I was scammed once, during the single, broiling summer I ever lived in New York City. In urgent need of an apartment, I exchanged messages with a friend of a friend; soon I found myself exchanging money, although I suppose exchange is the wrong word. I got nothing in return for my timely wire: no keys, no half of a decent two-bedroom, no reply to my furious question marks. It was a great deal of money for me and I felt too ashamed to go to the police and more ashamed than that to go to my father. To make up for it, I spent the rest of the summer dining for free, with men I pretended to find interesting. I tell this story to emphasize two points: first, that one falls for a scam because one wants to believe in it. And second, that to find yourself scammed is to open a portal into vengeful, embarrassed outrage, a grasping underdog’s ethics in which everything becomes permissible. There’s no such thing as guilt, when cons are reparations.
We are told, with increasing frequency, that we are living in a post-feminist age. As in, after feminism, chronologically. As in, over feminism, abandoning it, philosophically. Undeniably the gold-star celebrity feminists of the 2010s are changing. Writer-activist Lena Dunham dropped out of the discourse she once led, taking to bed with a doctor’s note. Audrey Gelman, founder of The Wing, a suffragette-inspired, girlboss coworking space, opened a homeware store described as “physically” in Brooklyn, but “emotionally … in the countryside.” Actress-who-reads and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson discovered that the only thing better than being equal to men is being divinely feminine: “This is 33,” she announced on Instagram last year, on her birthday. “Before 29 I hadn’t even heard of a Saturn Return as a concept. … Today I feel 🦋🦋🦋. Thank you to the witches in my coven.”
Post-feminism is most commonly associated with Gelman’s new target customer: the tradwife, trading corporate America for 1950s cosplay back home, undoing progress with every stitch she crochets for her Stepford family. She’s been talked to death, but what about her sisters, catalogued likewise online? The chronic sufferer, shopping for detoxes. The she-shaman, ketamine-tripping from medieval hut to modern Tulum. The overgrown “girl”; the nun, vocation questionable, in a cloistered abbey. The outright scammer, convinced she can turn the lemons of misogyny into lemonade for herself. Seemingly unrelated, except for one unifying theme: they all consider themselves the victims, or survivors, of a vast feminist setup.
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Women have always had a special relationship with lies; often, we have relied on them for survival. But it was the aspirational feminism of the 2010s—individualistic, empowering, breathless, especially after SoulCycle—which first introduced many of us to the art of lying to ourselves.
In those years, women followed a noble ethics—or a maladaptive one, depending on who you asked. We tried to live by the rules of how things should be, rather than how things are. The premises from which we were not to budge could be found in children’s books. Like “boys and girls are made of much the same, except for little things.” Or that girls can “be anything … even president,” as one 2019 book put it, quoting Hillary Clinton after she learned otherwise. Misogyny was a feedback loop that would keep running unless we intervened in it: systemic, embedded in all our expectations and validated each time we played along. Since our actions and speech could either reinforce misogyny or undermine it, feminists fought the patriarchy conceptually, with the right words and behavior. We would not flirt at speed traps or interviews. We would split the bill, despite making eighty cents on the male dollar. The smallest advantages of the current system, like free drinks, were guilty by association. Through conduct that was feminist, the argument went, we could make a feminist world; via a thousand micro-battles, eventually we could unseat the patriarchy. But misogyny was everywhere for now, even if we had to act otherwise. This introduced a tension, sometimes a personal cost. Eventually we developed a phobia of “reinforcing” faults merely by noticing them. And it was true that those who insisted on discussing ugly truths often seemed invested in enshrining them. It was a decade of working through seismic period cramps, as if that might make them vanish.
Then came 2020. If you put your ear to your phone, you might have been able to detect a great cry of unhappiness coming up in unison from women online. Lockdown had given us reflective distance from our lives, TikTok a new arena for peacocking and envy. Many used the language of conspiracy to express the sense that they had played themselves. Despite their good choices—or because of them. What had categorized these choices as good, at the time, were their feminist credentials: high in principles, low on pragmatics, a little like proudly aiming for the foot and shooting there. We hadn’t “settled” or “rushed,” and found ourselves infertile. We’d picked a job over a partner, but the job never picked us back. We’d followed the advice, frozen our eggs, and only after relying on them discovered how unreliable the process was. We’d done it all… the way into chronic fatigue. We’d lived by the new, aspirational rules of equality and crashed into the old, unfair rules of womanhood like walls. Meanwhile, our rights had been rescinded. “I’m tired of persevering,” a woman says, from a bouclé armchair, in a filmed podcast on TikTok. “I just want to sit for a little … I really girlbossed close to the sun … Did I scam myself? Maybe.”
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior. Too often it seems like they are just performing a bit, in the theater immortalized by the iPhone camera. A going refrain on social media advises women that “delulu is the solulu”—delusion is the solution. But when you’re asking women to live for an improved future, to disengage from reality so as not to prop it up, it should be no surprise when they become skilled in the art of doublethink. As how things are and how things should be fail to meet, like two halves of a zipper, women must wrench and hold together the sides—or pretend there’s not something gaping. Between the world we have and the world we’d like, there is always going to be a lag: today. The present. No wonder that to help navigate it, or perhaps escape it, post-feminists are inhabiting old stereotypes from the past.
But maybe we can learn something from the post-feminists too. About what it would take to reclaim, or excavate, a different attitude toward reality, one capable of satisfying those so starved for truth they’re willing to follow the first sign of it into extremism or magic. There must be some middle ground, after all, between the post-feminists’ embrace of ill-fitting costumes and the millennial trailblazer’s insistence on sewing blind. Maybe feminist realism means preserving from old patterns whatever we can still use, and testing our new experiences against them. There is a reason that our favorite book begins with the phrase “it is a truth universally acknowledged” and ends with love stories both deeply practical and romantic. The introduction of realism to literature revealed women to be complicated, not bad.
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Let us examine a trick I pull each time I board an airplane. How I pretend to struggle with my suitcase in the aisle when I’ve already picked out the man who will lift it for me. We’ve already made eye contact, he and I, the guy in the blue sweatshirt. His body tenses in advance of exertion; he even shifts his briefcase from his lap. Still we go through the pantomime, of hoisting my suitcase high in the air, of grunting and flailing, until he stands to save me. Neither of us is allowed to assume a woman is weak; I must perform my weakness as some kind of personal defect and then sit for ten hours with a pain in my side. Yet I am of average height and strength, I have no physical defects, only emotional ones. The overhead bin is too tall for most women by design.
