While promising liberation and endless possibility, the culture of the decade drove us relentlessly in pursuit of perfection, writes Eve Fairbanks in The Guardian. Read on:
I have been at that door so many times. The one you walk through into his apartment, or let him through into yours, and something shifts. It’s as quick as the click when the optometrist slides a new lens into the eye-test machine: a clear, almost weightless little sliver of a thing, but with the power to make the world resolve into clarity – or blur out, leaving you nauseous and unbalanced.
Once, it was the door to the celebrated journalist’s apartment that I stumbled through, aged 21. I’d taken a train to New York to meet him for career advice and, unexpectedly, he had suggested we meet at a bar, then bought me several martinis. But then again, I drank them. Whose fault was the sex that ensued? And then there was the door to an AirBnB I rented in Uruguay in 2014, with a pushy local journalist I had just met trailing behind me. As I fumbled with my keys, I remember thinking: how did I get here?
Me too. Isn’t that frightening? That almost every woman today can say these words? Finally, we are having a conversation about the sexual harassment – and the sexual encounters – that have left us feeling damaged. And yet there’s a kind of uncertainty still hovering around the unfolding conversation – something still tucked into the shadows. Some people have said women are being inconsistent, re-remembering encounters they hadn’t had a problem with at the time. Others wonder why women – particularly young women – are feeling so fragile, acting as if they have been terribly wounded by something as apparently minor as a leer.
Complaints about boorish behaviour or lame one-night stands, this critique goes, have the potential not only to delegitimise real accusations of rape, but #MeToo’s whole message. When a writer recently accused the novelist Junot Díaz of “forcibly kissing” her (which he denied) and other women came forward to say Díaz had acted aggressively towards them in public, a friend of mine in her 40s – a feminist who writes with empathy about women who kill their abusive partners – worried that Diaz was being pilloried for “assholery”, not legally actionable crimes. Just after saying that, though, this friend began to recount her own first kiss. The boy had shoved her hard up against a fence. She started to laugh, as if to pass it off as a wacky youthful memory, like a zit popping during a job interview. But it was clear something in her still wanted to cry.
The problem is, it’s this ill-defined area between “assholery” and attempted rape that troubles many women. This is hard to talk about, and increasingly so, as we perceive the damage that just remembering can apparently wreak. When I asked if it was “the right time” to write about my experience with the New York journalist, another male writer said to me, “Hell, no!”, telling me that “careers are being ruined”. But I don’t want to ruin anybody’s career.
We are having these conversations at last, but we are not talking much about the historical context. I think this is the key to understanding how women are feeling now. For me, born in 1983, the context was the 90s – a peculiar era, caught between the confidence that there had been fabulous progress in the relationship between the sexes, and the smouldering remnants of a past in which bold women were feared and ridiculed.
In the 1990s, the pressure on young people to succeed was intense. Women’s bodies and their sexual choices became the focus of ever-harsher scrutiny, and the expectation was that they would be perfect.
I remember leaving my childhood home for college in 2001. Among the items I packed were a pair of what everybody then was calling “fuck-me boots”: knee-high black leather boots with a four-inch heel. Like my textbooks, I felt the fuck-me boots were preparing me for adulthood – for a decisive step out of the self-doubt of my teens. It wasn’t that I associated adulthood with fucking. It was more that I was determined to become the kind of woman who was fuckable in just the right way. I still remember the look I gave myself in the mirror I’d pasted on the back of my dorm-room door the first night I put the boots on, to wear to a frat party, along with a slash of lipstick in berry pink. It was a look of wonder and hope: it felt like a magic mirror, and with those boots on I could stare myself into what I wanted to become.
The hopes of the end of the millennium were the mirror in which I saw myself. But the young woman there was only a picture. In flesh and blood, by the time I became a woman, I had already been singed by those smouldering embers of the past. And thus, I entered adulthood as two people: the image my era wanted me to be, and the other woman, the hidden one, the one with a body.
It’s 1993. I’m almost 10. In apartments across the US, Madonna’s new book, Sex, graces coffee tables, the cover depicting her in the throes of an orgasm. My family has just moved from the city to a house in the suburbs. My parents gave me – the child – the “master bedroom”. It had a wall-length closet covered in mirrored doors. I woke up every day staring at myself.
It was a narcissistic decade, but it was a strange narcissism, premised on the idea we could remake ourselves any way we liked, virtually from scratch. People came home from vacations in Germany with pieces of the Berlin Wall; the feeling was not that they’d got a memento of German reunification, but a piece of the ultimate wall, some figurative wall whose crumbling represented the tumbling-down of a whole world. My father, a former Reagan administration official, filled up our house with kitsch he found on trips to Moscow. Muddling around for the house keys, I’d touch medallions of Stalin and Lenin in the bowl in the hall.
The message I got from these objects was that enmity, conflict, maybe even pain – all the kinds of things my parents told me they’d had to fear as kids in the early 60s, when their schoolteachers made them hide under their desks in case of a Soviet nuke – were all some kind of big joke. We could keep Stalin in our house as an amusement, like those 19th-century Europeans who displayed the shrunken heads of conquered Polynesian tribes.
Unmanageable male lust was one of those things we hoped would become a kind of relic that we didn’t take all that seriously. Men in that decade’s pop culture tended to be harmless – think the goofs of Seinfeld and Friends. One of the bestselling American books of the early 90s, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, reassured readers that resolving miscommunications between the sexes was actually easy, if we just understood how to do it. Solutions were big then. A couples therapist named Harville Hendrix sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a guide called Getting the Love You Want, which unravelled “the mystery of romantic attraction” and answered “humanity’s yearning” in just 384 pages.
