiness. The ideal woman would have to be innocent, in both the sexual and the legal sense of the word. She also couldn’t be a stuck-up, ambitious intellectual, like Hillary; but, unlike Monica, she’d have to be sensible and morally upright enough to never make any bad decisions. And she’d have to be conservative, to avoid the stigma and scandal of the Clinton administration; yet, for all that, she couldn’t be prudish or uncool about her conservatism, like actual Republicans, because she would have to avoid the backlash facing them, too.

  To save herself from the hatred that defined the public lives of Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the ideal woman would have to steer between them, like Scylla and Charybdis, navigating the currents without being swept toward either side: Virgin and pin-up, wide-eyed innocent and worldly temptress, icon of cool and conservative Christian role model, she would always have to be both and neither, everything and nothing, and she would have to be able to do all of this when she was still very, very young.

  One month after March 1999, when Monica Lewinsky gave her Barbara Walters interview, Rolling Stone ran the first-ever magazine cover featuring Britney Spears.

  •

  Britney didn’t happen by accident. She was what we needed; the answer to a question no one wanted to admit asking. But then, all of the women discussed in this book emerged into the public eye, and became a central and charged topic of conversation, precisely because they embodied the anxieties of their time.

  Jane Eyre, for example, frightened people, not only because it was sexy, or because of the suspicion that it was written by a woman, but because the narrator was a governess; it shocked middle-class and wealthy readers with the uncomfortable awareness that servants, the non-persons they invited into their homes and interacted with all day, could also be sexually available women, capable of forming their own affections and ambitions. Valerie Solanas and Sylvia Plath were the uncomfortable spectres of feminism’s second wave: the crazy, man-slaughtering lesbian and the bitterly vengeful, bile-spilling housewife, given voice, and hence, giving reality to the idea that women might hit back. Billie Holiday was a black woman, a queer woman, a survivor, and an addict, thrown into a culture that was hospitable to none of those identities; Mary Wollstonecraft was a single mother in an era when single motherhood was a tragedy tantamount to death, and a French sympathizer at the moment when the French Revolution and democracy as a concept terrified all of Europe; Harriet Jacobs was, most obviously of all, a freed slave. Each woman was frightening, not just because of who she was, but because of what she was. Each woman had to walk through the world as the embodiment of an era’s fears.

  As the centuries move forward, the anxieties change with the terrain. Whitney Houston, one of the first black women to be treated like a mainstream “pop princess,” was a symbol for black women’s upward mobility; she was turned by reality TV and hostile media coverage into a woman that The O’Reilly Factor called “just another crackhead,” a loud, scary, down-market stereotype. You could even make a case for Hillary and Monica themselves as the scapegoats for second- and third-wave feminism, respectively: The second wave told women to work for equality and advance in the workplace, which Hillary did, and was hated for doing, and the third told women to embrace their sexuality and see femininity as a source of power, which Monica did, and was hated for doing.

  Britney was the most spectacular implosion
of all, the place where it all fell apart. She was the perfect girl, who fractured and shattered in agonizing slow motion, to show us that even female perfection—even nearly impossible perfection, the contradictory not-this-nor-that, both-this-and-that tightrope Britney was made to walk—was a fault line, a disaster waiting to happen. After two centuries of feminist progress and increasing female agency, the journey that started with Mary Wollstonecraft and seemed to proceed through to Hillary Clinton wound up with Britney: a reminder that no matter how rich, or important, or powerful she was, no matter how “good” or how beautiful she seemed, even the perfect girl would get drunk one day, or lose a boyfriend, or gain weight, or age, or get sad, or get sick. And when she did, we would be there. Ready and waiting to take her down.

  And, since the wrecks exist to embody our private monsters, to absorb and reflect women’s insecurities, it would seem to follow that the sheer fact of being women was also our most profound insecurity. Even if we got everything right, being female was a flaw that we could never quite correct or live down.

