In conversation recently I talked to a guy who shared his frustration about being “ghosted” by a woman with whom he felt he had a perfectly fine date. Theoretically I would have agreed with him that she could have just said at the end of it, when he asked to keep in touch, that she had a nice time but didn’t see it going anywhere. But I know that I have never been able to do this – and I have equally been almost totally unable to disappear from someone’s life completely without any kind of explanation whatsoever. Truth be told, I have mostly been scared of men my entire life – too afraid to disappear completely (what if they then find me and react badly?) but equally too afraid to wound a fragile ego. The point isn’t me, though.
No, it’s the idea that these people (usually men) who insist that they “just” want someone to be honest with them, that it would have been fine to say “thanks, but no thanks” are out of touch with reality. They often, as news stories everywhere all week long have pointed out, take a polite rejection as an invitation to keep trying, keep pestering, push harder, and sometimes, it escalates into outright threats and violence. This is nothing new to most women.
Sure, it might be civilized and polite to be able to say to someone, “Thanks for the drink, but I think we should go our separate ways”, but reality has taught us that we are rarely met with civilized responses.
Yesterday’s talk of silences and sharing was obliquely personal, but it did then make me think about an earlier moment this year when I read Ellen Pao’s book Reset, detailing the harassment and toxic culture in which she (and many other women) worked during her time as a VC at Kleiner Perkins. The timing of the book’s publication coincides with the contemporary tidal wave of public sharing/silence-breaking taking place en masse, but it seems Pao’s gender discrimination legal case came a little bit too soon (at least to deliver her a legal victory). Nevertheless her actions, as difficult and costly they were for her personally, certainly paved the way (however invisibly) for those who have finally found a voice with which to speak up.
I didn’t find the book riveting, nor Pao’s experiences shocking or surprising. In fact it took me a long time by my standards to get through the book. It’s not boring or badly written – it’s just that this is all so familiar. We (women) have seen this same story and had these experiences, all the silently slammed doors, slights, harassment, our part (as women) being cast only as ornaments or quotas to fill but who will be, as Pao asserts many times, compliant, hopeful and helpful enough to do all the grunt work, and to keep delivering ideas, progress and revenue under the radar. All the while, standing just on the edge of the action, we watch the high-fiving other people (usually men) do as they take undeserved credit or undercut or interrupt us. It sometimes feels like they do this because they are threatened; at other times it feels like they do this because we are invisible because this is the way the world is set up – mostly white men steering the ship while the women of the world are just bobbing along in the vast ocean hoping these men will benevolently deploy a liferaft.
And it’s a quiet, almost silent, kind of suffering – you don’t even realize you are in the shit until you are well and truly in it. Pao does a good job describing that first moment of realization – that it’s not just you on the outside. No, it’s the existence of an entire culture of discrimination that dawns on you. You might at first blame yourself, think you are overly sensitive and just not used to the way things are done. But even when you realize this is an offensive and hostile environment, and that you are not the only one to think so, what recourse do you have? You are invisible. OR you are the squeaky wheel, the bitch, the “difficult to work with” one. And it is only when you have exhausted all your options that you move to the extreme (in Pao’s case, litigation). And it’s then that all the energy and resources these men have channeled into insignificant frippery, such as paint colors on their private jets and discussions on porn stars and their ‘attributes’, are turned with full force toward discrediting any source of discord in their world.
And it’s crafty. I am first to admit that when the Kleiner Perkins PR machine churned into gear and started writing unflattering and defamatory stories about Pao (about whom I knew nothing at the time), I was inclined to believe the stories because I simply was not thinking about it critically. But when you think about it – why would well-respected, mainstream publications go on the attack against this individual woman in the vicious way they did unless there were something really big at stake underneath it all? Unless someone with deep pockets felt she had to be silenced? On the surface, it would be (and was) easy to look at her allegations in almost the same way the general public scoffs at the story of the woman who famously sued McDonald’s for being burned by hot coffee: it seemed frivolous. And why? In part because the general public has no understanding of the legal tenets of the case, the actual and physical damages (third degree burns) or the fact that McDonald’s knew their coffee could cause this level of harm – and showed during discovery that they knew and had had more than 700 similar complaints over the years – and did nothing to rectify the situation. But the other, bigger part of why the public vilified the woman for her litigious greed and to this day laugh at the case as an example of America’s sue-happy culture gone-too-far is because the PR machine was at work doing its ugly smear job.
Again. Still. As always.
Perhaps the book didn’t enlighten me in any way, but I certainly noted while reading Pao’s account that sometimes pushing the worst nightmares of your life into the light is your only recourse. Even if you get burned.
