so naïve, and violence seemed to be everywhere: a bus thundering through my village at night hit a person and kept driving; a drunk man threw a child against a wall. It was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive—that women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that men were suffering because they were expected to perform this dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago, that there was very little I could do.
This resulted in a state of mind that felt delusional and paranoid and underwater, so much so that I’m still not sure what exactly happened, whether I was overestimating or underestimating the danger I was in in any given situation, whether I was imagining the boys at the market who grabbed me as I walked past them on a side road, or the extra twenty minutes I spent in the cab begging the driver to take me home—or if, in the fifteen seconds that elapsed between my host father kissing me and me calling my friend, I had somehow simply imagined, or, worse, somehow instigated, the whole encounter. I was furious when my administrator blew me off, and I buried my anger because I understood that I was being entitled: I could terminate my service anytime I wanted to; I had it so easy compared to every local woman I knew. But even the suggestion that I was making something out of nothing made me wonder if I was, in fact, making something out of nothing. I started wanting things to happen to me, as if to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy, wasn’t hallucinating. Spiky with resentment, I glared at men who looked at me too closely, daring them to give me another event to write down in my little secret file of incidents, daring them to make visible the dawning sense I had of women living in a continual state of violation, daring them to help me realize that I wasn’t making any of this up. I wish I had known—then, in Peace Corps, or in college—that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.
The Cult of the Difficult Woman
Over the past decade, there’s been a sea change that feels both epochal and underrecognized: it is now completely normal for women to understand their lives, and the lives of other women, on feminist terms. Where it was once standard to call any unmanageable woman crazy or abrasive, “crazy” and “abrasive” now scan as sexist dog whistles. Where media outlets used to scrutinize women’s appearances, they still do—but in a feminist way. Slut-shaming went from a popular practice in the early 2000s to a what-not-to-do buzzword in the late 2000s to a hard cultural taboo by 2018. The ride from Britney Spears getting upskirted on tabloid covers to Stormy Daniels as likable political hero has been so bumpy, so dizzying, that it can be easy to miss the profundity of this shift.
The reframing of female difficulty as an asset rather than a liability is the result of decades and decades of feminist thought coming to bear—suddenly, floridly, and very persuasively—in the open ideological space of the internet. It’s been solidified by a sort of narrative engineering conducted both retrospectively and in real time: the rewriting of celebrity lives as feminist texts. Feminist celebrity discourse operates the way most cultural criticism does in the social media era, along lines of “ideological pattern-recognition,” as Hua Hsu put it in The New Yorker. Writers take a celebrity’s life and her public narrative, shine the black light on it, and point to the sexism as it starts to glow.
Celebrities have been the primary teaching tools through which online feminism has identified and resisted the warping force of patriarchal judgment. Britney Spears, initially glossed as a vapid, oversexed ingénue-turned-psycho, now seems perfectly sympathetic: the public required her to be seductive, innocent, flawless, and bankable, and she crumbled under the impossibility of these competing demands. In life, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston were often depicted as strung-out monsters; in death, they are understood to have been geniuses all along. Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a dumb slut, she was an ordinary twentysomething caught in an exploitative affair with the most powerful boss in