Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (5 page)

Much amiss in the head, Dear
,

I toil at a language, tax my brain

Attempting to draw—the scratches here!

I play, play, practise and all in vain:

But for you—if my triumph brought you pride
,

I would grapple with Greek Plays till I died
[.]

It’s not quite “Stupid Spoiled Whore,” but it’s close. (The main difference, I would argue, is that it leaves out the
“Spoiled” bit.) Wollstonecraft’s promiscuity and craziness ballooned outward from the facts, becoming monstrous. The
Anti-Jacobin
implied that we’d only heard about two instances of Wollstonecraft having premarital sex because Godwin was intentionally leaving out hundreds of others:
“The biographer does not mention many of her amours. Indeed it is unnecessary; two or three instances of action often decide a character as well as a thousand.”

The dates on these things are particularly illuminating. The
Memoirs
and the letters were released in 1798, shortly after Wollstonecraft’s death. Polwhele wrote his immortal verse in 1798, too, and the
Anti-Jacobin
was still cackling about Wollstonecraft’s “whoredom” in 1801. But Browning’s thoughts on Wollstonecraft’s desperation and stupidity went out in 1883—eighty-five years after the scandal first hit. Godwin’s
Memoir
didn’t affect Wollstonecraft’s reputation, it
was
her reputation, more or less until the dawn of the twentieth century.

As Wollstonecraft went, so went her cause. When
Vindication
was first published, it seemed that women’s rights would be naturally folded into the discussion of human rights, part and parcel of the increasing democratization of culture. But after the
Memoirs
, they dropped out of view: Even her former employer, the
Analytical Review
, was forced to conclude that some people “will be apt to say, that the experience of
Mrs. G is the best refutation of her theory.” Another magazine was more to the point:
“Her works will be read with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion.”

And bury her they did. The progressives who used to read her, such as John Stuart Mill, increasingly either avoided the topic of feminism or carefully eliminated all mention of Wollstonecraft when framing it. Novelists writing for lady audiences filled their plots with misguided, sex-crazed feminists who threw themselves at men—or off cliffs. The prediction that her work would be read with particular revulsion by “females” was correct; it was women, in fact, who increasingly drove the shaming of Wollstonecraft, in an effort to avoid being associated with her disgrace. In 1885, socialist Karl Pearson proposed naming his activist group after her. It was the women in the group who threatened to resign. Even if you believed in the brotherhood and equality of all mankind, you didn’t want to march into battle calling yourselves the Crazy Slut Fan Club.

The only way for a woman to engage in feminism at all, it turned out, was to actively participate in the shaming: Harriet Martineau, one of the few to carry the torch, declared that “Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace,
and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied.” Not only were
real
feminists entirely unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, allowing women like her into the movement set it back:
“[Their] advocacy of Woman’s cause becomes mere detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness, unless they have fortitude enough […] to get their own troubles under their feet, and leave them out of the account in stating the state of their sex.”

A whore, a madwoman, an idiot, a joke, and most of all, responsible for setting women’s rights back. It didn’t matter that she’d started the conversation about their rights in the first place. Feminism was for women who behaved correctly and had their shit together. As for Mary: Mary was over. She was wrecked.

•

The leap from Paris Hilton to Mary Wollstonecraft may seem like a long one. But in practice, it’s hardly even a bunny hop. The pattern of forcible exposure and public shaming that governs female sexuality is very old, and has changed very, very little. We simply find new personalities and new technologies with which to recreate the same drama.

In the summer of 2014, Eron Gjoni published “thezoepost,” a 9,000-word blog post. It was perhaps the world’s most exhaustive and lamentable effort on the part of an ex-boyfriend to prove that his girlfriend—well-reviewed
feminist game developer Zoe Quinn—was a bad person. It was also, if you watched closely, an eerie play-by-play reenactment of the furor surrounding Wollstonecraft and the
Memoirs
.

“This post exists to warn you to be cautious of Zoe,” Gjoni began.
“It is here to paint a portrait of her actual personality.”

