A long time ago in New York, I saw Ben Folds Five at a small club in the East Village. I held onto the name of the club for a long time, but my brain has now given up on such categories of information. I remember a standard-issue black box, with sticky floors and a lot of posters. I was a generally shat-upon college intern at Time Out New York that summer. Out of pity, I think, the marketing manager had given me her laminated pass to a music festival, plus the names of a few maybe-someday bands. The pass had her photo on it, and the only feature I shared with her was our gender. My California ID not only didn’t match the pass but also showed that I was twenty. And yet somehow, I saw some bands. The bouncer that evening on Avenue B squinted at me and said, “yeah, right.” But he let me in.
Ben Folds came on stage and sprayed pheremonal energy and sweat everywhere. He climbed all over his piano, which seemed to fill the room. I saw a couple of other bands whose sound I liked, bands who kicked at their gear and closed their eyes on the high notes. But that night, Ben Folds believed. He got down into his own music in that way that combines total release with pure control. I think it’s easier for men, that balance of wide appeal and intensely personal self-expression. For men, the rules about what is and is not sexy are slightly more lax. I now associate Ben Folds with a certain brand of late nineties irony, Rockin’ the Suburbs, the clueless chump you seem to think I am… But any rockstar has to play with charisma, and that night, he was very indie nerd testosterone.
Over the next few years, my socioeconomic demographic would come out big for Ben Folds. But I didn’t know that then, and I don’t tend to think of my own musical taste as particularly trend-setting. I was by myself in a club in New York. The vague recommendation of the marketing manager was all I knew about this odd, piano-centric band with funny lyrics. I stood there oscillating between euphoria and self-doubt. I let strangers jostle me. I steadfastly refused to give up my place near the stage. The crowd was full of music critics, industry insiders, real people who lived in New York and had real jobs… but suddenly I didn’t care what they thought. I wanted to run up to the stage and dance on that piano.
In an absolutely uncharacteristic move for me that summer, I found the guts to walk up to Ben Folds afterwards. I was burning with it. I had to tell him how much I liked his music. I had nothing in mind beyond pure admiration. I am technically no longer a teenager, I told myself. I have a pass around my neck that says Time Out. In the dark you can’t tell the lady in the picture is blond. I am paying rent on a sublet in New York. I have a right to be here. I can do this.
Ben Folds was incredibly nice. I managed to convey enthusiasm without drooling. We were chatting! Magic! And then he asked me if I lived in New York. I didn’t live anywhere! I was still in college! Keeping it cool, I said: I live in New Haven… He proceeded to tell me where he was playing next. And where and when he would be in New Haven. And that maybe he would see me there? if I came backstage, to let him know? The wheels in my barely post-adolescent brain strained with the effort. Not only had I managed to play the role of adult and Time Out writer convincingly, but this rockstar I had just met seemed to be asking me to come hang out with him.
As soon as I realized this, I blew it. I started thinking frantically about how I couldn’t get into the clubs he was telling me about, how I had no fake ID, how I was just an intern, how technically I was living with my boyfriend that summer, even if that wasn’t going particularly well. I felt like he could see all this on my face—that my face screamed confused college intern—which struck me as deeply shameful. So I froze. I got awkward and moved away. Before I even got out of the club, I started beating myself up, rehearsing all the ways that the more savvy, city, boarding-school kids I went to college with would have known how to respond. Since then, Ben Folds’ recorded music has never had quite the same panty-dropping effect on me, but I still like it. His voice gives me a warm feeling and reminds me gently that wanting something badly often makes me totally screw it up.
The Atlantic, while a storied magazine that hires talented writers, seems to have adopted an editorial policy that can be summed up in three words: “Provoke, provoke, provoke.” It’s like they lopped off the top of the BuzzFeed hourglass, the smiley half of the “what kind of shit do people forward?” equation, the part with cute kittens and dancing giraffes. They kept only the bottom part. In that bottom half, alongside conspiracy theories about how Dubya blew up the towers with nuclear secrets he bought from Chinese prostitutes trained by Hillary Clinton, sit top ten lists from the front lines of the gender wars. That and 90% of the Atlantic’s editorial content.