I remember my early girlhood as surrounded by a shimmering halo of possibility. Explaining the long-term inconveniences of an oesophageal surgery I’d had as an infant, my pediatrician told me with a wink that the only thing I could never be was an astronaut: as if, without that little fault, I’d have definitely gone to Mars. My friends and I loved the cartoon The PowerPuff Girls: “Sugar, spice, and everything nice,” the narrator intoned. “These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girl. But Prof Utonium accidentally added a can of whoopass to the concoction!” The PowerPuff Girls combined traditional female perfection (Mary Jane shoes, pigtails) with post-feminist female badassery (they whooped bad guys).
The success of MTV’s Real World – not, it was clear, real – confirmed that reality didn’t really matter; the only things that had to be real were our dreams. Oprah was the preacher of that decade. She told us we just didn’t have to believe in bad things any more. Fear, she said, was a useless emotion; it was all in our minds. Failure and lasting heartbreak were the monsters of the human childhood, which just vanished as soon as we opened the closet door. Her frequent guest, the motivational author Iyanla Vanzant, told a live audience in New York: “You can use words to totally redefine reality. What I do when I hear myself say ‘can’t’ is, I cancel it out. Cancel the word. Cancel the thought. You shouldn’t have any ‘problem’. ‘Problem’ means you are powerless. ‘Problem’ means you are weak. Say ‘divine opportunity’.”
Great expectations were especially great for girls. An op-ed my dad clipped from the New York Times quoted a female CEO declaring that “the successful women I know and meet [no longer] find themselves at war with men”, and that “today’s woman may be a full-time mother. Or she can work for someone else or herself. Or she can do both at the same time.” Elizabeth, the heroine of the 90s young-adult series Sweet Valley High, was nerdy, driven and a cub reporter for her school newspaper. But unlike previous such pseudo-feminist heroines, likesuch as Nancy Drew, she wasn’t also plain or awkward. She was gorgeous.
It wasn’t clear how men would fit into the picture of young 90s women’s futures. What guy on Seinfeld or the Simpsons could keep up with an ambitious woman? The lead male character in American Pie, the classic 90s comedy, tried to fornicate with a pastry.
In sex education classes, we spent endless time watching videos of sperm penetrating an egg, or labelling diagrams of the testes; there was no sense of a real man connected to these sexual organs, but there was a firm message of fear. Our instructors terrified us with stories of how condoms could fail, exposing us to STIs that would destroy our potential; we were taught about sex in the same classes as hard-drug awareness, implying it was a bit like cocaine, a quick thrill that could prove ruinous.
Though we were supposed to be the first generation that didn’t need men in a material sense, my friends and I in high school were absolutely obsessed with guys. We talked about little else. We didn’t know what men were for, but I think we wondered whether they could turn out to be the secret key – a kind of final stage in our self-development, or a confirmation that we had become as awesome as we were supposed to be. When I think back to that time, I remember a scene from my favorite teen TV show, Dawson’s Creek. Pacey, a boy, tried to tell two of his female friends about a serial killer who was reportedly stalking the region. “He cuts out women’s hearts,” he warned. Joey, a girl, just laughed. Jen, the other girl, smiled beatifically and said: “He’s probably just looking for love.” A powerful enough woman, in other words, could be a literal alchemist, turning even the worst heart-eating murderer into a good guy.
There was something else, though. In 1991, on my parents’ TV, I watched Anita Hill testify that Clarence Thomas, a conservative supreme court nominee, had sexually harassed her. In the end, Thomas took his seat on the court. A CBS-New York Times poll suggested fewer than 20% of Americans had a “favourable” opinion of Hill, and nearly half of Democrats did not believe her testimony. Even those who felt Hill was courageous often saw her as brassy – in some sense, the harasser herself. The year after that, I followed the gory story of how Lorena Bobbitt hacked off part of her husband’s penis. He had abused her, but my friends started to use “Bobbitt” as a verb for freaking out – referring to Lorena, not the abusive husband. And, when I was 13, I gobbled up all the details of the death of Princess Diana.
Female ambition was purportedly encouraged. But when it actually manifested in a real woman, it was often depicted as deadly, contradictory or grotesque. When Fergie, the Duchess of York, tried to recover from her divorce by entering business, a nasty Independent article, written by two women, mocked her efforts: “Goodness, she would have a jolly good go at anything!” Donald Trump had a tower and a plane, but it was Imelda Marcos, the wife of Philippine dictator Ferdinand, with her vast collection of shoes, who became the decade’s symbol of greed. In her 1991 biography of Nancy Reagan, Kitty Kelley accused the president’s wife of secretly “ruling the White House with a Gucci-clad fist”. Diana was applauded for rejecting her ugly prince. But she was also painted as reckless for getting killed with her playboy lover in a car chase with paparazzi.
Around the time the Bobbitts were in the news, I started to become very fearful. I wrote diary entries. Anxiety – over my grades, over the need to be perfect – was a theme. “I will get better and better at sledding,” I encouraged myself. I impressed on myself the need to be good, even at the things I did just for fun. “Goals: to work harder. Spend more time on homework and less time drifting away and ending up with my nose in a book.” After a report card came home, I mourned: “As the grownups say, I am not living up to my potential.” I was eight years old.
