Bad Feminist: Essays Read online

  I was the fifth seed in a field of twenty-one, so I was stupidly pleased with myself to still be seeded so high after the previous tournament. My opponent was unseeded and had no ranking so I mistakenly assumed she was a novice player.29 From the outset I was certain I would win the match handily even though I was hungover and barely able to cope with the dryness of my eyeballs.

  Toward the end of the match, I played BROASTED and BO for a Triple Word Score. My opponent challenged, and she won. When you challenge multiple words, though, the computer only tells you if the word combination is good or bad. If the combination is bad, it will not tell you if one or all the words in the combination are bad. I thought, because I was mentally incapacitated, that BO must not be a valid word. I may not know my three-letter words, but I do know my two-letter words. I was confused. I was not at my best.

  A couple moves later, I played BROASTED and BA in the same location. My opponent’s eyes widened. She stared at me like I was the stupidest person alive. In that moment, I hated every last cell in her body.

  “You’re going to do that again?” she asked, but it wasn’t quite a question.

  It was her tone that totally set me off. I had just laid down the tiles, thereby making it crystal clear I was going to make the same, ridiculous, amateurish mistake twice. What did she fail to understand?

  In my defense, I was so convinced BROASTED30 was a word, because it actually is a word, that I remained unwavering in my commitment to play the word. Had I succeeded, I would have earned 87 points. As we walked to the challenge computer, I could feel her laughing at me. I wanted to cry, but my eyes were still so terribly dry, and also there is no crying at a Scrabble tournament unless you’re in the bathroom and you have carefully checked all the stalls to make sure you are alone.

  The next time I see New Nemesis, I must explain, “I am not the idiot you think I am, or at least I am not an idiot for the reasons you think.”

  The match was a massacre. The final score: 500–263. That match set the tone for the tournament. Time and again, lower-ranked players taught me painful lessons. Time and again, I was humbled. At the end of the tournament, after the prizes were handed out and we applauded each of the winners and the players who had played the highest-scoring words, we losers stood in small clumps of failure bemoaning how terribly we had played while those who played well tried not to gloat. Their modesty was good-naturedly false. We packed up our boards, and the excitement of the tournament slowly seeped out of our muscles. We shook hands and bid one another good-bye until the next club meeting or tournament. We were no longer adversaries.

  [GENDER & SEXUALITY]

  How to Be Friends with Another Woman

  1.

  Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses—pretty but designed to SLOW women down.

  1A.

  This is not to say women aren’t bitches or toxic or competitive sometimes but rather to say that these are not defining characteristics of female friendship, especially as you get older.

  1B.

  If you find that you are feeling bitchy, toxic, or competitive toward the women who are supposed to be your closest friends, look at why and figure out how to fix it and/or find someone who can help you fix it.

  2.

  A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology.

  3.

  If you are the kind of woman who says, “I’m mostly friends with guys,” and act like you’re proud of that, like that makes you closer to being a man or something and less of a woman as if being a woman is a bad thing, see Item 1B. It’s okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, well, soul-search a little.

  3A.

  If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s just you.

  3B.

  I used to be this kind of woman. I’m sorry to judge.

  4.

  Sometimes, your friends will date people you cannot stand. You can either be honest about your feelings or you can lie. There are good reasons for both. Sometimes you will be the person dating someone your friends cannot stand. If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go-to explanation is “I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.” You are welcome to borrow it.

  5.

  Want nothing but the best for your friends because when your friends are happy and successful, it’s probably going to be easier for you to be happy.

  5A.

  If you’re having a rough go of it and a friend is having the best year ever and you need to think some dark thoughts about that, do it alone, with your therapist, or in your diary so that when you actually see your friend, you can avoid the myth discussed in Item 1.

  5B.

  If you and your friend(s) are in the same field and you can collaborate or help each other, do this without shame. It’s not your fault your friends are awesome. Men invented nepotism and practically live by it. It’s okay for women to do it too.

  5C.

  Don’t tear other women down, because even if they’re not your friends, they are women and this is just as important. This is not to say you cannot criticize other women, but understand the difference between criticizing constructively and tearing down cruelly.

  5D.

  Everybody gossips, so if you are going to gossip about your friends, at least make it fun and interesting. As a corollary, never say “I never lie” or “I never gossip” because you are lying.

  5E.

  Love your friends’ kids even if you don’t want or like children. Just do it.

  6.

  Tell your friends the hard truths they need to hear. They might get pissed about it, but it’s probably for their own good. Once, my best friend told me to get my love life together and demanded an action plan, and it was irritating but also useful.

  6A.

