Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (25 page)

So, I ask again, what is
wrong
with being too much? With being too big? With being openly sexual, openly emotional—with having “no calmness or content except when the needs of [your] individual nature were satisfied,” as Martineau
wrote of Wollstonecraft—or even with being openly unhappy?

Only this: Insisting on the needs of your individual nature, being unquiet and unhappy when those needs are not satisfied, requires that you have an individual nature to begin with. And it requires that you not be ashamed of it.

The trainwreck’s “good” sister, the feminine ideal floating just under the surface of our derision, gets more disquieting the more you look at her. She is a hollow doll, all reaction and no action: Completely asexual unless it is necessary for her to want sex, unable to love without being loved in return, unable to raise her voice or cry or suffer, for fear that the noise might bother somebody. Unable, it seems, to feel much at all, except concern for how others
want
her to feel, and eagerness to fulfill their expectations.

Consider the qualities that made Britney, that most impossibly Good of all Good Girls, so appealing to the music industry:
“In all that she did, Britney gave the distinct impression that if an adult says do something, you do it,” said Chuck Yerger, principal of the Mickey Mouse School where Britney was educated.
“She truly felt that all adults and people in authority were good people, who had her best interests at heart.” Max Martin, who co-wrote her career-making hit “… Baby One More Time,” was drawn to her because of his recent experiences with more self-motivated pop stars: “Max said, ‘She’s fifteen years old; I can make the record I want to make, and use her qualities appropriately, without
her telling me what to do.’ Which is kind of what happened.”

Consider this, and then consider the ever-obvious fact that even Britney couldn’t give enough; all the trust and obedience in the world couldn’t make her totally absent from her own life, or take her inner conflicts away.

The good girl, the un-trainwreck, is feminine selflessness, taken to its most literal extreme; there is no self, no
there
, except as a reflection of someone else’s wishes. She never makes mistakes, and she never has regrets, because she never does anything unless she is asked to do it. She is so entirely cleansed of neediness, irrationality, and inner conflict that the average woman cannot imitate her even in silence: Women who go silent about their needs, it turns out, still have needs. They’re silent because they’re repressing what they have to say. The ideal woman has a silence that arises from never wanting to speak about anything at all. And what living thing could be
that
passive,
that
quiet? Why
is
it, really, that we fixate on all of those Dead Blondes and Tragic Princesses? After looking at her long enough—the good woman, the ideal woman, the woman the trainwreck isn’t—you get the disturbing impression that she’s not a woman at all. She is a woman’s corpse.

And the trainwreck is crazy because we’re
all
crazy—because, in a sexist culture, being female is an illness for which there is no cure. We are all too sexual, or sexual in the wrong ways. We are all too emotional, or emotional about the wrong things. We are all prone to think and feel and
want things that other people don’t like or can’t tolerate or don’t want to give us, at least sometimes, because we are
ourselves
, and therefore
not those people
—because there’s a
there
, an “I,” a self that is not and cannot be determined by what the world wants or needs at any given time. Everyone faces that problem, at some point. But women, as a group, are far more likely to feel that having their own minds, rather than the mind of the person they’re talking to, is a sign that something is wrong.

What the trainwreck does, why she so frequently turns up ahead of us, is to act as if nothing is wrong. Loudly. Whether through conscious political engagement or sheer force of personality, she presents the world with a big, loud, unavoidable abundance of Self. Her body wants what it wants (food, alcohol, drugs, sex) and we all know it. Her heart feels what it feels (love, grief, rage, joyful abandon) and we all hear about it. Her opinions are so pronounced, and so gleefully indifferent to disagreement, that you can knock her down a staircase, lock her up, or throw her in the river without changing them. She makes mistakes, and she makes enemies, but no matter how many of them pile up in her wake, the trainwreck
is
. And not all the social conventions, laws, cruel jokes, or disapproving glances in the world can make her other than what she is. She winds up being right because, simply by virtue of overflowing all boundaries, she flows over those barriers to freedom that history and justice will naturally erode in time.

The trainwreck is alive. And for a woman to be fully alive is revolutionary.

This has been a book of female confessions: Humiliating, private things that women either brought themselves to publish or had published for them, or that were wrung out of them under duress. So here, as a form of penance for repeating all that dirt, is my own confession. I spend pretty much every day of my life talking about and advocating feminism. And yet I have, throughout my life, felt very wretched, for a very large portion of my day, because I could not be a “strong feminist woman.”

Strong feminist women, for example, don’t cry hysterically over breakups. Strong feminist women don’t even have breakups, as far as I can tell; they have functional egalitarian partnerships of their choosing (if their sexual and emotional fulfillment is best served by monogamy), and when it’s time for things to end, they settle things with a firm handshake and an all-around congratulations to both partners on an A-OK job. Strong feminist women also have great, healthy body images; they do not, as I do, recoil from every known photo of themselves. Strong feminist women don’t have trouble paying the rent, probably because they’re so busy breaking the glass ceiling at their various workplaces; strong feminist women don’t publish their opinions, then feel guilty and horrible about themselves because someone
disagrees with those opinions. Strong feminist women have probably never deleted twenty Tweets about Taylor Swift in a row. I have. I do. I am not a strong feminist woman, as it turns out; I’m a person, and sometimes I do good stuff, and sometimes I don’t. It’s as easy as that, or it should be, if I didn’t spend so much time feeling horrible about it all.

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.