“You could damn yourself with silence but never so effectively as by running your mouth.” –Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon
We are taught to stay quiet, so quiet, so as to remain nearly invisible. We hope that we will be noticed in some way despite the enforced, expected silence. Sharing, trusting, talking too much, revealing too much is trouble. To listen is to learn. To be quiet is to fulfill what is expected, to behave in a demure and controlled fashion.
But what if the story you have to tell is important? What if it will save your life, or at least redeem it? What if giving it voice – or life – restores your posture, finally lifting the invisible yoke of self-blame, doubt, responsibility, guilt (whatever it is) from your shoulders? What if finally speaking up frees you – finally – finally – finally?
But the consequences! How well we know and how bitterly we anticipate, and often, feel the consequences. The inevitable (?) backlash, the (un)expected wrath of hostile reactions, even if there is no hint of regret for having unclipped the tongue.
It makes no difference if the self-censorship hides your own feelings, wants, needs, experiences or shields the actions or feelings of others. It makes no difference if silence weaves its cocoon around systemic injustice. It all ends the same if it is never spoken or shared.
Who remembers the story of the Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher? A Long Island high school girl who had an affair with a car mechanic, Joey Buttafuoco, and then when he dumped her, she went to the Buttafuoco house and shot Joey’s wife, Mary Jo, in the face. What in the hell did Mary Jo have to do with this conflict? Sure, the teenage girl is unhinged and somehow sees the wife as the hindrance keeping her away from her lover. But it wasn’t the wife. It was the man: blaming his inability to know what he wants, playing all sides, having cake and eating it. But the women pay the price.
It was a long time ago, and you would be forgiven to have forgotten this sordid, ripped-from-the-headlines, made-for-tv tale. It was mined once more in a recent season of Mozart in the Jungle, but even that is not a must-watch for most, so the Buttafuoco/Fisher story isn’t immediately at the ready in most people’s memories. No matter – it is just an extreme example of the cautionary tale that we’re fed: women are jealous; women are crazy; women will try to kill each other over a man and imagine the worst intentions in the other woman. In fact, the other woman may be completely in the dark.
So often, it’s not the women. It’s almost always the men. The men are the ones making poor choices, misleading women… and then these blind women, who never have all the facts, end up doing stupid shit like shooting each other in the face.
Most are not shooting anyone in the face. Nothing quite so dramatic… or criminal. But I wonder about the majority of the women I know. There’s a lot of lip service about being supportive of women, being feminists, believing and listening to other women. But in practice, even the most reasonable of women are always suspicious of and placing blame on another (or ‘the other’) woman. But I don’t think the majority of women would, for example, actively pursue someone (male or female) whom they knew to be already involved/unavailable.
I wonder today, along these lines, how could woman A (a nameless/faceless woman) read book after book, all feminist manifestos and dialectics of women supporting women, and yet be so territorial about the man she lived with and supposedly didn’t even love or want? Woman B is simply told that man Z has split up with woman A. But woman A apparently has a different understanding of the situation. Why does she then blame woman B, who does not have accurate or truthful information about where things stand? Woman B has stumbled into a situation about which she does not have, well… any information. (Although that does not become totally clear until the end, when it no longer matters.) The problem always comes back to man Z. And why would either woman, given how they are being played and given false or incomplete information, even want man Z?
How could woman A, apparently intelligent, thoughtful and brilliant, after reading so much about women, act as though and treat other women – strangers, in most cases – as though they were enemies to her cause? As standing in her way? As trying to steal from her? Women so often, especially when someone else is in the middle, do not have all the information they need.
And the world goes on being a horrible place for women not only because of men’s oppression, which of course is in the news now – dominating headlines – but also because of women’s suspicion about each other and what they do to and how they treat and view each other.
Several months ago, Mr Firewall asked me if I had ever seen the ads for Bodyform feminine hygiene products that he remembers from his youth. I guess they were only in the UK (possibly Europe) because, as far as I know, Bodyform products don’t even exist in the US. As he always does, he charitably decided to belt out the ‘theme song’ of these ads. I thought surely his rendition was exaggerated and over-the-top… but for once, as I sought out the actual ads from the 80s, his version was almost toned down. I was a bit… stunned. What the hell kind of song was this?
Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Firewall remembered the first ad, but my first exposure was this second one… I can’t really tell what the people are doing. First it looks like a water tank, then an oil rig-like thing and then like they are welding or something. (Okay, I admit I am not really watching closely.)