Some women have found a way to abandon such pretexts without being bad feminists at all. Supermodel Bella Hadid disappeared for a few months the summer before last. Fans suspected rehab, but she’d been somewhere more literary: her fainting couch. Various fainting couches, rather, disclosed on a carousel of Instagram images she posted later online. Photographed curled up, cloaked in blankets, in the lap of luxury, or of her holistic health coach. Frail, golden, rich, exhausted, absolutely starving herself, abdominals exposed, with romantic under-eye bags in an expensive lilac shade, looking like no one had ever been so exquisite, or so saintly, tethered to the earth only by means of an IV line.
In her photo caption, she wrote of having chronic Lyme and Lyme co-infections, confusingly named diagnoses that may have nothing to do with Lyme disease, a tick-borne bacterial illness treated by anti-biotics, or the post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome that occurs in up to 20 percent of those cases. Rather, they make up a controversial, untestable phenomenon historically considered by most of the medical establishment to be little more than a pseudoscientific or psychosomatic scam. At most, a set of real symptoms that have been understudied and misattributed. Her mother and her little brother have it too, which is statistically unlikely, and also Justin Bieber. To treat it she took one hundred days off work. She wrote: “15 years of invisible suffering, was all worth it if I’m able to, God willing, have a lifetime of spreading love from a full cup, and being able to truly be myself, For the first time ever.”
A vast number of my friends are on sick leave. They introduce themselves with their diagnoses first. They’re former girlbosses, good capitalists, whose only excuse not to work had for years been the personal day. Many of their conditions are real, testable, medical in the classic sense. Others fall somewhere on a spectrum of factual to factitious, where rare becomes common, the enlightened self-diagnosed, and diagnoses of exclusion, nearly impossible to prove, are treated like bulletproof license to adopt a new label: dissociative identity disorder; stagnant liver; sticky bile; Tourette’s; Hashimoto’s, for women who are accused of eating disorders, like Bella’s sister, Gigi; histamine overload; chronic fatigue; Ehlers-Danlos; POTS, which causes dizziness upon standing but should not for any known reason induce you to film yourself mid-faint; mold toxicity; calcium shell. Plus, heavy metal exposure; nervous system dysregulation; “functional freezing”; vestibular migraines; elevated cortisol; mitochondrial dysfunction; leaky gut; exercise intolerance; brain fog. Some new entries to the medicalization complex include symptoms that have always seemed to me just the price of life, of having a body—acrid sweat and puffy eyes. Approved treatments, aside from psychotropic drugs, often belong to the world of functional or holistic medicine, disseminated online by twentysomethings. Such “protocols,” from parasite detoxes and castor oil packs to adrenal cocktails and online reiki, can constitute an entirely new life, or a time-consuming retreat from it. The diseases are mostly gendered. They rarely make men sick.
Bells are ringing; we have been here before. Illness is the original feminine expression of turmoil, medical clearance to avoid impolite society, loveless marriages, pleasureless sex, another pregnancy, conditions objectively nauseating. There is a whole genre of literature in which “sick” women go away to sanatoriums or resort towns to cheat on their husbands, like “Lady with Lapdog.” Stories of rest cures in Switzerland, Victorian women demanding to be carried from chaise to chaise, a weakness-as-strength approach that never goes out of style. For Frida Kahlo, her injuries were real, but she used what some speculate was Munchausen’s, for her cheating husband, as a kind of leash; he could only go so far before she opted for another surgery.
Women really do get sick. Our medical challenges are poorly researched; doctors are predisposed to disbelieve us; an effective treatment for menstrual cramps ranks lower on the human agenda than reaching Mars. “Yukiko’s diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo,” reads the last line of The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s book about changing female roles in Japan. One cannot fake diarrhea. As for my friends, their hives are real too. I can see them. Their hair is falling out. Yet I struggle to separate all their chronic health issues from their chronic discontent. Every dinner or drinks date devolves into a litany of complaints, a mutual diagnostic session, the unwinding of some medical mystery whose solution is always more sweet attention to the self. Perhaps, unable to speak the truth, it began to eat at them from the inside. On levels both literal and metaphorical, to fall sick after the aspirational 2010s is sensible. Surely you don’t have to stand up for women if you can hardly stand.
In my early twenties, I developed a problem with first my right leg and then my left, a puzzling case of double tendonitis that refused to appear on scans. It was labeled as “pain syndrome.” The pain kept me flat on my back, in bed; kept me from stairs, the backseats of certain vehicles, from dancing, high heels, low chairs. Eventually the pain faded, but my obsession over the scans remained: the X-Rays, the MRIs, great innovations that showed to me my muscles and bones but no apparent justification for my suffering.
I began to view my kneecaps as nebulas in which swirled falsity and truth, my loose screws and my reason, my bad joints and some old unhappiness, which gravity had finally brought from my head all the way down. I couldn’t think of any internal crisis that my knees had decided to manifest. An impending marriage, sure, which even in the best of cases struck me as a little violent, two people become one, the opposite of those laborious procedures in which they separate conjoined twins. Problems with my visa, applications to jobs, my reluctance to admit I wanted to be a writer, and so on. Then I moved flats and I laid there on the bed telling my fiancé what to pack, how and what to fold. I felt like a monk on a hunger strike in Nepal, a radiant consumptive, a kind of queen, and I considered just for a second that what my knees really wanted was not just rest, but power.
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In addition to all my friends who have grown sick, there are the ones who have grown witchy. Each month, they wade deeper and deeper into a cloud of burning sage. Inside, they chart their cycles, then the stars, before counting angel numbers, higher and higher.
The thinking of the increasingly popular she-shaman goes as follows: the contemporary woman is unhappy because she has been living, thanks to corporate feminism, in her masculine. Her feminine is wounded, separated from ancestral knowledge as in a case of amnesia. She is fatigued, stuck, creatively and sexually dysfunctional. Her gut instincts have soured, like her gut flora, and even the fiercest probiotics are not going to help. She doesn’t have to find a way forward for the sake of other women anymore. She has to go back.
She-shamans, or divine feminists, have their own kin—the Fifties-cosplaying tradwife, the overgrown “girl” in New York taking selfies in toddler tees and hair ribbons. They’re all separatists, restoring their injured self-confidence by forming a cult of the feminine. They express a bitter yearning for certain perks of being a woman they’d denied themselves, and perhaps for nothing. So they follow the pendulum swing, overcorrect right the other way: we are “just girls,” ditzy, bratty, traditional, superstitious. Half ironic performance, half cheeky tantrum, a revival of difference feminism, this time as farce. For she-shamans, the 2010s notion that you can speak reality into existence finds its extreme form in the dialect of affirmations. Thanks to divine femininity, a woman will learn she is not a harassed lawyer, bullied back to the office with a half-healed episiotomy. She’s a goddess.