  Don’t be totally rude about truth telling, and consider how much truth is actually needed to get the job done. Finesse goes a long way.

  6B.

  These conversations are more fun when preceded by an emphatic “GIRL.”

  7.

  Surround yourself with women you can get sloppy drunk with who won’t draw stupid things on your face if you pass out, and who will help you puke if you overcelebrate, and who will also tell you if you get sloppy drunk too much or behave badly when you are sloppy drunk.

  8.

  Don’t flirt, have sex, or engage in emotional affairs with your friends’ significant others. This shouldn’t need to be said, but it needs to be said. That significant other is an asshole, and you don’t want to be involved with an asshole who’s used goods. If you want to be with an asshole, get a fresh asshole of your very own. They are abundant.

  9.

  Don’t let your friends buy ugly outfits or accessories you don’t want to look at when you hang out. This is just common sense.

  10.

  When something is wrong and you need to talk to your friends and they ask you how you are, don’t say “Fine.” They know you’re lying and it irritates them and a lot of time is wasted with the back-and-forth of “Are you sure?” and “Yes?” and “Really?” and “I AM FINE.” Tell your lady friends the truth so you can talk it out and either sulk companionably or move on to other topics.

  11.

  If four people are dining, split the check evenly four ways. We are adults now. We don’t need to add up what each person had anymore. If you’re high rolling, just treat everyone and rotate who treats. If you’re still in the broke stage, do what you have to do.

  12.

  If a friend sends a crazy e-mail needing reassurance about love, life, family, or work, respond accordingly and in a timely manner even if it is just t
o say, “GIRL, I hear you.” If a friend sends you like thirty crazy e-mails needing reassurance about the same damn shit, be patient because one day that’s going to be you tearing up Gmail with your drama.

  13.

  My mother’s favorite saying is “Qui se ressemble s’assemble.” Whenever she didn’t approve of who I was spending time with, she’d say this ominously. It means, essentially, you are whom you surround yourself with.

  Girls, Girls, Girls

  A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track. The show would open deep in my lost year—the year I drop out of college and disappear. With no ability to cope and no way to ask for help, the main character—me—is completely crazy. She makes a spectacular mess.

  A lot happens in the pilot. About ten days before the start of junior year, my character gets on a plane and abandons everything. She runs away to Arizona by way of a trip to San Francisco with a much older man she has only corresponded with via the Internet. We’re talking about the old-fashioned Internet, in 1994—a 2400-baud modem or some such. It is a small miracle she isn’t killed. She cuts off all contact with her family, her friends, or anyone who thought they knew her. She has no money, no plan, a suitcase, and a complete lack of self-regard. It is real drama.

  The rest of that first season is equally dramatic. Before long, she finds a seedy job doing about the only thing she’s qualified to do, working from midnight to eight in a nondescript office building. She sits in a little, windowless booth and talks to strangers on the phone. She drinks diet soda from a plastic cup, sometimes with vodka, and does crossword puzzles. It is so easy to talk to strangers. She loves the job until she doesn’t.

  There is an interesting cast. Her coworkers are girls who are also messy. They are different races, from different places, but all lost together. They give themselves names like China and Bubbles and Misty, and at the end of a long shift they hardly remember who belongs to which name. My character has many different names. She wakes up and says, “Tonight, I’m Delilah, Morgan, Becky.” She wants to be anyone else.

  This is late-night television. Cable. China does heroin in the bathroom at work. Sometimes, she leaves a burnt strip of tinfoil on the counter. The manager calls them all into her office and yells. The girls will never rat China out. Bubbles has baby daddy problems. Sometimes, her man drops her off at work and girls smoking in the parking lot watch as Bubbles and her man yell at each other, terrible things. In another episode, the baby daddy drops Bubbles off and they practically fuck in the front seat. Misty has been on her own since she was sixteen. She is very skinny and has scabs all over her arms and never seems to wash her hair. After most shifts, the girls go to Jack in the Box and then lie out by the pool of the house where my character is staying. The girls tell my character how lucky she is to live in a house with air-conditioning. They have swamp coolers and live in crappy apartments. My character stares up at the sun from the diving board where she loves to stretch out and thinks, bitterly, Yes, I am so fucking lucky. She is too young to realize that compared to them she is lucky. She ran away but still has something to run back to when she is ready. My character doesn’t come to this realization until the season finale.

  Every woman has a series of episodes about her twenties, her girlhood, and how she came out of it. Rarely are those episodes so neatly encapsulated as an episode of, say, Friends, or a romantic comedy about boy meeting girl.

  Girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways. Most of these representations have been largely unsatisfying because they never get girlhood quite right. It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly—girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recognizable. All too often, however, this doesn’t happen.

