Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (4 page)

The Nicki Minaj Butt Conversation—whether she has had plastic surgery to enhance her butt, whether there is a sufficient amount of clothing apportioned to her butt, what her butt means for society, and/or for our own personal butts—has been louder and longer than common sense would seem to allow. “Nicki Minaj Butt” has its own searchable tag on the
Huffington Post
(sample headline:
J. LO’S BUTT
TAKES A BACKSEAT
). Elsewhere, entertainment news and gossip sites are strewn with highbrow, intellectually stimulating headlines like
NICKI MINAJ
’
S BUTT EXPOSED IN SHEER JUMPSUIT DURING DUBLIN CONCERT
, and
EVEN NICKI MINAJ ISN
’
T SURE IF HER BUTT IS PHOTOSHOPPED OR NOT
, and
NICKI MINAJ BUTT IMPLANT RUMORS ARE TRUE
!, and finally, depressingly,
NICKI MINAJ FIRES BACK AT HATERS WHO SAY HER BUTT IS THE REASON SHE’S FAMOUS
.

Nicki Minaj’s butt is perfectly fine, of course. She seems to have a healthy relationship with it; she’s rapped about it from time to time. But given the abundance of other accomplishments and qualities we could be talking about, it’s starting to feel as if Nicki Minaj could solve the mysteries of cold fusion and still be seen largely as (in the words of one popular YouTube parody)
“a stripper who also knows how to rap.”

Similarly, heterosexuality—the grand structure underpinning all these freak-outs—is the “norm.” It’s assumed, until it isn’t. But when a woman is presumed to be heterosexual, it normally takes exposed skin to trigger public freak-outs, invasions of privacy, and media handwringing. When a woman is rumored to be queer—a rumor that tends to arise whenever the press has trouble placing a famous woman with an equally famous man—all it takes is for her to go outside in the company of another woman. Whitney Houston’s close relationship with her childhood friend, Robyn Crawford, was so widely examined
and whispered about that, partly in order to defeat the rumors, Houston rushed into a marriage with Bobby Brown. Which, of course, did wonders for her happiness and reputation.

And, as our understanding of gender and sexuality gets deeper and more complicated, we seem to keep finding new reasons to shout at people.
It was only in 2015, after a good eight or nine years of being shamed for being insufficiently feminine and/or a “bad example” of girlhood, that Miley Cyrus made it clear that she is not a girl. She identifies, roughly, as “gender fluid,” somewhere between and beyond the male-female binary. She’s also not straight;
“I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl,” she’s said. One hopes that the world will be kind. But, considering the innumerable crude jokes and accusations of Ruining Feminism Forever that transgender celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have had to endure, it’s not hard to predict that the next wave of Miley Cyrus Sexual Outrage is just beginning.

The reason for this is what it always has been: A woman who’s “out of control” sexually isn’t just a person making decisions, most of which will never affect you. She’s a defector from the ongoing sexual warfare; her influence stands to tear the whole system down.

•

Anatomy of a Trainwreck

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

She was a concubine. An adultress. A prostitute. She sold herself to
“half the town.” She was a “usurping bitch,” with
“much amiss in the head,” an
“unsexed,” genderless “maniac” with “no sense of guilt,” “whom no decorum checked.” Her work, if allowed to spread, would pervert young women’s minds and destroy their innocence; it was a
“scripture, archly framed, for propagating whores.”

Today, Mary Wollstonecraft is so respectable that she’s actually not intrinsically interesting. She’s an eighteenth-century feminist, well-entrenched in the canon, whose
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
is a staple in any Women’s Studies student’s list of Books You Should Probably Get Around To, I Mean, Not Now, But Eventually. Her points have been so widely accepted that they neither shock nor enlighten: education for women? Sure! Women voting? Why the heck not? Letting ladies be doctors? Yes, yes, very good. Let’s move on to the hard stuff.

So you wouldn’t guess that for most of the time Wollstonecraft has been a part of the canon, she was known primarily
for her scandalous sex life. Nor would you know that while she may have written the first book of Western feminist theory, she was also the trainwreck that functionally derailed the feminist movement for one hundred years.

In her lifetime—a brief one; she was born in 1759, and died in 1797—Wollstonecraft was respected. She was connected with the writers and theorists of the British far-left wing; when people thought of her, they thought of French revolutionaries and pro-democracy radicals like Thomas Paine. Granted, “armed revolution against the monarchy” was not exactly a mainstream position. But it did have quite a lot of traction, particularly in France and the newly established United States, and Wollstonecraft enjoyed a surprising amount of legitimacy as a result.

Vindication
was well situated in a debate people were already having over the concept of “natural rights,” which kept it from seeming foolish, and made it one of those books that people felt obliged to know, if only so that they could argue about it. John and Abigail Adams read her work carefully. Aaron Burr (himself not the most well-liked guy in history) had a portrait of Wollstonecraft over his mantel, and educated his daughter according to Wollstonecraft’s theories. The conservative
Anti-Jacobin Review
, in one of its many takedowns, quipped,
“Rights of Woman
, which the superficial fancied to be profound, and the profound knew to be superficial”—but even they were forced to admit that people were listening.

And then she died. Quickly, unexpectedly, and early, at the age of thirty-eight. She had the great misfortune to have, at that time, an adoring husband, the philosopher William Godwin, who was determined that her genius should be remembered. He arranged for the publication of all her remaining work (including, fatally, her letters), and took the eight weeks immediately after her death to write a biography,
Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. To this day, it’s hard to say why Godwin did what he did: It could have been political conviction, or the hazy judgment of fresh grief, or simply the inability to understand that anyone might dislike the woman he’d loved. But for whatever reason, in his biography, William Godwin set out to expose every damaging secret Wollstonecraft ever had. Most crucially, he exposed the importance of two names: Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay.