This was my reaction to the story they just published about Joan Didion. On the one hand, it is, as is usually the case for the Atlantic, well written and contains some kernels of truth. On the other hand, it basically says: Hunter S. Thompson showed us how to be a Man by shooting things and drinking whiskey. Joan Didion showed us how to be a Woman by writing pretty words about curtains and fancy flower leis. That is what Male Writing and Female Writing should do. Muscular prose. Pretty things. As soon as Joan Didion tried to be feminine and personal and political all at the same time, this article basically posits, she lost it. How dare she get old and continue to expect us to listen to her! How dare she share her personal life and still demand that we take her seriously as a writer! Being old and female and having emotions in public? That makes you ridiculous.
I am being reductive. But I’m so tired. Today, I’m just so effing tired of the gender wars. I have had some firsthand experience with young people who think Hunter S. Thompson showed them how to be a man by talking about whiskey and peyote. These are the same people who think they’re Hunter S. fans because they saw both movies, who tell me they want to be writers because they saw Almost Famous. They are less tragic only than the young ladies who tell me that Paris Hilton is a “real businesswoman.” True fans of Hunter S. Thompson see that he held a dark mirror up to the world. He observed keenly, he wrote out of a profound repulsion for hypocrisy and cant. His accomplishment was not to give us permission to behave badly; he was just as harsh on himself as he was on his subjects. We, male and female alike, are perfectly capable of figuring out how to barf on people’s shoes without great Gonzo journalism. And we don’t need Joan Didion to show us how to fold our napkins. Paris Hilton, in fact, while not an entrepreneur, does teach women how to adopt status symbols. Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion are both much more complex and important than that.
I have some deep-seated problems with Didion’s work, and I haven’t read Blue Nights yet, and, yes, I’m worried I’ll have serious problems with it… but I have problems with her as a lifelong admirer of her work. And I really don’t want to get into that here.
Fact is, I’m tired of Joan Didion, in an existential way, tired of the way I sometimes can’t get her voice out of my head, tired of my own voice. I believe we all need a swift spiritual kick to the head, or maybe, just some karaoke. No really. I was entranced last night by a funny little book called “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” (by Raina Lee). It’s just a primer on singing over recorded music in public, but it made me think about the beauty of small acts of social courage, about cultural differences and lived tolerance, about the demon on Buffy who could read your soul by watching you sing… It made me think about close the ridiculous sits to the sublime. Being provocative and cutting is sometimes easier than being enthusiastic and vulnerable. Curtains and flowers, whiskey and horse races, the pitfalls of social outings, our quotidian hypocrisies and shame… Stupid karaoke. In the light of a keen and perceptive attention, dross can be gold, gold can be worthless.
Lisbeth Salandar takes an eye for an eye. The man appointed by the state to care for her, her guardian, turns out to be a monster. So she out-monsters him. The system is corrupt. It humiliates her boyfriend. Robin-Hood like, she steals it all back. Her response to the assault of a morally bankrupt and aggressive patriarchy is to go androgynous and underground. She fights back on the same violent terms. She waves her damage like a flag: tattoos, gauges, ripped t-shirts, black everything. This is not a solution. It’s a clothing line. Today, I love her anyway.
I wander through the toy store and think about Lisbeth Salander. I look at the “Spa & Perfume Science Kit!” for girls, the “Doctor Barbie” with her pink-heart stethoscope. Most days, I love pink. Some days, I imagine Lisbeth Salander roaring down the aisle on her bike with one hand out, knocking everything down, then tossing a cigarette butt into the pink plastic carnage. Burn it. Burn it all.
The Fincher movie drops into a culture drowning in procedural cop shows. Every week, hundreds of well-intentioned, serious, square-jawed cops bring killers-of-women to justice. Every week, evil is enacted on the bodies of women and avenged as a means of absolving the system. Lisbeth Salander is an Old Testament angel of alternative mayhem. The raper of women will be raped in return. I will turn your technology against you. How much does this help us? Probably not much. And yet I woke up the night after I saw the movie and bought Lisbeth Salander earrings before breakfast. In the book, she didn’t have this effect on me. But I don’t read procedurals. I watch them.
Martin, the main bad guy, acted out his fantasies. He raped and killed. We don’t see Martin’s victims, however, we don’t go through the usual forensic porn. We hear descriptions of the victims, we see still photos in the frame. But we already know what they look like; we saw them last week on Special Victims Unit. We see Lisbeth’s body, we see Lisbeth raped, and then we see her guardian/attacker’s body: this time he’s the one naked, handcuffed, screaming in pain, and tattooed with his crime. Lisbeth roars out of our collectively pissed-off subconscious, a goth Tinkerbell on two wheels, and drives Martin’s SUV off the road. His car flips over. Blood trickles down his forehead. He stares at her through the windshield. She clicks the safety on her gun. But she doesn’t have to shoot him, because she motherfucking blows him up with her mind. The visual feels like this: You’ve been taking your fantasies out on me for far too long. I now fantasize you out of existence. Boom.