The extent to which this has filtered down to your average girl is clarified by the casual reference made to it on The Kardashians (Kourtney, obviously). To heal her divine feminine, a woman should, according to Instagram: attend drum circles; undergo energy work; avoid work overload; “wear pretty pajama sets”; live according to her menstrual cycle, such as dating in the follicular phase and eating cacao in the luteal; pick up weaving; recover past lives; turn “intentionally celibate”; dabble in herbal medicine (here is where the sick girl can suddenly turn divine, or the divine girl sick). In addition: eat bone marrow; trade Barry’s Bootcamp for pilates (Barry being that wrong thing, male); look into astrocartography; avoid artificially scented candles; gather with other women among soft blankets to heal. The body is a map to be interpreted, even its most minor twinge. A UTI, for example, is a sign of sexual incompatibility. Tight hips mean extensive trauma, and so on; you may require “spinal energetics.” Retreats for the sacred feminine arts, in Tulum, Costa Rica and Portugal, cater to burnt-out party girls. They offer circles, meditations, workshops, where women lie down, breathe ecstatically, dance intuitively, orgasm, take sound baths, scream at the top of their lungs, writhe on the floor, shower in flower petals, receive ancient “downloads,” sip blue lotus tea, anoint themselves with crystals and make psychedelic offerings to Isis.
If a she-shaman does all this, she can manifest and attract the conditions of her choosing.
For a long time, I considered this all an extended PR scheme, a coping mechanism for reframing disappointment. A means of sidestepping the challenge, of making a better world through ancient spells rather than difficult choices. It’s absurd to reject a liberation that won you, among other things, a college education and a credit card; one cannot stay forever a girl; and pursuing mystical abilities can ultimately only detract from an earthly struggle that isn’t over yet. Watch enough videos of the she-shamans and they will eventually come down to earth, and instruct you on how to attract a male “provider.” To enter a state of “receiving” instead of giving for once. Then “PSA: the feminist movement is a scam,” “millennial women got set up,” and there we are: right back where we started. These are extreme cases. But even the most lucid women I know are throwing tea parties, plaiting their hair, whispering about a “soft life.”
And then I schedule a womb healing, for the sake of research, of course. I do not usually think about my womb; I’ve never considered it so important, that emptiness in me. But the healer lays me down on a pallet, marks my uterus with string. Waving her hands, she explains that I am different each week, while men are on a daily cycle. That I have been only working against myself, playing into their schemes, in overlooking this. She commands me to sleep more during my period, write furiously the week that follows. Cry as much as I’d like in the days meant for releasing, as I have been. When her hands reach a point on my lower right side, my leg kicks. A side that has given me much trouble, pulled muscles, what I mistook for digestion pangs. She spends a long time on it. Later she explains to me: my ovary is there. Something is wrong with it, physically, but metaphorically also.
I can tell you a great deal about the history of female oppression, but I didn’t know my ovary was there. I thought it was higher.
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The most radical post-feminist I know, seeking divinity in a different, if more traditional, fashion, is my friend Hallie. Hallie is joining a cloistered convent in Missouri, where she will never own a real mirror but will find in the falling snow some resemblance to the white habit framing her face. Her days will be comprised of prayer, work, mass, sleeping on wooden slats, a single meal, a single hour of free conversation, three letters home a month, two visits a year, no novels or films. That last part pains Hallie, for she is an ardent reader, and once wanted to be an actress. In the musicals put on by our all-girls high school, they cast her as the male lead. She has a Roman orator’s voice. A voice that could lead an army or, in the convent, a revolt—but she will never revolt, because she is going there to excel at being a certain kind of woman for once. She never really dated; problems with her father. She lost one hundred pounds and with them an appetite for the available female futures. She writes long, sincere missives on social media explaining her choice: “As a fragile little plant I realized the world’s constant winds are too much for me.”
Hallie is tall, strong, not fragile or dainty. I suspect, faintly, a con. A ploy for attention. I hope so at least. Only last year, Hallie ran a successful girlboss scheme, teaching women to freelance. Lots of hyperbole on LinkedIn. In our senior year, she fed me bits and pieces of a tender fantasy, starring a long-distance boyfriend no one had ever met called John. She showed me the loving emails she may have composed herself, a photograph in which he’d caught a slick and shining salmon, in rather the same way she had hooked me. I remember the loneliness of her smile. After graduation, I wrote to her. How is John? I asked. Heart emoji. John died in a car accident, she typed, conveniently. “I don’t want to talk about it.” As a nun, she will never have to. John is as real and not real as any of us. But of all the ways of being a woman, it strikes me she has chosen, for sound and timely reasons, one of the frankest. The nuns tell her exactly what she will be giving up.
Before she enters the convent, and I will never see her again, Hallie and I share a last lunch in which we wonder together whether or not she is a good person. A lamb, or a wolf? We do not touch upon what most intrigues me, which is whether or not she is lying. Later, I tell someone: I’ve never had a conversation like that one. Then I realize I have, thousands of times, with modern women and girls, obsessed by living some right, fair, moral way, while the ugly truth of reality flits unspoken between us.
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In 2021, a book of dubious politics published back in 2002 began to creep up the bestseller list, Why Men Love Bitches. Since then, I have watched biopics about infamous new fraudsters, all in skirts: Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes. Later, I read Caroline Calloway’s book, Scammer, and enjoyed it. Meanwhile on my phone, my algorithm began to attune itself to a certain archetype of girl, a female adventurer, getting her own back, in the style of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. The scammer, who perceives herself to be a “realist,” is our last post-feminist trope, and just as ancient as the rest of them. On Instagram, she will teach you to use feminine communication styles to your advantage; she will sing that catchy song about “looking for a man in finance,” which has netted its maker a major-label deal despite having been composed as a joke; she will detail how to dangle sex like a carrot, at interviews and speed traps. Her justification? When we are underdogs, trying to climb, our moves will always seem underhanded. The only way to win with a bad hand in poker, as in life, is to bluff.