That “actual personality,” in Gjoni’s view, was entirely comprised of the fact that, during their five-month relationship and/or the three months they’d been broken up, Quinn had slept with other people. Gjoni knew the language of left-wing and feminist outrage well enough to mimic it effectively (“I
very
much align with SJ [social justice],” he assured
Vice
) by claiming that his post was “helping a very large number of abuse survivors” and taking care to “apologize to those […] who have been triggered.”

Yet despite the highflown rhetoric, Gjoni’s definition of “abuse” was highly unorthodox—specifically: It failed to include his own behavior. Gjoni posted chatlogs in which he interrogated and browbeat Quinn into messy, borderline-suicidal breakdowns by calling her a liar and telling her that she was exactly like her violent mother and ex-husband. He counted as one of her sins the fact that she’d refused to let him search her private message archives for the word “love.” At one point, he even started calling hotels for “evidence” that she’d been there with other men.

About those hotel calls: Those, actually, were not in
Gjoni’s original post. He wrote about them on
4Chan
, one of the most powerful and virulent sources of online harassment for women, where Gjoni went to rally support for himself. He also posted the entire contents of “thezoepost” to
Something Awful
and
Penny Arcade
; Quinn alleged, when she filed her restraining order, that Gjoni knew them to be primary sources of previous harassment.

Still: He published it. He published the Facebook message in which she wrote “I should kill myself.” He published the fact that one of her partners had been married. He published her pleading with him not to tell that man’s wife to “go public” with the affair. In 2014, as in 1798, it was enough to burn a woman down to the ground.

Where Godwin’s disclosures were motivated by foolish love, Gjoni’s came from knowing and calculated hate. (
He would casually admit on Twitter that he calculated the odds of Quinn being harassed at 80 percent when he published.) But both had the advantage of cultural momentum: The communities Gjoni courted were already powerfully angry at “SJWs” (“Social Justice Warriors,” or, generally, leftist women) and feminists who criticized their beloved videogames. They leapt at the chance to take their anger out on one of these women, under the premise that she’d been immoral. These men quickly proceeded from crowing about Gjoni’s post, to concluding that Quinn’s career was entirely due to sexual favors, to (of course) leaking nude photos she’d taken and/or posting her address online, to,
finally, theorizing the existence of a vast feminist conspiracy to destroy video games as we know them.

Gjoni’s gesture was vile, but it was also silly: It was overwrought interpersonal drama from a small subculture (independent video game developers) that the mainstream rarely thought about, let alone tracked. But, as with Wollstonecraft’s disgrace, the chance to publish something embarrassing about a feminist woman, and therefore to discredit feminism itself, was an opportunity that got right-wing types salivating. One of the primary exponents of GamerGate, as the phenomenon came to be known, was Milo Yiannopolous, a “journalist” ensconced in the far-right hive mind of Breitbart.com, who published dispatches from the movement with titles like “Feminist Bullies Are Tearing the Gaming Industry Apart,” eagerly repeating apocryphal charges that Quinn
“cheated on her boyfriend for calculated professional advancement” with men who “know that they will be rewarded with sexual favours for promoting substandard work by some female developers.”

And so Gjoni’s Gjrudge Match leapt past the bounds of the subculture, into the deep waters of general far-right sexual outrage. Quinn began to receive a torrent of rape and death threats:
“Next time she shows up at a conference we … give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded
to fear us,” ran one threat, quoted in
The New Yorker
. Other long-standing female targets of the “gamer” community, including Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu, began to receive credible death threats and cancel their public appearances. If a publication criticized “GamerGate,” its advertising sponsors soon received waves of threats and harassment that sometimes caused them to withdraw support from the publication. And even this wasn’t the worst manifestation of the backlash: Several of GamerGate’s enemies, including web developer Israel Galvez, strayed GamerGater Grace Lynn, and critic Randi Harper, were subject to “SWATing,” a uniquely horrific tactic in which harassers reported false incidents to the police and gave their victims’ address as the source, thereby causing armed SWAT teams to show up at the target’s door. Developer Caroline Sinders, another target, was not SWATed herself—but SWAT teams were sent to threaten her mother.

