Age of innocence

One of my favorite little jabs is from Joan Didion’s The White Album. It’s a wonderful description that’s intended, in its own way, to be an insult. In her 1972 essay, ‘The Women’s Movement,’ which was included in the collection, Didion writes: “To believe in “the greater good” is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Ask any one committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”

Never mind the angels indeed. But looking into who controls production of pins is itself an ethical quandary. It brings up its own host of moral ambiguities, which Didion found so lacking in Marxism in general, and particularly in feminism. “That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news,” she writes, “but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.”

In other words, victimhood is a choice. And an infantile one at that. In the essay, Didion criticizes the women’s movement for coddling women, for promising them something better or more romantic or gentler than the harsh realities of adult life and reproductive labor, as if they were children or “wounded birds” who could not handle the truth. In a letter to Didion, included in Lili Anolik’s forthcoming book Didion & Babitz, Eve Babitz implores her to read In a Room of One’s Own, suggesting it might have elucidated her views on the women’s movement. For a long time, she points out, women weren’t allowed their own money or their own time and weren’t allowed to “shine” like Didion. “It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a ‘woman’s novelist’ […] You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose [.]”

It is one of the strange injustices of history that Didion is considered a more serious writer than Babitz. Even stranger that she is considered a more feminist one. There is lingering disdain for Babitz, the socialite who posed nude, who slept around, who was famously stacked, who wrote about her love affairs, who disdained the kind of snide pointed prose that characterizes Didion’s essays, who set herself on fire at the end of it all. She wasn’t up at the Haight Ashbury diagnosing the ills of societal decline. But from a totally different perspective, she is the quintessential and more enduring essayist. She does not write with reserve, from a distance. She gets inside things, she’s forensic, she believes in gossip, she’s read Virginia Woolf.

Why, you might ask, pit two talented women against each other? Well, for one thing, comparison is the basis of much literary critique. But there is also a nascent understanding that these are crudely two contemporary models for women writers. One, prudish, uptight, intellectual, desperate to be one of the boys; the other, a bubbly girl about town, beloved by all, admirers fall at her feet, she shrewdly and calculatedly markets herself. Both may be equally good at writing or equally bad at it. That isn’t the point. And if it seems obvious that this binary is a fairytale, a wet dream about women who have never really existed, that is also beside the point. Writing requires solitude, introspection, obsessive compulsions, the opposite of glamor. There is no literary it girl.

If you’re embroiled in social media, this debate may seem bewilderingly and suddenly omnipresent. I have gotten a whole slew of other newsletters about it, along with think pieces about girlhood, bows, Barbie, and other trendy topics that I have also covered here. But if you take a longer lens over the past decade, a more vexed trail emerges. It is the enduring problem of women, embodied in all their kinds and forms, trying to transcend their bodies to make art. For Didion, a professed anorexic, frequently photographed in loose, heavily draped clothing that has become iconic of the wasting white woman, the solution to embodiment was to deny and punish the body. If hedonism is compatible with an intellectual life, it is for men. And the further the woman strays from what is the acceptable profile of an upper-crust intellectual woman, the more she must struggle against her embodiment to prove her value.

“I got up and read the news of another public figure being accused of sexual harassment, like I did every day,” writes Natasha Stagg in a diary essay published in n+1 in the spring of 2018. “[…] reading stories of abuse and humiliation, like the big Bill Cosby exposé from a few years back, was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn’t feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless.”

In retrospect, and even at the time, it seems obvious that telling stories about abuse of power is not sufficient to curb abuse of power. The notion of exposing abuse, as a solution to abuse, and not simply a form of catharsis, relies either on a presumption of collective outrage or on a legal framework with punitive consequences. It suggests implicitly that the reason a powerful person can sexually coerce, harass, or abuse those with less power is because there is a shroud of silence around it. But what many of the #MeToo stories actually brought to light was that the behavior of the men in question was often relatively widely known. In the arts and media, where many of these stories were focused, gossip is a major social currency. Usually, by the time it is revealed that someone is a repeat offender, everyone knows. What public, you might be left asking, is left to pass judgment? Even if knowing who to avoid theoretically keeps other women safe (although many cannot or will not pass up opportunities for this reason, in my experience), it does not fundamentally disrupt power.

An NPR Morning Edition episode posited in 2018 that the reason the #MeToo movement took off in the way it did in 2017 was because of Trump. The first Women’s March had happened earlier that year around the time of his election. There was a sense of collective outrage about his crude soundbites (“grab them by the p*ssy”) that was acceptable even at the highest echelons of liberal society. The two movements, the #resistance and the #MeToo movement, seemed organically conjoined, most notably in the figure of Alyssa Milano, who made the second hashtag go viral in 2017 and who spoke at the 2018 Women’s March about democracy and voting, before leading a chant of “I believe that we will win.” Milano dropped out of the 2019 Women’s March over a refusal by the organizers to condemn Louis Farrakhan. Time’s Up, and the high profile women associated with it, would become embroiled in their own scandals over the following years as they came to the defense of liberal politicians like Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo. Sexual harassment, it increasingly appeared, was a thing of the Trump era. With his departure from power, feminist politics had been solved.