In the months since my introduction to Bodyform advertising, Firewall has continued to regale me with his renditions of this song, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in response to my statements, such as “I must have PMS” or “I must be ovulating”.
We recently had a discussion, though, about how so many men have no clue about menstruation. (Firewall has a bunch of older sisters, so he well knows.) But I read a handful of things online recently that echoed the same kinds of things I have heard boys, and even men, say… in all their ignorance. For example, they imagine that women can control their periods in the same way people control their bladders. Just WILL THE BLEEDING TO STOP – hold it in! Beyond that, the lifetime cost of having periods will apparently add up to almost USD 20,000.
I don’t really know why I am writing about this except that it makes me mad. We must deal with – as women – for almost our entire lives – something out of our control, uncomfortable and often painful. And then deal with the total misunderstanding and ignorance surrounding this within society. And then get to pay for the privilege… to the tune of the cost of a car. But even that isn’t as infuriating as it could be. At least I have access to choices and resources. And as ignorant as people can be about something like periods, I don’t live in a deeply shame-based culture that demonizes menstruation.
I was talking to someone else last night, mentioning these menstrual misconceptions and issues, and he said that he, too, had spent the evening talking about menstruation… although slightly more targeted than my kvetching aimlessly. No, he was discussing how he and a group with whom he will travel will get feminine hygiene products in bulk to girls in Sierra Leone. He himself will travel with 60kgs of tampons. (I am wondering about the efficacy, probability and feasibility of supplying menstrual cups, which seem easier to manage, transport, distribute sustainably… but not sure how well that would work.)
And this issue makes me infuriated at my own helplessness – not just the fact that young women in Sierra Leone, West Africa, many parts of Africa and all over the world don’t have these kinds of basic tools at their disposal – but the fact that resources in general are so scarce that it is always like anything one does ‘to help’ is a futile ‘drop in the bucket’, yet at the same makes a tremendous difference (in the way it never does in a well-resourced part of the world). I recognize that I am unfocused and grazing the surface in this venting.
It’s easy to dismiss it all with a casual, if pensive and somewhat distant, “It just never happened for me” when answering people’s intrusive questions about why you’ve never married or had children. I, for one, often flash to multiple interviews with former US Attorney General under President Clinton, Janet Reno, who died in 2016, and all the times she was forced to answer the question about whether or not she had wanted to marry and have a family; not one to be forced into answers on even the toughest of subjects, she seemed always to reply with some version of “it just never happened for me” (referring to herself as an “awkward old maid”). I don’t know if there’s any more to her story – and it doesn’t matter. She was – and is – entitled to that privacy. Aren’t we all? But that constant, awkward, pesky question about what we want, but didn’t get, persists… and always invites Janet Reno into my brain.
But it’s so much more complex than that. People want easy answers, if they are really looking for answers at all. They are not truly curious; they just want to pry a little bit and see if some horror story will come bursting out. If your inner dam of tears doesn’t burst upon their initial inquiry, they move on and start boasting about their progeny and their accomplishments. Possibly even their progeny’s progeny. Because, yes, like it or not, you’re at that age: near the very end of the possibility of fertility, while many contemporaries and peers have moved into happy, if quite early, grandparenthood.
And you, skin shriveling and pruning with age and passage of time, smile calmly, nodding along, feeling the rush of all the suppressed grief hit the buttress again and again. Smile, nod, stay watertight.
“Part of what interests me is the impulse to dismiss and how often it slides into the very incoherence or hysteria of which women are routinely accused.” –Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
When not enunciated clearly, “betrayal” and “portrayal” sound very much the same. And in reality, they are.
Applicable in many situations, it seems most apt when thinking about the portrayal women must give so often in the world, consciously or not, in the workplace, in their private lives, even in their friendships. And in giving this portrayal (or portrayals), she performs or reflects a kind of betrayal – of herself, other women and even the truth of what women are or can be. I wrote a bit about this – or about false feminism – or carrying the flag of feminism only when it is convenient or aligns with one’s own individual conception of feminism. But I can think of very little that betrays oneself and womankind – and does the least amount of good for all of humanity – than the idea of portraying a role, fitting into a mold, being or showing some unreality to the world and perpetuating it. At the same time, though, it is so ingrained as the expectation that it’s hard to do otherwise. After all, no one appears ready to take a woman at her word.
“I told you, but what does the proverb say? A woman’s prophecy is always taken lightly until it comes to pass.” –The Dance of the Jakaranda, Peter Kimani
At face value
I think of this often: we don’t take what women say at face value. Even if we believe them, and even if what they tell us bears out, e.g. Bill Cosby’s many accusers, Cosby’s own admissions of what he had done (without accepting any culpability, i.e. “I did it but it wasn’t wrong; it was consensual”), we still don’t apply the logic or truths of what women say, we still don’t hold anyone accountable for what women endure, reinforcing the idea that we might as well just shut up or contentedly portray our role.
