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She’d been there; she had touched the bottom they all feared. She understood their despair but, more importantly, she understood the fury hiding beneath their smiles. She knew there was nothing more powerful than a woman finally given permission to scream.
Women in the public eye could only have one personality type – nice – or everything they’d worked so hard for would be taken away from them.
During the press tour for Willing Silence, she’d said that she would never get cosmetic surgery. ‘I grew up in a household where money was made from women’s insecurities,’ she had declared. ‘And it makes me so angry. Why are we not allowed to age naturally, like men are?’ It went viral, her fans applauding Sam for her refusal to give in to patriarchal standards of beauty, but it was easy to make such proclamations when she was still in her late twenties. As she crept closer to forty, she found herself wincing at her reflection under the bright bathroom lights, pulling her face taut at the
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They weren’t the first to have questions of Sam over the years; there were plenty of others who wanted more from her than she was able to give, asking for names, dates, locations. Police reports and hospital files. It was infuriating, she repeatedly said in interviews. Demanding Sam be ‘specific’ about her assault betrayed a lack of understanding of how trauma worked.
The joyless way Carolyn did everything – the individual square of dark chocolate after dinner as ‘a treat’, the identical beige silk shirts hanging in her closet, the 5 a.m. aerobics regime before her work day – all designed to keep her life so tidy, so neat. Her mother made the denial of pleasure look like an art form.
Becky gave a harsh laugh. ‘I don’t think an eating disorder is a good excuse for bullying someone, Sam. And if you do, then you haven’t done quite as much “work” on yourself as you might like to believe.’
Sam had told the world a half-truth because she knew that would be easier for them to believe. ‘Someone’ raped me was more palatable than that husband did it, that father, that son. That newsreader smiling at you through the television, that musician whose song you chose for the first dance at your wedding. It was easier to make monsters out of faceless strangers than the nice, ordinary men who worked in your office, who let you skip the line in the grocery store, who held the door open for you at the bank.
It began with kickback about the use of the name ‘Shakti’, accusations of cultural appropriation, and Sam had listened. She didn’t believe, as many of her contemporaries did, that ‘you can’t say anything any more!’; she never wanted to be defensive or reactive in the face of criticism. As she’d told her team, white people had to do the work now, didn’t they? They had to show up. She’d chosen White Fragility for the Shakti book club and the conversations had been fascinating; it had really opened her eyes. She’d noticed the girls at her events were becoming more politically engaged, wondering
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‘Believe in yourself,’ she said, ‘and nobody can hurt you ever again.’ Maybe that was what she was selling; the impossible promise of safety. Maybe that was all these women wanted, in the end.
