should be.
In other words, just like the difficult women, the lifestyle types fall short of an ideal. They, too, are admired and hated simultaneously. Feminist culture has, in many cases, drawn a line to exclude or disparage the Mormon mommy bloggers, the sponsored-content factories, the “basics,” the Gwyneths and Blakes. Sometimes—often—these women are openly hated: sprawling online forums like Get Off My Internets host large communities of women who love tearing into every last detail of an Instagram celebrity’s life. There’s an indicative line in Trainwreck, where Doyle writes, “Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own failings and flaws to be loved. The question, then, is choosing between the two.” But why would these ever be our only options? The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.
In 2015, Alana Massey wrote a popular essay for BuzzFeed titled “Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths.” It began with an anecdote from her twenty-ninth birthday, when a guy she was seeing made the unnerving disclosure that his ideal celebrity sex partner would be Gwyneth Paltrow. “And in that moment,” Massey writes, “every thought or daydream I ever had about our potential future filled with broad-smiled children, adopted cats, and phenomenal sex evaporated. Because there is no future with a Gwyneth man when you’re a Winona woman, particularly a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths.” The essay that followed expanded the space between, as Massey put it, “two distinct categories of white women who are conventionally attractive but whose public images exemplify dramatically different lifestyles and worldviews.” Winona Ryder was “relatable and aspirational,” her life “more authentic…at once exciting and a little bit sad.” Gwyneth, on the other hand, “has always represented a collection of tasteful but safe consumer reflexes more than she’s reflected much of a real personality.” Her life was “so sufficiently figured out as to be both enviable and mundane.”
For women, authenticity lies in difficulty: this feminist assumption has become dominant logic while still passing as rare. The Winonas of the world, Massey argues, are the ones with stories worth telling, even if the world is built to suit another type of girl. (The world, of course, is also built to suit Winonas: though Massey acknowledges the racial limitations of her argument, the fact that a wildly popular essay could be built on analyzing the spectrum of female identity represented between Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder indicates both the stranglehold of whiteness on celebrity discourse and the way celebrity irregularity is graded on an astonishing curve.) Later on, Massey wrote about the period of success that followed the publication of this essay, in which she bought a house, went platinum blond, and upgraded her wardrobe. She looked at herself in a mirror, seeing “the expertly blown out blonde hair and a designer handbag and a complexion made dewy by the expensive acids and oils that I now anoint myself with….I had become a total. fucking. Gwyneth.” The hyper-precise calibration of exemplary womanhood either mattered more than ever or didn’t matter at all.
Massey included the Winona/Gwyneth piece in her 2017 book, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers, which took on a familiar set of female icons: Courtney Love, Anna Nicole Smith, Amber Rose, Sylvia Plath, Britney Spears. The operating concept seemed to be that the world under patriarchy had badly aestheticized the suffering of women—and that, perhaps, women could now aestheticize that suffering in a good way, an incandescent and oracular way, one that was deep and meaningful and affirming and real. As the title suggests, we could want their trouble, their difficulty. In this book, celebrity lives are configured as intimate symbols. Sylvia Plath is “an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly.” Britney Spears’s body is the Rosetta stone through which Massey decodes her own desire to be thin and sexually irresistible. Courtney Love, a “venomous witch,” is “the woman I aspire to be rather than the clumsy girl I have so often been.” Like a priestess, Massey spoke a language that conjured glory through