Coexisting with the sense of limitless possibility was a strong counterstrain of dread. If life in the late 20th century could theoretically be perfect, then any wrong step was potentially catastrophic. On an Oprah episode called Stranger Danger, an “anti-abduction” specialist taught a group of very young children how to evade potential kidnappers by doing things such as jumping into rubbish bins or kicking out the brake lights of the car if a paedophile locked them in the boot. “Fantastic way to signal the police,” he’d say.
The kids in the show, though, struggled to contain giggles. In that situation, who would remember to kick out the brake light? I remember learning stuff like this – the sinkholes to misfortune I might stumble across in the future, and how to tiptoe around them – and just laughing, too. It felt so much easier, and more powerful, to imagine danger just didn’t exist or could be risen above, as the girls in Dawson’s Creek did, than to acknowledge we could screw up our glittering destinies.
At 16, I got my first boyfriend. But I couldn’t enjoy it. I was timid and terrified, unable to voice my feelings or concerns. I felt muzzled by contradictions: love could be everything; love was a distraction. He wasn’t the right guy; he might be the right guy and I would blow it. I had become detached from my real instincts, because love was an achievement, rated, in some vague way, by outside forces.
When my boyfriend grew depressed and increasingly angry, I felt I had to figure out how his behaviour was actually due to my actions. As a young woman, the infinite power I’d been told I had turned out to have given me infinite responsibility – and that was a terrible burden. He was like a gear in the complicated but glorious machine I was assembling called my life, and if he went wonky, it must be my fault.
I spent a lot of time sobbing in car parks. When I broke up with him, I brought him a fruit basket. I wanted so much for a bad thing to be good, to make a “divine opportunity”. As I got in my car to leave, he threw himself under the front wheels. The emotion I recall is numbness, a sense of profound dissociation. The more messed-up the evening got, the more I had to pretend it was almost funny, a “crazy” story I would later tell my girlfriends – proof of promising qualities I had been assured of in magazine personality quizzes, like adventurousness and a willingness to let life unfurl in all its wackiness.
The writer Andrew Solomon has explored the lives of prodigies, gifted children burdened from a very young age by great expectations. The experience, he writes, is “isolating, mystifying, petrifying”. I think many millennial women, and not just the wealthiest ones, had youths a little like prodigies. We were invested with the hope that the suffering of generations of women who had gone before us hadn’t been in vain. Recently, a friend told me that her mother got into Harvard in the 1970s but chose not to go because of the explicit inequalities for women that remained there. “They had a male-only library. She wasn’t allowed to be in the marching band,” she said. My friend felt that her mother was in awe – even jealous – of our condition, apparently freed from that overt discrimination. My friend recalled that she grew up being told: “This is how good you get it. You get to live in this time when everything is possible.”
My mother, the nerdy daughter of penniless Polish immigrants, loved literature and music. But, when she applied to college, her father insisted she study science, and she did so, because daddy was still king in the 60s. Defeated, she dropped out. She felt, I think, trailed by the shadow of opportunities denied. Her determination that I not screw up my special opportunity became, at times, overwhelming. When I came home with a B in geometry, I got chewed out as if I had written off the car. When I looked deep into my mother’s eyes, sometimes I thought I saw a plea: tell me you are going to make it.
It sounds paradoxical, but all the power we were told we had led often not to courage, but to hesitation, rationalisation, even self-hatred and self-harm. It was portrayed as a liberation to have the chance to be everything all at once, brainy and gorgeous. But in practice, it was crushing: if we could be anything, we had to be ideal.
The beauty rituals of the 90s focused on scraping, plucking and driving out. We knew we had to be godly, so we became like monks, obsessed with flaying ourselves and exorcising the evidence of sin within us in the form of stray hairs and blackheads, which we cruelly tried to rip off of our delicate faces with special tape. Our 90s models of beauty – Kate Moss, Posh Spice – were hollow-eyed, so blemishless and skinny that they seemed to be melting away. The beloved teen magazine Seventeen played the role of our advisor on romance, and it was a harsh tutor, reminding us incessantly of all the ways we could fail. One recurring feature was the quiz, dedicated to helping young women identify and root out their neuroticisms. “Quiz: Do You Play Mind Games?”, “Are You Overreacting?”, “Are You Paranoid?” Another feature was “550 Guys on First Moves and the Worst Thing a Girl Could Do”.
We were rated on everything. I got graded at summer camp. In high school, we took the Myers-Briggs type-indicator test, which adjudicated our entire personalities and generated quantitative values for our traits; we could even be rated on how much we liked to have fun. This was the insidiousness of the decade’s philosophy: in the guise of liberation, it swallowed up everything and directed it towards incessant self-perfection.
Educators who work with prodigies know they often become paralysed because any action at all would be a betrayal of the ideal performance. Or they start to sabotage themselves. Many girls I knew began to cut themselves. Young-adult novels began to proliferate in which the teenage protagonists became grievously ill, bedridden, or died. In recalling her thoughts of suicide, the writer Porochista Khakpour described it as the only choice that had not yet proved itself imperfect.
In an environment where being extraordinary is never quite enough, being dramatically, pointedly off the mark becomes a way to get attention. A friend of mine and I privately called the girls who cut themselves the “Arrogant Suicidals”. We assumed they were doing it to stand out.
It makes me sick to recall that I presumed feeling suicidal could be just another performance. But it might have been, at times, because everything was. The longer everybody tried to be amazing, the harder we all had to look for marks of distinction in paradoxical places.
We longed so much to step or fall off the narrow tightropes we walked. In the early days of the internet, a lot of kids my age took a quiz called the “Purity Test”. Among the hundreds of questions were ones such as:
“Have you used a drug to lower someone’s inhibitions about sexual activity?”
