Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (22 page)

Britney was the most spectacular implosion of all, the place where it all fell apart. She was the perfect girl, who fractured and shattered in agonizing slow motion, to show us that even female perfection—even nearly
impossible
perfection, the contradictory not-this-nor-that, both-this-
and
-that tightrope Britney was made to walk—was a fault line, a disaster waiting to happen. After two centuries of feminist progress and increasing female agency, the journey that started with Mary Wollstonecraft and seemed to proceed through to Hillary Clinton wound up with Britney: a reminder that no matter how rich, or important, or powerful she was, no matter how “good” or how beautiful she seemed, even the perfect girl would get drunk one day, or lose a boyfriend, or gain weight, or age, or get sad, or get sick. And when she did, we would be there. Ready and waiting to take her down.

And, since the wrecks exist to embody our private monsters, to absorb and reflect women’s insecurities, it would seem to follow that the sheer fact of being women was also our most profound insecurity. Even if we got everything right, being female was a flaw that we could never quite correct or live down.

There may never be a spectacle to rival Britney’s. Even contemporaries who actually died—Amy, Whitney, Anna Nicole
Smith—seemed like dim echoes, unable to match her for sheer humiliation. And Britney, in the end, did not even die: She was buried alive. Put under her father’s conservatorship, she now lives under a form of legal control that is normally reserved for late-stage Alzheimer’s patients and people with severe developmental disabilities;
she is no longer legally allowed to decide whether she gets married, or where she lives, or who her doctors will be, or how to spend her money. She can no longer legally sign a contract. She is not allowed to use her cell phone unless her father approves. It reads like a cruel joke: The “Queen of Teen,” the ideal American girl-woman, is now condemned to be a child in the eyes of the law for, potentially, the rest of her life.

But, just as she was breaking down, something strange happened: The world began to love Britney Spears again. The endless, devouring need to see her fall apart and break down was replaced with something more like sisterhood, a desire to see her well, or happy, or free. Feminist writers began to attack and reject nasty or invasive press coverage, to protest the conservatorship that made her, in the words of Michelle Dean,
“a prisoner”; in 2014, when
Medium
ran an article by Taffy Brodesser-Acker about her Las Vegas residency, Britney’s central place in gender politics was so assured that Brodesser-Acker could confidently call her “a feminist role model for single working mothers here and everywhere” without fear of being laughed out of town.
Brodesser-Acker also quoted fans talking about the trainwreck years. Here was their assessment:

“Oh, I loved it,” said a fan named Andrea. “She was just saying fuck you to the world over and over. This was who I knew she was. In the early 2000s, she was a phony.
This
was really her.”

Meanwhile, mainstream pop-culture coverage stopped using words like “meltdown” and “white trash” and started calling Britney words like “icon,” and “living legend.” They referred to a woman in her early thirties as if she were the battle-scarred survivor of some ancient war, which—in a way—she was. Her suffering had purified her, allowed us to identify with her in a way that perfection had precluded. The ideal girl broke down, became a monster, and emerged on the other side as a real, flawed, and struggling woman, with plenty of reasons to say “fuck you” to the world.
That
woman, we didn’t have to see as a role model. That woman, we could simply love.

And she wasn’t the only one. After the Lewinsky scandal died down, and Bill Clinton’s presidency ended, Hillary Clinton—the woman who spent most of the ’90s being reviled for being “too political,” too baldly interested in power—successfully ran for the Senate in New York.

And she ran for president. And she became secretary of state. And she ran for president again. By 2015, when people wondered who Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential pick would be, they weren’t joking. They were also faced with the
odd fact that Hillary Clinton—elitist! Ultra-feminist! Enemy of boners everywhere!—was, by a substantial margin, the
“most admired woman anywhere in the world.” The one thing about her that reliably brought on the most vilification—a
woman
! Who was interested in
politics
! Why, she acted as if
she
could be president!—turned out to be the one thing she excelled at for the next several decades of her life.