“If we could recognize or even name this pattern of discrediting, we could bypass recommencing the credibility conversation every time a woman speaks. One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god. The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along. But with the real-life Cassandras among us, we can lift the curse by making up our own minds about who to believe and why.” –Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
Crazy label: Unspoken message
“As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.” –Cane, Jean Toomer
I read this week about Sylvia Plath, and how she is widely regarded in academia and in general as a gifted but troubled woman. Clearly if you’d commit suicide, you must have been crazy. She was just a jealous woman who had been cheated on, like so many before her, and could not handle it. Unhinged. Hysterical. But is any story or person that simple? It’s so easy to dismiss her this way because this is what evidence we have; this is the narrative that her ex-husband sought to craft in her death. Not to preserve her reputation as a literary voice but to protect his.
The article I read asks: “Why are we so unwilling to take Sylvia Plath at her word?” The “crazy label” assigned to her (which, granted, is not hard to assign when a person kills herself and is therefore left defenseless; any written evidence she left behind was destroyed by the aforementioned ex-husband) automatically makes her an unreliable witness to her own existence, all the more so because she was a woman. The hushed-up, unspoken message is clear: You don’t need to listen to a woman if she’s crazy, and much of the language used to describe women and their behavior (as if it can be so easily classified and compartmentalized) makes all women seem crazy in some way. All women then are unreliable or biased witnesses. When an individual woman’s own situation becomes unbearable and visible to others, it is demanded: “But why didn’t you say anything?” Answer: “I did and no one listened/believed me” or eventually, “Who would have believed me?” When their prescience comes to prove itself, later people ask, “But why didn’t anyone say anything?” Well, we did. It went unheard until it came to pass.
Uncontrollable circumstances, self-blame
As Dorthe Nors writes in So Much for that Winter,“and it is woman’s weakness to believe it’s because she isn’t good enough that things don’t go according to plan (and it is woman’s weakness that things should go according to plan).” Perhaps it is this near-built-in inferiority coupled with the idea that somehow you (as a woman) should be perfect that makes one seem crazy. Even though this is exactly the portrayal women are asked to give every single day.
“Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.”
(Wo)man with a plan
It’s overly simplified and not universally true (in other words: here are some sweeping generalizations for you), but in very broad strokes, women plan and then feel guilty and inadequate when that plan does not work precisely, dwelling on the consequences (even if they often have also performed risk assessment and made contingency plans even for the simplest of maneuvers). Men do not plan, and walk away without a second thought when the things around them fall apart, feeling no connection at all to the consequences.
Or, men’s and women’s idea of what constitutes a “plan” are fundamentally different: A man makes a plan, points A through Z. He rarely seems to follow the threads of what happens if any of those alphabetical points does not go to plan, which is where many women excel. She is thinking about point A1, and the contingency plans A2, A3 and how those interact and meet with the next possible steps in the plan, points B-Z and their subplans. If she thinks this way, how can she not foresee and foretell pitfalls and disasters? It’s a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure book but without any real surprises. A bit like a woman’s life at times: chaos and silence, ignoring and being ignored and many rousing sessions and furious responses that lead nowhere.
I remember being taught about slippery, misleading false cognates when I first started learning a second language: a word means something in one language, but the same word means something else in another. I return to this idea of false cognates again and again, but more in terms of life and how related things are (or are not). I wrote about this – the things that pop up repeatedly, seemingly coincidentally, but without any connection. But somehow even randomness can be wrapped together to make something thematic. (“As Laplace has pointed out, to discover is to bring together two ideas that were previously unlinked.” –Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal.)
If an interdisciplinary-style university education taught me anything, it’s that interconnectedness can be woven from very little. Sometimes the connections are more subtle but reasonable – we, even without thinking, curate the things we are open to by the choices we make. I may read one book, then watch a talk show, reflect on a book I read some time ago, have a conversation that all strike the same chords. It’s unconscious but guided by the things that keep feeding and forming us.
False feminism?
