about whether Rihanna is a Bad Role Model for Women,” and “the verdict for Rihanna is never favorable.” Valerie Solanas is remembered as a “bogeyman” of the “dirty, angry, fucked-up, thrown-away women of the world,” while violent Norman Mailer is remembered as a genius. (I would guess that plenty of women in my millennial demographic semi-ironically venerate Solanas, and know Mailer mainly as the misogynist who stabbed his wife.) Doyle is motivated, she writes, by “a life spent watching the most beautiful, lucky, wealthy, successful women in the world reduced to deformed idiot hags in the media, and battered back into silence and obscurity through the sheer force of public disdain.”
There is an argument to be made that this is what you have to do to counteract a force as old as patriarchy—that, in order to eradicate it, you have to fully reckon with its power, to verbalize and confront its worst insults and effects. But the result often verges on deliberate cynicism. “The leap from Paris Hilton to Mary Wollstonecraft may seem like a long one,” Doyle writes. “But in practice, it’s hardly even a bunny hop.” She’s referring to the fact that Wollstonecraft’s sex life overshadowed, for some time, her canonical work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and that William Godwin published Wollstonecraft’s salacious letters after her death. It’s possible to draw a bright line between this and Rick Salomon selling a sex tape without Hilton’s permission. But what changed between 1797 and 2004 shouldn’t be underestimated or undercomplicated—nor should what changed between 2004 and 2016. I’d venture that our reality is not actually one in which the most beautiful, lucky, successful women in the world are being turned into “deformed idiot hags.” Women are the drivers and rulers of the celebrity industry; they are rich; they have rights, if not as many as they ought to. The fact that women receive huge amounts of unfair criticism does not negate these facts but informs them, and in very complicated ways. Female celebrities are now venerated for their difficulty—their flaws, their complications, their humanity—with the idea that this will allow us, the ordinary women, to be flawed, and human, and possibly venerated, too.
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I’ve been thinking about this argument since 2016—and specifically, since the week when, within a couple of days of each other, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint and Elena Ferrante was doxed. An online feminist outcry interpreted these two incidents as a single parable. Look at what happens to ambitious women, people wrote. Look how women are punished for daring to live the way they want. This was true, I thought, but in a different way than everyone seemed to be thinking. The problem seemed deeper—rooted in the fact that women have to slog through so many obstacles to become successful that their success is forever refracted through those obstacles. The problem seemed related to the way that the lives of famous women are constantly interpreted as crucial referenda on what we have to overcome to be women at all.
There’s a limit, I think, to the utility of reading celebrity lives like tea leaves. The lives of famous women are determined by exponential leaps in visibility, money, and power, whereas the lives of ordinary women are mostly governed by mundane things: class, education, housing markets, labor practices. Female celebrities do indicate the rules of self-promotion—what’s palatable and marketable to a general public in terms of sexuality and looks and affect and race. In today’s world, this can seem like an essential question. But famous women do not always exist at the bleeding edge of what’s possible. Attention is in many respects constrictive. Female celebrities are dealing with approval and backlash at such high, constant levels that it can be significantly more complicated for them to win the thing we’re all ostensibly after—social permission for women to live the lives they want.
In 2017, Anne Helen Petersen published Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, a book that took the double-edged sword of female difficulty as its thesis. Unruly women have taken on an “outsized importance in the American imagination,” Petersen writes. To be unruly is both profitable and risky; an unruly woman has to toe an ever-moving line of acceptability, but if she can do so, she can accrue enormous cultural cachet.
Petersen’s book focuses on this sort of lauded unruliness—“unruliness that’s made its way into the mainstream.” She writes about, among others, Melissa McCarthy,