Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (26 page)

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?

The thing is, I’ve never seen one. Not in real life. Not
in the wild. As far as I can tell—and I have more evidence, and more access to it, than I would have had at any other point in history—they don’t exist. Even the women who seem Good or Bad at first glance tend to fragment into something more complicated and ambiguous if you look at them long enough. Women are not symbols of superhuman virtue. Women are not symbols of all that is disgusting and corrupt. Women, it turns out, are not symbols of anything, other than themselves.

And if I can see this, given only the ability to read and an Internet connection, then women throughout the world can see it as well. It’s as simple as opening a window. All the standards we’ve been trying to chase, all the Goodness we shame ourselves for not having, all the Badness we impute to each other in anger or in fear … it just isn’t real. None of it was ever real. It was something we believed in, like the flat earth, or curing diseases by balancing humours, before we had the tools to see how things really worked. All the women we were supposed to be, all the women we feared being: They never existed. The only thing that exists is
us
, in a world where there are no normal girls.

There’s a dream I had, writing this book. I’m alone in a room, a high school locker room. People come in—every person I know will eventually come into this room—and I hand them a black marker.

This is my punishment, for everything I’ve done wrong in life. Each person is allowed to write one new word on my body—the worst thing they’ve ever thought about me, or wanted for me, summed up. “Die,” “slut,” “cunt.” These are popular choices. An ex-boyfriend writes some crack about my body. He takes care to write it on my back, so I can’t see it—he knows I’ll be more bothered that way. Parents write “disappointment.” Strangely, none of these hurts as much as the people who refuse to write anything. They just stare at me and walk away. They don’t hate me. They just don’t care.

It has to go on this way, until there’s no more room to write. Until I’m completely covered in other people’s assessments of me. Then, they take me to the water and hold me under. Like the “common scolds” were held under the water, to cure them of running off at the mouth. Like Whitney, falling into her bathtub, all alone.

I’m not scared of this, strangely enough. It could be bad, but I still don’t know why they’re doing it. They either intend to drown me, or to save me. Either I’ll die of being hated, or all the words, all the harsh judgments and insults I’ve accumulated throughout my lifetime, will just wash away.

With all that we can do to each other, these days, it still seems like this is the choice at hand. We can drown in it, the judgment and hatred we have for each other. We can tank women’s lives, hold them under until they shut up or stop breathing. Or we can let it wash away.

I don’t know how you feel. I don’t know what you’re writing onto the women in your life. I don’t know what’s been written on you. But this is what I hope for you: that when they take you to the water, you come out clean again. That nothing they write on you can define you. I hope we all wind up back on dry land, clean and new as morning.

Acknowledgments

Do not skip these acknowledgments.

I always used to skip the acknowledgements! I thought they were self-indulgent. The author says some nice things about their parents, tells you which famous people they know, I flip the page because of how bored I am, and it’s over. Now, I know they’re more like the credits of a movie: Without them, you think George Clooney just came up with witty things to say while robbing a casino, and cameras happened to be there at the time.