This group of post-feminists microdoses truth in the way it has become popular to microdose mushrooms. I come across brief TikTok videos that startle me in their honesty, in their banality, in the extraordinary combination of the pair in the mouth of an ordinary woman or girl. Often she’s doing her makeup. “Nobody wants to hear this” is a common slogan, as is “I’m tired of pretending.” “You can buy pretty later.” “Women are not small men.” “We don’t have, like, a thousand units of testosterone coursing through our veins every single morning.” Watch enough videos, and a young woman picks up the quirk like a dialect.
The TikTok truth-tellers help some of my friends to begin freeing themselves from the underwire of aspirational speech. They bob their heads, arch their eyebrows, as the girls in the clips do. And suddenly, we are less sick, we are less witchy; we do not delude ourselves about our limitations or supernatural capacities or mislead each other at brunch. We begin to confess to sins, like feigning tears, or dieting. We give each other little shots of truth, like doctors do patients getting over an allergy. We draw each other the chessboard so we can make moves for once. It’s a far cry from the old style, like the time I mentioned biological clocks to a stubborn girlboss and she put her hand to her throat like I was choking her.
But as in the case of mushrooms, if consumed with the wrong mindset, truth may lead to a bad trip. Or a vengeful one. One video advises us, “Don’t be afraid to ask men for things,” like money, for “they will ask you to take your clothes off in two seconds.” Female Dating Strategists, online, call men “scrotes” and debate whether “crypto boys” have it coming. A woman tells me she is seducing her boyfriend with what he believes are her cooking skills but is really her Thermomix. “What is the best age to start finding a husband?” one video asks. “When you’re tired of working.” On Netflix reality shows the scammer tests her hypothesis repeatedly: she can take “how things are” for women, and subvert them to her own benefit. She will survive our disdain, then transcend it, lucratively. In the case of Christine Quinn, on the show Selling Sunset, she nearly gets away with it. Christine is a realtor, wicked to the point of delightful camp. She is false, in terms of hair, nose and designer clothes, which viewers suspect are rented. Most of her coworkers are former bottle girls, or actresses, equally posturing, funny, hungry. She treats them a little cruelly. She doesn’t deserve it, but in Season 3, suddenly, she wins. She gets the mansion of the kind she used to sell, the baby, the husband so insecure and fresh from the tech bubble that she can mold him into anything. It is not what all women want. But it is what Christine wants precisely. As part of her victory lap, she publishes a book called How to Be a Boss B*tch. Then, without warning, she begins to send up distress signals. She orders four hundred euros’ worth of manifestation candles, rose smudge sticks. Two sets emblazoned with the mantra “Cleanse & Protect.” Within weeks, her husband is arrested for domestic violence.
A power that comes from a sleight of hand is not real power. That summer in New York, I was not a strong villainess. I was a girl, frightened of her phone, crowded with messages from men I hated. When women get tired of living aspirationally, is the most sensible option remaining to sink low? Is there a truth for women who feel victimized that is not a can of worms, maggots? An honesty with the self that does not mean demeaning oneself for an advantage, or embracing these slapstick or tragic characters?
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The truths that governed the lives of women in Jane Austen’s day were grimmer than our own, sorrier and more rigid. Yet we can find in Austen’s novels plenty of reminders of our own strategies for escaping an imperfect reality. The lighting is poor, what with the candles, the air is bad, what with the breath, they wear petticoats and paper curls, but from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion there go in their past lives the familiar ensemble: Mary Musgrove and Mrs. Churchill complain of aches and pains; Lucy Steele, Isabella Thorpe and Lady Susan angle for “providers,” fancying there is no winning against the house without acting like a card shark, especially if the game is marriage; Catherine Morland indulges gothic hallucinations; Maria Bertram and Lydia Bennet stroll past “danger” signs and off perfectly visible cliffs, since the cliffs ought not to be there.
Austen’s happy endings are granted only to those protagonists who learn to look at reality, and live in it, clear-eyed. Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot, even the priggish Fanny Price, and above all Elizabeth Bennet are exceptional protagonists because they are, in Austen’s world, almost the exception to the rules of uncritical capitulation, cynicism and delusion. It is a fine line they walk; it takes Emma all of Emma to find it. Sense and Sensibility was the first of Austen’s mature works, and she teases out, with the triangle of Elinor Dashwood, Marianne Dashwood and Lucy Steele, an ethical trigonometry, however provisional: extreme sensitivity is unwise, material self-interest worthy only of our censure, common sense is good—with these as givens, solve for happiness and security next. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen pushes further. She asks, how can you be of an imperfect world without turning worldly? How can a woman maneuver herself without the unusual beauty and attendant luck that make maneuvering moot, as in the case of Elizabeth’s sister, Jane, and without losing her integrity, like Charlotte Lucas? Elizabeth Bennet “has something more of quickness than her sisters.” She also has moral authority. She is neither silly like her younger sisters, nor tactless like her mother, rank-obsessed like her cousin, disengaged like her father, for sale like Charlotte Lucas, supercilious like the inhabitants of Netherfield (minus Mr. Bingley). Her manner is arch; her pleasant ridicule, of certain conventions and herself, seems to the modern reader well-placed, and her irony even better. Lizzy does not suffer fools. Her “fine eyes” impress Mr. Darcy, but they also throw us a wink. Perhaps she is not one of them but one of us?
But for all that Elizabeth is above nineteenth-century Hertfordshire, she is certainly part of it too. “I never ridicule,” she says, “what is wise.” She knows her mother is uncouth, that Mr. Collins should not introduce himself to Mr. Darcy, that her sister’s disgrace will rub off on her like a bad smell. When Lydia runs off with Wickham, she reacts as if Lydia is not simply no longer a virgin but something closer to dead. She is happy for Jane’s “felicity” and also at the idea of her being “settled in that very house”—you know, the nice one. She might not play the hustler, marrying without love, but neither does she play the revolutionary, nor the martyr. She does not live as if the utopia were already here, just the Regency era, as it was actually lived. Elizabeth weighs the universally acknowledged truths of her day, deciding which are superfluous and which essential to her life. Her realism pins her, I suppose, a little to the ground. It limits the scope of what she might imagine for herself. Yet is it not a step forward when, in knowing the game but playing sincerely, she gets not just what she needed, but wanted and deserved?
These stories are not sticks of dynamite, burning down the system, but they are not inert. Today, we have different universal truths; tomorrow will bring newer ones; but I’d put money on Elizabeth remaining a model. If our world is any better than Austen’s, we can’t dismiss the role of such stories, the fact of our reading them, the fact of Austen, who won so little in her lifetime but so much after, writing them down. Here is a realism capable of delivering female characters from stereotype, from caricature, from sure fates of tragedy or farce. And also of delivering something to them: the real power that comes not from sleights of hand or strategic silences, but from speaking candidly about our lives as women and girls. The only dependable basis, I think, for the kind of political action it has always taken to improve them.