His death is in some ways less gratifying than the journey of Rooney Mara going femme and square, and then back to her Lisbeth self. She kills the Chanel version of herself, and visually, that death is more satisfying. In order to enact her final vengeance, she dons a blonde wig, takes out her piercings and wears expensive clothes. Porcelain skin uninterrupted, she sits quietly at a series of desks, in front of fat, smug, white men. The well-appointed off-shore banks remind us of the wood-paneled office of her sadistic pig guardian. But this time, Lisbeth has all the power. She has the numbers, the code. She takes what she wants. Then she smokes and throws the blonde wig out the window of a train. She reclaims the banners of her pain. Look, here is the girlie-girl of your dreams, the cream puff you trust, the girl you think you can control, she tells the camera. I drive my motorcycle all over her. And you.
When I read the book, I resisted Lisbeth’s flattened moral universe, where systemic power imbalances are expressed, conveniently, as gothic sexual crimes. The rich and powerful don’t always do us the favor of sinning so flamboyantly. I resisted Lisbeth’s flat chest and boyish looks—she seemed like she could wield a golf club as a weapon but not like she had ever had her period. I resisted the idea that horrific sexual abuse mints heroes. I resisted Stieg Larsson’s sentences, translated from the Swedish.
But the movie got under my skin. I read some psychological research on tattoos. “A tattoo should serve as a clinical reminder to think about the possibility of a psychiatric problem being present.” Tattoos are “comorbid” with risk-taking behavior, linked to trauma and abuse, but also sometimes a form of “self-expression and personal identity.” They correlate with increased sexual behavior, with more drinking but not—interestingly—with more binge-drinking. The social mores around them are changing; they’re getting more common. They are, according to experts, sometimes a sign of rebellion against the mainstream. No shit? Even my Facebook feed polices female skin: that tattoo makes her “needy,” “stupid hipster,” “tramp stamp.” My inner Lisbeth says: Back off. Sometimes, body art is art, not symptom. Sometimes art can’t be explained by science, or reduced to a political program, even mass art that seems to have emerged directly from the reptilian base of our brains… Lisbeth Salander has been in my dreams.
We tattoo our skin to make exterior some interior mark, pain and change worn as aesthetic statement. We take the stigma and claim it. We colonize the margin and have a party there. Some days, we do the slow, hard work of changing the terms of the fight. And some days, we indulge our vengeful fantasies. Girls draw pink unicorns, they keep journals, they hack computers, rip their jeans and get tattoos. Ink it on my back forever.
In 2009, I went to a “Mommy & Me” screening of New Moon, the first installment of the Twilight Saga. “Mommy & Me” is where you try to watch a movie in the theater with your infant. Needless to say, one doesn’t retain much from such screenings. All I really remember from the first film was that I kept waiting for the story to start, and hey! Vampire baseball! Also: Vampires now sparkle in the sun.
When The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 came out, I figured I would skip it. After all, my child is now old enough to see the screen, but far too young for sex and vampires. But then my friend Sarah made a very convincing case that as someone who cares about pop culture and what girls are into, I should see the movie. Off we went.
In this wonderful essay, another Sarah (Blackwood) writes eloquently about Twilight and how complicated it is to demand strong female characters without asking that they simply be more like men:
“If, as feminists, we believe in girls’ and womens’ autonomy, how do we understand the autonomy-shattering power of desire? Do we determine that some desires (to be dominated? to be beautiful? to get married?) are bad and others good?”
She gets at many of the profoundly interesting questions raised by the gender politics of the cultural phenomenon that is the Twilight Saga.
I can’t really get at those questions, in part, because I haven’t read the books. And seeing this latest movie without having read the books was like seeing a movie translated from the Chinese, in China. The film is unapologetically free of exposition. Its millions of fans know the source material. But… do all of their mothers? Countless parents across the country must relate to my mystified reaction.
What follows is intended as an experiential summary of what it was like to try and make sense of Breaking Dawn. I don’t pretend that this is particularly incisive cultural criticism, and I intend no disrespect to Twilight. But I’m telling you: Watching this movie was intensely, intensely weird. Some of that weird has got to mean something.