It’s not that people stopped hating Hillary Clinton, exactly. Plenty of people still hate her; people, particularly men, always have, and they probably always will. Since 2005 alone, conservative writer Ed Klein has published three straight books about how much he hates her, which are most famous for the theory that Hillary Clinton is so frigid that Chelsea Clinton had to be the product of marital rape. During her first Presidential run, left-wing anchorman Keith Olbermann publicly expressed a desire for
“somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out”; during her second,
Nation
editor Doug Henwood (author of such subtle and nuanced works as
“Stop Hillary!”) posted
a Photoshopped image of her eating a baby. She still has a remarkable ability to turn otherwise reasonable people into tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.

But in all the fury, the conspiracy theorists and angry men seemed to miss one of the strangest facts about Hillary Clinton: Gravity works differently on her. You can trip her up or knock her over, but when Hillary falls, she falls
up
. Every baby-eating Photoshop, every public humiliation,
every unflattering picture or crushing defeat or speculation as to her fuckability or “likability,” has been the prequel to Hillary Clinton making another unprecedented step forward, doing one more thing no one thought she (or, for that matter, women) would ever be able to do. It is too early to know how history will regard Hillary Clinton. But history will certainly regard her—probably with no small amount of confusion—as a woman who appeared in the age of the “ambition gap,” and who just threw a grappling hook over to the other side of the damn thing and swung across it like Tarzan.

Monica Lewinsky, at first glance, seems to have emerged as the sole loser. She had neither Britney’s fame nor Hillary’s base of power from which to rebuild; she spent her adult life trying in vain to hit on some viable form of employment (handbag designing, weight-loss campaign spokeswomanship), earning her masters’ degree in social psychology, and being rejected from every job to which she applied. At forty, she is still trying to build a life from the wreckage of
The Starr Report
. But when she published the essay in
Vanity Fair
about her experience, denouncing the “culture of humiliation” that had done her in and driven her to the verge of suicide, young feminists were listening, and ready to back her up: Why
had
Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer for comparing Monica to Glenn Close in
Fatal Attraction
? Why had the comments about her focused so often on her weight, on the blow jobs she’d given rather than the orgasms she’d had; why had
calling her a “blow-job queen” or “Portly Pepperpot” ever been okay? Why had we all been so willing to buy the line of
The Starr Report
or the Clinton defenders, and see her as stupid, or a stalker, or a slut: Wasn’t it possible that the three S’s didn’t apply, that she had just been a twenty-something girl with a misguided crush on a notoriously charming man, operating out of pure, foolish, human feeling?

Trainwrecks are myths, yes. They are our monsters: cultural monsters, who embody the tensions of our moment or our expectations of women, and deeply personal monsters, who embody the parts of ourselves we are most afraid of. But there is another thing to note about all this: We are all, each and every one of us, our own worst monsters. And we all yearn, despite this fact, to be loved.

The trainwreck is the inverse of what a woman ought to be: She is demanding, sexually voracious, where women are meant to be merely sexy, and receptive to outside desire. She is emotional, needy, where women are meant to be likable and agreeable at all times. Where women are meant to care for others—where Britney was slammed for not caring enough about her children, and Hillary was slammed for not caring enough about Bill, and Monica was slammed for not caring enough about Hillary—the trainwreck is utterly vulnerable, sometimes incapable of keeping even herself going, desperately in need of care.

But there is no one woman who is purely sexy, purely agreeable, purely caring; there is no one devoid of appetite, or sadness, or rage, or the need to be taken care of. There is no “ideal girl.” We tried to manufacture her, at one point, and she turned out to be the biggest wreck of all.

