Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (2 page)

But it escalates from there. All too often, losing your story also means that if you make decisions people don’t like—after a certain point, in this process, every decision you make will be one people don’t like—they feel entitled to hurt you. It means being subject to a hostile, unasked-for, all-consuming intimacy: having other people claim ownership over your body, your sexual history, your medical history, your emotional life, your future. Having them feel entitled to scream slurs at you, or threaten your life, or call your employer until you’re unemployed, if you don’t follow instructions. Nothing is off-limits: After Whitney Houston died,
ABC News
published the information that the coroner had found scars on her chest consistent with breast implants. It had nothing to do with her death—she had drowned, and breast implants have never, to my knowledge, risen up of their own accord and drowned their owner—but the world was, apparently, entitled to that information.

This isn’t “the cost of fame,” some necessary price one pays for being a public figure—or, if it is, it’s only in the sense that everyone is a public figure, because it happens to “civilians,” too—people who post unflattering pictures of themselves, or irritate one too many people with their personal blogs, or say stupid things on Twitter. And it isn’t simply a matter of getting punished for wrongdoing—or, if it is, we should all be worried, because this specific wrongdoing tends to sneak up on people from behind, when they haven’t intentionally or knowingly broken any rules. No one
becomes a musician hoping to be placed on someone’s celebrity death watch list. No one takes her first drink hoping to become an alcoholic. And no one—I am almost entirely certain—has ever had sex assuming that the experience will later be summarized on a popular novelty T-shirt.

And yet, here we are. With the stories we have; with the experience of constantly witnessing somebody else’s wreckage. Once we start to realize that it can happen to anyone, we can begin to ask why it happens at all.

Envy is a powerful force. Traditionally, the trainwreck starts out as the girl who “has everything going for her”: She is famous, after all, because she’s attained some extremely rare level of professional success, and probably some of the wealth and adulation that goes along with it. Her implosion is a way of taking her back down a few notches, to where we live. The girl who “has everything” can have everything taken away.

This isn’t entirely unfair. As long as we live in an unjust society, where the vast majority of us are struggling, and where ridiculously huge rewards are handed out for ridiculously stupid reasons—where pretending to be a sexy doctor on TV comes with more money, more praise, and vastly more publicity than actually going to med school and saving lives—it will always make some kind of sense to resent celebrities. The moralistic, concern-trolling quality of
trainwreck coverage, the “What’s Going to Come of Poor Dear Lindsay” factor, might just come down to our wanting to believe they “deserve” their fame. (As if anyone could possibly deserve such a thing; Leonardo DiCaprio has a private island, for God’s sake. He wouldn’t “deserve” that standard of living if he followed up each and every movie project by saving a busload of kindergarteners from going over a cliff.) We may just want to believe that the people we reward the most are the most deserving of being rewarded; that they got better lives by being better people. Which, in turn, makes our delight in celebrity suffering a form of vigilante justice: We’re meting out what we believe to be just punishment of people enjoying a lifestyle that they haven’t “earned,” punishing flawed people to reaffirm our belief that celebrities must be better than human.

Or perhaps it comes down to a simple need to feel good about ourselves—a need to believe that someone else in this world is doing worse, or just
is
worse, than we are. It’s an ugly little facet of human nature, but it’s unavoidable: We define ourselves by exclusion, by rejecting or shaming others as a means of proving that we don’t share their flaws. You might do it to drug users, or the mentally ill, or Republicans, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t do it. By zeroing in on the messiest and most badly behaved women, and rejecting them, we make a statement about what makes a woman good.

Or it could all come down to the “just world hypothesis”: The social-psychology theory that if we see something
bad happen to another human being, we assume that the person deserved it and start coming up with reasons. On some level, human beings are incapable of accepting that bad things happen for no reason. We have to assume that misfortune proceeds from personal flaw. Any other explanation is just too frightening: Whether you’re getting threatened on Facebook, getting mugged on a street corner, or just getting a piano dropped on you from a great height, we assume you just shouldn’t have posted that picture, lived in that neighborhood, or walked down that street on piano-moving day. If we believed anything else, we’d have to acknowledge that the universe is indifferent; that no benevolent force protects us from being mugged, threatened, or squashed. We’d have to acknowledge that we don’t live in a just world.

