View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality. And yet there is enormous pleasure in individual success. It can feel like license and agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself—in a good picture, on your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement—exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.
Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: where beauty is concerned, we have deployed technology not only to meet the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands. The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities—think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces—and remained stagnant in many other ways. We still know surprisingly little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so many of the one hundred million women around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.
It wasn’t until third grade or so that I grasped the fact that identity could govern our relationship to what we saw and what we read. It happened on one afternoon in particular, when I was sitting on the floor of my dim pink room, next to my pink polka-dot curtains, playing Power Rangers with my friend Allison, who insisted, over and over, that I had to play the Yellow Ranger. I didn’t want to, but she said there was no other way we could play. When I realized she wasn’t kidding—that she genuinely believed this to be something like a natural law—the anger that hit me was almost hallucinatory. She was saying, in effect, that I had failed to understand my own limits. I couldn’t be the Pink Ranger, which meant I couldn’t be Baby Spice. I couldn’t be Laura Ingalls, rocking her bench until she got kicked out of the classroom; I couldn’t be Claudia Kincaid, taking baths in the fountain at the Met. A chasm opened up between us. I told Allison I didn’t want to play anymore. She left, and I sat still, shimmering with rage.
That day marked either the beginning of a period of self-delusion or an end of one. Afterward, I still identified with girls in books, but things were different. And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase “complicated female character” for years. Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world.
i love the flashes
Much of The Second Sex still scans as unnervingly contemporary. De Beauvoir notes that men, unlike women, experience no contradiction between their gender and their “vocation as a human being.” She describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life. “If the young girl at about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” de Beauvoir writes, “it is because she feels defenseless before a dull fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is obsessed with this fate.”
damn
The teenage girl, wrote de Beauvoir, is bound up in a “sense of secrecy,” a “grim solitude.” She is “convinced that she is not understood; her relations with herself are then only the more impassioned: she is intoxicated with her isolation, she feels herself different, superior, exceptional.” So it goes with a certain type of blockbuster YA heroine—the series protagonist who either doubles down on her sense of isolated exceptionalism, if she’s in a dystopian universe, or superficially attempts to reject it before acquiescing, if she’s in a romantic one.
surely not only girls though
[...] Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012), nods to de Beauvoir while writing about the existential horror of traditional gender roles—“the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.”
wow
Severing ties to these theatrics was easy. But for some time afterward, I retained an intense hunger for devotion itself. For about five years—the end of high school, the beginning of college—I turned my attention inward, tried to build a church on the inside, tried to understand faith as something that could draw me closer to something overwhelming and pure. I kept a devotional journal, producing a record of spiritual longing that was fierce and jagged and dissolving. I pleaded for things I still find very recognizable. Help me to not put on an act of any kind, I wrote. I told God that I wanted to live in accordance with my beliefs, that I wanted to diminish my own sense of self-importance, that I was sorry for not being better, and that I was grateful for being alive. It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in, I wrote, between entries where I tried to understand if it was inherently wrong to get drunk. (At my school, you could be expelled for character-based spiritual offenses such as partying, being gay, or getting pregnant.) I stood between both sides of my life, holding the lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one side go.
Recently, I found myself doing this again—this time in the desert, that perennial seat of madness and punishment and epiphany, in a house at the top of a hill in a canyon where the sun and wind were incandescent, white-hot, merciless, streaking and scintillating across the bright blue sky. I left the house and walked down in the valley, and started to feel the drugs kick in when I was wandering in the scrub. The dry bushes became brilliant—greener—and a hummingbird torpedoed past me so quickly that I froze. I experienced, for the first time, Weil’s precise fantasy of disappearance. Each breath I took felt like it was echoing clangorously, an impure reverberation. I wanted to see the landscape as it was when I wasn’t there. I had tugged on some fabric and everything was rippling. I had come to that knife-edge of disappearance. For hours I watched the blinding swirl of light and cloud move west and I repented. At sunset, the sky billowed into mile-wide peonies, hardly an arm’s length above me, and it felt like a visitation, like God was replacing the breath in my lungs. I sobbed—battered by a love I knew would fall away from me, ashamed for all the ways I had tried to bring myself to this, humiliated by the grace of encountering it now. I dragged myself inside, finally, and looked at the mirror. My eyes were smeared with black makeup, my face was red, my lips were swollen; a thick whitish substance clung stubbornly around my mouth. I looked like a junkie. I found a piece of paper and wrote on it, after attentively noting that the ink seemed to be breathing: “The situations in my life when I have been sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I was encountering God.”
Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation, making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like the way things were going to be. It came after the election of Donald Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as the quintessential American ethos. It came after a big smiling wave of feminist initiatives and female entrepreneurs had convincingly framed wealth acquisition as progressive politics. It came after the rise of companies like Uber and Amazon, which broke apart the economy and then sold it a cheap ride to the duct tape store, all while promising to make the world a better and more convenient place. It came after the advent of reality TV and Facebook, which drew on the renewable natural resource of our narcissism to create a world where our selves, our relationships, and our personalities were not just monetizable but actively in need of monetization. It came after college tuition skyrocketed only to send graduates into low-wage contract work and world-historical economic inequality. It came, finally, after the 2008 financial crisis, the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam.
The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the con man succeeds. The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way millennials did—just as we were becoming adults.