Case in point: A woman acquaintance who never shuts up about her feminist bona fides and is fairly judgmental about approaches to feminism (because, she stubbornly asserts, women can and should do anything!) that do not align with her views on How Feminism Is Done and What It Means to Be a Liberated Woman. She also does her job based on her ‘instinct’, despite the fact that what she is doing should be informed by readily available data. This leads to expensive mistakes and a lack of results. Part of her ‘instinct’ (which may well be correct in this case) is that the company she works for must have all its videos and voiceovers done in men’s voices. She is certain that this will resonate with the core audience (mostly developers) because no woman will sound authoritative and credible. That might be true, but isn’t that also a part of feminism? Working to change what is perceived as credible (so that women are not automatically discounted as “not credible”)?
I’ve seen this happen in many companies, even in my own job a couple of times; I happened to see this article about how most companies’ video/marketing ads are centered on and make use of men to create “the impression that marketers aim their technology products and services at adult, white men and that these images serve to reinforce the association between masculinity and technology.”
“According to the researchers, the emotionality and passivity of women in most of the advertisements analyzed perpetuates the idea that women are not in control of the creation and usage of technology.”
Sure, there’s certainly something to be said for what’s realistic, what’s expedient versus lofty goals of changing minds one tech video at a time. But it’s also a miserable failure of follow-through to never challenge stuff like this, particularly if you’re a vocal mouthpiece of this need for equality. Demand that women in tech be taken seriously, but don’t bother to inject women into your outward-facing communications efforts?
False face, fucked filter
When I write that we ‘curate’ the reality around us, it’s very much the same concept as people who end up reading only news or ideas that confirm their bias or worldview. Sometimes it works for us (opening us up and guiding us to new and interesting places) but often works against us (letting the walls close in, making a truly fucked-up filter through which to see (or not see) the world and its realities). I’d guess my own ‘curation’ (a word/concept that is so overused that I hate using it here) is strange and eclectic because I want to ‘taste and see’ (Levertov) everything. Even the stuff that hurts, even the stuff I vehemently oppose.
But the point here is that even the most casual path taken generates its own trails of interconnectivity. Against this backdrop of ‘false/when-convenient feminism’, I had just read Roxane Gay’s Hunger, which in and of itself is not a ‘feminist’ book (she has written a much-read book on the subject, though, called Bad Feminist) but deals with issues germane to the subject (identity and ‘sub-identities’, e.g. being black, being the child of immigrants, being female, being queer, being a victim of sexual assault, being fat, etc.). It’s not a vast leap to go from Gay’s book to Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen, which explores various aspects of behavior that have been off-limits for or criticized in women. Petersen examines ways in which a handful of famous women exemplify these “too much” traits, getting at the heart of the fear that comes with stepping outside the lines and being (or being perceived as) the “unruly women” Petersen cites in her title. Petersen begins by discussing “acceptable” female celebrities who cultivate a tightly controlled brand (interestingly, I read this on the heels of Naomi Klein’s No Logo, which was written at a time when ‘personal branding’ was in its infancy) as a counterpoint to the women who do and say what they want and in doing so become points of “fascination and disgust”, e.g. Serena Williams, Lena Dunham, Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Nicky Minaj, among others). It’s a lot more nuanced than that. I suggest you read the book.
“This Is How Much America Hates Women. Not all women, of course. … In other words, unruly women—the type who incite Trump’s ire, and whom millions of voters have decided they can degrade and dismiss, simply because they question, interrogate, or otherwise challenge the status quo.” –Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud
(As a side note, while most of her observations on Madonna and aging were astute and valid, it felt a bit like Petersen, while not eviscerating Madonna, really took her to task in a way that felt out of place given the subject matter and the more thoughtful and laudatory tone granted to every other person in the book. It was intelligent “breakdown takedown” and analysis, but felt like the writer reserved some extra ire to heap on Madonna, well-deserved or not. Also, Madonna: French women, and some other Europeans, have aging with quiet sex appeal almost down to a science. No one needs a regressive Madonna trying to create something like that when it exists in nature already.)
What happens if you do tell your truth or story as a woman? What if you don’t play your role? In these unruly women we see both the good and the bad. But the central theme in the end plays out like you, as a woman, are always damned if you try, but equally damned if you don’t. And you are double damned if you try too hard, try too late, try at the wrong time, and try while being any number of other ‘wrong’ things according to society’s skewed standards. Especially in America.
I happened to revisit Frankie Boyle’s proposal: America Hates Women from American Autopsyat the same time as I was reading Petersen’s book. As long as misogyny runs rampant in men and women both, and even in the double standards of purported feminists, I’d agree: you can’t win as a woman. You’re hated on some deep, dark and often unacknowledged level. And these days, it’s open season – so it’s not deep, dark or unacknowledged. The Twitter feed of the current president of the United States is a good place to find a whole lot of that darkness raging right out in the open.