  We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of Bridesmaids, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women are funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie. Bridesmaids had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the state of affairs for women in entertainment—everything hangs in the balance all the time.

  Bridesmaids could not afford to fail, and didn’t. The movie received a positive critical reception (the New York Times referred to the movie as “unexpectedly funny”) and did well at the box office. Critics lauded the cast for their fresh performances. Some people even used the word “revolution” for the change the movie would bring for women in comedy.

  A revolution is a sudden, radical, or complete change—a fundamental shift in the way of thinking about or visualizing something. Could one movie really be responsible for a revolution? Bridesmaids is a good movie, one I really enjoyed—smart humor, good acting, a relatable plot, a somewhat realistic portrayal of women in a cinematic wasteland where representations of women are generally appalling. Bridesmaids isn’t perfect, but given the unfair responsibility placed on the movie, the burden was shouldered well. At the same time, the movie did not bring about radical change, particularly when, as Michelle Dean discusses in her review of the movie for The Awl, many of the familiar tropes we see in comedies and in the depictions of women are present in Bridesmaids. She notes that the portrayal of Melissa McCarthy’s character, Megan, in particular, treads familiar ground: “Almost every joke was designed to rest on her presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type and an aversion to makeup.” Within this context, considering Bridesmaids revolutionary is a bit much.

  Why do we put so much responsibility on movies like Bridesmaids? How do we get to a place where a movie, one movie, can be considered revolutionary for women?

  There’s another woman-oriented pop artifact being asked to shoulder a great deal of responsibility these days: Lena Dunham’s Girls, a television series on HBO. The show debuted to a lot of hype. Critics almost universally embraced Dunham’s vision and the way she chronicles the lives of four twenty-something girls navigating that interstitial time between graduating from college and growing up.

  I am not the target audience for Girls. I was not particularly enthralled by the first three episodes or the first two seasons, but the show gave me a great deal to think about. That counts for something. The writing is often smart and clever. I laughed a few times during each episode and recognize the ways in which this show is breaking new ground. I admire how Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, doesn’t have the typical body we normally see on television. There is some solidity to her. We see her eat, enthusiastically. We see her fuck. We see her endure the petty humiliations so many young women have to endure. We see the life of one kind of real girl and that is important.

  It’s awesome that a twenty-five-year-old woman gets to write, direct, and star in her own show for a network like HBO. It’s just as sad that this is so revolutionary it deserves mention.

  A generation is a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously. In the pilot, Hannah Horvath is explaining to her parents why she needs them to keep supporting her financially. She says, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a generation . . . somewhere.” We have so many expectations; we’re so thirsty for authentic representations of girls that we only hear the first half of that statement. We hear that Girls is supposed to speak for all of us.

  At times, I find Girls and the overall premise to be forced. Amidst all the cleverness, I want the show to have a stronger emotional tone. I want to feel something genuine, and rarely has the show given me that opportunity. Too many of the characters seem like caricatures, where more nuance would better serve both the characters and their story lines. In the first season, for example, Hannah’s not-boyfriend, Ada
m, is a depressing, disgusting composite of every asshole every woman in her twenties has ever dated. We would get the point if he were even half the asshole. The pedophile fantasy Adam shares at the beginning of the “Vagina Panic” episode is cringe-worthy. The ironic rape joke Hannah makes during her job interview in that same episode is cringe-worthy. It all feels very “Look at me! I am edgy!” Maybe that’s the point. I cannot be sure. More often than not, the show is trying too hard to do too much, but that’s okay. This show should not have to be perfect.

  Girls reminds me of how terrible my twenties were—being lost and awkward, having terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke, eating ramen. I am not nostalgic for that time. I had no money and no hope. Like the girls in Girls, I was never really on the verge of destitution but I lived a generally crappy life. There was nothing romantic about the experience. I understand why many young women find the show so relatable, but watching the show makes me slightly nauseated and exceptionally grateful to be in my thirties.

  As you might expect, the discourse surrounding Girls has been remarkably extensive and vigorous—nepotism, privilege, race. Dunham has given us a veritable trifecta of reasons to dissect her show.

  Lena Dunham is, indeed, the daughter of a well-known artist, and the principal cast comprises the daughters of other well-known figures like Brian Williams and David Mamet. People resent nepotism because it reminds us that sometimes success really is whom you know. This nepotism is mildly annoying, but it is not new or remarkable. Many people in Hollywood make entire careers out of hiring their friends for every single project. Adam Sandler has done it for years. Judd Apatow does it with such regularity you don’t need to consult IMDb to know whom he will cast in his projects.