In Praise of Messy Lives (26 page)

Anyway, the angry commenter is a new breed, and the study of them also new: I welcome, of course, any further evidence or information that would help our understanding of this fascinating and mysterious species.

One bright day a book came across my desk with a letter from its editor saying that the writer was a “big fan” of my work and would like a blurb. As the writer was from Gawker, it seemed a tiny bit surprising that she would be “a big fan” of my work as Gawker itself is not a big fan of my work, and in fact a quick search turned up an item by this writer called “Katie Roiphe Is Big Immature Baby.” Admittedly I did not find this piece very wounding, but some old-fashioned part of me still found it strange that she would send me her book for a blurb. I thought if I had written “Joan Didion Is Big Immature Baby,” I would probably not send a book to her for a blurb.

But then it occurred to me that perhaps I had misunderstood Gawker. If you are pumping out autopilot schadenfreude all day long, maybe there is nothing personal in it. The rage, the dissociated nastiness, floats through the ether and attaches itself fleetingly to a subject, but really, taking it personally is like being annoyed at the wind for messing up your hair. The attack is so generalized, so mindless, so contentless, why would the writer
think I would attach any specific animus to it, or that it was in any specific way intended for or directed at me?

Here I suppose is my main objection to Gawker: it’s all tone, no content, and the tone itself is monotonously unvaried—namely the sneer. (Of course, fans and devotees of Gawker might argue that I am exaggerating and there is a full, impressive range of tone that goes all the way from smirk to sneer.) What the Gawker ethos (i.e., the sneer) comes down to is this: everyone is a phony, except presumably those writers at Gawker who labor tirelessly to point out this phoniness (think Holden Caulfield gone a little sour, and getting a little old).

Gawker takes the explicit stance of the outsider, specifically the fashionably slothful outsider. They once republished a piece about one of my essays: “I think she wrote the piece because she liked the idea of having a big, long, ‘provocative’ think piece in the NYTBR, one lots of people would argue about. I don’t blame her for that. If I had my shit more together, I’d probably aim for the same brass ring of neediness.” In other words, they murmur to their reader: I am brilliant and talented, but too cool or sublimely untainted by anything as sordid and uninteresting as the ambition to try to do anything.

I imagine on a good day the producers of Gawker feel that they are serving a function: keeping people honest. But the highest form of keeping people honest demands more wit, more precision, more specificity, more sharpness. If you make fun of everyone in the same register, in the same tone, it begins to be a little generic. (“Jesus Christ, Bill, you’re hogging a media platform that could be used to say something, you know, interesting.”) The idea that you could almost plug in anyone to the formula is almost explicitly part of Gawker’s approach (“Frank
Bruni is the new Bill Keller is the new Thomas Friedman! Which is to say, the latest New York Times columnist who can be reliably depended upon to use his priceless media real estate to write utterly vacuous and worn-out tripe.”)

It’s not that one wants one’s gossips to be nice, exactly, but one wants them nuanced, substantive. One wants to remember an amazing line, and not have a vague impression of cloudy nastiness. Think of great or colorful or stylish pieces of nastiness that stay in your head. Take, for instance, what other writers made of Mary McCarthy’s smile. Susan Sontag wrote, “Mary McCarthy can do anything with her smile, even smile with it”; Dwight Macdonald said in an interview, “When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open”; Randall Jarrell wrote of his McCarthy character in a novel, “Torn animals were removed at sunset from that smile.” Or think of Virginia Woolf describing a visit with T. S. Eliot “in his four-piece suit.” Or Nabokov observing that some of his students’ ears were “merely ornamental.”

Humor, and even name-calling, are more effective when they’re less generic, less anonymous, less generally applicable to anyone who has done anything. I can speak to this as a target: more effective than “Katie Roiphe Is Big Immature Baby” or even Gawker’s poem in their feature, “Shut Up, Katie Roiphe” is when, in
The New Yorker
, someone once called me a “self proclaimed bad girl and sexual rebel.” It had an admirable understated sting, that “self proclaimed.” It was saying something specific and interpretive about the book it was skewering, about me. I don’t agree with it, of course, but I can see that it was an excellent and effective instance of name-calling.

Of course, one could argue that Gawker is less the real scourge
than the gawkerish habits of mind that have been internalized by certain segments of the Internet-scouring populace. To casually and sloppily take down, to ironize, to sneer, comes very naturally to us, we can do it in our sleep, but to care, to try, to want, are harder. And to admit that you care or are trying or are wanting, well, forget it: those will be impossible.

There is a great moment in
Paradise Lost
where Satan is trying to persuade Eve to eat the apple and he says, “These, these, and many more / causes import your need of this fair fruit.” He turns his groping, his very inarticulateness, into a style. And it is this mindless rattling of the saber, this contentless argument, this portentous throat clearing, that I think Gawker has, to their credit, perfected: these, these, and many more causes are why you should hate Miranda July or Tom Friedman or Stephenie Meyer.

I gather there are a lot of restless assistants and bored office people who thrive on that secret, inarticulate razzing, that blind grasping at reasons to hate, that vivid stirring of resentment, that rage with nowhere to settle—Stephenie Meyer! No, Miranda July! And I don’t think it is a doomed or fruitless venture to draw on the resentment and bitterness and envy adrift in this city. But what would it be like to draw on it with more personality, more artfully? In the end, a computer program could produce Gawker, which is why it doesn’t matter which of their writers pens an item, or if an old one leaves or a new one comes, or if one of them would like to disassociate herself because she would like a blurb for a book.

I suppose what is disheartening or surprising is not that the city’s disappointed artists or thwarted hopeful or anxious young love Gawker, but that there isn’t a better Gawker for them to love.