“Have you had sex with a woman who was asleep and she didn’t wake up?”
“Have you ever accepted money for sex?”
“Have you ever masturbated into a houseplant?”
It wasn’t entirely clear whether it was good or bad to get a low score – to be “pure” – but I recall it was judicious to be pure and cool to be impure, and we kind of had to be both.
The people who designed the purity test were high achievers: students at MIT. I suspect the test reflected fantasies of getting off the dizzying fast track. But it’s telling, and sad, that their fooling around also yielded a grade. In the end, “impurity” was just another proof of accomplishment. In the test’s logic, prostitution and rape were almost wickedly charming, marks of daredevil extraordinariness. Early on in the iconic 90s film American Beauty, Angela, the movie’s ingenue, fields creepy attention from an older, married man. She converts that problem into a divine opportunity.
“If people I don’t even know look at me and want to fuck me, I really have a shot at being a model, which is great!” she says. “Because there’s nothing worse in life than being ordinary.”
Years later, in 2014, on a reporting trip to Montevideo, I hosted a dinner for local artists and journalists. One of them gave me the eye across the table. We ended up at a bar. He walked me home to my AirBnB. We went upstairs. I recall these steps as feeling both discomfiting and inevitable, as if someone else was moving my feet. The whole time I walked, I thought brightly: I can always go back.
But I couldn’t. My first step towards the AirBnB had arisen from a wish to be fancy-free – but then it became a rule. For if I’d had the power in that situation, then I’d have been able to make the best choice at any given time. To stop walking, to change my mind, was to admit that I had made a mistake, been stupid – a crippling admission.
After I let him into my AirBnB, he dropped his pants and blocked the door with his body. Now this was real. This was bad. This was the point at which I was supposed to kick out the brake light of the car to signal the police. But all I could manage was to feebly voice what had become for me, by then, a go-to excuse for ending such encounters: that my vagina was broken. I said it had a “disorder”.
Unfortunately, my excuse didn’t work. He just grinned and said: “Maybe mine will be the dick that will fix that for you.” Horrible – but wasn’t that kind of always the hope? That a man would come along and put the last piece into the not-yet-quite-perfect puzzle of our feminine lives?
It felt awkward, even childish, to hit him or to scream. I also felt I owed him a long explanation for my inconsistency, even though I had not yet managed to explain it to myself. Suffocating under contradictions, I just lay back and resigned myself. I think so many of us resigned ourselves to situations that were wrong, not because we were powerless, but because we thought this was the way for us to experience our power. To shove the man, or to scream, felt like an admission to myself I had misjudged the situation in the first place, and I’d always been taught that to lose control of a situation was a mark on your character. A failure.
I trekked to his office the next morning to return a sweater he’d left behind. He gave me a warm smile, which I returned with a queasy one. I didn’t know what to think of myself, and in that void, I didn’t want to seem inconsistent. I think he thought my solicitousness meant I’d had a good time. And why shouldn’t he have? How could he have known all the fears and concerns I had brought in with me to that AirBnB, when we, as a culture, go so terribly far to conceal them?
But I’ve thought of Montevideo during the #MeToo conversation. There are many of these kinds of ambiguous yet heartbreaking encounters that women have not yet voiced. Some commentators have fretted about “evolving standards” – as if all of a sudden women just decided that things they used to be cool with aren’t so cool any more. There is surprise at some of the #MeToo stories – when strong women such as Amy Schumer reveal that they endured abuse, sometimes for years. But it all makes sense to me. We aren’t changing our standards. We are remembering things. Why should we be surprised that women are only now remembering, or understanding, what really happened to them, when, in the time that so many of us came of age, we told ourselves that everything we knew about life and human behaviour could be forgotten, that we had left the past behind?
How many times have I recounted a truly scary or hurtful encounter with a man to my girlfriends as a jolly story? But, it turns out, it just isn’t funny or adventurous to see your boss masturbate on a houseplant. It’s traumatic. There are, perhaps, only so many times a woman can deny the impact of such experiences before she loses it. Every one of them dredges up the memories of the others, cumulatively, until one day a stranger whistles at you on the street, or you read an account of some random celebrity’s misdeeds, and you find yourself raving on Twitter like a person who has been halfway destroyed.
Yes, some of these experiences are minor. But what’s behind them is not. Love as triumph, love as ruin. Sex as weightless, sex as incredibly freighted. Men as pointless, men as the whole point of life’s game. Women as witches, magicians; women so fragile they cut themselves open in high-school bathrooms. Women as careful, women as carefree.
In some of the #MeToo critiques, I perceive an anger that younger women weren’t the perfectly empowered people their elders had hoped they would be. The older generation had prepared the ground, after all, and fought their battles. To acknowledge how younger women have struggled would entail a painful admission that the battles of previous generations may not have been won as decisively as they had hoped. We were told, decades ago, that we were starring in a totally new story, and that we didn’t have to experience any of these painful conflicts. But that only made our ultimate experience of them more painful.
Nine months after it began, I sense an ebbing of some energy around #MeToo – a tiredness; perhaps an acknowledgement that the contradictions and painful realities it revealed are too big to solve fast. Frantically firing offending males may make it harder for women to tell their complex stories. But the suffering of men who have been publicly accused of sexual assault or misconduct must not shut us up now, either. I want more stories. I want more curiosity about the complexity of women’s lives – instead of a panicky retreat from the conversation.