***Total and complete spoiler alert.***
Bella is getting ready to marry the vampire! The vampire family is very, very pasty. Some very strange race dynamics, here. Powder-white aristocratic vampires. Native American werewolf tribe. Damn, the décor is lovely.
Edward comes to say hi to his bride the night before the wedding. Bella crawls suggestively on her bed, butt in the air. She wants to marry him. Yes, she does. But he has an important confession to make: Once upon a time, in days of period dress, he ate some people. In the flashback, it looks like he is about to eat a girl in red. But no! He eats the man following her, instead! The implication: Edward ate rapists. We see him biting a couple of men in the neck. Mmmm. Human blood.
But there’s no time to discuss the moral niceties of murdering rapists and murderers. His buddies wait outside. One of them climb / flies to the window. Let’s go! It’s time for a vampire bachelor party! Bella asks him, “Are there going to be strippers?” No. Just some mountain lions. “And maybe some bears.” Then he goes outside and wrestles with unusual exuberance with his male friends. (I say unusual, because Edward’s main affect is a pained, longing gaze from beneath his well-sculpted hair. People joke about his hair at the wedding.)
Let me reiterate: Edward admits, just before his wedding, to some intimate biting of men. Then he talks about how instead of strippers, he’s going to have “bears” at his bachelor party. Okey doke.
The wedding is gorgeous. The camera pans slowly down the translucent back of Bella’s gown. This makes clear: Bella will be married entirely free of undergarments.
Bella’s ex-boyfriend turned into a wolf and ran in the forest upon receiving her wedding invitation. (Which he got in the mail. The mail! Everything is so old-fashioned. Who actually learns information through the USPS?) He was upset. But he shows up at the wedding anyway. Bella is incredibly and openly glad to see him. He is incredibly and openly still in love with her. Edward is remarkably calm.
Jacob and Bella have great chemistry, and he kisses her neck, kind of, and then they talk about sex and death. Will she be turned into a vampire tonight? She says no. She will have a regular honeymoon, because she doesn’t want to spend it “writhing in pain.” Jacob gets even more upset. And I don’t know why. Clearly, this is about sex. Did he think there would be no sex? Does human-on-vampire sex kill you? Jacob seems to think so. Or is it the possibility of vampire pregnancy? Do vampires have sperm? I mean, if they sparkle in the sun…?
Jacob runs off, wolf-mad, into the lush woods of the Pacific Northwest.
After this… lifestyle porn. The wedding is breathtakingly well-designed. So is the private island in Brazil where the honeymoon takes place. A long, lingering shot shows Bella fingering the curtains around the canopy bed. Is this about the sex? Or about the lovely stitching on the taupe linen? The moderne tropique fantasy-fulfillment here is so unsubtle, I find it almost embarrassing. At the same time: I get it. Whisked off, through Rio, via speedboat, to a paradise for two, with dedicated staff? Hells yeah.
Kristin Stewart, who plays Bella, is beautiful in an intriguing and ambiguous way. She does tortured introspection and worry with great magnetism. While Edward plunges into the ocean for a swim, Bella unzips a lot of bags, looks at some lingerie and brushes her teeth. She is in a kind of anxious tizzy. This must be about the sex. “Don’t be a coward,” she tells herself. Is she worried that human-on-vampire sex will hurt more than normal sex? What was it, exactly, that Jacob thought would kill her? Maybe she’s worried about joining the living dead, as a metaphor for marriage more generally. I’m not sure. But I like watching her worry.
They have sex. It’s remarkably tame, and much too short. He does break the bed, though.
And then: Bam. She’s pregnant. It’s been, like, a day, and she can feel the baby moving inside her. The honeymoon is over.
Guess what’s better than vampire baseball? Vampire suitcase-packing.
The next third of the movie is boring. Indie rock plays during the montages. Wolves and people run through the Pacific Northwest forest. There’s plot involving werewolves who want to kill either Bella, or Edward, or Bella’s vampire baby. Vampires debate the use of the word “fetus.” That’s right: The undead do earnest pro-life dialogue.
People and wolves say exactly what they are thinking. All of the time. (That’s really Leigh’s observation.) There is a series of shots where no less than six people turn and look meaningfully into the camera. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Then suddenly, the movie takes its gothic turn. And it’s no longer boring. The vampire baby is eating Bella from the inside out. The solution? She has to drink her own blood out of a styrofoam cup. The camera lingers on her bloody teeth.
Bella looks like a holocaust victim. It’s gruesome. She decides to name the baby Renesme, which is a combination of René and Esme. Jacob’s smirk allows that this name might be humorous… And then Bella’s body gives out. She goes into labor.