They say the truth hurts. Yes and no. I grew up hearing about labor pains, misogyny, the bosses who would grope you and the dark alleys you couldn’t walk down, menopause, postpartum depression, the grief of leaving a baby at home, the grief of leaving your work at the office because there was a baby at home. And yet I learned also of certain joys available to me on account of my sex. No one ever handed the promise of perfect equality to me like a present, and then one day took it back. Perhaps, despite my best efforts, I may never live as freely as men, not according to the same metrics at least. And yet there must be a reason why, when I ask my friends if they would like to be a man, they shake their heads and laugh at me.
Art credit: Zoe Hawk, The Stairway, 2020. Oil on panel, 24 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist.
I was scammed once, during the single, broiling summer I ever lived in New York City. In urgent need of an apartment, I exchanged messages with a friend of a friend; soon I found myself exchanging money, although I suppose exchange is the wrong word. I got nothing in return for my timely wire: no keys, no half of a decent two-bedroom, no reply to my furious question marks. It was a great deal of money for me and I felt too ashamed to go to the police and more ashamed than that to go to my father. To make up for it, I spent the rest of the summer dining for free, with men I pretended to find interesting. I tell this story to emphasize two points: first, that one falls for a scam because one wants to believe in it. And second, that to find yourself scammed is to open a portal into vengeful, embarrassed outrage, a grasping underdog’s ethics in which everything becomes permissible. There’s no such thing as guilt, when cons are reparations.
We are told, with increasing frequency, that we are living in a post-feminist age. As in, after feminism, chronologically. As in, over feminism, abandoning it, philosophically. Undeniably the gold-star celebrity feminists of the 2010s are changing. Writer-activist Lena Dunham dropped out of the discourse she once led, taking to bed with a doctor’s note. Audrey Gelman, founder of The Wing, a suffragette-inspired, girlboss coworking space, opened a homeware store described as “physically” in Brooklyn, but “emotionally … in the countryside.” Actress-who-reads and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson discovered that the only thing better than being equal to men is being divinely feminine: “This is 33,” she announced on Instagram last year, on her birthday. “Before 29 I hadn’t even heard of a Saturn Return as a concept. … Today I feel 🦋🦋🦋. Thank you to the witches in my coven.”
Post-feminism is most commonly associated with Gelman’s new target customer: the tradwife, trading corporate America for 1950s cosplay back home, undoing progress with every stitch she crochets for her Stepford family. She’s been talked to death, but what about her sisters, catalogued likewise online? The chronic sufferer, shopping for detoxes. The she-shaman, ketamine-tripping from medieval hut to modern Tulum. The overgrown “girl”; the nun, vocation questionable, in a cloistered abbey. The outright scammer, convinced she can turn the lemons of misogyny into lemonade for herself. Seemingly unrelated, except for one unifying theme: they all consider themselves the victims, or survivors, of a vast feminist setup.
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Women have always had a special relationship with lies; often, we have relied on them for survival. But it was the aspirational feminism of the 2010s—individualistic, empowering, breathless, especially after SoulCycle—which first introduced many of us to the art of lying to ourselves.
In those years, women followed a noble ethics—or a maladaptive one, depending on who you asked. We tried to live by the rules of how things should be, rather than how things are. The premises from which we were not to budge could be found in children’s books. Like “boys and girls are made of much the same, except for little things.” Or that girls can “be anything … even president,” as one 2019 book put it, quoting Hillary Clinton after she learned otherwise. Misogyny was a feedback loop that would keep running unless we intervened in it: systemic, embedded in all our expectations and validated each time we played along. Since our actions and speech could either reinforce misogyny or undermine it, feminists fought the patriarchy conceptually, with the right words and behavior. We would not flirt at speed traps or interviews. We would split the bill, despite making eighty cents on the male dollar. The smallest advantages of the current system, like free drinks, were guilty by association. Through conduct that was feminist, the argument went, we could make a feminist world; via a thousand micro-battles, eventually we could unseat the patriarchy. But misogyny was everywhere for now, even if we had to act otherwise. This introduced a tension, sometimes a personal cost. Eventually we developed a phobia of “reinforcing” faults merely by noticing them. And it was true that those who insisted on discussing ugly truths often seemed invested in enshrining them. It was a decade of working through seismic period cramps, as if that might make them vanish.
Then came 2020. If you put your ear to your phone, you might have been able to detect a great cry of unhappiness coming up in unison from women online. Lockdown had given us reflective distance from our lives, TikTok a new arena for peacocking and envy. Many used the language of conspiracy to express the sense that they had played themselves. Despite their good choices—or because of them. What had categorized these choices as good, at the time, were their feminist credentials: high in principles, low on pragmatics, a little like proudly aiming for the foot and shooting there. We hadn’t “settled” or “rushed,” and found ourselves infertile. We’d picked a job over a partner, but the job never picked us back. We’d followed the advice, frozen our eggs, and only after relying on them discovered how unreliable the process was. We’d done it all… the way into chronic fatigue. We’d lived by the new, aspirational rules of equality and crashed into the old, unfair rules of womanhood like walls. Meanwhile, our rights had been rescinded. “I’m tired of persevering,” a woman says, from a bouclé armchair, in a filmed podcast on TikTok. “I just want to sit for a little … I really girlbossed close to the sun … Did I scam myself? Maybe.”
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior. Too often it seems like they are just performing a bit, in the theater immortalized by the iPhone camera. A going refrain on social media advises women that “delulu is the solulu”—delusion is the solution. But when you’re asking women to live for an improved future, to disengage from reality so as not to prop it up, it should be no surprise when they become skilled in the art of doublethink. As how things are and how things should be fail to meet, like two halves of a zipper, women must wrench and hold together the sides—or pretend there’s not something gaping. Between the world we have and the world we’d like, there is always going to be a lag: today. The present. No wonder that to help navigate it, or perhaps escape it, post-feminists are inhabiting old stereotypes from the past.
But maybe we can learn something from the post-feminists too. About what it would take to reclaim, or excavate, a different attitude toward reality, one capable of satisfying those so starved for truth they’re willing to follow the first sign of it into extremism or magic. There must be some middle ground, after all, between the post-feminists’ embrace of ill-fitting costumes and the millennial trailblazer’s insistence on sewing blind. Maybe feminist realism means preserving from old patterns whatever we can still use, and testing our new experiences against them. There is a reason that our favorite book begins with the phrase “it is a truth universally acknowledged” and ends with love stories both deeply practical and romantic. The introduction of realism to literature revealed women to be complicated, not bad.