We would like to believe that clearer rules around “positive consent” will put an end to much of this difficulty. But I worry a little about “positive consent”. It still puts the onus on the woman to perfectly manage the situation – this time with non-verbal cues, communicating desire or retreat with a flicker of the eye. It wasn’t a better description of “consent” that I needed while growing up. I was taught endlessly what I should and shouldn’t consent to for my life not to go wrong. All that emphasis on all my power to make things turn out right ended up paralysing me.
I lacked a perception of what I wanted. I think that’s one of the things that lurks in the shadows of #MeToo. How to enable young people to discover what they really want and need out of love and sex – this is what we should be talking about in sex-education classes. Forget about putting condoms on bananas. But as long as we venerate doing and solving – making things more efficient and perfect – it will be hard to glimpse what we really want out of sex or of love.
I have been at that door so many times. The one you walk through into his apartment, or let him through into yours, and something shifts. It’s as quick as the click when the optometrist slides a new lens into the eye-test machine: a clear, almost weightless little sliver of a thing, but with the power to make the world resolve into clarity – or blur out, leaving you nauseous and unbalanced.
Once, it was the door to the celebrated journalist’s apartment that I stumbled through, aged 21. I’d taken a train to New York to meet him for career advice and, unexpectedly, he had suggested we meet at a bar, then bought me several martinis. But then again, I drank them. Whose fault was the sex that ensued? And then there was the door to an AirBnB I rented in Uruguay in 2014, with a pushy local journalist I had just met trailing behind me. As I fumbled with my keys, I remember thinking: how did I get here?
Me too. Isn’t that frightening? That almost every woman today can say these words? Finally, we are having a conversation about the sexual harassment – and the sexual encounters – that have left us feeling damaged. And yet there’s a kind of uncertainty still hovering around the unfolding conversation – something still tucked into the shadows. Some people have said women are being inconsistent, re-remembering encounters they hadn’t had a problem with at the time. Others wonder why women – particularly young women – are feeling so fragile, acting as if they have been terribly wounded by something as apparently minor as a leer.
Complaints about boorish behaviour or lame one-night stands, this critique goes, have the potential not only to delegitimise real accusations of rape, but #MeToo’s whole message. When a writer recently accused the novelist Junot Díaz of “forcibly kissing” her (which he denied) and other women came forward to say Díaz had acted aggressively towards them in public, a friend of mine in her 40s – a feminist who writes with empathy about women who kill their abusive partners – worried that Diaz was being pilloried for “assholery”, not legally actionable crimes. Just after saying that, though, this friend began to recount her own first kiss. The boy had shoved her hard up against a fence. She started to laugh, as if to pass it off as a wacky youthful memory, like a zit popping during a job interview. But it was clear something in her still wanted to cry.
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| illustration by Nate Kitch |
We are having these conversations at last, but we are not talking much about the historical context. I think this is the key to understanding how women are feeling now. For me, born in 1983, the context was the 90s – a peculiar era, caught between the confidence that there had been fabulous progress in the relationship between the sexes, and the smouldering remnants of a past in which bold women were feared and ridiculed.
In the 1990s, the pressure on young people to succeed was intense. Women’s bodies and their sexual choices became the focus of ever-harsher scrutiny, and the expectation was that they would be perfect.
I remember leaving my childhood home for college in 2001. Among the items I packed were a pair of what everybody then was calling “fuck-me boots”: knee-high black leather boots with a four-inch heel. Like my textbooks, I felt the fuck-me boots were preparing me for adulthood – for a decisive step out of the self-doubt of my teens. It wasn’t that I associated adulthood with fucking. It was more that I was determined to become the kind of woman who was fuckable in just the right way. I still remember the look I gave myself in the mirror I’d pasted on the back of my dorm-room door the first night I put the boots on, to wear to a frat party, along with a slash of lipstick in berry pink. It was a look of wonder and hope: it felt like a magic mirror, and with those boots on I could stare myself into what I wanted to become.
The hopes of the end of the millennium were the mirror in which I saw myself. But the young woman there was only a picture. In flesh and blood, by the time I became a woman, I had already been singed by those smouldering embers of the past. And thus, I entered adulthood as two people: the image my era wanted me to be, and the other woman, the hidden one, the one with a body.
It’s 1993. I’m almost 10. In apartments across the US, Madonna’s new book, Sex, graces coffee tables, the cover depicting her in the throes of an orgasm. My family has just moved from the city to a house in the suburbs. My parents gave me – the child – the “master bedroom”. It had a wall-length closet covered in mirrored doors. I woke up every day staring at myself.
It was a narcissistic decade, but it was a strange narcissism, premised on the idea we could remake ourselves any way we liked, virtually from scratch. People came home from vacations in Germany with pieces of the Berlin Wall; the feeling was not that they’d got a memento of German reunification, but a piece of the ultimate wall, some figurative wall whose crumbling represented the tumbling-down of a whole world. My father, a former Reagan administration official, filled up our house with kitsch he found on trips to Moscow. Muddling around for the house keys, I’d touch medallions of Stalin and Lenin in the bowl in the hall.
The message I got from these objects was that enmity, conflict, maybe even pain – all the kinds of things my parents told me they’d had to fear as kids in the early 60s, when their schoolteachers made them hide under their desks in case of a Soviet nuke – were all some kind of big joke. We could keep Stalin in our house as an amusement, like those 19th-century Europeans who displayed the shrunken heads of conquered Polynesian tribes.