Everything that happens next is horrific, intense and wildly confusing.
An untrained vampire lady is going to cut Bella open with no anesthesia? The vampire lady is licking the razor! She’s losing it! This vampire is going to eat the birth! OK, she’s gone.
Bella looks awful. She says the baby is suffocating! Wait a second, why is Edward biting her? And down there? Is he eating her? I blurt out: “What’s going on?!?!” I’m told he’s biting the baby out of her!! So much blood!!! Does she have to drink Edward’s blood to become a vampire? Evidently not, Edward has a big syringe. He says it’s his venom. Vampires have venom?
Jacob gives Bella CPR. She is so gaunt it’s terrible to see anyone touching her at all. Edward takes the big syringe and plunges it into her. He pumps a milky, pearly substance into her sternum. What the hell is vampire venom? Did he milk it out of his teeth? Did he masturbate?
Holy shit, now Edward is biting her wrist. And her leg. Why is he biting her? I thought the venom was supposed to do the trick? He bites her ankle. Her thigh. That’s it. Edward has finally lost his marbles. He’s trying to merge their souls by eating her, or something. She is so skeletal, when he bites her it’s like watching a junkie hunting for the last vein. Please stop.
The vampire lady demands that Edward give her the baby, who is still covered in blood. Is she going to eat that baby?
Meanwhile, there are werewolves outside fighting with the other vampires. The fighting looks like wrestling. Totally unclear who is bigger, who is stronger, and who can fly.
It seems like Bella isn’t going to make it. Jacob goes outside to be with the woods and cry.
More fighting. Jacob is pissed. He goes back inside and glowers at the baby. The baby is clean now, and weirdly alert and chubby. Oh, my G-d, maybe Jacob is going to kill the baby.
Nope. Jacob looks deep into the baby’s eyes. He falls to his knees. A montage emerges from the baby’s face and shows us: A future baby Renesme as a hot teenager. Jacob, a voice-over tells me, has “imprinted” on Renesme. This means he will be “whatever she needs, a protector, a brother…”
We saw “imprinted” werewolves, earlier in the film. They were making out. So… Jacob just fell in love, with some kind of spiritual pheremonal finality, with the half-vampire daughter of his ex, who happens to be about four minutes old.
Jacob goes back outside. The “imprint” means that the werewolves can’t kill Renesme. Someone says, “It is their most absolute law.”
The wolves leave.
A long, horrifying shot of lifeless Bella on the operating table. Her bones spike up like they’re going to pierce her skin. Bite marks and bruises up and down her limbs. A bloody swath across the sheet at her crotch.
And then… a beautification montage. She heals and gets a blue dress. Her cheeks fill out. Close-up on her eyes. Where did that eyeshadow come from? And then: Bam. Her eyes fly open. They’re vampire red.
She’s a vampire!!!
***
My friends and I walked across the street to have a cocktail. They had all read the books. And yet, not everything about the movie became clear, even with their deeper knowledge. I did find out that Edward first bit the baby out of his wife, but that his further biting was meant to circulate his venom. Like, to suck it around through her body. Okey doke.
There was a lot of enthusiastic conversation, at the restaurant, with a lot of real curiosity about what had just happened. We came up with a wonderful little hand gesture to indicate, “I am milking my fangs.” At one point, the waiter came over and said, “Are you ladies still talking about Twilight?”
I never really got into Sex and the City, but when I saw it, I always felt like the main draw was a fantasy of endless time and money to spend poring over every detail of everything with your girls. I wished that Bella seemed more able to talk with girlfriends, in Twilight. I’m not sure if it’s like this in the books, but she didn’t seem to have much supportive feminine energy around. The wedding preparations barely registered.
Nonetheless, I have to thank Bella, and Stephanie Meyers, for providing a fascinating excuse for a truly top-notch ladies night. Yes, my waiter friend, we are still talking about it. And no, you’re not invited. Do you have venom? I didn’t think so.
When I found out I was having a girl, I cried for three days. It took me a while to figure out some basic facts about this reaction, including the fact that not everyone has it. In the language of therapy, pieces of the past remained unprocessed. One of the undigested bits was my senior year of high school. I thought, for a long time, that as I got older, that year would simply fade away. It would just get less important. For a while, it did. And then I found out I was having a daughter, and all I could do was fold my arms over the child inside me and think, I can’t protect her, I won’t be able to protect her.