  There may never be a spectacle to rival Britney’s. Even contemporaries who actually died—Amy, Whitney, Anna Nicole Smith—seemed like dim echoes, unable to match her for sheer humiliation. And Britney, in the end, did not even die: She was buried alive. Put under her father’s conservatorship, she now lives under a form of legal control that is normally reserved for late-stage Alzheimer’s patients and people with severe developmental disabilities; she is no longer legally allowed to decide whether she gets married, or where she lives, or who her doctors will be, or how to spend her money. She can no longer legally sign a contract. She is not allowed to use her cell phone unless her father approves. It reads like a cruel joke: The “Queen of Teen,” the ideal American girl-woman, is now condemned to be a child in the eyes of the law for, potentially, the rest of her life.

  But, just as she was breaking down, something strange happened: The world began to love Britney Spears again. The endless, devouring need to see her fall apart and break down was replaced with something more like sisterhood, a desire to see her well, or happy, or free. Feminist writers began to attack and reject nasty or invasive press coverage, to protest the conservatorship that made her, in the words of Michelle Dean, “a prisoner”; in 2014, when Medium ran an article by Taffy Brodesser-Acker about her Las Vegas residency, Britney’s central place in gender politics was so assured that Brodesser-Acker could confidently call her “a feminist role model for single working mothers here and everywhere” without fear of being laughed out of town. Brodesser-Acker also quoted fans talking about the trainwreck years. Here was their assessment:

  “Oh, I loved it,” said a fan named Andrea. “She was just saying fuck you to the world over and over. This was who I knew she was. In the early 2000s, she was a phony. This was really her.”

  Meanwhile, mainstream pop-culture coverage stopped using words like “meltdown” and “white trash” and started calling Britney words like “icon,” and “living legend.” They referred to a woman in her early thirties as if she were the battle-scarred survivor of some ancient war, which—in a way—she was. Her suffering had purified her, allowed us to identify with her in a way that perfection had precluded. The ideal girl broke down, became a monster, and emerged on the other side as a real, flawed, and struggling woman, with plenty of reasons to say “fuck you” to the world. That woman, we didn’t have to see as a role model. That woman, we could simply love.

  And she wasn’t the only one. After the Lewinsky scandal died down, and Bill Clinton’s presidency ended, Hillary Clinton—the woman who spent most of the ’90s being reviled for being “too political,” too baldly interested in power—successfully ran for the Senate in New York.

  And she ran for president. And she became secretary of state. And she ran for president again. By 2015, when people wondered who Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential pick would be, they weren’t joking. They were also faced with the odd fact that Hillary Clinton—elitist! Ultra-feminist! Enemy of boners everywhere!—was, by a substantial margin, the “most admired woman anywhere in the world.” The one thing about her that reliably brought on the most vilification—a woman! Who was interested in politics! Why, she acted as if she could be president!—turned out to be the one thing she excelled at for the next several decades of her life.

  It’s not that people stopped hating Hillary Clinton, exactly. Plenty of people still hate her; people, particularly men, always have, and they probably always will. Since 2005 alone, conservative writer Ed Klein has published three straight books about how much he hates her, which are most famous for the theory that Hillary Clinton is so frigid that Chelsea Clinton had to be the product of marital rape. During her first Presidential run, left-wing anchorman Keith Olbermann publicly expressed a desire for “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out”; during her second, Nation editor Doug Henwood (author of such subtle and nuanced works as “Stop Hillary!”) posted a Photoshopped image of her eating a baby. She still has a remarkable ability to turn otherwise reasonable people into tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.

  But in all the fury, the conspiracy theorists and angry men seemed to miss one of the strangest facts about Hillary Clinton: Gravity works differently on her. You can trip her up or knock her over, but when Hillary falls, she falls up. Every baby-eating Photoshop, every public humiliation, every unflattering picture or crushing defeat or speculation as to her fuckability or “likability,” has been the prequel to Hillary Clinton making another unprecedented step forward, doing one more thing no one thought she (or, for that matter, women) would ever be able to do. It is too early to know how history will regard Hillary Clinton. But history will certainly regard her—probably with no small amount of confusion—as a woman who appeared in the age of the “ambition gap,” and who just threw a grappling hook over to the other side of the damn thing and swung across it like Tarzan.