The moment seems to have left strangely little trace. With the lockdown of the pandemic and the retreat from the kinds of office interactions or wild parties that were heavily scrutinized in 2017, the culture industry has in many ways totally restructured. Those who lost their jobs, like Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, have been mostly rehabilitated into other positions. Their names and bylines and creative work still appear. As for the women, well, there is an increasing sense that no one wants to be the girl who cried misogyny. They are accused of prudishness, of immodesty, of flirtatiousness, of unseriousness. Underlying the accusations lurks a darker implication: maybe they were just never very good to begin with.

This was the thrust of Katie Roiphe’s infamous 2018 Harper’s article, “The Other Whisper Network,” which purports to be about how feminism has gone too far but is mostly really about Twitter. “I can see how the drama of this moment is enticing,” she writes. “[…] It justifies all our failings and setbacks and mediocrities; it wasn’t us, it was men, or the patriarchy, holding us back, objectifying us. It is easier to think, for instance, that we were discriminated against than that our story wasn’t good enough or original enough to be published in The Paris Review, or even that it did not meet the editor’s highly idiosyncratic yet widely revered tastes. Or that a man said something awful and sexual to us while we were working on a television show, and we got depressed and could never again achieve what we might have. And yet do we really in our hearts believe that is the whole story?”

It is an easy comeback to any kind of accusation of structural discrimination. How dare you assume that your work really merits that kind of consideration? Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you’re not that good? This line of thinking rests heavily not only on willful disregard of the existence of misogyny or racism or transphobia or other forms of exclusion, but also on a formulation of the subject at hand. You assess her critically: her hysteria, her narcissistic delusions of genius, her mediocrity concealed by some kind of sex appeal that has failed to really get her far enough. She thinks objectification has ruined her life, but it is really her standing in her own way, unable to surmount her debilitating femininity, her sensitivity to crude jokes, to being leered at, to being hit on. She is her own worst enemy. And why did she post a selfie online, by the way, if she is so concerned about being sexualized?

You might be forgiven for not being particularly sympathetic to this concern. The #MeToo movement so prominently and heavily featured middle class white women in professional jobs that it quickly became its own worst disclaimer. Sexual abuse, which is a clear structural abuse of power and not a “social” issue, could be relegated by critics of the movement to a privileged issue. The movement failed spectacularly to forge solidarity across lines of class and race and sexuality. Although immigrant women, sex workers, and other precariously employed workers are often both more vulnerable to sexual abuse and more vulnerable to retaliation or violence, their stories are curiously absent from the media narrative of 2017.

This is not to say that sexual abuse is less harmful when it happens to the wealthy or the famous or the white collar worker with supposed recourse to HR. It is impossible to measure harm in this way and also undesirable. But the movement encouraged this kind of gap. It did not offer a vocabulary to forge solidarity and the backlash against it was swift and vicious. Whatever feeble gains were made have been swept away by this aftermath. Pundits may still be wringing their hands over whether #MeToo made it impossible for men to hit on women and the supposedly ruined lives and careers of accused perpetrators, but almost everyone who was at some point named as an predator has staged a comeback. It is not so much forgiveness as cultural amnesia.

I moved to New York in the summer of 2017, a few months before a crowdsourced document known as the “Shitty Media Men” list was published online. It would be a strange and painful year. In graduate school, I tried to file a Title IX complaint. The woman who handled complaints made small talk about the torrential rain and her commute from Connecticut. I had the strong feeling that her job was really to handle me and not my complaint. She spoke softly the way that therapists do and asked goal-oriented questions like: What do you want to come out of this?

I don’t know and my complaint sprouts too many heads, ends up becoming diluted. There is a problem with climate. I am bored out of my mind. I am offended. I am offended that other people aren’t more offended. I keep hearing harrowing stories about abuse and discrimination that keep me awake at night. Can intuition be a complaint? I feel uptight even to myself, as if I am trying to box off experiment and intellectual freedom, the inevitable entanglement and erotics of intimate working relationships. I don’t want anyone to be prosecuted or fired even. If I am being honest, I have a naive desire for them to acknowledge that they are wrong, to hold space momentarily for the ways they have trodden on and harmed other people. Apologies feel insincere and insufficient.

Anthropologists like to tell stories about far-away tribes and how they lived before capitalism. I learn that Amazonian jaguars think they’re human. My EO wants to be clear from day 1 that we’re not the best anthropology program out there but this is what we’ve got. My first three months of graduate school, I have persistent migraines, headaches like thunderclaps. The subway drones in my ears. Eventually, I write my EO and tell him that I’m dropping out of graduate school. “That sounds like a good decision,” he writes back.