The hurt we cause each other is never simple. Some of my senior year could not have been prevented or ameliorated by the adults in my life. Some of it could. This is, in most respects, a story about how the adults at my high-powered prep school failed us.
A girl in my class named Miranda hung posters around the school that read: “You say: Keep your hands off my car. We say: Keep your hands off our bodies. Signed: The women of this school.” The poster was aimed at a classmate of ours. She was effectively accusing him of sexual harassment, or worse. I use her real name only because she herself chose to publish her account of this incident.
This accusation, as Miranda admits, was based on rumor and her general dislike of this boy, whom she calls Xavier. His behavior was not something she had personal experience with. It was “widespread knowledge:” “Older girls told younger girls.” “He wasn’t a stud, he wasn’t well liked. His power came from being a brute in an Izod shirt.” As she tells it, when the administration took the posters down, she threatened the principal with a lawsuit. As a result, we had an assembly about sexual harassment. In her account, it seems the incident ended there. The last line of Miranda’s essay reads: “Right after this I graduated and became a Riot Grrrl, to the tune of: We want revolution, girlstyle, NOOOWW!”
Miranda writes: “Thinking about it now I imagine he had his share of suffering, but to understand this story it’s important that you feel no sympathy for him.” Twenty years on, I disagree intensely with this. To understand this story, it’s important that you feel sympathy for everyone involved, including, yes, Xavier. Because any teenager accused of sexual harassment deserves a fair hearing, even if — or perhaps especially if – he can be kind of an ass. It’s important, too, that you understand that this story isn’t just about Miranda and Xavier. The school administration compelled me, at seventeen, to investigate the allegations. For me, and for a number of other young women at the school, this incident did not end with a Riot Girrl cheer.
Because Miranda’s piece was published in a magazine for girls, and because I love women who are the mothers of sons, I feel the need to give my version of these events. In those posters, Miranda made serious accusations based — as she admits — on rumor and her own casual feelings about Xavier. I believe that the events surrounding those posters seriously hurt Xavier. That hurt rippled outwards. Those posters were the understandable but ill-advised actions of a young person, a girl still exploring her political beliefs, her own sexuality and anger. We were all very young, and convinced that we had all the answers. It was the school’s job to use those posters as a teachable moment, as they say; the adults in the situation held the most power and responsibility. In retrospect, I believe they acted with cowardice and poor judgment. But now — as adults ourselves — we should both hold them responsible, and be careful not to condone those posters. Those posters were not brave political speech. They were a stunt, an attack intended to humiliate another student.
Let us be clear: Xavier was not a political appointee, not a public figure. He was no one’s boss. The kind of public accusation that might be appropriate for Herman Cain or John Edwards was not appropriate. Xavier may have been a dick, at times. He was also kind and sensitive, at times. Most importantly, he was seventeen. While the administration did take the posters down, they took neither the harm done to him nor the harm he might have done truly seriously. They just tried to cover their asses against precisely the kind of lawsuit that Miranda threatened.
I got a fundraising letter last week from my high school. “What do you remember about high school?” the letter opened. “I remember a place where I felt safe and respected, encouraged and supported, where I was able to grow and learn…” I guarantee you Xavier ripped that letter up, just like I did.
Miranda admits that the trigger for her posters was an entitled, pissy comment Xavier made about his car at assembly. He was, in other words, someone she didn’t like. What she did, in return, utterly derailed his senior year. At graduation, he refused to shake the headmaster’s hand and made a pointed show of walking the wrong way down the aisle, to shake the hand of our former principal.
I remember a student body torn apart by those posters. We were intensely analytic, politicized kids. I remember my own reaction. I was sure, as were a number of my friends, that Miranda must have known something, that Xavier must have done something terrible directly to her or to one of her close friends. Surely she wouldn’t have hung those posters on rumor alone? We discussed whether this was the best way to go about dealing with whatever had happened. It wasn’t fair to accuse him anonymously, we thought. But what if there was a frightened victim, afraid to come forward? We were just learning to grapple with our own feminism. We fought with each other. What if he was innocent? What if he wasn’t? What if it wasn’t black and white? We had a complicated set of questions based on specific individuals. The posters, and Xavier, were all anyone talked about for a long time. It was incredibly polarizing.
When is it powerful to lash out, and when is the radical thing, in fact, to reach across the lines that divide us? What is it that we want political action to achieve? If we take the crime seriously, doesn’t that mean we have to give the accusation equal weight? We grapple our whole lives with these questions, as members of movements and as individuals. When I think about feminism now, I want it to be a set of principles that will help my daughter navigate both her sexuality and her anger.
