bad behavior

A girl I know one time told me about the golden ratio. To demonstrate she lined up her face at a side angle, approximated measurements in the air. See? she said. I didn’t see but I also didn’t know what to say. To deny her her scientific beauty seemed petty and spiteful, a clear indication of jealousy and arrogance about my lopsided face. To go along with it seemed wrong, a kind of empty deferral to social hierarchy, to the presumption that it’s really possible, anatomically speaking, to be the most beautiful.

There’s an essay in The Point that was going around a little while ago about having a beautiful friend. The author, Grazie Sophia Christie, writes about a lifelong friendship of hers with another woman who is more beautiful than she is. In her retelling of their friendship, it was through this constant comparison that she learned she was the less pretty one, or entirely average-looking. “I pursue beautiful friends like some women do men who will strike them in bed at night,” she writes. “On account of our addictive relativity.” Christie goes on to find constant dyads of female friendship, divided into more beautiful and less beautiful women. The plain ones are overly self-conscious, they try too hard, they suffer. The beautiful ones are out of touch, float through the world unaware of how the other half lives.

I found the essay fascinating but alienating. I didn’t really relate to it, maybe because I’ve never had any delusions of being remarkably beautiful. The closer you are to the golden ratio maybe, the more torturous your obsession with hierarchies and the more absolute your idea of what beauty is. I sent it to a friend of mine though who is obsessed with relative beauty, who I know walks into a room and sizes up every other woman there. I sometimes have the uneasy sense that she is watching me for signs of beauty, that our relative attractiveness fluctuates, that she is comforted by the ways in which I am less beautiful, admires the ways in which I am more beautiful.

The thesis is complicated by Christie’s discussion of the famous Ferrante friendship. Lila is the more beautiful friend, according to her, and wins at everything. Studious Lenú fights her way up the social ladder, becomes a successful writer, lives overall a happier life, but will forever remain in Lila’s shadow. Everyone who reads the book, according to the essay, will identify with Lenú but secretly long to be Lila. Evidence that pretty girls come out on top.

But Ferrante’s novel is called My Brilliant Friend not My Beautiful Friend. Lila may be beautiful but that’s sort of beside the point. It is not entirely clear if she is really the most beautiful. Other characters constantly indicate that she is ugly in certain ways by local standards. Regardless, her aura isn’t really about being beautiful in a static, model-like kind of way. She’s charismatic, wayward, unwilling or unable to comply with social rules and to defer to power, she’s quick and smart and engaging, brilliant, in other words.

I find it strangely sad to read Ferrante and to only see in it a confirmation of some kind of genetic hierarchy and the power of conforming. The book is not simply a chronicle of Lenú longing to be Lila either. There’s a push and pull between them. When Lila pursues Nino, it is partly out of her desire to be Lenú, educated, upwardly mobile, a nice girl who deserves to be courted and not violently possessed as a trophy. When Lenú sleeps with Nino’s father, it is out of her mimetic desire to be Lila, for Lila. She writes to excise Lila from herself precisely because they’re so entangled, because neither one can ever win.

Viewing friendship as hierarchal or as an opportunity to dominate betrays something else. Although it’s often said that women care about being beautiful to compete with each other, every example devolves into romantic competition. This is a worldview in which women not only must battle it out with each other for attention, but one in which everyone must abide by the rules of the hierarchy. If men settle for you, it’s only because they can’t get a more beautiful woman. If you have other qualities, intelligence, sexiness, charisma, they must be subsumed to the dominance of beauty.

This is kind of a primal, Darwinian way of ordering society. Interpersonal relationships necessarily suffer. If your friendships are ego-driven—a desire to be more beautiful—or masochistic—a desire to suffer in the shadow of beauty in order to be associated with it (like Christie)—or simply elastically shaped around the assumed desires and preferences of men, how can you ever really see other women? It also makes it hard to perceive beauty, which in terms of both aesthetics and desirability, is often more proximate to ugliness than it may initially appear. What’s sexy or interesting or compelling is weird and intangible and fluid and sometimes highly personal. Trying to cater to the desires of men is a losing game.

In 3 Conversations, a dialogue between merritt k and Charlotte Shane about beauty, relationships, and sex work merritt writes about the strange drive to beauty and how it can become a work ethic of sorts. “I want to be content, I guess? But I’m not really sure what that looks like, and sometimes I worry that what I really want is to be the prettiest person in the room, which is such a nightmare trap to fall into.” Later on, she remarks in a phrase that shook me when I first read it years ago: “Work has taught me a lot about male desire, the most important thing being that it’s basically inexhaustible.”

Some of the best writing I’ve read about this inexhaustibility and the wonkiness of desire is by Mary Gaitskill, an icon of weird sex writers. Gaitskill is interested in the recesses of people’s minds, in how and why their desires work, more than she is in titillating. It’s the opposite of the slick eroticism of say, The Idol, which offers no specificity, no fantasy that doesn’t easily derive from mainstream porn. “The best sex writing seems to be about sex but is really about something else,” writes Larissa Pham in a Bookforum essay about Gaitskill, “such as the failures inherent in romantic fantasy, or our inability to find connection.” Desire is often mismatched in Gaitskill’s writing, such as in “A Romantic Weekend,” the story Pham describes, where two lovers attempt to have an affair. The woman, Beth, wants to be dominated, but she wants to be made to want it and hence for it to resolve into a kind of uneven mutuality. The man wants pure fantasy on demand. Beth starts to suspect by the end that his desire for her to be reducible to a sex object is rooted in a real, deeper desire, one in which she is entirely passive.

