In 2007 I was twenty-four, outside a club somewhere in the city, sitting on a sidewalk taking pulls from a flask with this guy I had kept running into over the years. When I met him, he was a Louis Vuitton runway model, but he was twenty-two now, and washed up, most beautiful boy I had ever seen up close. He looked like a painting of a person, and his boyfriends were always awful. We loved being pretty, but we were worried about it, too.
We were high as all get-out on something he’d paid for, guessing what kind of people we’d be when we weren’t pretty anymore, but this was mostly just for him. I was a fringe kid; I wasn’t a real pretty girl. I was an impostor. We talked about that a lot: How I was never going to be a model. Not actually.
I’d been modeling for one of those alternative pinup websites, one of the biggest players in the tattooed girls scene, which was a big deal at the time because in those days, mainstream media didn’t give modeling or acting jobs to freaks, but capitalism swooped in and made sure it made a little niche for fetishizing girls with tattoos. Just enough for us to have the illusion of being accepted. The scene called itself inclusive, but still touted the idea that only thin white girls were hot. The scene was so edgy, showing photos of us goth girls with all our tattoos, while we chanted, Fuck Victoria’s Secret, but it’s easy to be fooled when you’re thrown a bone. We were being tricked, and we didn’t ask, Where are all the fat girls? Where are all the women of color? I guess when you’re trained to believe what you are told, and you are told you’re being liberated, it’s going to take you a long time to ask the important questions.
I was anorexic, but it wasn’t even for that, or because of it. I just was. I was never going to be skinny enough, and it wasn’t even ever about my appearance. It was about my body never belonging to me. It was a weird time to be a pinup model.
Bettie Page was hip again and I had bangs, and I was too short and starving and still not skinny enough to be a real model, but alt-girl pseudo porn sites loved me, and I felt pretty good about the whole thing, but couldn’t tell anyone because my boyfriend was embarrassed that I was naked on the internet. We fought about it all the time. He didn’t want me telling my friends. He didn’t want my friends to see the photos, looking at me like that. I always asked him, If anyone sees me naked, shouldn’t it be my friends? But coming down from the 90’s was a trip, man, and we weren’t there yet.
In New Orleans, years later, I was dressing for some parade, with some other boyfriend, because I went through a new one every two years or so, and my intended outfit was a white lace costume corset. You could see through the lace, which was cool, because the tattoos on my back and ribs could show. My boyfriend didn’t like my outfit. He said it was an invitation. He didn’t understand why I wanted to let people look at me like that. Not people. Men. He only cared if other men looked at me like that.
I was a feminist, but I loved my boyfriend and it seemed like I was always having to choose and he asked all the time why being a feminist had to mean being slutty.
Last year a dude told me all women who wore makeup looked like whores, and makeup was stupid because we didn’t need it, and I was like, You don’t need that stupid hat you’re wearing either, and yet I have no feelings about it, and here we are. And then he tried to go home with me. I was wearing red lipstick. He told me I wasn’t like other women. I told him, So, you think very little of all women except me? He said yes, and as I got up to leave, he asked me why I wasn’t flattered. I told him I don’t like it when people talk shit about my friends. He told me I was a cunt, and that I was ugly anyway. What if I had grown up in control of my own perception of my body? Maybe if I hadn’t come into the world feeling like my body belonged to everyone else, I wouldn’t have been anorexic for so long. Maybe I’d have fucked fewer people who didn’t care about me. Maybe I’d have left abusive relationships sooner. Maybe I never would have wondered if the alcoholic I loved was going to actually kill me in one of his blackout rages. Maybe I wouldn’t have blamed myself. See how this all connects? This is rape culture, man. This is what it does. It’s not just victim-blaming and slut-shaming. It’s not just Weinstein-level assault. How on earth do you think it got there to begin with? Rape culture happened because an entire culture was built around denying women ownership of their own bodies. How do you deny that ownership?
You raise them, for generations, to believe that their only power is in sex, but that sex is owed to specific people, and does not belong to them. You raise them, for generations, to believe that the only desirable personality trait is to be nice, and they must be nice in order to be valued, and if they are not nice, then they are hysterical, and they cannot be taken seriously if they are hysterical. You raise them, for generations, to believe that their only worth is in how fuckable they are, how able they are to produce children, how marriageable they are. And then you tell them they are not being nice when they take the smallest bit of pride in any of that, too.
In order to be an appropriate, acceptable woman, you have to be wonderful always, and ashamed of how wonderful you are. You can’t blame a victim until you’ve discredited them. And the best way, historically, to discredit a woman is to shame her for being attention-seeking, for being bitchy, for being emotional, for being unintelligent. For being a dumb blonde. For wearing that. For liking her own image in the mirror. You tack it onto her character, you see. You say, She must be a less reputable person, because all she cares about is attention, she must be irrational. And you take every act of self-love, every act of defiance against the culture that has told her that her body doesn’t belong to her (but the bad things that happen to it are her fault), and you call it attention-seeking.
