Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why

by Alexandra Petri

  The clitoris is like the Northwest Passage: Many men perished searching for it in vain; it does not exist, and never has. Do not go looking for it; you will surely die, and first you will have to see your dogs die.

  This thing that looks sort of like a carrot that is having some problems is just—icky, and we need not discuss it, I think. It is a great mystery of the sort Man Was Not Meant to Know. It stores witchcraft and secrets and the ability to knit and perform emotional labor.

  You might mistake this anatomy for a person, but actually it is just something that could contain a person; the moment the thingy is implanted in the whatsit by the you-know-what in a process that I fully understand—that is the moment there is a person. And the thing around it, that featherless biped which erroneously felt maybe that it was in possession of a soul—ceases to exist or to be of any interest to science. I am pretty sure. It can be discarded like a Whopper wrapper, to which, indeed, it is analogous—it is no longer important.

  Again, these are not people. Indeed, as a special treat, I have brought one of these fantastic vessels for you to dissect and legislate upon to your heart’s content today.

  Do not worry. No matter what she says, it will not hurt her; she is not real like you.

  May 11, 2019

  Male Authors Describe Men in Literature Right

  I am not alone in noticing that male authors sometimes fall short—that is, they spend so much of their ammunition in their glorious and perfect descriptions of female characters that they sometimes, I fear, do not take quite the same care with their men. Imagine if we lived in a world where they did! Well, you need imagine no longer. I have fixed it.

  RAYMOND CHANDLER

  Marlowe was the kind of brunette who would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window, and only half the hole would be from heterosexual panic. The other half would be that look he gave you, under his hat brim, the kind of look you thought you could cash in later in a cheap hotel room, before you saw the headache sticking out of his hip pocket.

  LEO TOLSTOY

  Vronsky had once been beautiful. His hands, once white and soft, were thin and wasted from the labors of child-rearing, and his face appeared pinched and unattractive. His voice had acquired a querulous tone. His arms, once the right shape, were now the wrong shape, because of the passage of time and the moral degradation that came with it. There was a horse who suffered an awful accident, and Vronsky was like that in a way.

  HOMER

  White-thighed Odysseus emerged from the water freshly bathed and glistening with oil

  His skin glowed like the dawn sweeping in on his swiftly sandaled feet

  The goddess beheld him with rapture

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  Jon Snow’s abs moved imperceptibly beneath his tunic, firm and hard and pale like winter apples that had been harvested, sliced carefully, and arrayed in rows.

  JOHN UPDIKE

  He peed, but he had no idea how, because inside his body was anatomy that was impossible to understand.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  He had a butt that looked good. She grasped the butt with her hands. He was a bit put out but not too much. This was how things went between men and women.

  JACK KEROUAC

  His lovely ripe pectorals were barely concealed beneath his white nightshirt, and Dean looked at me as if to say, if this is America, I’d like to see more of it.

  WILLIAM FAULKNER

  He had been a big man once, but now his skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark or a statue or a monument to a cause that boys see not once but whenever they want it, so it’s always the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on a July afternoon in 1863, the brigades in position behind the rail fence, the guns laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags already loosened, every year for a thousand years.

  THE TERMINATOR

  Large but delicately framed, with a pinprick red eye that lights up when he enters a room. He stops the party when he walks into a room (by killing the party with his mechanized weaponry), but you wonder what lurks under that steely exterior.

  TOY STORY

  Possessing a promising body with hard, shapely curves, Buzz dresses older than his age, but manages to pull it off.

  PULP FICTION

  With silky dark hair and full lips, Vincent is a Greek god. He walks and his shoes slap on the floor. His mane of lustrous black hair and his turtle neck (not turtleneck, that is something different) poke up out of a boxy suit, like a prairie dog saying hello.

  FERR IS BUELLER’S DAY OFF

  Ferris isn’t the hottest guy in class, but he’s definitely top five.

  STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE

  LUKE SKYWALKER IS IN HIS LATE TEENS, PRETTY WITHOUT KNOWING IT.

  STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  Darth Vader could be attractive if he tried, but he has instead settled for menacing. Tall, dressed in all black with a breathing mask affixed to his face—an outfit that screams, “LEAVE ME ALONE.”

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  Lawrence is strikingly beautiful with piercing blue eyes, but hides it in large, bulky garments.

  E .T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL

  With a lithe, lissome neck and large, expressive blue eyes, he looks damn good on a bicycle.

  JAWS

  Wearing nothing at all, the shark emerges from the water. We can’t help but be fixated on this toothsome vision of beauty. Our eyes are drawn first to his mouth, large and sensuous, full of even, white teeth. But then they’re drawn along his body’s sleek curves—a body that throbs with raw sensuality and hunger, like an automobile that throbs with raw sensuality and hunger.

  RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

  Indiana Jones is in his thirties, but he’s dressed like a much younger man in a half-unbuttoned shirt and a hat that he thinks too much of. He wears glasses, but would look good without them.

