The Unmade Bed Read online

  The hollow patriarchy is as much cultural as it is economic or political; it exists in the clothes we wear, in advertising, in slang, in novels and in the movies and in conversation. The rise of equality implies doing away with difference. Feminism is a humanism exactly because it refuses to limit the potential of women and men based on gender. Anything boys can do, girls can do. Anything girls can do, boys can do. And yet every bit of culture, every inflection of voice, no matter how minor, remains gendered. The cut of a suit or the cinch of a belt, the line of a melody or the arms of a sofa or the structure of a sentence or the texture of a brush stroke—anything made by a human being can be described in gendered terms. Culture calls out for the duality, but any attempt to ascribe definite gendered attributes to men or women falls apart like a soggy sandcastle. The rise of equality between men and women should mean a collapse of the concept of manliness and womanliness. It has not. It will not. It leads instead to an order of masculinity and femininity embraced and contained by permanent quotation marks. It leads to straight camp.

  * * *

  I take it as given that the period of popular culture I lived through, or rather through which my youth happened to pass, between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, was the worst period for popular culture of all time. I lived it. I can say it. Television (Dukes of Hazzard, Three’s Company, Matlock) was as stupid and boring as it would ever be. Music was brittle (Depeche Mode), empty (Madonna), self-righteous (U2), or suicidal (Nirvana). The movies became opportunities to decorate cups at Burger King. There are those in my generation—a noncommunal community if one ever existed—who claim to love the material of our shared childhood; all I can say about their bizarre thumb-sucking nostalgia is that they must long for their childhood with all the failure coiled in their high-expecting lives. To be a pop culture critic in any period is to obsess over the quality of one’s own shit. But the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s was real shit. The most notable feature of the period—by no means a redeeming feature—was its flux and heave with absolute weirdness around men and women: weird hypermasculinity (the flexes of bodybuilders with their vermicular veins), weird unmasculinity (the rise of the conquering nerd), weird hyperfemininity (the impossible tits of Dolly Parton) against nascent androgyny (fourteen-year-old catwalk models). It was a mess, a tacky mess of a million absurd poses. Nancy Reagan sitting on the lap of Mr. T dressed as Santa. Arnold Schwarzenegger marrying a Kennedy. Cher riding the guns of the USS Missouri. It was super weird.

  In the middle of all this weirdness I had only one beacon of clarity: Free to Be You and Me, the only cultural artifact of my childhood that addressed gender politics outright. The 1972 album release, which has sold in the vicinity of half a million copies, was followed by a bestselling book in 1974 and a television special that got massive ratings. I can still sing almost every song, recite almost every monologue. Free to Be You and Me has to be one of the most successful pieces of propaganda ever made. I’m not sure I’ve ever been truly close with anyone who wasn’t raised on it. For me it defines prerational gender assumptions. The dialogue between two babies, played by Marlo Thomas and Mel Brooks, made a whole spiel out of shattering gender stereotypes. Alan Alda retelling the story of Atalanta as a woman who makes her own decisions about her future, an explanation of how advertising lies when it portrays smiling moms doing housework, why Dudley wants a doll: these are scenes from my childhood assumptions. Every time I deviate from the explicit political opinions of that album, a minor thrill of taboo violation goes through me. Part of its appeal is that it conjures up the innocence of presexual childhood and a world without the overwhelming consciousness of differentiation and diffusion. It remains my Utopia.

  In my own life Free to Be You and Me was at the center, and the pop culture explosion of extreme gender dualities—Parton, Schwarzenegger—was at the periphery. The reverse was the case for the wider culture: there wrestling was the norm, equality was exotic. The culture that rises with the end of the gender wars is livid with the tension between the two sides: the humanistic rationalism of equality and the monstrosity of elaborated personae, a world in which boys and girls are the same and another world in which boys want to be Jake the Snake and girls want to be Malibu Barbie. A culture that dreams of gender equality also dreams of supermen and living dolls. The feeling of being a man or the feeling of being a woman shimmers on the skin, but the source of its potency is that it roots itself all the way down. It feels like the opposite of a choice. It feels as natural as anything human.

  * * *

  Gender difference is not one difference among others; it is the first to be noticed, the most prevalent, the most enduring. One group of social psychologists found that, of twenty different types of “natural distinctions,” gender was by far the most significant. Sex is the first question asked about a newborn, even before health, and our tendency to make this distinction remains instinctive. It’s been noticed in babies as young as three months. Adults can tell whether a person is a man or a woman from the way they walk in “as little as 2.7 seconds,” according to psychophysical researchers. Insofar as human beings are capable of making distinctions at all, we distinguish between men and women. It is the fundamental mode of differentiation, which means that the way you feel about the differences between men and women doesn’t solely reflect your feelings about men and women; it also reflects your feelings about difference itself.

  Thirty years ago third-wave feminism took Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” as a starting point and began to question how we live gender rather than how we think about it. The legal gains, the economic gains, the intellectual gains had no cultural equivalent. Magazines and television and film commented elaborately on the feminist revolution; they failed almost completely to reflect it. This remains true: the standard forms of masculine and feminine beauty have remained remarkably static. Between Grace Kelly and Gwyneth Paltrow, or indeed between Cary Grant and George Clooney, there is a transfer from black and white to color and little else.

