More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In his 2009 history of white fraternities, The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett writes, “Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”
As the idealism of the earliest frats was subsumed, in the twentieth century, by a changing idea of masculinity that increasingly allowed high-class status and low-class behavior to coexist in a single individual, fraternity members “used their status as self-proclaimed gentlemen to justify their less-savory antics….In performing gentlemanliness in public, they justified their existence. What they did behind closed doors was then supposed to be their business alone.”
Institutions, by definition, are not natural or primal. They are not what just happens when you let boys be boys. They are created and sustained for a reason. They do work.
Women’s bodies have always been test sites upon which governing hierarchies are broken down and reiterated.
The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively manufactures. No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain
...more
I was twenty-one, and I was trying my hardest to be permeable, to be alive to other people’s suffering, but I didn’t know how to stop being permeable when it was pointless, when it was ultimately narcissistic, when it did no good. I felt, monstrously, that there was no boundary between my situation and the larger situation, between my tiny injustices and the injustices everyone faced.
It was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive—that women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that men were suffering because they were expected to perform this dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago, that there was very little I could do.
I wish I had known—then, in Peace Corps, or in college—that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.
Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political import.
It should at least as often be framed as proof of the distance between celebrity narratives and ordinary life.
Kim has benefited from the feminist tendency to frame female courage as maximally subversive, when, just as often, it’s minimally so. It is not “brave,” strictly speaking, for a woman to do the things that will make her rich and famous. For some women, it is difficult and indeed dangerous to live as themselves in the world, but for other women, like Kim and her sisters, it’s not just easy but extraordinarily profitable.
She is proof of a concept that is not very complicated or radical: today, it’s possible for a beautiful, wealthy woman with an uncanny talent for self-surveillance to make her own dreams of increased wealth and beauty come true.
This type of rule-breaking operates, by definition, on the level of the extraordinary individual. It’s not built to translate to ordinary life.
Feminists have, to a significant degree, dismantled and rejected the traditional male definition of exemplary womanhood: the idea that women must be sweet, demure, controllable, and free of normal human flaws. But if men placed women on pedestals and delighted in watching them fall down, feminism has so far mostly succeeded in reversing the order of operations—taking toppled-over women and re-idolizing them. Famous women are still constantly tested against the idea that they should be maximally appealing, even if that appeal now involves “difficult” qualities. Feminists are still looking for
...more
Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin.
On the one hand, sexism is still so ubiquitous that it touches all corners of a woman’s life; on the other, it seems incorrect to criticize women about anything—their demeanor, even their behavior—that might intersect with sexism. What this means, for the women of the Trump administration, is that they can hardly be criticized without sexism becoming the story. Fortuitously for them, the difficult-woman discourse intercepts the conversation every time. Every female figure in Trump’s orbit is difficult in a way that could serve as the basis for a bullshit celebratory hagiography.
The pattern—woman is criticized for something related to her being a woman; her continued existence is interpreted as politically meaningful—is so ridiculously loose that almost anything can fit inside it.
despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.)
Misogyny insists that a woman’s appearance is of paramount value; these dogged, hyper-focused critiques of misogyny can have an identical effect. Generic sexism is not meaningfully disempowering to Kellyanne Conway in her current position as an indestructible mouthpiece for the most transparently destructive president in American history.
Talking about Hicks without acknowledging the role of patriarchy in her biography may be possible, but to say that it’s politically necessary seems exactly off the point.
It’s as if what’s signified—sexism itself—has remained so intractable that we’ve mostly given up on rooting out its actual workings. Instead, to the great benefit of people like Ivanka, we’ve been adjudicating inequality through cultural criticism. We have taught people who don’t even care about feminism how to do this—how to analyze women and analyze the way people react to women, how to endlessly read and interpret the signs.
Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the truth that sexism is so much more mundane than the celebrities who have been high-profile test cases for it. Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be. And a woman doesn’t have to be a feminist icon to resist it—she can just be self-interested, which is not always the same thing.
It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms.
In exchange, from that point forward, in the eyes of the state and everyone around you, your needs will slowly cease to exist. This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women, becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids.
