Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (14 page)

“I was smiling like a fool and people were snapping away. When I realized it, I cried and begged the photographers not to print it, but it was everywhere,” Reid said. “I was on the Web sites as having the ugliest boobs in the world.”

Before long, stories about Reid’s “botched” plastic surgery dominated all discussion of her. It wasn’t just the breasts: Her stomach, which similarly had liposuction scars
and looked a bit rippled (she says she had a hernia) was also the subject of vehement, widespread disgust.

These were relatively minor, human blemishes, the sort you would expect to find on a body formed of malleable flesh instead of heated, hormonal fantasy, but you wouldn’t know it from reading about them; Reid was routinely framed as existing somewhere between Frankenstein’s monster and the Elephant Man on the scale of medical anomaly.
CBS News
called Reid’s breasts “deformed”;
People
ran a feature about whether Reid was
“ ‘moving on’ from the botched breast augmentation and stomach liposuction that left her disfigured in 2004.”

Reid was quoted in both those pieces. This was the final stop on her humiliation tour: She had to give interviews about her surgery, in which she publicly repented for the fact that she—a starlet, a sex symbol, a woman whose job it was to look thin and conventionally pretty—had gotten medical help to look thin and conventionally pretty.

“It wasn’t really the pictures that hurt me. The comments hurt me. People wrote, ‘Look at that flabby old actress,’ ‘She used to be so hot,’ ‘She’s gross.’ It’s like, gosh, come on. I’m not fat,” she told
People
. Predictably, the commenters of the world did not come flocking to Tara Reid’s doorstep to offer heartfelt apologies. Perhaps more significant was the quote she gave
CBS News
, on how having a body that had become a national spectacle (old, freakish, blemished,
unsexy
) affected one’s career as an actress who mostly played
young, beautiful seductresses. The surgery had only been undertaken to help her career; she thought her breasts were uneven, thought her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and, well, “I figured, I’m in Hollywood. I’m getting older. I’m going to fix [it].” And yet, afterward:

“I couldn’t wear a bikini,” she said. “I lost a lot of work.”

And that was it. At the peak of the Tara Reid Era, it seemed that people would never stop talking about her. She had ruled youth culture, as a sex symbol; she had ruled tabloid culture, as the epitome of ugliness. But when we ran out of things to hate Tara Reid for, we stopped thinking about her. After her body and personality had been rendered hyper-visible, invaded and dissected and ripped apart in every way imaginable, in the end, Tara Reid just sort of … disappeared.

Silence and invisibility are a familiar end point for celebrity trainwrecks. It’s not just Tara Reid who vanished; the same cycle repeated itself, even faster, for Vanessa Hudgens, who was perhaps the most visible face of Disney’s TV empire next to Miley Cyrus, and the lynchpin of the hugely popular
High School Musical
series, until her private nude photos were leaked—she had taken them for her boyfriend; someone else got hold of them, as “someone else” seems to keep on doing—and she was dropped from the franchise.

Hudgens didn’t even have a period of infamy and reality-TV notoriety before we dropped her into the oubliette. She had a much younger fan base; she was a Disney employee,
and therefore expected to be a model of sexless virtue; she was a woman of color, a biracial actress with a Filipina mother, whose sexuality was already more closely monitored, and more suspect, than the white and blond Reid (or, for that matter, Cyrus). Hudgens didn’t get dragged around through the mud, as her white peers did; she simply went from ubiquitous to invisible, pretty much overnight.

These women still exist, and they still work in entertainment—Reid’s presence is one of the recurring jokes of the
Sharknado
series, and Hudgens has grabbed roles in indie movies like
Spring Breakers
, where her acting has actually been fairly well received—but their star power has long since dissipated in a cloud of dirty jokes and negative headlines. Somehow, they just stopped being part of the conversation. Some women, like Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes, have their silence imposed upon them, by parental conservatorship. Even mainstays of the trainwreck industry, big attractions like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, have become less visible over time. The “fame” of a trainwreck is usually quick-burning; like a cat toying with a mouse, we trash these women for just as long as they have an entertaining amount of fight in them, and then, we get bored.

Yet this is not our first crop of disappearing girls. And the state of disgrace that befalls most celebrity trainwrecks—the metaphorical “disappearance” that comes with a sudden
drop-off in fame—is actually not the worst thing that can happen to a woman. Alongside their stories, there is also a confusingly large number of female culture creators—smart, exceptional female artists, some of them actual geniuses—who have, quite literally,
disappeared
. As in, “from the face of the Earth.”

Connie Converse, for example, has been called
“the first American singer-songwriter.” She lived in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and recorded self-written ballads (often in her friends’ living rooms) that borrowed heavily from folk and pop tradition, but skewed it toward sharp, often funny depictions of her own emotional landscape. It was the same approach that Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen would become generational icons for adopting, but she did it in 1954, a decade before anyone had heard of either man. And it’s a good thing she recorded those songs—and copyrighted them; her brother got the rights—because, by 1961, she believed she was a failure, and moved back home to Michigan, where she worked as a secretary. By 1973, she was depressed, and drinking heavily. And in 1974, she wrote a few letters to her family members saying that she wanted a fresh start, got into her car, and left town. She was never seen again. Her body of work was only discovered when a friend who’d recorded her in the ’50s played a tape on a radio show. In 2004.