  Monica Lewinsky, at first glance, seems to have emerged as the sole loser. She had neither Britney’s fame nor Hillary’s base of power from which to rebuild; she spent her adult life trying in vain to hit on some viable form of employment (handbag designing, weight-loss campaign spokeswomanship), earning her masters’ degree in social psychology, and being rejected from every job to which she applied. At forty, she is still trying to build a life from the wreckage of The Starr Report. But when she published the essay in Vanity Fair about her experience, denouncing the “culture of humiliation” that had done her in and driven her to the verge of suicide, young feminists were listening, and ready to back her up: Why had Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer for comparing Monica to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Why had the comments about her focused so often on her weight, on the blow jobs she’d given rather than the orgasms she’d had; why had calling her a “blow-job queen” or “Portly Pepperpot” ever been okay? Why had we all been so willing to buy the line of The Starr Report or the Clinton defenders, and see her as stupid, or a stalker, or a slut: Wasn’t it possible that the three S’s didn’t apply, that she had just been a twenty-something girl with a misguided crush on a notoriously charming man, operating out of pure, foolish, human feeling?

  Trainwrecks are myths, yes. They are our monsters: cultural monsters, who embody the tensions of our moment or our expectations of women, and deeply personal monsters, who embody the parts of ourselves we are most afraid of. But there is another thing to note about all this: We are all, each and every one of us, our own worst monsters. And we all yearn, despite this fact, to be loved.

  The trainwreck is the inverse of what a woman ought to be: She is demanding, sexually voracious, where women are meant to be merely sexy, and receptive to outside desire. She is emotional, needy, where women are meant to be likable and agreeable at all times. Where women are meant to care for others—where Britney was slammed for not caring enough about her children, and Hillary was slammed for not caring enough about Bill, and Monica was slammed for not caring enough about Hillary—the trainwreck is utterl
y vulnerable, sometimes incapable of keeping even herself going, desperately in need of care.

  But there is no one woman who is purely sexy, purely agreeable, purely caring; there is no one devoid of appetite, or sadness, or rage, or the need to be taken care of. There is no “ideal girl.” We tried to manufacture her, at one point, and she turned out to be the biggest wreck of all.

  There is an undeniable cruelty in our need for stories about wrecked women. We do sometimes seek them out for reasons of pure schadenfreude, or internalized misogyny. We can use them as projection screens for our own fears and failings, or look to them to confirm that we’re doing our own gender correctly. It’s understandable that we would: Women are punished, cruelly, for failing to be appropriately feminine, and there are dozens or hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Tuning into a reality-TV show where women punch each other while vying for the affections of some spray-tanned has-been, or looking at pictures of a celebrity stumbling drunkenly out of a car without her panties on, offers us a real if short-lived brand of comfort: It confirms that the standard for acceptable behavior is much lower than previously supposed, that if we haven’t punched anyone, or fucked Bret Michaels, or forgotten to wear pants today, we are at least doing better than someone else. We can look to the trainwrecks in order to tell ourselves, well, at least I’m not that girl.

  But even if we’re not that girl, we’re never perfect girls. And our love for messes—our willingness to accept and validate and admire even the most formerly polarizing of women, once we’ve seen enough of their suffering—suggests that there is a kinder and healthier reason to enjoy trainwreck stories. These women, with all their loudness and messiness, their public loneliness and weepy outbursts, their falling down and falling apart, are the image of our own vulnerable selves, the wild and agonized messes we all conceal beneath our hopefully acceptable personas. They can embody the women we hope not to be, but they can also give a public voice to our own suffering; they can be the women who speak for us, when they say “fuck you” to the world.