So, we may wreck people simply to validate ourselves. We may wreck them because we’re jealous. We may wreck them because we fear the sight of public suffering, or because, well, everyone else hates them, so they must have done something to deserve it. Maybe. But then, there’s my favorite theory: Maybe we wreck people because they’re women.

It’s not that men can’t be wrecked. There are plenty of male celebrities who have become the targets of full-scale, cross-culture hatred. But they usually have to work a lot harder for it: Chris Brown had to beat his girlfriend within
an inch of her life. Justin Bieber and Michael Richards had to get caught dropping n-bombs. Mel Gibson had to terrorize his girlfriend, and also utter every ethnic and sexist slur in the books, on more than one occasion, over a period of years, before we gave him up. Conversely, just try asking people why they “hate” Katherine Heigl, or Kristen Stewart, or Anne Hathaway: She just seems arrogant. She just seems unpleasant. She just seems like she’s trying too hard to be liked.

Men also have more options, in terms of redeeming themselves. It’s easy to say that acts of open violence are the line to draw, but if you can even remember that the rugged-yet-sensitive heartthrob Josh Brolin was arrested on a domestic battery charge in 2004, you’re a rare bird indeed. Bringing up the fact that Norman Mailer stabbed his wife will get you labeled a philistine, in some circles. Steven Tyler once adopted a sixteen-year-old girl in order to have sex with her, and for his crimes, we rewarded him with a judge slot on American Idol.

And, while I could try to find examples of famous men who have redeemed their reputations from wild behavior, promiscuous sex, and irresponsible drug use, research reveals that the answer is, roughly, all of them. In fact “redemption” seems like the wrong word for what happens to some of these guys: Keith Richards’s drug career has included accidentally snorting strychnine, setting himself on fire on multiple occasions because he was so wasted he passed out while smoking a cigarette, and taking to the
media in 2013 to defend heroin as essentially useful to the creative process. Hunter S. Thompson was best known for getting wasted on the job and living in a “fortified compound” stocked with dynamite and heavy firearms. Henry Miller wrote a modernist epic about how much fun it was to have sex with prostitutes. Members of Led Zeppelin once encouraged a woman to put a dead fish up her vagina. For all this, these guys became heroes: hard-living, boundary-pushing rock-and-roll badasses. Courtney Love and Lindsay Lohan, though? Those bitches are crazy.

So, as the trainwrecks keep floating up through our social-media timelines and gossip-blog feeds, as the social media pile-ons and hate-reads keep on coming, as this year’s girl continually arises, scandalizes, flames out, and is replaced, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we have a vast and insatiable appetite for specifically female ruin and suffering. And if you, like me, have a tendency toward more-than-mild paranoia involving The Patriarchy, it’s hard to avoid the fact that this appetite has reached unprecedented levels right at the moment when women are making unprecedented gains in terms of access, visibility, and general empowerment to enter public life. All those
MILEY CYRUS HOSPITALIZED: DID DEATH OF DOG TRIGGER TAILSPIN?
headlines were running right next to predictions of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy in 2016.

As long as there has
been
a public sphere, there have been women attempting to
enter
the public sphere, and usually being punished for it. The one thing that all trainwrecks have in common is the temerity to be heard. Where we now exhibit “celebrity meltdowns” on
TMZ
, we used to exhibit “hysterics” on public viewing days at mental institutions. Where we now have sex bloggers living in fear that their real identities will be revealed behind their pseudonyms, we used to have women posing as men or assuming anonymity to publish groundbreaking novels. Where we now have conservative blogs ranting about Clinton’s lesbian affairs and/or murder sprees, we used to have poems run in conservative newspapers about how Mary Wollstonecraft—yes, her, the
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
lady—was a suicidal hooker with a shame-baby.

Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles. And this, I would argue, is a none-too-veiled attempt to push women back into the places we’ve designated as “theirs.” If you stay at home, get married right away, never get a job, never display any unwelcome emotions, and stay away from the public eye to such an extent that you actually never make any sort of impression whatsoever, you can’t become a trainwreck. You become a miserable, sheltered woman living in a prison of her own making, but hey: At least no one’s going to disapprove.

But, if you don’t plan on doing that, the trainwreck—in
all her varied and historical iterations—is actually a useful figure, in more than one way. She’s not just the worst-case scenario. She’s not just the cost of showing the world the wrong things, or of being Visible While Female. She’s a signpost pointing to what “wrong” is, which boundaries we’re currently placing on femininity, which stories we’ll allow women to have. She’s the girl who breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she’s actually the best indication of which game we’re playing, and what the rules are. And, in her consistent violation of the accepted social codes—her ability to shock, to horrify, to upset, to draw down loud and powerful condemnation—she is a tremendously powerful force of cultural subversion. At the end of the day, despite all our praise of strong women and selfless activists and lean-inners, the trainwreck might turn out to be the most potent and perennial feminist icon of them all.

Consider this book, then, a feminist anatomy of the trainwreck. It’s an effort to figure out who she is: what her crimes are, why she’s making us so angry; what, in general, she hath done to offend us. These are questions of more immediate and personal relevance than you might think: When women look hard enough at the trainwreck, we almost invariably end up looking at ourselves.

So this is an attempt to figure out what we’re looking at, and why we keep staring into this particular warped mirror. It is also an attempt to reclaim the trainwreck, not only as the voice for every part of womanhood we’d prefer to
keep quiet, but also as a girl who routinely colors outside the lines of her sexist society. It is, above all, an attempt to use the figure of the trainwreck, and our fascination with her, for good: to take all that earth-shattering and civilization-angering power of hers and channel it toward something that might make the world a more just place for the women who live in it.

Part I

THE TRAINWRECK: HER CRIMES

1

SEX

There’s no neat and simple taxonomy of the trainwreck. She doesn’t come in different flavors, like a bag of assorted lollipops; we don’t get a Trainwreck (var. Whore), Trainwreck (var. Drunk) or Trainwreck (var. General Offensiveness). Instead, her sins tend to be messy and boundaryless, to bleed together and become indistinguishable from one another. Once she’s found guilty, she’s always guilty of more than one thing. But if you want to figure out how and why these women piss off the American public, well, there is one big, obvious starting point.

So let’s start here: Who’s the first person you imagine when you hear the phrase “celebrity trainwreck”? Summon her in your mind, whoever she is for you: “Wild,” out of control, doomed. The girl gone off the rails. Put a name to her, and a face, and hold her in your mind’s eye for a minute.

Okay. Second question: Have you seen her naked?

In my many years of covering gender issues, I have come to perhaps one firm and unshakable conclusion: We, as a society, will never run out of opinions on twenty-something girls’ genitalia.

Throughout the 2000s, Britney Spears’s vagina was covered by the media as if it were suspected of holding WMDs. It was blogged about, talked about, photographed, and discussed and debated on talk radio and TV: You really couldn’t get away from the damn thing. Especially not if you were Britney Spears. The vagina’s doings (and, peripherally, those of the woman who owned the vagina, whose sole and exclusive rights to disclose information about it had long since been stolen) were so widely assumed to be a matter of public interest that, when paparazzi caught Spears giving oral sex to her soon-to-be-husband Kevin Federline on a hotel balcony, outlets like
Gawker
and
Salon
linked to the resulting photos.

In
Gawker
’s case, those photos were captioned with pure contempt:
“Can we
please
have one fucking day away from Britney, Kevin, and paparazzi photographs that absolutely cannot be allowed to pass without comment?” The writer, charmingly, went on to speculate that the blow job had been arranged by Federline “taping some Cheetos to [his] penis.”