Unmanageable male lust was one of those things we hoped would become a kind of relic that we didn’t take all that seriously. Men in that decade’s pop culture tended to be harmless – think the goofs of Seinfeld and Friends. One of the bestselling American books of the early 90s, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, reassured readers that resolving miscommunications between the sexes was actually easy, if we just understood how to do it. Solutions were big then. A couples therapist named Harville Hendrix sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a guide called Getting the Love You Want, which unravelled “the mystery of romantic attraction” and answered “humanity’s yearning” in just 384 pages.
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| ‘She told us we didn’t have to believe in bad things anymore’ … Oprah Winfrey in 1996. Photograph: Chris Kasson/AP |
The success of MTV’s Real World – not, it was clear, real – confirmed that reality didn’t really matter; the only things that had to be real were our dreams. Oprah was the preacher of that decade. She told us we just didn’t have to believe in bad things any more. Fear, she said, was a useless emotion; it was all in our minds. Failure and lasting heartbreak were the monsters of the human childhood, which just vanished as soon as we opened the closet door. Her frequent guest, the motivational author Iyanla Vanzant, told a live audience in New York: “You can use words to totally redefine reality. What I do when I hear myself say ‘can’t’ is, I cancel it out. Cancel the word. Cancel the thought. You shouldn’t have any ‘problem’. ‘Problem’ means you are powerless. ‘Problem’ means you are weak. Say ‘divine opportunity’.”
Great expectations were especially great for girls. An op-ed my dad clipped from the New York Times quoted a female CEO declaring that “the successful women I know and meet [no longer] find themselves at war with men”, and that “today’s woman may be a full-time mother. Or she can work for someone else or herself. Or she can do both at the same time.” Elizabeth, the heroine of the 90s young-adult series Sweet Valley High, was nerdy, driven and a cub reporter for her school newspaper. But unlike previous such pseudo-feminist heroines, likesuch as Nancy Drew, she wasn’t also plain or awkward. She was gorgeous.
It wasn’t clear how men would fit into the picture of young 90s women’s futures. What guy on Seinfeld or the Simpsons could keep up with an ambitious woman? The lead male character in American Pie, the classic 90s comedy, tried to fornicate with a pastry.
In sex education classes, we spent endless time watching videos of sperm penetrating an egg, or labelling diagrams of the testes; there was no sense of a real man connected to these sexual organs, but there was a firm message of fear. Our instructors terrified us with stories of how condoms could fail, exposing us to STIs that would destroy our potential; we were taught about sex in the same classes as hard-drug awareness, implying it was a bit like cocaine, a quick thrill that could prove ruinous.
Though we were supposed to be the first generation that didn’t need men in a material sense, my friends and I in high school were absolutely obsessed with guys. We talked about little else. We didn’t know what men were for, but I think we wondered whether they could turn out to be the secret key – a kind of final stage in our self-development, or a confirmation that we had become as awesome as we were supposed to be. When I think back to that time, I remember a scene from my favorite teen TV show, Dawson’s Creek. Pacey, a boy, tried to tell two of his female friends about a serial killer who was reportedly stalking the region. “He cuts out women’s hearts,” he warned. Joey, a girl, just laughed. Jen, the other girl, smiled beatifically and said: “He’s probably just looking for love.” A powerful enough woman, in other words, could be a literal alchemist, turning even the worst heart-eating murderer into a good guy.
There was something else, though. In 1991, on my parents’ TV, I watched Anita Hill testify that Clarence Thomas, a conservative supreme court nominee, had sexually harassed her. In the end, Thomas took his seat on the court. A CBS-New York Times poll suggested fewer than 20% of Americans had a “favourable” opinion of Hill, and nearly half of Democrats did not believe her testimony. Even those who felt Hill was courageous often saw her as brassy – in some sense, the harasser herself. The year after that, I followed the gory story of how Lorena Bobbitt hacked off part of her husband’s penis. He had abused her, but my friends started to use “Bobbitt” as a verb for freaking out – referring to Lorena, not the abusive husband. And, when I was 13, I gobbled up all the details of the death of Princess Diana.
Female ambition was purportedly encouraged. But when it actually manifested in a real woman, it was often depicted as deadly, contradictory or grotesque. When Fergie, the Duchess of York, tried to recover from her divorce by entering business, a nasty Independent article, written by two women, mocked her efforts: “Goodness, she would have a jolly good go at anything!” Donald Trump had a tower and a plane, but it was Imelda Marcos, the wife of Philippine dictator Ferdinand, with her vast collection of shoes, who became the decade’s symbol of greed. In her 1991 biography of Nancy Reagan, Kitty Kelley accused the president’s wife of secretly “ruling the White House with a Gucci-clad fist”. Diana was applauded for rejecting her ugly prince. But she was also painted as reckless for getting killed with her playboy lover in a car chase with paparazzi.
Around the time the Bobbitts were in the news, I started to become very fearful. I wrote diary entries. Anxiety – over my grades, over the need to be perfect – was a theme. “I will get better and better at sledding,” I encouraged myself. I impressed on myself the need to be good, even at the things I did just for fun. “Goals: to work harder. Spend more time on homework and less time drifting away and ending up with my nose in a book.” After a report card came home, I mourned: “As the grownups say, I am not living up to my potential.” I was eight years old.
Coexisting with the sense of limitless possibility was a strong counterstrain of dread. If life in the late 20th century could theoretically be perfect, then any wrong step was potentially catastrophic. On an Oprah episode called Stranger Danger, an “anti-abduction” specialist taught a group of very young children how to evade potential kidnappers by doing things such as jumping into rubbish bins or kicking out the brake lights of the car if a paedophile locked them in the boot. “Fantastic way to signal the police,” he’d say.
The kids in the show, though, struggled to contain giggles. In that situation, who would remember to kick out the brake light? I remember learning stuff like this – the sinkholes to misfortune I might stumble across in the future, and how to tiptoe around them – and just laughing, too. It felt so much easier, and more powerful, to imagine danger just didn’t exist or could be risen above, as the girls in Dawson’s Creek did, than to acknowledge we could screw up our glittering destinies.
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| Katie Holmes and James van der Beek in Dawson’s Creek. Photograph: Channel 4/imagenet |
When my boyfriend grew depressed and increasingly angry, I felt I had to figure out how his behaviour was actually due to my actions. As a young woman, the infinite power I’d been told I had turned out to have given me infinite responsibility – and that was a terrible burden. He was like a gear in the complicated but glorious machine I was assembling called my life, and if he went wonky, it must be my fault.
I spent a lot of time sobbing in car parks. When I broke up with him, I brought him a fruit basket. I wanted so much for a bad thing to be good, to make a “divine opportunity”. As I got in my car to leave, he threw himself under the front wheels. The emotion I recall is numbness, a sense of profound dissociation. The more messed-up the evening got, the more I had to pretend it was almost funny, a “crazy” story I would later tell my girlfriends – proof of promising qualities I had been assured of in magazine personality quizzes, like adventurousness and a willingness to let life unfurl in all its wackiness.
The writer Andrew Solomon has explored the lives of prodigies, gifted children burdened from a very young age by great expectations. The experience, he writes, is “isolating, mystifying, petrifying”. I think many millennial women, and not just the wealthiest ones, had youths a little like prodigies. We were invested with the hope that the suffering of generations of women who had gone before us hadn’t been in vain. Recently, a friend told me that her mother got into Harvard in the 1970s but chose not to go because of the explicit inequalities for women that remained there. “They had a male-only library. She wasn’t allowed to be in the marching band,” she said. My friend felt that her mother was in awe – even jealous – of our condition, apparently freed from that overt discrimination. My friend recalled that she grew up being told: “This is how good you get it. You get to live in this time when everything is possible.”
My mother, the nerdy daughter of penniless Polish immigrants, loved literature and music. But, when she applied to college, her father insisted she study science, and she did so, because daddy was still king in the 60s. Defeated, she dropped out. She felt, I think, trailed by the shadow of opportunities denied. Her determination that I not screw up my special opportunity became, at times, overwhelming. When I came home with a B in geometry, I got chewed out as if I had written off the car. When I looked deep into my mother’s eyes, sometimes I thought I saw a plea: tell me you are going to make it.
It sounds paradoxical, but all the power we were told we had led often not to courage, but to hesitation, rationalisation, even self-hatred and self-harm. It was portrayed as a liberation to have the chance to be everything all at once, brainy and gorgeous. But in practice, it was crushing: if we could be anything, we had to be ideal.
The beauty rituals of the 90s focused on scraping, plucking and driving out. We knew we had to be godly, so we became like monks, obsessed with flaying ourselves and exorcising the evidence of sin within us in the form of stray hairs and blackheads, which we cruelly tried to rip off of our delicate faces with special tape. Our 90s models of beauty – Kate Moss, Posh Spice – were hollow-eyed, so blemishless and skinny that they seemed to be melting away. The beloved teen magazine Seventeen played the role of our advisor on romance, and it was a harsh tutor, reminding us incessantly of all the ways we could fail. One recurring feature was the quiz, dedicated to helping young women identify and root out their neuroticisms. “Quiz: Do You Play Mind Games?”, “Are You Overreacting?”, “Are You Paranoid?” Another feature was “550 Guys on First Moves and the Worst Thing a Girl Could Do”.
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| Kate Moss in 1994. Photograph: Peter Lindbergh/PA |
Educators who work with prodigies know they often become paralysed because any action at all would be a betrayal of the ideal performance. Or they start to sabotage themselves. Many girls I knew began to cut themselves. Young-adult novels began to proliferate in which the teenage protagonists became grievously ill, bedridden, or died. In recalling her thoughts of suicide, the writer Porochista Khakpour described it as the only choice that had not yet proved itself imperfect.
In an environment where being extraordinary is never quite enough, being dramatically, pointedly off the mark becomes a way to get attention. A friend of mine and I privately called the girls who cut themselves the “Arrogant Suicidals”. We assumed they were doing it to stand out.
It makes me sick to recall that I presumed feeling suicidal could be just another performance. But it might have been, at times, because everything was. The longer everybody tried to be amazing, the harder we all had to look for marks of distinction in paradoxical places.
We longed so much to step or fall off the narrow tightropes we walked. In the early days of the internet, a lot of kids my age took a quiz called the “Purity Test”. Among the hundreds of questions were ones such as:
“Have you used a drug to lower someone’s inhibitions about sexual activity?”
“Have you had sex with a woman who was asleep and she didn’t wake up?”
“Have you ever accepted money for sex?”
“Have you ever masturbated into a houseplant?”
It wasn’t entirely clear whether it was good or bad to get a low score – to be “pure” – but I recall it was judicious to be pure and cool to be impure, and we kind of had to be both.
The people who designed the purity test were high achievers: students at MIT. I suspect the test reflected fantasies of getting off the dizzying fast track. But it’s telling, and sad, that their fooling around also yielded a grade. In the end, “impurity” was just another proof of accomplishment. In the test’s logic, prostitution and rape were almost wickedly charming, marks of daredevil extraordinariness. Early on in the iconic 90s film American Beauty, Angela, the movie’s ingenue, fields creepy attention from an older, married man. She converts that problem into a divine opportunity.