  THE MUPPETS

  With soft, peach-fuzz skin, Kermit the Frog intrudes on the viewer’s attention not gradually but all at once. Unaware of his impact, and stronger than he knows.

  2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

  The first thing you notice about HAL 9000, a glowing red boob in space, is that he’s a glowing red boob in space.

  April 4, 2018

  Surprise! I’m Back, and I Atoned

  I’M BACK! I KNOW I admitted to doing some lousy things to women who trusted me and looked up to me. But don’t worry. I atoned.

  I did Whole30. I walked across a lake of fire. I listened to some podcasts where people did not hold back. I did sit-ups. I lived in a hut. In a hair shirt! By candlelight! For a year! Well, less than a year. And not by candlelight. Or in a hut. Or any of those other things. But for a period of literal months, I did not do something that I wanted to do. Which is an extremely long time.

  So it turns out that nothing you do actually has any consequences. Have you noticed this? I always felt like if you did something really wrong you would be stopped somehow, and if no one stopped you, it couldn’t be that wrong. Like, when your computer won’t let you click on something. Ding! Not allowed! Or like a video game. “Sir, that’s a wall. You’re trying to walk through a wall.” Oh, okay. Thank you, game, for looking out for me and not letting me walk through that wall. But if the game is like, obviously, it is frowned upon to drive the wrong way down the highway and murder the women you encounter, but, you know, we have programmed it so that if you want to, you can. That doesn’t feel like it’s on me! That feels like it’s a programming failure on the game’s part.

  You know how if you leave a cat alone for three days with a bag of food, the cat will figure out how much food it should eat and pace itself, but if you leave a dog alone for three days with a bag of food, the dog will just eat the entire bag of food because there is nothing the
re to stop them? I resemble that second thing. You want me to—not do this thing? But nothing will stop me? And afterward people will offer to clean up? That can’t be right. This feels like a setup. I am offended. I think someone owes me an apology, frankly.

  And if I did do a bad thing, can’t I atone? Like in the old days. When you could go and do a series of labors and then they would be like, oh, didn’t he murder his mother? No, yeah, he totally did, but he traveled a lot and then he touched the Shrine of Athena, so, it’s, like, fine. You know? Didn’t he light his spouse on fire? Yeah, but he went down to Hades and he walked this dog, and, so, you know, clean slate.

  It doesn’t seem fair that today if you do something bad, you’re just—stuck. Like, you can literally make “Ignition (Remix)” and people are like, nope, still a bad person. And you’re supposed to go away forever. Forever? That’s like, multiple minutes. I’m just supposed to sit underground forever where no light shines, like some kind of albino mushroom or a woman’s career?

  I’m not denying that I did something that was wrong. I do understand that. I feel bad. I have felt bad! I felt really bad for a really long time! People yelled at me, and I had to sit there and listen to them tell me that I made them feel bad, and I felt bad. That is a terrible feeling. I don’t want to overstate this, but I think it is literally the worst feeling in the world, having other people tell you that you did something wrong.

  Although, are we 100 percent sure about this whole right and wrong thing? I’m just asking! I’m just putting it out there! Science, I feel like, science has figured life out, it knows about cells and things. But philosophy is just sort of like—we have some theories. No one’s like, well, we’ve made a big breakthrough in philosophy, we’ve figured out definitely what is and is not moral to do, you know? Like, the ancient Greeks, they were maybe the best at philosophy, but to get to the philosophy you have to wade through like a whole framing device about courting a young boy. Before we reach the metaphysics, it is very urgent that I give you these tips for hitting on adolescents! Which doesn’t make you feel great about philosophy, going in. So maybe there is no right or wrong! Maybe nothing I’ve done has any impact on anyone! In which case I have definitely put in enough time.

  I want to do my task. I want to be like, I’ve atoned! I went down to Hades and I walked a dog, and I also slew this big beast with like eight heads, more heads all the time! I had to singe the necks! It was incredibly difficult! And then I put a microphone on my shoulder and I walked until nobody knew what it was, and I lived there for up to six entire weeks, so Poseidon isn’t allowed to still be mad.

  Everyone’s like, why did you do that? Did you ask the people affected by your behavior what they wanted, and they said to do that? Did you read the suggestions that people came up with for what you could do to make this right? No, no, I just did the beast thing, because that is what you do to atone. I think we can agree that it was very difficult to do what I did with the beast and the dog, much more difficult than talking to the people I hurt, who are, for the most part, nice people who are easy to talk to. What I did was the harder thing. I decided that.

  And I get that some things you should not be able to ever atone for. Not ever. Except, maybe? Maybe if the thing you do is really difficult? Like, if I got rid of malaria, just eradicated it completely, I feel like people shouldn’t get to still be mad at me. That’s cutting off your not-having-malaria-as-a-species to spite your doing-bad-things guy. I think if you do something like get rid of malaria people should have to forgive you. I did not do that, but it’s okay because I did the next best thing, which was nothing. For a few months. Which is like forever.

  So, I atoned.

  August 29, 2018

  Without the Swimsuit Part of Miss America, When Will I Be Able to Judge Women’s Appearances?