The special forum of platitudes about sexual harassment at my high school didn’t help, and the administration was evidently still worried about legal action waiting in the wings. They wanted someone both they and the other students could trust. So they came to me. They tasked me with the following: Talk to the women who are upset about Xavier. Tell us what really happened.
Now, it’s this memory that pains me the most. I thought I was so grown up. I thought of myself as a feminist. I thought the adults at my school had our best interests at heart. I didn’t have a relationship with any adults that I trusted enough to share my intense discomfort over this assignment. It never occurred to me that I could say no. I’m still able, all these years later, to keep myself up at night rehearsing what I should have said: “No, vice principal. I don’t have to do that. Don’t put me in that position. I don’t have to take this on.”
I talked to dozens of girls. I won’t go into what they said for a number of reasons. First, because all that intensely private business should never have been mine to safeguard. Second, because we have all suffered enough from the spotlight, and this essay is emphatically not intended to investigate Xavier’s guilt. And third, I don’t trust some of my memories from that year, because I actually repressed a lot of it for a while. It was a bad year, for many reasons. Soon after, I blocked it all out. For a while, I couldn’t remember huge chunks—big things, like an entire trip that I took, and little things, like what people said when. At one point, I had blacked out the entire set of events surrounding Xavier and those interviews. My best friend had to remind me that it had happened. There were interviews, I asked? She said, “Sweetie, you were the one who did those interviews.” Later that day, fragments of memory came flooding back to me, unbidden, while I was eating a salad.
The main thing is this: Nothing was cut and dry. I reported back to the administration. I was intensely upset. I was confused, I didn’t know how to help the women I had spoken with. At the same time I felt intense guilt. Xavier was openly furious with me for stabbing him in the back. The administrators listened to me and let me go. They didn’t reach out to the women I had spoken with. They took no further action.
What’s clear to me now is that the administration didn’t have me do those interviews because they were concerned about the girls. Consider this irony: While I was out interviewing, three male teachers were behaving in ways that got them fired from my high school that year. At least one of those teachers turned out to have a long history of seducing female students. No one went around making sure those students were alright. That teacher went on to get a job, immediately after, at a Catholic all-girls school. In other words, someone from my school gave him good references. The administration at my high school did nothing to help the girls I spoke with because they sent me out on those interviews for one reason alone: To suss out and avoid possible lawsuits. I vaguely remember that they called Xavier’s parents in.
How else could they have behaved? For one, they could have sent someone out to the girls in our school who was trained to help young women cope with sexual behavior. Someone like a social worker, or a counselor. Someone with a framework for evaluating what she was told, who could have offered guidance and support. Someone, say, who had actually had sex before. Someone who didn’t then have to sit in class with Miranda and Xavier. Someone eminently not me.
Then, once they had determined their asses were covered, the administration could have tried to help all of the incredibly pissed off, humiliated and confused students at their school. I’m not saying helping us would have been easy. It was nonetheless their responsibility. We didn’t know it, but we were all out of our league. The stuff of how to grapple with sex crimes, accusations of sex crimes, and budding sexual independence is complicated. We desperately needed some wisdom. Instead, they hung us all out to dry.
I remember standing in line with Xavier and a group of other kids at Disneyland, on a school trip our freshman year, before all this happened. We were sitting on a railing in front of a statue of R2D2 playing free association. The only rule was that you couldn’t repeat a word that had been said before. Like, “Frog!” “Tadpole!” “Flagpole!” “Sky!” I have a vivid mental image of him in one of his Izod shirts, laughing hard at some stupid word I had said. Yes, he came from a wealthy family. He could be a jackass. He once wrapped his BMW around a tree. But like the rest of us, he was very, very young. Some of the teachers at that school may have been irredeemable. Xavier was not. And the events of our senior year didn’t help him to become a better guy. I suspect, in fact, that they fucked him up pretty hard.
My other memory of Xavier is this: On our senior retreat, we were all supposed to be sharing happy memories, to be written up on a nostalgic poster board. I asked him to talk to me. He hadn’t made eye contact with me for a month. The only language I had to describe what I felt had been done to him was legalistic. I tried to say that he hadn’t been given a chance to face his accusers. I was such a verbal kid, my whole life, and that year was dominated by things I couldn’t say and couldn’t articulate. I was upset and confused by what the other girls had confided in me. I was distressed about his situation. In any case, I tried to apologize to Xavier. We had gone behind a building, outside. In the gathering dark, he faked a lunge at me. Then he got in my face. All this I remember with crystal clarity.
