by Sady Doyle
I am not a special case, I don’t think. Every day brings me new evidence that women, by and large, do not like themselves very much: their ambition gaps, their orgasm gaps, their impostor syndromes, their poor body images, their endless variety of real or perceived failures, including their failures to feel good about who and what they are. Their trainwrecks, and their need for trainwrecks; the enduring, self-loathing need to find someone about whom they can say well, at least I’m not that girl.
But, in the context of trainwreck media, a female self-confidence gap is not only predictable, it’s practically unavoidable. We can’t spend twelve hours a day mainlining ideas of sexual or emotional or aging or ill women as monsters, messes, and freaks, then expect to wake up feeling beautiful and confident in the morning. Every “ugly” photo of Amy Winehouse, every nasty word typed about Azealia Banks in a comment section, is going to come back the next time we’re vulnerable, and take yet another chunk out of our ability to believe that we can screw up and still be basically worthwhile.
So here’s the moral of all these tales, the monster at the end of the book: I may not be a strong feminist woman. And, if you are a woman, and reading this book, it’s entirely possible that you aren’t a strong feminist woman, either. Because the fact is, I’ve spent a while looking at the lives of the strongest, most feminist women in history. The icons; the immortal geniuses; the women to whom we are all meant to aspire. And the thing is? There’s not a strong feminist woman among them.
Charlotte Brontë was a genius, whose work has resonated for centuries as an example of female intellect and expressive power. Her letters to Constantin Heger are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, a masterful, two-year-long demonstration of one woman’s inability to absorb the fact that the guy she liked did not like her. Mary Wollstonecraft was over a century ahead of her time on women’s education, and twice as far ahead on women’s sexual freedom. She still thought she’d rather drown than not have a boyfriend. Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. She survived unspeakable atrocity, thanks only to her own daring, ingenuity, and resilience, and published one of the most important political documents of her age. And she was afraid that “educated people” would make fun of her grammar.
She was scared, but she did it. That’s all being strong is, apparently: being scared, or flawed, or weak, or capable (under the right circumstances) of astonishing acts of stupidity. And then going out and doing it all anyway. Trying, every morning, to be the woman you want to be, regardless of how often you manage to fall short of your own high expectations.
Feminine ideals are a strange business. They seem to have been constructed, for most of history, to rule out pretty much every living woman. And “strong feminist woman,” though it’s managed to kick the can a few yards down the road—now you don’t just have to be literally perfect at all of your relationships; you also get a job, and it turns out you need to be perfect at that, too—can, all too easily, turn into yet another trap. Applied the right way, it can allow us to applaud each other for what we do manage to get right. Applied in the age of trainwrecks, it can become yet another mile-high yardstick, against which women measure themselves and each other, and invariably come up short.
We have been punishing women for doing public life “the wrong way” for as long as women have had public lives. And, as women have pushed ever more inexorably into the public sphere—as the movements of Theroigne and Mary and Harriet and Billie and Valerie gained momentum, and pushed more women, of more sexualities and races and class backgrounds, ever further into the public eye and into positions of power—we have developed ever more technologies and means by which to insult them. This may make entering the public sphere dangerous, and painful. But it is, perhaps, less painful to be punished for what you do than to punish yourself by never doing anything at all.
“It is perfectly simple,” Theroigne once said, “and you should even be forewarned against it, that they will marshal the carpers and the hired hacks in an attempt to keep us back, using the weapons of ridicule and calumny, and all the ignoble means that base men employ … I would urge you yet again: let us raise ourselves to the height of our destinies; let us break our chains; at last the time is ripe for Women to emerge from their shameful nullity, where the ignorance, pride and injustice of men had kept them enslaved for so long a time[.]”
Theroigne was right. If you are a woman, and you make yourself visible in the world, they will always marshal the carpers, and (if you’re lucky) some hired hacks, to insult you back into silence. But she was also correct that these are ignoble means, and base men employ them; base men have, in fact, been employing those tools for centuries, apparently without ever getting even a little bit more imaginative as to their uses. And they are easy tools to break.
Because the only big secret that all that ridicule can reveal—the only big weapon anyone has against you—is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record “Strange Fruit” while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abundance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.
But maybe we should give Theroigne the last word here. God knows, she’s had to wait for it.
“If we wish to preserve our liberty,” Theroigne said, “we must be prepared to do the most sublime things.”
The first item on that list, and the greatest liberty you can claim, lies in deciding that you—human, fuck-up, mess, trainwreck that you are—may well be capable of the sublime.