  OH NO! I, A REASONABLE MAN, am devastated to learn there is no longer a swimsuit portion in the Miss America competition! And the evening-wear portion is now whatever the contestants want to wear, which could be anything at all, and which might be a bulky and functional tarpaulin that would delight my eyes not one whit!

  This is egregious! If there is no bathing-suit competition, when can I hope to judge women on their appearance, except on dating apps,

  or when they appear on television to talk about the lifesaving surgery they just performed on a pair of conjoined twins,

  or when they are serving me at a Hooters restaurant,

  or a regular restaurant,

  or when they’re bringing me a cup of cranberry-apple juice on an airplane,

  or when they are applying for a job,

  or when I am reading their scholarly research articles online and there isn’t even a picture so I have to Google the name and cannot even be sure that the appearance of the person I am criticizing is the relevant person,

  or when they make a YouTube video,

  or when a man does something awful to them and they appear in court to testify about it,

  or when they are running for office,

  or when they are on television telling me the weather,

  or when they are trying to ask a question during a news conference,

  or when they are representing the country at the Olympics,

  or when they are walking in front of me on the sidewalk,

  or when they are my colleague,

  or when I am suggesting that they reallocate their sexual resources in a rational manner (I suggest this completely dispassionately with no self-interest whatsoever, and I have devised a complex numerical system),

  or when they perform music on national television,

  or when they are engaging in activism to end gun violence,

  or when they are the first lady or the former first lady,

  or when they are in a Star Wars movie and I didn’t like the Star Wars movie,

  or when they are on the receiving end of sexual advances from the president,

  or when they work for the president,

  or when they work against the president,

  or when they appear on the cover of magazines,

  or when they write something and put it online and I had to squint at the avatar that was one inch by one inch and conclude, from this highly pixelated monstrosity, that I Would Not Bang,

  or when they are on the radio, which takes real effort,

  or when they wrote a novel in the eighteenth century,

  or when they are a character in an ongoing fantasy epic, or when someone wants to put them on currency,

  or on Thursdays?

  Except for these scant few contexts, I will have nothing! The swimsuit contest must be saved.

  Already, this has gone too far.

  June 5, 2018

  I’m Fine with Women in Power, Just Not This One Specific Woman Currently in Power

  The first thing I need to make clear is that I love and support women. I am eager to see more women rise to positions of power. Hashtag #pinkwave! Hashtag #pinkhat!

  But I have to say, I’m a little frustrated that we keep putting forward this specific woman who really grinds my gears. Not because she’s a woman. I would know if that was why. It is not that. It’s just—ugh, her, you know? She just doesn’t excite me, and I feel that she is too compromised. That’s not a woman thing, though. It’s just a her thing. I would have that issue with anyone who had her baggage, that same difficult-to-pin-down sense that something about her was fundamentally tainted.

  But it is just this one woman in particular. And can I say how glad I am that we are at a point when we are able to judge women on their merits, as people, and find them inexplicably, inevitably wanting, as people? But definitely all women do not do this. There are plenty of women who do not make my teeth go on edge in the way this one lady does. My mother, for instance. My daughter, for another instance. And others I could name! Oprah, in her current capacity, though I hope she stays in her lane.

  In general, I am excited to vote for a woman, maybe even in 2020, though I do, I have
to say, worry that maybe other Americans are not so ready, and we wouldn’t want to make that mistake in a year with such high stakes. Not me—I was born ready! I was given birth to by a woman. So it’s clear where I stand.

  That is why I am so frustrated with the specific women who keep being put forward. Like, Nancy Pelosi? I want women to lead everything! I want them to stare down charging bulls on Wall Street, and I can’t imagine anyone other than a lady being Wonder Woman, but—this is the House we’re talking about, and . . . ugh, Nancy Pelosi.

  You see what I’m saying here. I am flabbergasted and upset that each and every one of the women being talked about as front-runners are the specific women who have already alienated me. I am as frustrated by this terrible coincidence as you are, believe me! Believe, women!

  What I want is not impossible! I want someone who is not tainted by polarizing choices in the past, but who also has experience, who is knowledgeable but doesn’t sound like she is lecturing, someone vibrant but not green, someone dignified but not dowdy, passionate but not a yeller, precise but not mechanical, someone lacking in off-putting ambition but capable of asking for what she wants, not accompanied but not alone, in a day but not in a month or a year, when the moon is neither waxing nor waning, carrying a sieve full of water and a hen’s tooth. Easy!

  That’s why I’m so worried about our current slate of choices. A woman, sure, but—Kamala Harris? Elizabeth Warren? Kirsten Gillibrand? There are specific problems with each of them, entirely personal to each of them, all insurmountable. We need someone fresh. Someone without baggage. Joe Biden, maybe. But female! If you see.

  I can’t wait to vote for a woman in 2020. A nameless, shapeless, faceless woman I know nothing about who will surely be perfect.

  November 18, 2018

  I Am in Favor of Confederate Statues. I Am Definitely Not a Pigeon.