  Until very recently, women’s magazinesI offered the same advice they have since the 1980s: how to look pretty, how to cook well, how to run an organized house, how to give blowjobs. A lot of them now feature “how she does it” columns on career and family. This was a standard bromide of 1950s magazine profiles. Whenever the culture industry tries to be progressive, it’s reliably a hilarious misstep. “We’re going to show ‘real women,’ ‘women with curves,’ ” who turn out to be size 6. Powerful women, on those startling and rare occasions when they appear, are throwbacks—Tina Fey on 30 Rock is an updated version of Mary Tyler Moore—the powerful woman as outlier and misfit. Hollywood is supposedly a slave to the marketplace and left-wing politics. It certainly is excellent at throwing a vast self-congratulatory orgy whenever a minuscule milestone has been passed. But the truth is the culture industry is as hidebound as they come. Between 2009 and 2013 only 4.7 percent of feature films released by the six biggest Hollywood studios were directed by women. Even more incredibly, only one female director in all those films directed two features. That’s a single woman. Of the one hundred top-grossing films of 2013, 1.9 percent of the directors were female. It gets worse. Ninety-eight percent of films in the one hundred top-grossing films have more male than female characters. Of 4,506 speaking parts, 29.2 percent were for women, 28 percent were female leads, and only 16 percent were in films that had gender parity. The hack of Sony emails revealed that the pay gap between male and female Hollywood stars is substantial. Even the biggest stars of the moment—Charlize Theron and Jennifer Lawrence—make millions less than their male counterparts.II Hollywood is far less welcoming to women than the Republican Party is.

  Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth examined this landscape with classic mid-1990s nuance and sophistication and took it all as evidence of conspiracy. “We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement,” Wol
f wrote. “It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.” Not merely a stand-in for oppression, the representation of women was the root of oppression itself. If “images of female beauty” were the new weapons, magazines, television shows, and movies were to be disarmed; pop culture took the place of government and business as the enemy to be overcome, and the way to overcome the forces of representation was by extensive, fulsome, elaborate critique, and occasionally protests outside Miss America pageants or the offices of Seventeen magazine or, in the United Kingdom, Tesco retailers that stacked lad mags.

  The Beauty Myth was a strong polemic in the sense that it had the strength to reduce complex realities to a manageable figment. Its epigraph came from Virginia Woolf: “It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.” An apt metaphor: the way you murder a phantom is by showing the world that it is a phantom. But in this case the phantom continued its haunting. Part of the problem was that The Beauty Myth could not bring itself to be prescriptive. Wolf argued for openness and selfishness, for intellectual consumerism: “Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices.” But what does that mean? Ultimately vacuous bromides about shamelessness and pleasure were placeholders, a means of negotiating future embarrassments: Loretta Lynn singing about the Pill in the frilliest of frilly dresses, and later Nicki Minaj showing off her ass as proof of power. In the absence of new ideals of femininity, the old ones flooded back in. But it was a convenient incoherence: you could work yourself into a lather over something as negligible as a new line of lipstick. You could take Beyoncé singing “Bootylicious” as feminist iconography. You could justify what you liked. You could condemn what you didn’t.

  Choice was the word that tolled like a bell over the morass of this lousy culture and its critics. The economic basis of women’s liberation made no other kind of critique possible. Women have come up through the middle class, and choice has always been the banner under which the middle class marches. Thus the nature of the freedom, the brand of pride: “You have earned the money. You decide what to do with it.” The economics of women’s rise has been inherently individualistic.

  Only tangentially does Wolf acknowledge that the market for the beauty myth is almost entirely female: men do not produce or consume Vogue or Katherine Heigl movies or Martha Stewart Living. Because Wolf ignores, or rather excuses as taught self-hatred, the fact that women have made the beauty myth themselves, the real mystery of the period eludes her: why women who collectively earned vastly more money and achieved remarkably more power and insisted to an unprecedented degree on their full humanity would buy cultural material on how to look pretty, how to cook a good meal, and how to give better blowjobs.

  The feminism of choice is not inherently progressive; it is indifferent to but also transcends the content of women in culture. So long as women choose to do what they do, their choices are beyond judgment. They may choose to have sex with other women. They may choose not to have babies. They may choose to shave their heads. But also: They may choose to attend wet T-shirt contests. They may choose to stay home and cook for their husband. They may choose to wear a burka. Women choosing to do exactly what patriarchy has always told them to do cannot be questioned, their right to self-determination being an absolute value.

  * * *

  Choice feminism has no specific content, but that doesn’t mean it’s static; the old iconography remains but the meaning underlying it has shifted. In the magazines of the 1950s women learned how to cook soufflés; in the magazines of the 2010s too, women learn how to cook soufflés, but the motive of the readers and the writers has changed, and so everything has changed. A screen has been drawn between women and their objectification.