Conclusion
THE VIEW FROM THE TRACKS
A fourteen-year-old girl in Florida wakes up to find “SLUT” painted on her driveway. Her MySpace page has been drawing the wrong kind of attention. It’s not the word that’s the problem: It’s the fact that they know where she lives.
A woman gives birth to octuplets in California. It’s discovered that she’s on public assistance, and that she has six other children. “Octomom” is the joke of the year. Her sanity and resemblance to Angelina Jolie become matters of public speculation. She’s offered a chance to make ends meet by starring in porn.
A woman Tweets a picture of herself dressed as a Boston Marathon bombing victim for Halloween. The name and address of her employer are uncovered in the comment section of a sports blog. She is fired almost immediately. She receives rape threats and threats to bomb the houses of her friends and family. Someone found them, too.
A PR worker tweets a racist joke before boarding an airplane. She becomes a trending topic globally. When the plane lands, someone from the hashtag is there to greet her. They knew where she was. Everyone knew where she was. Anyone could have been waiting for her, there on the other side.
A teenage girl is raped by boys who post a videotape of it on social media in Ohio.
A teenage girl is raped by boys who post a videotape of it on social media in New York.
A teenage girl is raped by boys who post a videotape of it on social media, again.
And again.
And again.
A teenage girl posts a video about her rape and subsequent suicide attempt on social media. By the time we see it, she’s gone.
There is a final step to this process—beyond celebrity blogs, beyond twenty-four-hour news coverage, beyond celebrities at all. You could say that we’ve started to go easier on famous people, in the last few years. (Ariana Grande, who landed on a most-hated-celebrities list for licking a doughnut, might disagree.) But the fact is, if we’ve backed off on famous women at all, it’s because we don
’t really need them any more. Why would we? We have each other.
The boom in surveillance and communications technologies that turned famous people from distant, nearly mythical objects of adoration into professionals who stay in contact with their fan bases twenty-four hours a day—thus allowing us to see them, un-Photoshopped warts and all—had another, even more radical effect. We are now able to see our fellow citizens, just as clearly as we ever saw the stars. Friends, family, Katy Perry, or some woman with too many babies or a bad outfit or an annoying Twitter feed in Detroit: It’s all the same, all perfectly visible, on the twenty-four-hour feed of human flaws and failures to which many of us now stay plugged in for most of the day.
Celebrities, even in the late-2000s heyday of Britney and Amy and Whitney—the age when it seemed that privacy was definitively over, and the distance separating us from them was hair-thin at best—always had certain disadvantages, as targets. For one thing, it was a big investment: To knock a famous woman down, you had to spend years building her up and getting to know her, and by that point she was bound to have more than a few die-hard fans. For another thing, celebrities were professionals, even when they didn’t act like it: It was their job to be public, and to sell themselves to the public. So they always had teams, managers, fellow professionals who could coach them through their mistakes and at least attempt to turn around the narrative. Celebrities, even when the verdict against them was seemingly unanimous, had power. Their annihilation could never be total.
Except, of course, that for Whitney and Amy, it was. And, of course, after we’d had fun with them all throughout the Perez Hilton Administration, they wound up dying within seven months of each other, and just as the ’10s started. Guilt no doubt played a role here.
But if you couldn’t go after celebrities and feel good about yourself—or if you couldn’t go after celebrities and win, which for some people may be the same thing—you could always go after the “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” guy. And people did. Lots of them. Face it: When I typed those words, you knew exactly who I meant. And you probably remember finding it funny.
But lots of people found it funny simply because he was a relatively feminine-seeming person, who wore makeup and was heavily invested in a woman’s feelings, and was in obvious pain. And those people tend to find it equally funny to go after women.
Civilian women make better, bigger, messier trainwrecks. They just do. There’s no track record, no prior investment. When they fuck up, their fuck-ups can become the whole story: You knew the Boston Marathon Costume Girl, or Octomom, or Tiger Mom, or Crying YouTube Kid With Weird Dad (who transitioned a few years later, but who was likely treated so viciously because people saw him as a little girl—there was only one thing folks had in mind when they called him “slut” and went to look for “nudes”), but you didn’t know anything about them before their moments of infamy. Their worst moments were all they’d ever been.
Also, normal people don’t have “teams”; they don’t have defense strategies prepared. When they fumble and fluster and break down and dig themselves in deeper—which they almost invariably do—they’re doing it for real, because they’re not famous, and they don’t know how to be, and “stage a comeback when the world hates you” is quite possibly the single hardest task with which to start learning fame. The effective comeback from ignominy is something you learn when you’re at grad school levels of Famous: Robert-Downey-Junior-in-Iron-Man, Britney-Does-Vegas levels of Good at Being Famous. These people? Some of them are literally children. Not only can’t they rebound from global infamy, they couldn’t open a mall.