Fuseli was the lesser offense. He was a self-consciously risqué painter, with whom Wollstonecraft had gotten involved just as he was getting married to one of his models. This culminated in a spectacularly awkward episode in which Wollstonecraft arrived at Fuseli’s doorstep, asked his horrified wife for permission to move in, and was thrown out on her face. In 1798, this story alone would have been enough to destroy a woman’s reputation. But, as it turns out, it was just an opener for the main event, featuring the American writer, father of Wollstonecraft’s first child, and All-Time Great Historical Douchebucket, Gilbert Imlay.

Wollstonecraft and Imlay lived together in France, where she had gone to cover the Revolution. This was at the height of the Reign of Terror, when saying the wrong word in the street could result in execution; England had declared war on France. So, to avoid Wollstonecraft’s being taken for a British spy, they claimed to be married. The idea, though, was to be
better
than married: Like many radicals of the day, they believed in a higher bond, something outside of the patriarchal arrangements, which could be held together by love rather than legal consequences. Or at least, they believed it for a time. Then, Wollstonecraft gave birth to their daughter, Fanny. At this point,
she
believed in a higher bond, and
he
believed he had to go out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes—you know, not far out, just
out
, preferably across a national border or an ocean or two. Be back soon! Love you, honey! Bye!

It would have been cruel to simply disappear, but what Imlay did was crueler: For months, Wollstonecraft wrote to him, begging him to return, only to be put off each time with promises that he’d rejoin her as soon as his “business prospects” allowed. She believed him for longer than sense would seem to permit. But then, there was very little that made sense about her situation. She was a woman with a newborn, living in a war zone, and the person she most trusted kept telling her that the truth she could almost certainly perceive—she was alone, she was unprotected, Fanny had no father—was a delusion brought on by her own overheated
emotions. Unmoored and gaslit, her tone became steadily darker. She began to mention death more often. She wrote that she could not sleep. That she wondered if she were already dying.
“I wish one moment that I had never heard of the cruelties that have been practised here, and the next envy the mothers who have been killed with their children,” she wrote. “You will think me mad: I would I were so, that I could forget my misery—so that my head or heart would be still.”

Finally, in April of 1795, Wollstonecraft arrived in London and discovered what had kept Imlay: While she’d been fearing death, raising their baby and begging for his return, he had been living comfortably in London with another woman. Strung-out, overwhelmed, and at the end of her tolerance, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide with a laudanum overdose.

Imlay, to give him credit, personally rescued her from the attempt. Imlay, to give him less credit, somehow convinced her to hide herself
again
, assuring her of her importance and then sending her away to Scandinavia. She went, wrote a book about it—one of her more well-received works, in fact—and returned to find Imlay still with his new partner. She tried to drown herself in the Thames. This time, she told Imlay not to save her: “Nothing but my extreme stupidity could have rendered me blind so long,” she wrote to him. “Yet, whilst you assured me that you had no attachment, I thought we might still have lived together … 
Your treatment has thrown my mind into a state of chaos; yet I am serene. I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence.”

But, once again, she survived. And, in time, she got down to the business of surviving; she cared for Fanny, she returned to work, she found a way to be alone. “I flinch not from the duties which tie me to life,” she was able to write to Imlay, in late 1795. And though the angry letters about the deterioration of their relationship and the fate of their child continued until about 1796, she was happy to report that when she saw him in the street, she could say hello without experiencing any strong feelings whatsoever.

By that time, of course, much of her focus was on her old friend, William Godwin. As she recovered, the friendship had quickly turned romantic, and sexual (another fact Godwin was all too eager to share with the world), and in 1797, when Wollstonecraft once again found herself pregnant, they bit the bullet, overcame the years in which both of them had publicly fulminated against marriage as an institution, and officially got married.

William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had only been married for six months when she died from complications of childbirth. His state of mind is probably reflected in the name of their daughter: Simply “Mary Wollstonecraft.” (Later to be known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and even later, of course, as Mary Shelley.) He claimed that he
had fallen in love with her through her writing. He had just committed to spend the rest of his life with her. And then, almost overnight, she was gone. In the midst of his grief, Godwin did something that he believed would keep Mary’s name alive.

Godwin published the old suicide note. He published Wollstonecraft’s tender recollections of sex. He published the bitter breakup letters in which Wollstonecraft told Imlay that he was a sex-crazed, loveless asshole who would turn into a sad old man. All of it, everything: It was out there. And it was attached to a woman who had argued, of all things, that emancipating women would make them
more virtuous
.

So, that was the tragedy. And here were the reviews:

William hath penn’d a waggon-load of stuff

And Mary’s life at last he needs must write
,

Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough
,

Till fairly printed off in black and white
.

With wondrous glee and pride this simple wight

Her brothel feats of wantonness set down
.

Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight

How oft she cuckolded the silly clown

And lent, O lovely piece! Herself to half the town
.

That was the
Anti-Jacobin
(they’re the folks responsible for the “scripture” line, along with timeless zingers such as “God
help poor silly men from such usurping bitches.”) There was also this, from Richard Polwhele, concerned with the damage wrought by “unsex’d females” like “WOLLSTONECRAFT, whom no decorum checks”:

Come, from those livid limbs withdraw your gaze
,

Those limbs which Virtue views in mute amaze;

Nor deem, that Genius lends a veil, to hide

The dire apostate, the fell suicide
.

And this, from Robert Browning, who took it upon himself to write a poem in the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft herself, and whose “Mary Wollstonecraft” is, essentially, a blithering idiot with a stalker’s crush (she has “more than a will—what seems a power / to pounce on my prey”) who pretends to be smart in the vain hope of getting a boy to notice her: