Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (6 page)

Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses,
Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of
Vogue
with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they’ve done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women’s bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it’s only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you’ve told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.

2

NEED

The sex in the Wollstonecraft (or GamerGate) scandal was only half the story. The story of a woman happily fucking her way across the world stage would, no doubt, enrage a large portion of the population. But half the point of creating a villainess is being able to witness her downfall. It’s in the breakdown—the messy, pleading letters, the self-loathing chat transcript, the suicide attempt, the broken relationship, the vision of a woman being punished with total emotional collapse—that the appeal of the trainwreck narrative really lies.

The big sales pitch for ideals of feminine purity, after all, is that they make women happy. If a woman keeps it together and plays by the rules, she supposedly gains safety, approval, love, and the glowing sense of well-being that only comes from not being chased down the street by people who think she’s an unholy bitch. If a woman strays from the path, however, she pays for it. And not just because we
make her. Her lack of virtue makes her unlovable and corrodes her from within.

The truthfulness of this is, well—what’s the most polite way to say this?—horseshit. There are plenty of well-behaved women living lives of quiet desperation, just as there are no doubt plenty of reckless women having the time of their lives. But trainwreck narratives seize on the stories that serve the sales pitch: the one where the bad girl gets hurt in the end.

If sex is one of the easiest ways for a woman to invite hatred and mockery in our culture—to be labeled a slut, a deviant, or any one of the many unprintable slurs that we use to mean “transgender woman”—then ceasing to have sex with someone should be a reliable solution to the problem. And yet, it is not so. Breakups, you see, lead to sadness, and also to anger. And, instead of admitting that women feel unpleasant emotions when they’re in unpleasant situations, we have a tendency to label any public display as bitter, vindictive, obsessive, pathetic, desperate or, yes, “crazy.”

If there were any one woman who could elude the media’s hunger for celebrity carnage through sheer force of good behavior, it would be Taylor Swift, the woman
PopEater
once crowned
“The Teen Anti–‘Train Wreck.’ ”

Swift’s persona played perfectly to the ideals of feminine purity and innocence that her unlucky peers had been caught
violating. The press marveled that her lyrics were “wholly unlike the banal sexual come-ons that crowd the music of most of her contemporaries.” She did everything right and took all the right stances: against casual sex (
“Where’s the romance? Where’s the magic in that? I’m just not that girl”), against revealing costumes (
“ ‘I wouldn’t wear tiny amounts of clothing in my real life so I don’t think it’s necessary to wear that stuff in photo-shoots”), against sexting (her phone contained only text messages;
“You wouldn’t find any naked pictures”), against premarital virginity loss (one single, “Fifteen,” bemoaned the fate of a friend who “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind”). She did not drink, did not use drugs, and told interviewers her idea of fun was spending time with her parents. Just to drive the point home, a few of Swift’s songs pitted her against overtly sexual harlots—“Better Than Revenge” concerned “an actress / [who’s] better known for the things that she does on the mattress”—whom Swift demolished with the sheer rhetorical force of her righteousness.

Swift’s image struck some as sanctimonious, or at least, a little too dependent on trashing other women. But it worked: The CEO of her record label, Scott Borchetta, crowed to
The New York Times
that
“[Swift] isn’t a person who’s going to wake up half-naked, drunk in a car somewhere in Hollywood”; Swift herself took to
Seventeen
magazine to “defend her good girl image”:
“Honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!”

Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy. No matter how well behaved Swift was, she couldn’t avoid the non-stop, invasive media coverage that comes with her level of celebrity, and the public indignities that are its more-or-less invariable result. One of the key selling points for Swift, in that “Teen Anti–‘Train wreck’ ” piece, ran as follows: “She’s never really been tabloid fodder—we don’t know who she dates.”

That … well, that changed. By 2014, thanks to a few high-profile relationships and a few breakup songs, most of Swift’s album press was devoted to figuring out which song was about which boyfriend. And most of Swift’s media and/or songwriting strategy was focused on convincing the world that she was not
“some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend.”
TMZ
’s head honcho, Harvey Levin, had released a video calling her a “nutcase” and “BATBLEEP CRAZY.” Levin made his point with his typical subtlety; the video’s title on YouTube was
“Taylor Swift—HAS SHE LOST HER MIND?!?” Still, the allegation resonated even among writers with a healthier relationship to the caps-lock key.
Thought Catalog
ran a piece entitled “Taylor Swift Is a Psycho”;
The Frisky
provided a list of
“Seven Crazy Taylor Swift Girlfriend Moves”;
DListed
responded to the news that her latest single was about a breakup by dubbing her the
“Bad Seed of music” and a “crazy bitch.”

The allegation was always the same: Taylor Swift dated men, and got dumped by men, specifically so that she could write cruel songs about them and harm their careers:
“[Swift’s] career depends on her getting laid and having her heart broken,” wrote Ryan O’Connell in the
Thought Catalog
piece. “That’s what 99 percent of her songs are about. If we don’t know who she’s sleeping with, what else is there to really know about her?”

The coverage, slowly but inevitably, turned inside-out, until she was receiving the exact inverse of the praise she’d gotten for having no visible love life. Even if you had been a Swift skeptic, this was bizarre. She had written and performed breakup ballads since the start of her career; in this, she was much like every musician to step within twenty yards of a microphone. But the same behaviors that had gotten critics and moral guardians gushing in 2009 were, by 2012 at the latest, considered to be symptoms of lunacy and promiscuity. She’d played the game exactly right, and she still hadn’t won it—not completely, not without incurring penalties. Which is what happens, when games are designed so that no one can win.

If Swift has been cast as the scary, angry Psycho Ex—out on a rampage of peppy, blond, Max-Martin-enabled revenge—at least she can thank her lucky stars that she’s not Jennifer Aniston. (
Star Magazine
report on Taylor Swift, 2014:
“Why can’t I keep a guy? I feel like I’m turning into Jennifer Aniston.”) Aniston, once crowned
“America’s Favorite Spinster,” has spent ten years and counting stuck on the pathetic-and-needy end of the spectrum.

Following her 2004 divorce from Brad Pitt, Aniston reportedly
became so desperate for the touch of a man that she drained his very life force: In 2008,
CelebrityFix
warned us that
“the ex-
Friends
star has a habit of being a bit too much in relationships—a characteristic that pissed off her ex-husband Brad Pitt,” and that “she’s back to her ‘clingy’ ways now that things are getting serious with new man John Mayer.” Once the saintly Mayer had managed to extricate himself from Aniston’s iron grip, she reportedly went about looking for new men to throttle: In 2011,
Hollywood Life
reported that
“Jennifer Aniston’s latest romance with actor and writer Justin Theroux may be over almost as quickly as it started,” and that Theroux was “already complaining how Jen is suffocating him.”

Aniston and Theroux got married. But this has done nothing to cure Aniston’s essential dumped-ness, nor slow her descent into madness: “Jennifer Aniston is apparently suffering from PTSD,” warns
Celeb Dirty Laundry
in 2014. “It seems she can’t be reminded that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt exist without some sort of dramatic episode.” The site goes on to relate one such “dramatic” incident, in which Aniston attended a party where the hosts were showing
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
—the movie on which Pitt and Jolie reportedly began dating—and … well, “and” nothing.
CDL
notes that Aniston “ultimately tried to act as if it were no big thing,” no doubt restraining her natural impulse to throw herself through a window.

Of course, these gossip sites are just trying to manufacture
a story that will interest their readers. No one is going to click on a headline that reads
JENNIFER ANISTON WENT TO A PARTY AND NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED
, after all. But it’s still instructive to note who the story is about. No one is writing blog posts about the massive relational trauma of Brad Pitt; it’s women, specifically, that we like to see disintegrating or overreacting.

Plenty of men get rejected by their partners. Plenty of men react in over-the-top, unflattering, or just plain dangerous ways to that rejection.
Eighty-seven percent of stalkers are male, and, in the case of specifically female victims, 62 percent are former husbands or boyfriends.
In 2008, 45 percent of all female murder victims were killed by a partner, as compared to 4.98 percent of male victims. In a terrifyingly high number of cases, women’s ex-boyfriends have turned out to be Eron Gjoni. (Well, okay, there’s only one of him. Still, it should terrify all of us that he’s still walking around, free to ask women out on dates—and that there are other men out there who are just as frightening.) Yet not all the
4Chan
-based temper tantrums and filed restraining orders in the world have been enough to make “crazy ex-boyfriend” a pervasive stereotype.

In fact, men are remarkably free to be publicly sad and lonely. It’s romantic: Think of Lloyd Dobler in
Say Anything
, parked outside of his ex-girlfriend’s house with his boom box hoisted high. We see those men as fragile, sensitive, or wounded. We don’t see them as crazy. Yet the most well-known
movie about a woman who stands outside a former lover’s house and refuses to leave is
Fatal Attraction
, in which the female lead’s stubborn romantic longing quickly escalates into home invasions and/or murdering the household pets.

And this legacy gets handed down to the rest of us civilians, for whom the Crazy Girlfriend—the girl who calls too much, texts too much, cries too hard, gets too angry, takes revenge, holds a torch, won’t let go—is the subject of countless advice columns and listicles. Everyone knows the character, in one way or another. Men are counseled on how to avoid her. Women are counseled on how to avoid being her.

On
xoJane
, for example, you can find the by-now-notorious piece
“I Slept With a Crazy Woman,” in which the male writer details his horrifying encounter with a woman who did such insane things as (a) text him, (b) drink, (c) text him while drinking, and, finally, this: “Crazy D asked if I wanted her to blow me again. It felt like an odd move—too much, too soon and slightly desperate. Who blows someone twice on the first date, I thought.” So add “too sexually generous” to the list of crazy-woman signifiers—although that shouldn’t be too surprising.

The association of emotional instability and sexual openness—“crazy in the head, crazy in the bed,” to quote an old proverb of the Bro-American community—is no accident. The crime of a slut is physical, and the crime of the crazy girlfriend is emotional, but both are crimes of
overabundance; the rules against being “crazy” are more or less the same as the rules against being “slutty,” played out on another, deeper level of control.

The other half of desire is wanting to
be
desired—wanting other people to find you attractive, or fascinating, or likable, so that you can have the amount and kind of sex you really want. In some instances, desire is wanting to be loved. Naturally, if your society is already stomping out female desire on the level of sheer physical impulse, this weightier, more personal need—to be actually important, in the eyes of at least one other person; to be seen as good, and valuable, and worth listening to and respecting—is even more taboo. A woman who wants you to love her is dangerously close to becoming a woman who demands the world’s attention. Whether your girlfriend wants you to stop going to strip clubs or stop passing legislation that bars her access to safe and legal abortion, the scary thing is that she’s started
wanting
things, and you might have to actually do them. The relationship is not one-sided any more. She’s started acting as if she can write the rules.

In an ideal patriarchal world, men pursue relationships, create relationships, and end relationships; women simply sit there and get related to, answering male desire and affection rather than feeling their own. “Crazy” women, again, are women who operate as subjects rather than objects, women who want things rather than passively accept the fact of being wanted; they’re seen as unnatural and grotesque because
their desire exists on its own terms, rather than in answer to male needs.

So the ultimate clarifier is to ask, not what constitutes “crazy,” but how surreal and artificial a perfect rendition of “sane” heterosexual romance would look on these terms, and what a woman would be if she were genuinely only activated by male desire rather than her own: A woman who imitates a man’s affection levels seamlessly, instantly, like a reflection moving in a mirror. She reaches out when he reaches out; leans in when he leans in; declares love when he declares love, wants sex when he wants sex, backs away when he backs away. When he leaves, she disappears.