I write to Alexis because she seems less hemmed in by convention than me. I know that she is less hemmed in by convention than me because in her Facebook profile photo she is standing on a velvet chaise longue in the Chelsea Hotel in a leather corset, fishnet thigh highs, and crazy platforms holding a whip over her head.

But when I meet her in a bar on the Lower East Side, she is in her day clothes, faded jeans, furry Ugg boots, a black sweater, her hands cupped around a mug of mint tea, because she doesn’t drink. I am surprised to see an ordinary blond girl waiting a little uncomfortably at a bar.

On Facebook, where I first experience Alexis, her photographs have an astonishing, almost confusing range. She can be childish, stunning, plain, intense, mannish, elegant, terrifying, magnificent, catlike, innocent, angry, Helmut Newtonish, Greek goddess–like, Marilyn Monroe–like, Venus in furs–like, Valkyrie-like; she can have blond hair, black hair, red hair. Someone who sees her photographs says, “She looks like a whole acting troupe.”

So to start with: I’ve never met anyone so much in command of her own image.

Her first week at the dungeon Alexis was overwhelmed by what she saw. What she saw was subs being whipped and caned, subs with bloody marks and welts, subs walking on all fours on leashes, subs getting slapped in the face and spat on, subs licking the bottoms of women’s shoes, subs in Little Bo-Peep costumes being forced to suck on dildos while the dommes laughed and taunted them, subs being electrocuted with a special device, subs left bound in cages for six or eight hours. She had to remind herself of a line from
The Night of the Iguana:
“Nothing human disgusts me …”

When you start, she says, it feels like being thrown into a deep ocean when you don’t know how to swim. You are coughing up water, choking, feeling like you are drowning.

She thought of her mother saying that you become brave by acting brave. Though she also thought of other things her mother would say about what she was doing.

In the beginning it was very hard to get the voice of her Upper East Side upbringing out of her head, to separate the flock of preppy Spence girls in their green plaid uniforms, the blocks of doorman buildings and tulip-lined avenues, from the amorphous
entity she was beginning to think of as her self. Those first days in the dungeon, wearing latex, whip in her hands, she hears a voice call her trashy, a whore, a loser, but she doesn’t know if it’s her voice.

Then somewhere she crosses over. The world she has moved into is so extreme, so profoundly and flamboyantly unacceptable, that it frees her from the narrow or confining definitions of a successful life she was struggling with; it’s not like failing a little, or not fitting in a little. It’s like going to Mars.

The abstractions here are easier to understand than the specifics. By that I mean that if you watch thirty seconds of one of the fetish films Alexis makes, in which a woman steps in stiletto heels on a man’s genitals, you will not see Alexis’s world as clearly as if you read Susan Sontag’s essay on sadomasochism and fascism: “The color is black, the material is leather, the justification is truth, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.”

When Alexis first told her mother what she was doing, her mother said, “Don’t come in the house.” Alexis’s mother was the closest person in the world to her. Alexis said, “Fine, if that’s what you want.”

In the end her mother let her back into the house. But the break is still there, not visible but there, the break where you find in yourself the ability to walk away from everything you have known; the break is thrilling, liberating, and, as Alexis says, a little like dying.

Alexis describes her mother as a dark, remote, beautiful creature, drinking coffee, smoking long cigarettes, reading her books by dead Russians. “She would probably be the best domme in the world,” Alexis says.

Her father is a Serbian émigré, a scientist, an artist. She mentions
that he went to L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; he showed his paintings in galleries in the seventies; he worked as part of a team of scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital that won a Nobel Prize for their research; he played chess with Bob Dylan.

He was so formal and European when her mother met him that he wouldn’t answer the door without a blazer. But he is not shocked by what Alexis does. As a child during World War II he saw human heads carried around on sticks. Instead, he views what she does as “extreme decadence.”

Her father’s continuing disapproval makes her feel like she is about to run a long and important race and someone is whispering: “You can’t do it, you are going to lose, you’ll never make it.”

Alexis’s grandfather was shot by the Nazis in Belgrade during the war. According to family lore, her chain-smoking grandmother, who is like a tank, marched over to the central office and demanded that they write her a letter explaining why they had killed her husband. Apparently she was so tanklike that the Nazis obliged by writing the letter in German, and Alexis’s father still has it. It’s a very rare and unusual document: the Nazis explaining themselves.

One of the tricky financial issues that Alexis runs into with her fetish film business is that she can’t resist spending money on the aesthetics: she wants a real goat skull for the Viking shoot, or an antique morgue table from the thirties, or the perfect cigarette holder for a film noirish shoot, or an art deco chaise longue, or a side table from a Masonic temple, or a Carolina Herrera vintage Roman gown.

In one of her films a mysterious redhead lies naked on the art deco chaise longue, her bottom half painted gold, her upper body splattered with gold, a delicate 1920s belt around her waist. A man comes to her house for a date, thinking she will be an easy conquest, and she captures him, and puts him in a cage and makes him her sexual slave. The camera pans to his scared face, and then blacks out.

It could be her weakness as a businesswoman that Alexis cares about how her films look more than she cares about cheaply and efficiently delivering the fetish. In fact it seems as if her heart is most unambiguously in painting the sets, in the installation, in the design, in the construction work, in the hunt for costumes and props, in the trips to Home Depot, in the composition, in the look.

Alexis often explains her attraction to sadomasochism in general as aesthetic. “There is something beautiful about the sound of a whip in the dark,” she tells me when she is describing her first days in the dungeon. For her there is also something beautiful in the inversion of regular life: the way the men are on their knees, shirtless, small, bent over, and the women are taller.

I begin to notice that Alexis uses the word “aesthetically” when she wants to distance herself from other things that are happening. On the other hand, she
is
truly interested in the aesthetics
of sadomasochism, and I can’t think of a time when I have seen her when she doesn’t have paint under her fingernails.