Somehow, that’s not the only time a female genius’s biography has ended with the woman in question evaporating
into thin air. Consider the strange case of Barbara Newhall Follett, a child prodigy who published two critically acclaimed novels by the age of fourteen. The
Saturday Review of Literature
called her work “almost unbearably beautiful”; her book reviews (yep, she wrote those too) inspired H. L. Mencken to tell her parents that
“you are bringing up the greatest critic we heard of in America.” By the age of sixteen, her family had lost everything in the Great Depression, and she was working as a secretary. By twenty-three, she was in a rocky marriage; at twenty-five,
she had a particularly bad argument with her husband, left the apartment carrying thirty dollars in cash, and (you guessed it) was never seen again.

In cases like Follett’s and Converse’s, one tends to expect the worst. (And one expects it, particularly, for Follett, whose husband did not report her missing for two weeks.) But these women didn’t necessarily disappear into death. They may have simply disappeared into something even grimmer: everyday, anonymous existence.

Converse may have been the first female musician to disappear, but she’s not the only one—indeed, she’s not even the only one
in folk music
. Judee Sill was the Next Big Thing, a Laurel Canyon wunderkind who appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone
; when she died of a drug overdose in 1979, her friends were shocked, largely because she’d gone missing so long ago that they’d assumed she was already dead. Shelagh McDonald recorded two popular folk albums, then disappeared until 2005, when she gave a brief interview to
say that she’d been working in department stores and living on welfare; she had been so sure that her popularity would “burn out” that she never thought to pick up her royalty checks.

Then, there’s Vashti Bunyan, a rising British pop star who went missing for the last three decades of the twentieth century. She only reappeared in 2000, due to the fact that her self-written 1970 album
Just Another Diamond Day
—a resounding critical and commercial failure at the time of its release—was considered a masterpiece, and was selling for around $2,000 per copy. None of which went to Bunyan, of course; she had no idea she had become famous until she Googled her own name. In the intervening time, she’d been a housewife. Her children knew
Diamond Day
existed, but were forbidden to listen to it in her presence; the failure had been so painful that Bunyan herself couldn’t bear to hear the work that made her name.

Women disappear because they’ve been wrecked—because we’ve hated them for long enough to get bored of them. But they also disappear due to being misunderstood, or condescended to, or ignored. They vanish into irrelevance, but they also disappear into poverty, or addiction, or domesticity, or day jobs. The natural tendency is to see these disappearing girls as titillating unsolved mysteries. But they weren’t spirited away to never-never land; they were talented professionals whose careers were put on hold for decades, or for the rest of their lives. And, in the face of the sheer number
of stories like this, it’s hard to interpret any one story as an individual tragedy or mystery.

The more reasonable explanation is that the historical lack of support for women as artists or public figures—the dismissal and condescension they face, the pressure to do the “reasonable” thing and put marriage and family first, the lack of cultural context that would make supporting and promoting them a political act—has resulted, not only in women avoiding the arts or being shamed out of them (
I confess, I do think
) but in a landscape where even relatively famous and ambitious women were so unimportant that they could disappear without a trace.

Which brings us to the idea that silence is not just an unlucky outcome, for a woman. It may be the natural outcome—as far as many people are concerned, the
ideal
outcome—of being female in a sexist world.

Which is to say: In the present day, silence may be the end of a famous woman’s career. But in the story of women as a whole, silence has always been the
beginning
: The culturally prescribed and enforced mode of female life, the thing every woman’s work had to fight through or around in order to exist. As Virginia Woolf put it, in her much-misquoted and much-bumper-stickered adage:
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

A Room of One’s Own
, of course, is a book entirely devoted
to female silence; it sets out to answer the question of whether there
were
women in literature, and, if not, where they’d all gone. And, in that book, Woolf wrestled with the fact that the history of women’s writing—one of the most permanent, and most obvious, ways that women have managed to make themselves heard in public—is also a history of women who have tried not to be noticed or seen as writers:

It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them
.

All true. Brontë even said as much, counseling a friend who had the misfortune of having a musically gifted daughter:
“I was told you had once some thoughts of bringing Fanny out as a professional singer, and it was added Fanny did not like the project … Fanny probably looks on publicity as degrading, and I believe for a woman it is degrading
if it is not glorious.” A woman must be perfect, or not be anything at all, to encounter fame without being shamed or scarred.

Mary Beard, writing in the
London Review of Books
, traces the idea as far back as the Odyssey: Telemachus, as a means of claiming his manhood, tells Penelope to
“go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all.” The word he uses, Beard tells us, is important; gossip and informal conversation are not denoted by it. The speech Telemachus is claiming for men is
muthos
, speaking with authority in public. This speech is also forbidden to women in Christian scripture:
“Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”

These injunctions against female speech were not just cultural. They also passed into law. In Europe and the United States, there were crimes of speech—like being a “common scold,” an
“angry woman who, by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours, disturbs the public peace”—that only women could commit. Common scolds were punished by being made to wear a gag called a “scold’s bridle” in public; it was made of metal, and sometimes lined with blades or spikes, so that moving one’s tongue at all would cause injury. For those who felt that the bridle was too cruel, there was also “ducking”—repeatedly submerging
a woman in a lake or river, or (if all else failed) a horse trough, to simulate the feeling of drowning—which, as you may have already noticed, is basically identical to the punishment we call “waterboarding,” and regard as a form of torture, in the present day. Don’t worry, though: Common scold laws in the United States were ruled unconstitutional. After a New Jersey woman was successfully convicted of the offense in 1972.

It’s no wonder, then, that we make such ugly, public sacrifices of women who’ve dared to become famous. The expansion required to make oneself heard or seen by the public—the act of
muthos
—is deeply at odds with the basic female work of getting and staying small.