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Let us examine a trick I pull each time I board an airplane. How I pretend to struggle with my suitcase in the aisle when I’ve already picked out the man who will lift it for me. We’ve already made eye contact, he and I, the guy in the blue sweatshirt. His body tenses in advance of exertion; he even shifts his briefcase from his lap. Still we go through the pantomime, of hoisting my suitcase high in the air, of grunting and flailing, until he stands to save me. Neither of us is allowed to assume a woman is weak; I must perform my weakness as some kind of personal defect and then sit for ten hours with a pain in my side. Yet I am of average height and strength, I have no physical defects, only emotional ones. The overhead bin is too tall for most women by design.
Some women have found a way to abandon such pretexts without being bad feminists at all. Supermodel Bella Hadid disappeared for a few months the summer before last. Fans suspected rehab, but she’d been somewhere more literary: her fainting couch. Various fainting couches, rather, disclosed on a carousel of Instagram images she posted later online. Photographed curled up, cloaked in blankets, in the lap of luxury, or of her holistic health coach. Frail, golden, rich, exhausted, absolutely starving herself, abdominals exposed, with romantic under-eye bags in an expensive lilac shade, looking like no one had ever been so exquisite, or so saintly, tethered to the earth only by means of an IV line.
In her photo caption, she wrote of having chronic Lyme and Lyme co-infections, confusingly named diagnoses that may have nothing to do with Lyme disease, a tick-borne bacterial illness treated by anti-biotics, or the post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome that occurs in up to 20 percent of those cases. Rather, they make up a controversial, untestable phenomenon historically considered by most of the medical establishment to be little more than a pseudoscientific or psychosomatic scam. At most, a set of real symptoms that have been understudied and misattributed. Her mother and her little brother have it too, which is statistically unlikely, and also Justin Bieber. To treat it she took one hundred days off work. She wrote: “15 years of invisible suffering, was all worth it if I’m able to, God willing, have a lifetime of spreading love from a full cup, and being able to truly be myself, For the first time ever.”
A vast number of my friends are on sick leave. They introduce themselves with their diagnoses first. They’re former girlbosses, good capitalists, whose only excuse not to work had for years been the personal day. Many of their conditions are real, testable, medical in the classic sense. Others fall somewhere on a spectrum of factual to factitious, where rare becomes common, the enlightened self-diagnosed, and diagnoses of exclusion, nearly impossible to prove, are treated like bulletproof license to adopt a new label: dissociative identity disorder; stagnant liver; sticky bile; Tourette’s; Hashimoto’s, for women who are accused of eating disorders, like Bella’s sister, Gigi; histamine overload; chronic fatigue; Ehlers-Danlos; POTS, which causes dizziness upon standing but should not for any known reason induce you to film yourself mid-faint; mold toxicity; calcium shell. Plus, heavy metal exposure; nervous system dysregulation; “functional freezing”; vestibular migraines; elevated cortisol; mitochondrial dysfunction; leaky gut; exercise intolerance; brain fog. Some new entries to the medicalization complex include symptoms that have always seemed to me just the price of life, of having a body—acrid sweat and puffy eyes. Approved treatments, aside from psychotropic drugs, often belong to the world of functional or holistic medicine, disseminated online by twentysomethings. Such “protocols,” from parasite detoxes and castor oil packs to adrenal cocktails and online reiki, can constitute an entirely new life, or a time-consuming retreat from it. The diseases are mostly gendered. They rarely make men sick.
Bells are ringing; we have been here before. Illness is the original feminine expression of turmoil, medical clearance to avoid impolite society, loveless marriages, pleasureless sex, another pregnancy, conditions objectively nauseating. There is a whole genre of literature in which “sick” women go away to sanatoriums or resort towns to cheat on their husbands, like “Lady with Lapdog.” Stories of rest cures in Switzerland, Victorian women demanding to be carried from chaise to chaise, a weakness-as-strength approach that never goes out of style. For Frida Kahlo, her injuries were real, but she used what some speculate was Munchausen’s, for her cheating husband, as a kind of leash; he could only go so far before she opted for another surgery.
Women really do get sick. Our medical challenges are poorly researched; doctors are predisposed to disbelieve us; an effective treatment for menstrual cramps ranks lower on the human agenda than reaching Mars. “Yukiko’s diarrhea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo,” reads the last line of The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s book about changing female roles in Japan. One cannot fake diarrhea. As for my friends, their hives are real too. I can see them. Their hair is falling out. Yet I struggle to separate all their chronic health issues from their chronic discontent. Every dinner or drinks date devolves into a litany of complaints, a mutual diagnostic session, the unwinding of some medical mystery whose solution is always more sweet attention to the self. Perhaps, unable to speak the truth, it began to eat at them from the inside. On levels both literal and metaphorical, to fall sick after the aspirational 2010s is sensible. Surely you don’t have to stand up for women if you can hardly stand.
In my early twenties, I developed a problem with first my right leg and then my left, a puzzling case of double tendonitis that refused to appear on scans. It was labeled as “pain syndrome.” The pain kept me flat on my back, in bed; kept me from stairs, the backseats of certain vehicles, from dancing, high heels, low chairs. Eventually the pain faded, but my obsession over the scans remained: the X-Rays, the MRIs, great innovations that showed to me my muscles and bones but no apparent justification for my suffering.
I began to view my kneecaps as nebulas in which swirled falsity and truth, my loose screws and my reason, my bad joints and some old unhappiness, which gravity had finally brought from my head all the way down. I couldn’t think of any internal crisis that my knees had decided to manifest. An impending marriage, sure, which even in the best of cases struck me as a little violent, two people become one, the opposite of those laborious procedures in which they separate conjoined twins. Problems with my visa, applications to jobs, my reluctance to admit I wanted to be a writer, and so on. Then I moved flats and I laid there on the bed telling my fiancé what to pack, how and what to fold. I felt like a monk on a hunger strike in Nepal, a radiant consumptive, a kind of queen, and I considered just for a second that what my knees really wanted was not just rest, but power.
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In addition to all my friends who have grown sick, there are the ones who have grown witchy. Each month, they wade deeper and deeper into a cloud of burning sage. Inside, they chart their cycles, then the stars, before counting angel numbers, higher and higher.