“If people I don’t even know look at me and want to fuck me, I really have a shot at being a model, which is great!” she says. “Because there’s nothing worse in life than being ordinary.”
Years later, in 2014, on a reporting trip to Montevideo, I hosted a dinner for local artists and journalists. One of them gave me the eye across the table. We ended up at a bar. He walked me home to my AirBnB. We went upstairs. I recall these steps as feeling both discomfiting and inevitable, as if someone else was moving my feet. The whole time I walked, I thought brightly: I can always go back.
But I couldn’t. My first step towards the AirBnB had arisen from a wish to be fancy-free – but then it became a rule. For if I’d had the power in that situation, then I’d have been able to make the best choice at any given time. To stop walking, to change my mind, was to admit that I had made a mistake, been stupid – a crippling admission.
After I let him into my AirBnB, he dropped his pants and blocked the door with his body. Now this was real. This was bad. This was the point at which I was supposed to kick out the brake light of the car to signal the police. But all I could manage was to feebly voice what had become for me, by then, a go-to excuse for ending such encounters: that my vagina was broken. I said it had a “disorder”.
Unfortunately, my excuse didn’t work. He just grinned and said: “Maybe mine will be the dick that will fix that for you.” Horrible – but wasn’t that kind of always the hope? That a man would come along and put the last piece into the not-yet-quite-perfect puzzle of our feminine lives?
It felt awkward, even childish, to hit him or to scream. I also felt I owed him a long explanation for my inconsistency, even though I had not yet managed to explain it to myself. Suffocating under contradictions, I just lay back and resigned myself. I think so many of us resigned ourselves to situations that were wrong, not because we were powerless, but because we thought this was the way for us to experience our power. To shove the man, or to scream, felt like an admission to myself I had misjudged the situation in the first place, and I’d always been taught that to lose control of a situation was a mark on your character. A failure.
I trekked to his office the next morning to return a sweater he’d left behind. He gave me a warm smile, which I returned with a queasy one. I didn’t know what to think of myself, and in that void, I didn’t want to seem inconsistent. I think he thought my solicitousness meant I’d had a good time. And why shouldn’t he have? How could he have known all the fears and concerns I had brought in with me to that AirBnB, when we, as a culture, go so terribly far to conceal them?
But I’ve thought of Montevideo during the #MeToo conversation. There are many of these kinds of ambiguous yet heartbreaking encounters that women have not yet voiced. Some commentators have fretted about “evolving standards” – as if all of a sudden women just decided that things they used to be cool with aren’t so cool any more. There is surprise at some of the #MeToo stories – when strong women such as Amy Schumer reveal that they endured abuse, sometimes for years. But it all makes sense to me. We aren’t changing our standards. We are remembering things. Why should we be surprised that women are only now remembering, or understanding, what really happened to them, when, in the time that so many of us came of age, we told ourselves that everything we knew about life and human behaviour could be forgotten, that we had left the past behind?
How many times have I recounted a truly scary or hurtful encounter with a man to my girlfriends as a jolly story? But, it turns out, it just isn’t funny or adventurous to see your boss masturbate on a houseplant. It’s traumatic. There are, perhaps, only so many times a woman can deny the impact of such experiences before she loses it. Every one of them dredges up the memories of the others, cumulatively, until one day a stranger whistles at you on the street, or you read an account of some random celebrity’s misdeeds, and you find yourself raving on Twitter like a person who has been halfway destroyed.
Yes, some of these experiences are minor. But what’s behind them is not. Love as triumph, love as ruin. Sex as weightless, sex as incredibly freighted. Men as pointless, men as the whole point of life’s game. Women as witches, magicians; women so fragile they cut themselves open in high-school bathrooms. Women as careful, women as carefree.
In some of the #MeToo critiques, I perceive an anger that younger women weren’t the perfectly empowered people their elders had hoped they would be. The older generation had prepared the ground, after all, and fought their battles. To acknowledge how younger women have struggled would entail a painful admission that the battles of previous generations may not have been won as decisively as they had hoped. We were told, decades ago, that we were starring in a totally new story, and that we didn’t have to experience any of these painful conflicts. But that only made our ultimate experience of them more painful.
Nine months after it began, I sense an ebbing of some energy around #MeToo – a tiredness; perhaps an acknowledgement that the contradictions and painful realities it revealed are too big to solve fast. Frantically firing offending males may make it harder for women to tell their complex stories. But the suffering of men who have been publicly accused of sexual assault or misconduct must not shut us up now, either. I want more stories. I want more curiosity about the complexity of women’s lives – instead of a panicky retreat from the conversation.
We would like to believe that clearer rules around “positive consent” will put an end to much of this difficulty. But I worry a little about “positive consent”. It still puts the onus on the woman to perfectly manage the situation – this time with non-verbal cues, communicating desire or retreat with a flicker of the eye. It wasn’t a better description of “consent” that I needed while growing up. I was taught endlessly what I should and shouldn’t consent to for my life not to go wrong. All that emphasis on all my power to make things turn out right ended up paralysing me.
I lacked a perception of what I wanted. I think that’s one of the things that lurks in the shadows of #MeToo. How to enable young people to discover what they really want and need out of love and sex – this is what we should be talking about in sex-education classes. Forget about putting condoms on bananas. But as long as we venerate doing and solving – making things more efficient and perfect – it will be hard to glimpse what we really want out of sex or of love.
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