What in the whole fuck is that? How are you not raging at how obvious this all is?
My darling woke men, my sweet allies, you are being duped. You’re playing right into it, and we’re going to talk about it now.
Because you keep showing up to women’s marches, and you’re really, really here for our #metoo stories, but you’re still complaining about our selfies. And if you weren’t complaining so loud, I wouldn’t be addressing this, but here you are. Making fun of us. Making those mean jokes, you know the ones, the kind where you say something shitty and when you’re called on it you get to say, I was just joking, though.
I keep explaining why selfies are so important for this reason: I have spent my whole life being told I can only be attractive in specific, allowable ways. And I keep hearing men complain about insecure women, saying confidence is sexy, and then complaining about our selfies, about us acting like we can have anyone we want, about us walking around knowing we are pretty. Because we’re supposed to feel secure, but never, ever talk about it. And the process we go through to get there, we have to do it in secret.
And I’m like, you don’t actually think we place all our value on our looks, do you? You don’t actually think that the fact that we’re fuckable holds water with us, do you? You don’t really think we are this vapid, this one-dimensional, do you? You, a culture of men who prides yourselves on your intellectualization of everything, your glowing analytical skills, you can’t crack this one? You can’t figure out all on your own that self-love, especially what looks like vanity in women, is actually a revolutionary thing that is a response to rape culture and patriarchal oppression? Bullshit. Maybe you just don’t want to know, and maybe it’s because you were raised to believe you don’t have to, but we’re going to do a full stop on that right here.
Every man I have had this conversation with has a story about a girl he knew who was like that. Like what, I ask. Like, she was vain, she only cared about how she looked, she thought she was better than other people because she was gorgeous. And all I hear when I am told these stories is another story about a man who wasn’t paying attention to a multitude of layers under the surface of what he was seeing. A story about a man who wants to use that one time in college as an excuse to negate the complexity of the culture of womanhood, right now, in real time. What fucked her up that way, bro? Did you ask her? If you were so sure she was obsessive and compensating with all those manicures, why didn’t you help her by empowering her and reinforcing her value?
Listen, dudes, we are trying to help too, here. It must really suck to be wanting us so badly and thinking so little of us at the same time. We are just out here trying to explain to you what living an entire life inside of the Madonna/Whore struggle looks like. We’re trying to show you. Because if you’re going to call yourself progressive, you’re going to have to take a minute to stop oversimplifying our selfies, our bodies, our struggle to come to terms with the way we live in the world. The way we live in the world is inherently tied to our being told we don’t own ourselves, and that we must be good enough to be owned. You’ve got to let us explain how that works and what it feels like if you’re going to smash the patriarchy with us.
We’re told the way the world sees us is everything. We’re told the way you see us is everything. We’re out here trying to see ourselves, for once.
Stop trying to take us down a notch. Stop acting like we need to be punished just because we know you’ll fuck us. Stop being part of the mass of dudes basically putting their fingers in their ears yelling “la la la la” like tantruming toddlers every time we try to tell you what’s going on with us.
We are literally just trying to tell you what’s going on with us. Literally. Actually. Entirely. Just trying to tell you.
How about this: Be really kind to us. Support our rebellion against the control of Christian patriarchal oppression, which is what our culture’s fucking obsession with modesty is rooted in, anyway. Treat us like we’re smart, because we are. Let us do our thing over here, knowing we’re pretty. Let us talk about it. Ask us if we’d like to share our stories of growing up being told we were unacceptable if we weren’t pretty, but if we were ever raped, it was our fault because we were pretty. Ask us if we would like to unpack that. And listen to us when we do. Be really good friends to us. Let us explain this shit to you. Stop trying to tip the power balance by calling our examination of this hugely complex situation narcissism. Are you a doctor? Can you diagnose this on a mass level? Probably not. Your obsession with using our embracing of our beauty against us, to insult us, to discredit us, is a power play, my dudes. It’s a power play created by rape culture, and you’re not down with that, anyway.
And stop talking over us by inserting men’s insecurities into these conversations. Listen, we know what you’re up against. We know the volume of awful expectations placed on you as men, about your bodies and your emotions, and it’s not less important but it is different. We want to have those conversations too, but they are separate conversations. Today we are having this one.
Y’all are not stupid. Stop acting like you are, and stop treating us like we are.
You keep saying you want to show up for us. And I believe most of you, honestly, when you say you really, really want to. But you’re still letting yourselves get tricked by archaic structures, and Gentlemen, you should be pissed about that. If you are not here for my selfies, you are not here for my rebellion against rape culture.