“What?! What?!” he yelled when I flinched. “Are you afraid of me? You think I’m going to hurt you? Huh?”
I tried again to say something about how I didn’t think he had been treated fairly. He didn’t give a shit.
“You know what?” He was in my face, spitting, yelling, bearing down. “You know what? I’m going to go to a better school than you, I’m going to make more money than you, I’m going to have a better life than you!”And that was the last thing he ever said to me.
At the time, I thought, Ok, he’s just going to be an asshole, so there’s nothing else I can do. It made me that much more desperate to leave senior year and all of high school far behind me. Xavier looked at me and saw a friend who had betrayed him. His behavior in that moment stands as a testament to the kind of pain he was in. Standing in front of him, I remember feeling terribly alone. Now, I see Xavier as a kid driven back on his entitlement and rage because he hadn’t been given any other options.
***
Today, as I watch my bubbly, confident, assertive little three-year old girl begin to ask for princess dresses, I often think about that year. First, I think that if any teacher tries to mess with her, if any boy tries anything against her will, if any blinkered authority figure tries to sacrifice her innocence to his own needs, my solution is very simple. I will cut his heart out with a butcher knife.
But then I remember that her father and I have shaped our lives around shared values—which include feminism, empathy across lines of race gender class and creed, and nonviolence. I remember that I can’t help my daughter from jail. I remember that I believe our values can help her avoid my senior year, and that mostly, I want her to speed ahead to the part where she knows how to choose a guy like her dad.
Those posters came from a feminist impulse. I understand that impulse. I was a precocious and self-professed feminist from the time I was ten. I had a pro-choice poster on my bedroom door for most of high school, complete with a big graphic of a bloody hanger. It greeted everyone who came into our house (a fact I now find intensely embarrassing). That version of feminism didn’t protect me. My senior year, my life was seriously derailed, partly because of my own complicated feelings towards men. Feminism as an oppositional stance was not enough. It didn’t help me figure out how to relate to men for a long time. This is the crucial paradox of feminism, that it can’t be worked out in isolation from masculinity and males. Part of what I need my feminism to do is to give me both wisdom and empathy, to help me to live with men, as an equal—men I work with, men I love, men I might raise.
I don’t know why the authority figures at my school were so lacking, that year, in wisdom and empathy. Maybe it was because, from the outside, my class looked so together. We were an incredibly high-achieving group. Of seventy five graduating seniors, thirteen went to Harvard (I went to Yale). In case you don’t pay attention to Ivy League acceptance rates, that’s a bit like winning the lottery. We were extremely articulate, accomplished, confident and brazen. I think it may have been easy to forget that we were—behind the vocab words and the higher maths and the political opinions—still children finding our way. Another way to see it is that they weren’t getting sued, and our college admissions numbers were fabulous. So they left it at that.
For whatever reason, on behalf of both the young men and the young women of my school, I blame the grown-ups. I hope some of those responsible adults don’t sleep well at night. I pray for better mentors for my daughter. I hope against hope that she will turn to me in high school. I know that I can’t protect her against everything that comes her way. I can only hope that she will be strong and brave, full of self-respect and empathy for others, at all times—whether she’s in the dark with a boy at a party, thinking about putting up an angry poster, or standing in an office in front of her vice principal.
My husband and I took our daughter down to the Occupy protests this month. She called them “the tents.” We were struck with how radical the simple act of listening can be. I don’t pretend to be able to fully describe the movement, but it’s clear they’re furious. They are unafraid to stand up and express their anger—at banks, at corrupt politicians, at corporations. At the same time, no matter your race, gender, creed or class, if you were physically present at Occupy — if you sat your ass through a general assembly — your voice counted. They combined a radical act of listening, of human empathy, with militant action.
Our school had gender problems, indeed. But what we needed, I have to believe, was not more darkness but more light. I turn to the words of Dr. King: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Respect and empathy, for ourselves and each other — that’s where our personal politics have to begin. It’s not easy, in this world, to learn how to navigate our anger and attraction, to learn how to be strong, sexual women and kind, gentle men. The least we can do for our kids is to take seriously the example we set for them, take seriously their evolving feelings and actions, and even if we can’t solve their problems, to engage in good faith with all that they lay at our feet.
