My massively desturated college senior portrait
I was just thinking, on the topic of having been told (forty years later, and apologetically, but nonetheless told) that when I was ostensibly at the height of my attractiveness (at age 21, young, slender, absolutely fending off the college men who came to parties), that frat boys in a car on their way from Mount Holyoke back to Princeton were making fun of me for being ugly.
I am pretty sure who led that mockery in that car: it was an American Psycho type of finance bro-in-training. I hung out with that crew on a number of occasions one or two years after that, in Manhattan, and he was EXACTLY the type of guy who regarded women as tokens to be collected – the blonder and boobier, the breastier, the better. He was in charge of the agenda under which these frat boys lived, all in an apartment on the Upper East Side. His rules, in other words.
It literally does not matter how beautiful or not beautiful you are. You could be one of the most gorgeous women living or the ugliest. The Cornell men mocked the woman they raped for her looks – as if to convince themselves that she should consider herself privileged to be fucked by them. But also to degrade her. To tell her she wasn’t that much of a thing.
This last couple of days in the Russell Brand trial (and please trust me, it pains me to link to the Daily Heil, but they are the ones covering this trial blow-by-blow; they’ve always hated him because he’s presented himself as a leftie, and now they hate him because he lied about that) have been absolutely awful. This latest testimony was brutal: You have to shower because you don’t smell nice to me. You have to brush your teeth because I don’t like your taste. And then anal rape, bleeding, and then the coldness thereafter. Clean up the mess you’ve made. Whereas, obviously, if you’re a man raping a woman in the ass, the blood and excrement and semen is your own damn mess.
It’s about degredation and denigration. It’s about ensuring that, as a woman, you know that you can be ground under the heel of a man’s boot at any opportunity. It’s about power and control.
And yes, and yes, I’m bringing up Meghan Markle/Sussex again. Because she has been in this position with regard to the media and it’s fucking disgusting. The news came out yesterday that her father is under investigation for possession and consumption of child pornography. And she was alerted to this in 2018, but the allegations were unproven and she couldn’t say anything; according to her statement, authorities were investigating, and why would any sane person jeopardize that kind of investigation? Especially if it’s your father?
The media is now doing a lot of mea culpa, just as they did after Diana died. “Were we too quick to judge?” It’s a game the media plays – torment a woman to death or near death, and then do the breast-beating and hair-shirt and self-recrimination.
THE LIES.
“You’re not pretty enough.” “You don’t smell nice enough.” “You’re not remotely acceptable to our kind.” “There must be something wrong with you.” “You always lie.” And all along, women have been abused, raped, beaten, denigrated, gaslit, and then tarred and feathered and accused of witchcraft and hanged for merely telling the truth about what happens to them.
There’s a reason this is all happening now. #MeToo came too close for comfort. Virginia Giuffre came too close for comfort. Amber Heard came too close for comfort. Hillary Clinton came too close for comfort. And Meghan Sussex merely scratched the surface of what she’d been through in interviews and the world came for her. There were whole institutions behind this. There are whole institutions who are massively, massively invested in demonizing intelligent, querying women. Women who peer too closely at the massive apparatus set up to protect men.
Rape is one of the tools they use. Humiliation – how many times have I been told to clean up a mess that was never my responsibility? Years ago – not long after that Princeton conversation happened – when I was working a summer job in Boston, I was raped. A man was determined to possess me, and he kept me in his apartment till after dark (not by gunpoint, but by gaslighting and persuasion; psychological coercion, if you will). This was in Jamaica Plain – in 1987 a dicey neighborhood, so I was taking my chances if I managed to get out of his apartment and run out to the street to find the T station. It was a classic case of the devil you know versus come what may. I don’t think choosing the devil was necessarily voluntary; it was a question of overall safety. And he successfully humiliated me until dawn. And I had to wash the dishes before I left.
Mockery, on the male side, is another method of keeping everyone in line. Riding back to Princeton after a night at Mount Holyoke, it’s extremely important to ensure that none of your boys are prioritizing a possibly romantic relationship with a friend over the need for male bonding – in fact, it’s important to ensure that the romance is never, ever even explored. The brotherhood must be preserved, even if it means a strong friendship is lost and the friend is mocked. And that’s how men keep one another toeing the line.
In this kind of environment, if a woman pokes her head above the parapet in any sort of remotely competent way, it’s a guarantee that the guillotine will come for her, in the form of relentlessly interrogating her past, making shit up, hiring bots and trolls, and trying to demolish whatever tatters of reputation she might have left. It is a campaign, there is a playbook, and there are results. And if a man tries to defend her, he is discredited as well.
Again, you could be beautiful, or you could be ugly. Or whatever that means. Looks are subjective. But this kind of denigration and decrediting has gone on forever, since Mary Magdalene was branded a whore by an insecure Pope, who apparently couldn’t stand the fact that she was a woman of independent means.
“Clean up the mess you’ve made” – when you never made the mess, you never caused the mess. “She’s ugly” – when that wasn’t even objectively true, or had any basis in reality. “She’s a liar” – when in fact, what she’s saying turns out to be correct. “She’s a whore” – when it turns out she can support herself and doesn’t have to depend on a man for sustenance.
Which is why I love unbounded celebrations of women’s sexuality. Own it. Get hold of it. Claim it. And make mischief with it.
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