The thinking of the increasingly popular she-shaman goes as follows: the contemporary woman is unhappy because she has been living, thanks to corporate feminism, in her masculine. Her feminine is wounded, separated from ancestral knowledge as in a case of amnesia. She is fatigued, stuck, creatively and sexually dysfunctional. Her gut instincts have soured, like her gut flora, and even the fiercest probiotics are not going to help. She doesn’t have to find a way forward for the sake of other women anymore. She has to go back.
She-shamans, or divine feminists, have their own kin—the Fifties-cosplaying tradwife, the overgrown “girl” in New York taking selfies in toddler tees and hair ribbons. They’re all separatists, restoring their injured self-confidence by forming a cult of the feminine. They express a bitter yearning for certain perks of being a woman they’d denied themselves, and perhaps for nothing. So they follow the pendulum swing, overcorrect right the other way: we are “just girls,” ditzy, bratty, traditional, superstitious. Half ironic performance, half cheeky tantrum, a revival of difference feminism, this time as farce. For she-shamans, the 2010s notion that you can speak reality into existence finds its extreme form in the dialect of affirmations. Thanks to divine femininity, a woman will learn she is not a harassed lawyer, bullied back to the office with a half-healed episiotomy. She’s a goddess.
The extent to which this has filtered down to your average girl is clarified by the casual reference made to it on The Kardashians (Kourtney, obviously). To heal her divine feminine, a woman should, according to Instagram: attend drum circles; undergo energy work; avoid work overload; “wear pretty pajama sets”; live according to her menstrual cycle, such as dating in the follicular phase and eating cacao in the luteal; pick up weaving; recover past lives; turn “intentionally celibate”; dabble in herbal medicine (here is where the sick girl can suddenly turn divine, or the divine girl sick). In addition: eat bone marrow; trade Barry’s Bootcamp for pilates (Barry being that wrong thing, male); look into astrocartography; avoid artificially scented candles; gather with other women among soft blankets to heal. The body is a map to be interpreted, even its most minor twinge. A UTI, for example, is a sign of sexual incompatibility. Tight hips mean extensive trauma, and so on; you may require “spinal energetics.” Retreats for the sacred feminine arts, in Tulum, Costa Rica and Portugal, cater to burnt-out party girls. They offer circles, meditations, workshops, where women lie down, breathe ecstatically, dance intuitively, orgasm, take sound baths, scream at the top of their lungs, writhe on the floor, shower in flower petals, receive ancient “downloads,” sip blue lotus tea, anoint themselves with crystals and make psychedelic offerings to Isis.
If a she-shaman does all this, she can manifest and attract the conditions of her choosing.
For a long time, I considered this all an extended PR scheme, a coping mechanism for reframing disappointment. A means of sidestepping the challenge, of making a better world through ancient spells rather than difficult choices. It’s absurd to reject a liberation that won you, among other things, a college education and a credit card; one cannot stay forever a girl; and pursuing mystical abilities can ultimately only detract from an earthly struggle that isn’t over yet. Watch enough videos of the she-shamans and they will eventually come down to earth, and instruct you on how to attract a male “provider.” To enter a state of “receiving” instead of giving for once. Then “PSA: the feminist movement is a scam,” “millennial women got set up,” and there we are: right back where we started. These are extreme cases. But even the most lucid women I know are throwing tea parties, plaiting their hair, whispering about a “soft life.”
And then I schedule a womb healing, for the sake of research, of course. I do not usually think about my womb; I’ve never considered it so important, that emptiness in me. But the healer lays me down on a pallet, marks my uterus with string. Waving her hands, she explains that I am different each week, while men are on a daily cycle. That I have been only working against myself, playing into their schemes, in overlooking this. She commands me to sleep more during my period, write furiously the week that follows. Cry as much as I’d like in the days meant for releasing, as I have been. When her hands reach a point on my lower right side, my leg kicks. A side that has given me much trouble, pulled muscles, what I mistook for digestion pangs. She spends a long time on it. Later she explains to me: my ovary is there. Something is wrong with it, physically, but metaphorically also.
I can tell you a great deal about the history of female oppression, but I didn’t know my ovary was there. I thought it was higher.
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The most radical post-feminist I know, seeking divinity in a different, if more traditional, fashion, is my friend Hallie. Hallie is joining a cloistered convent in Missouri, where she will never own a real mirror but will find in the falling snow some resemblance to the white habit framing her face. Her days will be comprised of prayer, work, mass, sleeping on wooden slats, a single meal, a single hour of free conversation, three letters home a month, two visits a year, no novels or films. That last part pains Hallie, for she is an ardent reader, and once wanted to be an actress. In the musicals put on by our all-girls high school, they cast her as the male lead. She has a Roman orator’s voice. A voice that could lead an army or, in the convent, a revolt—but she will never revolt, because she is going there to excel at being a certain kind of woman for once. She never really dated; problems with her father. She lost one hundred pounds and with them an appetite for the available female futures. She writes long, sincere missives on social media explaining her choice: “As a fragile little plant I realized the world’s constant winds are too much for me.”
Hallie is tall, strong, not fragile or dainty. I suspect, faintly, a con. A ploy for attention. I hope so at least. Only last year, Hallie ran a successful girlboss scheme, teaching women to freelance. Lots of hyperbole on LinkedIn. In our senior year, she fed me bits and pieces of a tender fantasy, starring a long-distance boyfriend no one had ever met called John. She showed me the loving emails she may have composed herself, a photograph in which he’d caught a slick and shining salmon, in rather the same way she had hooked me. I remember the loneliness of her smile. After graduation, I wrote to her. How is John? I asked. Heart emoji. John died in a car accident, she typed, conveniently. “I don’t want to talk about it.” As a nun, she will never have to. John is as real and not real as any of us. But of all the ways of being a woman, it strikes me she has chosen, for sound and timely reasons, one of the frankest. The nuns tell her exactly what she will be giving up.
Before she enters the convent, and I will never see her again, Hallie and I share a last lunch in which we wonder together whether or not she is a good person. A lamb, or a wolf? We do not touch upon what most intrigues me, which is whether or not she is lying. Later, I tell someone: I’ve never had a conversation like that one. Then I realize I have, thousands of times, with modern women and girls, obsessed by living some right, fair, moral way, while the ugly truth of reality flits unspoken between us.