  The act of citation has become the act of power. Models in the pages of Vogue may imitate porn stars without fear of being confused with the real thing because the gesture of citation demonstrates how removed they really are from the status of sexual utensil. Hipsters may dress like Emily Dickinson because the gesture of citation demonstrates how conscious they are of their own sleek modernity. Citation is fashion’s will to power, and it is reflected on every level. For Cosmo magazine how to give a man the best orgasm of his life is the way to empowerment, and for the Gentlewoman it is creating idiosyncratic narratives out of clothing. The process is the same—empowerment through the projection of a chosen femininity—but the level of projection is much more distinct in the latter, and therefore more sophisticated, and therefore more powerful. The clarity and detail of the femininity in the Gentlewoman oozes money.

  The tiny crack between image and identity may be nearly invisible, but it is the whole point of empowered cultural practice. “For the girl, erotic transcendence consists in making herself prey in order to make a catch,” de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex. “She becomes an object; and she grasps herself as object; she is surprised to discover this new aspect of her being; it seems to her that she has been doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with her self, here she is existing outside of her self.” That doubleness, the self-alienation, has gone nowhere, but it has transferred beyond the gaze of men and other women. Clothes are worn for the mirror, for the selfie. A young woman still becomes an object, but she becomes an object for herself. She becomes her own prey. She preys on her own identity. She only baits the clothes with her body.

  Coco Chanel, the inventor of modern fashion, made herself into a luxury product for men. Tavi Gevinson, the creator and editor of Rookie magazine and the future of fashion, makes herself into a luxury product for herself. Chanel made herself fascinating; Gevinson finds the world fascinating. Chanel was a mistress; Gevinson is mistress of herself. Chanel once said, in desperate pride as much as in humiliation, “Those on whom legends are built are their legends.” Chanel was a dark genius, a genius of the type the world shouldn’t need. That is the labyrinthine mess of the self we call glamour. Gevinson has herself. She is building her own legend.

  The insertion of a screen between women and their objectification means that women may choose to play at any femininity they like, so long as it remains clear they are choosing. As a man I envy this fluidity. The cultural wars of feminism have been nasty, but they have given women a vast trunk of costumes to put on, each with its own strength and weakness. Radical lesbian. Wife and mother. Scholar. Prostitute. Quirky and independent urbaniste. CEO. One may be a woman in a hundred different ways at a hundred different moments. Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, an economic assassin, the woman who said of the Greeks during their economic crisis, “They should help themselves collectively by paying their tax,” keeps a caricature of herself in fishnet stockings on the wall of her office. Why shouldn’t she? Nobody believes she is brutalizing the world’s bankers in a feminine way. The intellectual incoherence of third-wave feminism, so far from being weakness, has been a source of strength—an embrace of life’s messiness, a willingness to ride on the surface of things. The ease of movements between the various registers of being is the contemporary form of grace.

  In this mobility and grace men are thirty years behind women, if not fifty, if not a hundred. Feminism has articulated a dizzying variety of positive ways to be a woman.III Men remain obsessed mostly with how not to be a man.

  * * *

  My grandfather wore the watch while he was flattening German cities. He served as a rear gunner in a Lancaster bomber. Alone, in the dark, in silence, in a cold that sometimes dipped to 15 below, he waited behind the infamously weak guns of the Lancaster for German fighters to cruise up behind him into shooting range. The average survival rate for an RAF rear-gunner was four missions. My grandfather flew fifty. (Incidentally he did not receive any extraordinary medals for this service; seventy years ago such actions were not considered worthy of commendation.)

  In the sunny summers in New Brunswick I slept on a cot in a
room whose walls were lined with guns. My grandfather had worked at a Canadian Pacific tin shop, and some of the guns he had built himself. His medals too were in that room, but forgotten, hidden under a collection of board games in the closet, where I would rustle around on rainy days. A treasure eventually emerged from my digging: my grandfather’s war diary. A real-life horror story. A nightmare that was lived. He would pass out from fear and wake up after landing, covered in vomit. He wrote with painful blankness about making friends who died a week later and the loneliness of being a farm boy in London during the Blitz. His main theme was longing for “Bertie,” my grandmother Roberta. No doubt my preoccupation with stories and their power dates from this scene: I am lying in the faint smell of mothballs and rain, restless, perusing the records of a grand passion, a grand agony, while on the ground floor, impossibly, my smiling, slightly walleyed grandfather sits mildly stoned on rum and pineapple juice, watching whatever happens to be on television, and my grandmother tidies the kitchen. I would walk down to them later, and they would rouse into their performances of themselves, while I knew the impossible currents of their subterranean lives and said nothing. I still write my best stuff lying in bed.

  My grandfather’s watch is an antique object of masculinity, a memento of the strong and silent type that the Second World War produced in masses, the men who returned from the war against evil and never spoke about it. My grandfather did his duty and didn’t make a big deal of it. That’s still what we mean when we say “Act like a man.” We don’t mean “Give a performance of manliness”; we mean “Stop performing.” Masculinity has an anti-aesthetic aesthetic at its core. Straight men have lived with this paradox since the Second World War: to perform manliness is to be unmanly. It is a paradox that lives in silence and a peculiar species of sadness and a willful forgetfulness about the biological and emotional realities of men. It lives in self-hatred too and empty arrogance and a host of tortured and corrupt poses.