There is an undeniable cruelty in our need for stories about wrecked women. We do sometimes seek them out for reasons of pure schadenfreude, or internalized misogyny. We can use them as projection screens for our own fears and failings, or look to them to confirm that we’re doing our own gender correctly. It’s understandable that we would: Women are punished, cruelly, for failing to be appropriately feminine, and there are dozens or hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Tuning into a reality-TV show where women punch each other while vying for the affections of some spray-tanned has-been, or looking at pictures of a celebrity stumbling drunkenly out of a car without her panties on, offers us a real if short-lived brand of comfort: It confirms that the standard for acceptable behavior is much lower than previously supposed, that if we haven’t punched anyone, or fucked Bret Michaels, or forgotten to wear pants today, we are at least doing better than someone else. We can look to the trainwrecks in order to tell ourselves,
well, at least I’m not that girl
.

But even if we’re not that girl, we’re never perfect girls. And our love for messes—our willingness to accept and validate and admire even the most formerly polarizing of
women, once we’ve seen enough of their suffering—suggests that there is a kinder and healthier reason to enjoy trainwreck stories. These women, with all their loudness and messiness, their public loneliness and weepy outbursts, their falling down and falling apart, are the image of our own vulnerable selves, the wild and agonized messes we all conceal beneath our hopefully acceptable personas. They can embody the women we hope not to be, but they can also give a public voice to our own suffering; they can be the women who speak for us, when they say “fuck you” to the world.

Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own flaws and failings to be loved. The question, then, is choosing between the two; whether we’ll continue to demand that women in the public eye act as our personal scapegoats, for the crime of being human, or whether we’ll go ahead and admit that—to quote a former president; I apologize in advance for this one—we feel their pain.

8

REVOLUTIONARY

If you are ever in the mood to feel grateful for modernity and all its conveniences, there are few things more apt to do the trick than a book entitled
Curious Punishments of Bygone Days
. Written in 1896 by colonial historian Alice Morse Earle, it is a compendium of all the tortures embraced, by our Revolutionary forefathers, as a means of correcting bad behavior. Public branding; holes poked through the tongue; ears lopped off as a special punishment for recidivism; I’m telling you, this club has
everything
. Most of it, as Earle notes, carried out in public to make it more emotionally painful.

Being a woman, Earle seems to have been particularly interested in which humiliations were doled out to women, and why. So, not only can you find historical evidence of our forefathers discovering the nation’s first Paris Hilton (
“Anne ux. Richard Walker being cast out of the church of Boston for intemperate drinking from one inn to another, and for light and wanton behavior, was the next day called
before the governour and the treasurer, and convict by two witnesses, and was stripped naked one shoulder, and tied to the whipping-post, but her punishment was respited”) or penning delightful poems in praise of waterboarding their wives to end an argument (
“No brawling wives, no furious wenches / No fire so hot but water quenches”), you can also get several instructive glimpses of the actual women who were thus shamed. For example, this woman:

One of the latest, and certainly the most notorious sentences to ducking was that of Mrs. Anne Royall, of Washington, D.C., almost in our own day. This extraordinary woman had lived through an eventful career in love and adventure; she had been stolen by the Indians when a child, and kept by them fifteen years; then she was married to Captain Royall, and taught to read and write. She traveled much, and wrote several vituperatively amusing books. She settled down upon Washington society as editor of a newspaper called the “Washington Paul Pry” and of another, the “Huntress”; and she soon terrorized the place. No one in public office was spared, either in personal or printed abuse, if any offense or neglect was given to her. A persistent lobbyist, she was shunned like the plague by all congressmen. John Quincy Adams called her an itinerant virago. She was arraigned as a common scold before Judge William Cranch, and he sentenced her to be ducked in the Potomac River. She was, however, released with a fine, and appears to us to-day to have been insane—possibly through over-humored temper
.

Well: She might appear to be insane. Or she might appear to be, you know, a
journalist
. By all accounts, a good one: inquisitive, ruthless, unafraid to expose corruption and malfeasance in powerful institutions, and completely unwilling to bow to pressure, even when that pressure came from the highest offices in the nation.