One of the most disturbing and provocative stories I’ve read of Gaitskill’s is “The Girl On the Plane,” from her collection Because They Wanted To. In it, a man ends up sitting next to a woman on a plane who he finds very attractive and who reminds him of a girl from his past, Patty. Although Patty was beautiful, he recalls, “she presented her beautiful body statically, as if it was a shield.” She was also known to be easy, viewed as laughable and crazy. When it becomes clear she has a crush on him, his friends mock her and him by extension, making him ashamed of his ambivalent attraction to her. She eventually asks him to date her and he refuses. But later on, she gets blackout drunk at a party and multiple men there have sex with her. After they’ve all left, he crawls into bed with her also. On the plane, he strikes up a conversation with his fellow passenger, the woman who reminds him of Patty, and she is surprisingly open about her past with alcoholism and struggles in life. Her vulnerability disarms him and he ends up telling her that he once raped someone (Patty). When she reacts in horror, he becomes defensive, trying to explain. It wasn’t like that.

What makes the confession stranger is his association of the woman with Patty, the way he conflates them. He also mindlessly conflates alcoholism with rape as personal weaknesses. In another recollection, he describes telling his future wife about having group sex as a teenager, a bunch of guys and one girl. In his retelling, his wife is turned on by the “dangerous pack-animal aspect of his masculinity.” When she asks him what it was like, he says “a good time with the guys.” It’s not just his capacity for physical domination that he views as alluring (in both conversations), but also his psychic indifference to the interiority of women. What both experiences have in common is their male bonding potential, a shared experience among men, enacted upon women.

If female friendship is often described as a brutal evolutionary competition to get picked by or to ward off men, male friendship is traditionally viewed as almost totally extraneous to women, a sociality oriented around other kinds of pursuits.

My first year of college, there was a gossip magazine put out by the students that basically functioned in the same way as a tabloid. They outed one of the queer students. They detailed a girl losing her virginity to her boyfriend. They made a list of everyone another girl had slept with. It was supposed to be all in good fun. I remember the girls laughing about it. It was shut down later in my degree.

There was this one guy in my year who became notorious for abusing the girls he dated. He was handsome, wealthy, well-spoken, had attended a prestigious boy’s London school along with a large number of my other fellow students. He dated a friend of mine who was the first one to tell me about it. She had fantasies about harming him afterwards. Eventually, a few of the girls got together and formed this group for women that was basically a reading group of feminist writing but ended up becoming kind of an insulated social network.

Even so, after the details were made public of this guy’s behavior, most of the students I knew refused to pass judgement him (to “cancel” him, they would say now, although that wasn’t really the concept). I don’t think any of the girls wanted retribution exactly or for any action to be taken against him. They just wanted a showing of solidarity, a general sense that his behavior was viewed as antisocial and aberrant, and that he, not they would be ostracized. That is not, of course, what happened.

In the years since, with the emergence of and swift backlash against “cancel culture,” I’ve thought a lot about this desire. It’s in some ways, simply a desire for validation, an instinctive wish to be seen and humanized, for people to care about your suffering. As many have written, it is also undeniably healthy for people to communicate with each other about abuse, assault, and other bad behavior, because it offers protection to a group. It functions as a form of solidarity. This is much harder to do online, where it often ends up playing out now, because the internet isn’t really a community. Random people get involved. Call-outs spin out of control. There’s still no real mechanism or sense of the appropriate way to deal with this kind of information.

And increasingly, there’s a sense that it doesn’t matter again. Mainstream culture is back. It’s cool to be a jock again. Traditional values are on the rise. Abortion is illegal. Amber Heard, describing her assault by Johnny Depp, was widely memeified on the internet, with TikTok users creating thirsty videos to the sound. I think it’s right to be skeptical of the idea that there was ever really a feminist breakthrough moment, that at the height of the #MeToo movement, everyone cared more about sexual violence. But I also think it’s hard to deny that the responses have become more callous, that a lot more people are ready to say with their chest on record that a woman is a whore, is a liar, was asking for it, that she’s crazy, that she’s irredeemably fucked up beyond repair.

The first man who assaulted me was my boyfriend and the second one wanted to be my boyfriend. The first was one of those grey area stories. The second one was much more explicitly violent. I came home with bruises and had wild dreams for a while afterwards. That one also kind of felt like a grey area to me though at the time. Maybe he had just misunderstood something. It’s kind of a tired story at this point. Describing it feels like trauma mining, an inability to move on.

That obviously has to do with my own internalized sense of fucked up-ness, my psychic shame about not being a good enough woman. But we are also all heavily conditioned towards this idea. When I told a group of women recently about being catcalled on the street in New York, they reacted competitively. Everyone wanted to see who got catcalled more. I wish I got catcalled, one told me. I’m pretty sure they said on Red Scare that it’s a compliment. The guy who made a crude comment about my breasts to me on the street the other night and then lingered to see how I would react evidence that my Brandy Melville crop tops are flattering, working as intended.

I don’t experience it as a compliment, but it also doesn’t really jar me anymore. I experience it as a part of the inevitable flow of city life, probably a symptom of resignation. It falls into the category of things not worth getting upset about. They said on Nymphet Alumni that jock culture is back, that it’s cool to be mainstream again. The 2010s are over. We’re in the future now.