You can do the trainwreck quick, clean, easy, if you pick them off social media. You can get in and out, in a week tops, with a definitive casualty and (usually) no visible blood on anyone’s hands. It performs the same function that trainwrecks always have: It keeps women convinced that there’s something wrong with them, and afraid to step out of line. More afraid than ever before, in fact. All those years, you thought you were just standing around, waiting to see the trains collide with something. Now you look down and find out that you’re standing on the tracks.
“The Internet is mean” is a pretty well-rehearsed truism, and frankly, a bad one. Dig into “the Internet is mean,” and usually you find some variety of “people are too sensitive these days,” which itself is usually hiding “Why can’t women take a compliment?” or “I should be able to say the n-word,” and ultimately, the inescapable conclusion is that people often claim that the Internet is mean because they would like to be much, much meaner, preferably toward their least-favorite oppressed groups.
The Internet, in and of itself, is not mean. “The Internet” is millions of people, and we don’t all check in with each other to set the day’s agenda when we log on. But when “the Internet” has an established pattern of fixating on and demonizing specifically female people, we can identify a real problem. It’s an old, unsexy, thoroughly established problem that we persist in finding strange and inexplicable every time a new communication technology is invented to perpetuate it.
Twitter is not mean; Tumblr is not mean; Facebook is not mean; blogs, cable news channels, magazines, and newspapers are not mean. Misogyny is mean. Misogyny is the art and craft of being particularly mean to women, and treating them worse than you treat men, because you think they are not as good as male people. The Internet did not start this fight; it only enables us to have it on a new scale. GamerGate started the first time a man ever put a gag on a woman and paraded her through town for criticizing him too harshly. Making fun of crying, feminine people in YouTube videos started when we invented the concept of hysteria. “Revenge porn” began at the moment that men decided that women’s sexuality was disgusting, and that women should be humiliated for it, which (if you go by the Bible, anyway) happened more or less immediately after God created Heaven and Earth. Page 1, God creates Eve. Page 2, we all have to wear clothes now because Eve is awful. I doubt it’s a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply embedded.
Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet—even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quote Jurassic Park) finds a way—but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don’t like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a “good” woman, or a “likable” woman, or simply a “woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman,” can be.
And we do have to do it. All of us. Each of us for our own sake. Maybe you’re not worried, right now; maybe you’re doing all of the right things, and none of the wrong ones. Maybe you think you could spot the danger coming, stop yourself before you made your big mistake. Maybe, right now, you feel perfectly safe. For you, there is no train coming. No sign that you might get hit.
But we had train tracks in my town, when I was growing up. There’s something they taught us in school about them. There must have been accidents, because they repeated this very often: Trains move much faster than you think they do. Trains are also surprisingly quiet, for objects of their size. You can never stand on the train tracks. Not ever. Not if you want to live. By the time you hear the train coming, you are always hearing it too late.
There is the potential for redemption in all this. The same tools that we use to observe and police and judge each other have also given us the ability to resist that judgment, and potentially to expose it for the fallacy that it is.
I run into quite a lot of women online. I am given access to an endless stream of inner monologues, all female, all different. It’s why I go there in the first place—an endless world of women, almost none of whom I would otherwise know, all giving me the world as it is from inside their skin. Checking Twitter, at 6:49 a.m. on a Tuesday, I
see, at random: A Scottish PhD in Digital Sociology, a culture editor for Buzzfeed UK, a world-renowned Indian environmentalist and anti-globalization activist, a novelist and Springsteen fan from Brooklyn, and an independent theatre director in Washington, D.C. This is an incomplete list. The women I can see are (again, at random, in one moment of time) discussing a potential biopic of Pakistan’s first woman firefighter, showing off Twitter bots they created, sharing pictures of their hair back-combed into beehives, saying they’ve really grown to like Lianne La Havas’s second album, and admitting that they use cartoon-character glasses to serve wine. And this list, too, is incomplete. These are the wee hours of the morning, and my Twitter feed is not yet crowded.
Granted, the #1 trending topic is still a debate about whether Rihanna is a Bad Role Model for Women—those debates seem to arise every two weeks, and the verdict for Rihanna is never favorable—but you begin to see my point. There are literally millions of women, speaking in public, at this moment in time. Each woman gets to tell me exactly what she wants me to know, in her own words, at any hour of the day or night. I have personally come to know hundreds, maybe thousands of women in this fashion. I like some, dislike others, and am entirely neutral much of the time. But these women I hear about? The Good Women? The Ideal Women? Or the truly, unilaterally, unfixably horrible women? The Trainwrecks?