It would be tempting to conclude that society is moving away from the hysteria and unprocessed, raw sexism that defined the upskirt-crazed, sex-tape-centric turn of the century: When dozens of female celebrities had their private nude photos leaked in 2014, the response was largely angry and concerned for the women in question, rather than gleeful, with sites like
Jezebel
(a
Gawker
property) and
Salon
joining with victims like Jennifer Lawrence in calling it “a sex
crime.” Twenty-three U.S. states have laws against revenge porn—the non-consensual leaking of sexual tapes or photos—and Google will now remove it from search results at the victims’ request. As my colleague Amanda Hess wrote, declaring the death of the celebrity sex tape,
“the Internet masses [have] found a new vice, outrage, to replace our voyeurism.”

Not so fast. For one thing, outrage and voyeurism have never been distinct vices. The trainwreck lies straight in the center of the Venn diagram where the two overlap, converting hatred, anger, and scorn into an almost hypnotic fascination with the subject, an inability to look away from her, and an increasing need to see her exposed.

In fact, sex scandals are marvelous for their ability to turn the realities of prurience into the language of highflown morality or pseudo-progressive politics. Watching Hilton’s video, as Hess herself writes, was framed as a form of “class warfare,” a way to “knock the princess down a peg.” Making a TV episode that depicted the victim of a sex crime as constantly gagging on semen was more acceptable if you first took the trouble to call her “spoiled.”

Similarly, the cruelest commentary aimed at trainwrecks often takes on a veil of pro-woman, pro-girl righteousness. The revulsion at Cyrus’s real or (mostly) perceived sexuality was consistently framed in terms of high-toned objection to rape culture; Cyrus was accused of either “molesting” male pop stars or of giving actual child molesters ideas. The
Daily
Mail
can justify calling Rihanna a
“whore” in a headline by claiming that her videos’ “crudity and dancing, combined with money-focused lyrics, are telling Rihanna’s fans—many of them still children—that it is good for women and girls to sell their body.” One might even call them a scripture for propagating whores.

It’s not all trumped-up dudgeon, either. As with Wollstonecraft’s exile, even genuinely feminist women can participate in the cycle. Consider feminist Elinor Burkett, taking to the pages of
The New York Times
to kick Caitlyn Jenner out of cisgender feminism’s lunch table, citing Jenner’s
“idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular ‘girls’ nights’ of banter about hair and makeup.” It ostensibly meant to reclaim feminist purity from mainstream beauty standards, but it sure did sound like she was calling Jenner a slut.

At times, leftist sexual critique and conservative prudery can be nearly identical. When Milo Yiannopolous mocked Beyoncé’s self-identification as a feminist in the UK
Independent
, declaring that
“sexual titillation for men [is] … perhaps the least effective route to female empowerment imaginable” and calling Beyoncé “what men demand of her, less than the sum of her body parts,” it was hard to tell him apart from the feminist
Ms
. readers who were offended by the magazine’s Beyoncé endorsement, and who swarmed its Facebook page to complain about her
“wearing
these stripper outfits onstage while dancing like a stripper all for men.”

The nasty but unavoidable truth is that political outrage and the good old-fashioned desire to punish “bad” women are not disconnected. The field for one has been fertilized (or, if you prefer, salted) by the other. Complex, deep, and necessary critiques—like the feminist critique of mainstream beauty standards, in Jenner’s or Beyoncé’s case, or the critique of class privilege, in Hilton’s case, or the antiracist critique of Cyrus’s appropriation of black aesthetics and the industry’s simultaneous dismissal of black artists (Nicki Minaj wound up having to make a few)—are appropriated and imitated by the mainstream to rationalize our culture’s underlying pattern of demolishing sexually unruly women. And even socially conscious women (myself very much included, I must admit) can easily fall into age-old and socially encouraged habits of punishing sinners, unaware of which patterns have taken hold until it’s too late. Exposure and punishment, sexual transgression and murderous rage: The cycle holds, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. We keep women’s bodies controlled, and women themselves in fear, with the public immolation of any sexual person who is or seems feminine, keeping even “private” women inhibited by reminding them of the catastrophe that will ensue if they live out their desires too freely.