A few months later, a scandal will erupt at one of the undergraduate colleges linked to my graduate institution, involving sexual abuse, harassment, drugs, and a buried Title IX complaint. One of the men implicated in it, a professor who allegedly drugged and assaulted his undergraduates and employees, was a graduate of my PhD program. He did fieldwork about sex trafficking and the narcotics trade in what the media liked to describe as an ironic twist. Anthropologists might call him a native informant.

None of this is particularly novel. When I am an undergraduate, student/professor relationships are allowed if tacitly discouraged. I personally know several girls who have romantic or sexual relationships with their professors. One of them gets brutally ghosted and spirals into deep depression. Another professor, a star of the Classics department, is known for getting drunk and making suggestive comments to his undergraduates about their breasts. Higher ed, to me, is boys clubby, despite what they say in the news. I want so badly at this time to be taken seriously. I feel totally at odds with my body, unable to reconcile the ways I want to be desirable and the ways I want to be smart, how that has gotten all tangled up.

After I graduate, I intern briefly at a newspaper while I am au pairing. I develop an obsessive crush on my boss who is clearly attracted to me. He does things like sit behind me to review my copy edits and lean forward, arms around me, to make changes. Everyone notices, we’re in an open plan office, but they just roll their eyes. I try to make things happen, even though I am deeply intimidated by this world-wise man, who has worked in war zones. I invite him to a party at my apartment. He shows up but sits awkwardly the whole time unable to integrate. Everyone here is so young, he tells me. He has a moral conflict, it becomes clear to me. He’s flirting just enough that he doesn't have to feel bad about it. Depressed and humiliated, I quit the job and we silently watch each other’s Instagram stories for years and years.

Later on, when I tell stories like this to women I know, they become defensive, they comment things like, well at least you get attention, no one is sexually harassing me. Someone I used to work with, a partnered woman in her 30s, would say over and over again whenever the topic came up: why didn’t he hit on me?

If anyone is the real loser of this cultural morass and its rapid backslide, it is those who are already marginalized. While white women with bylines and book deals and industry jobs obsessively debate self-branding, “pretty privilege,” whether you have the right to call yourself a girl even if you don’t put “literary it” before it, the media industry has cratered. Journalists have been laid off in stunning numbers, whole sections and publications have been shut down at lightning speed, rates have lowered, further squeezing desperate freelance writers. Leftist politics have become increasingly taboo in reactionary legacy publications like The New York Times or The Atlantic. In this landscape, debates about whether it is classless to self-brand or self-promote or go to parties to network or seek opportunities feel like a vicious byproduct of scarcity. It is increasingly difficult to look compassionately and reasonably at a younger writer, striving, and to not feel threatened by the imagined comparison. By the idea that they might be cooler or shinier or more talented or more attractive.

Like every other kind of scarcity, this version breeds phantom enemies. Nobody forces women to buy the package, scolds Didion. But it seems like everyone these days is buying the package at least a little bit. The glory of opting out is fragile and unremarkable and no amount of opting out will unsettle structural power or ward off grotesque misogyny. In The Spectator last week, the magazine’s theater critic described going to a talk at Cambridge University, given by Lea Ypi, an academic and writer on political theory and revolution, who he called a “beautiful historian.” Sexually frustrated by his unfulfilled leering at Ypi, he went across town to see a sex worker. Most of the article is dedicated to describing his encounter with the sex worker, an Asian woman who he objectifies in the most patronizing and despicable terms.

Was Ypi not a serious enough writer, you might wonder? Did she buy into the package too much? She is a professor at LSE and has been awarded numerous high level research prizes. And yet, in one of Britain’s most widely circulated publications, she is explicitly named as the subject of a crude jerk off fantasy. It is not incidental that Evans acts out his desire on the body of another woman, an immigrant, working class, a woman of color, a sex worker, tacitly sexually available where Ypi is off limits.

There is very little meaningful debate to be had around the seriousness of a writer and the apparent suggestiveness of her appearance or sexualization. To critique a woman’s work through her embodiment is to further condemn her to immanence, to further dismiss her creative potential. Liberation is not a horizon in which women fully and permanently transcend their bodies in order to enjoy the freedom traditionally granted to men. Rather, it is a horizon where the body and the mind are allowed to peacefully coexist in tandem and to nourish each other without the burden of narrow stereotyped gender.

So if you worry about the aspiring writer who is objectifying herself, who seems to only be performing intellectual labor for the sake of looking sexy, perhaps spare a thought for those who are objectifying her. Objectification, after all, always starts somewhere. Power is vertical if you are willing to follow the pins upstream to the source of their production.