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In 2021, a book of dubious politics published back in 2002 began to creep up the bestseller list, Why Men Love Bitches. Since then, I have watched biopics about infamous new fraudsters, all in skirts: Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes. Later, I read Caroline Calloway’s book, Scammer, and enjoyed it. Meanwhile on my phone, my algorithm began to attune itself to a certain archetype of girl, a female adventurer, getting her own back, in the style of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. The scammer, who perceives herself to be a “realist,” is our last post-feminist trope, and just as ancient as the rest of them. On Instagram, she will teach you to use feminine communication styles to your advantage; she will sing that catchy song about “looking for a man in finance,” which has netted its maker a major-label deal despite having been composed as a joke; she will detail how to dangle sex like a carrot, at interviews and speed traps. Her justification? When we are underdogs, trying to climb, our moves will always seem underhanded. The only way to win with a bad hand in poker, as in life, is to bluff.
This group of post-feminists microdoses truth in the way it has become popular to microdose mushrooms. I come across brief TikTok videos that startle me in their honesty, in their banality, in the extraordinary combination of the pair in the mouth of an ordinary woman or girl. Often she’s doing her makeup. “Nobody wants to hear this” is a common slogan, as is “I’m tired of pretending.” “You can buy pretty later.” “Women are not small men.” “We don’t have, like, a thousand units of testosterone coursing through our veins every single morning.” Watch enough videos, and a young woman picks up the quirk like a dialect.
The TikTok truth-tellers help some of my friends to begin freeing themselves from the underwire of aspirational speech. They bob their heads, arch their eyebrows, as the girls in the clips do. And suddenly, we are less sick, we are less witchy; we do not delude ourselves about our limitations or supernatural capacities or mislead each other at brunch. We begin to confess to sins, like feigning tears, or dieting. We give each other little shots of truth, like doctors do patients getting over an allergy. We draw each other the chessboard so we can make moves for once. It’s a far cry from the old style, like the time I mentioned biological clocks to a stubborn girlboss and she put her hand to her throat like I was choking her.
But as in the case of mushrooms, if consumed with the wrong mindset, truth may lead to a bad trip. Or a vengeful one. One video advises us, “Don’t be afraid to ask men for things,” like money, for “they will ask you to take your clothes off in two seconds.” Female Dating Strategists, online, call men “scrotes” and debate whether “crypto boys” have it coming. A woman tells me she is seducing her boyfriend with what he believes are her cooking skills but is really her Thermomix. “What is the best age to start finding a husband?” one video asks. “When you’re tired of working.” On Netflix reality shows the scammer tests her hypothesis repeatedly: she can take “how things are” for women, and subvert them to her own benefit. She will survive our disdain, then transcend it, lucratively. In the case of Christine Quinn, on the show Selling Sunset, she nearly gets away with it. Christine is a realtor, wicked to the point of delightful camp. She is false, in terms of hair, nose and designer clothes, which viewers suspect are rented. Most of her coworkers are former bottle girls, or actresses, equally posturing, funny, hungry. She treats them a little cruelly. She doesn’t deserve it, but in Season 3, suddenly, she wins. She gets the mansion of the kind she used to sell, the baby, the husband so insecure and fresh from the tech bubble that she can mold him into anything. It is not what all women want. But it is what Christine wants precisely. As part of her victory lap, she publishes a book called How to Be a Boss B*tch. Then, without warning, she begins to send up distress signals. She orders four hundred euros’ worth of manifestation candles, rose smudge sticks. Two sets emblazoned with the mantra “Cleanse & Protect.” Within weeks, her husband is arrested for domestic violence.
A power that comes from a sleight of hand is not real power. That summer in New York, I was not a strong villainess. I was a girl, frightened of her phone, crowded with messages from men I hated. When women get tired of living aspirationally, is the most sensible option remaining to sink low? Is there a truth for women who feel victimized that is not a can of worms, maggots? An honesty with the self that does not mean demeaning oneself for an advantage, or embracing these slapstick or tragic characters?
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The truths that governed the lives of women in Jane Austen’s day were grimmer than our own, sorrier and more rigid. Yet we can find in Austen’s novels plenty of reminders of our own strategies for escaping an imperfect reality. The lighting is poor, what with the candles, the air is bad, what with the breath, they wear petticoats and paper curls, but from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion there go in their past lives the familiar ensemble: Mary Musgrove and Mrs. Churchill complain of aches and pains; Lucy Steele, Isabella Thorpe and Lady Susan angle for “providers,” fancying there is no winning against the house without acting like a card shark, especially if the game is marriage; Catherine Morland indulges gothic hallucinations; Maria Bertram and Lydia Bennet stroll past “danger” signs and off perfectly visible cliffs, since the cliffs ought not to be there.
Austen’s happy endings are granted only to those protagonists who learn to look at reality, and live in it, clear-eyed. Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot, even the priggish Fanny Price, and above all Elizabeth Bennet are exceptional protagonists because they are, in Austen’s world, almost the exception to the rules of uncritical capitulation, cynicism and delusion. It is a fine line they walk; it takes Emma all of Emma to find it. Sense and Sensibility was the first of Austen’s mature works, and she teases out, with the triangle of Elinor Dashwood, Marianne Dashwood and Lucy Steele, an ethical trigonometry, however provisional: extreme sensitivity is unwise, material self-interest worthy only of our censure, common sense is good—with these as givens, solve for happiness and security next. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen pushes further. She asks, how can you be of an imperfect world without turning worldly? How can a woman maneuver herself without the unusual beauty and attendant luck that make maneuvering moot, as in the case of Elizabeth’s sister, Jane, and without losing her integrity, like Charlotte Lucas? Elizabeth Bennet “has something more of quickness than her sisters.” She also has moral authority. She is neither silly like her younger sisters, nor tactless like her mother, rank-obsessed like her cousin, disengaged like her father, for sale like Charlotte Lucas, supercilious like the inhabitants of Netherfield (minus Mr. Bingley). Her manner is arch; her pleasant ridicule, of certain conventions and herself, seems to the modern reader well-placed, and her irony even better. Lizzy does not suffer fools. Her “fine eyes” impress Mr. Darcy, but they also throw us a wink. Perhaps she is not one of them but one of us?
But for all that Elizabeth is above nineteenth-century Hertfordshire, she is certainly part of it too. “I never ridicule,” she says, “what is wise.” She knows her mother is uncouth, that Mr. Collins should not introduce himself to Mr. Darcy, that her sister’s disgrace will rub off on her like a bad smell. When Lydia runs off with Wickham, she reacts as if Lydia is not simply no longer a virgin but something closer to dead. She is happy for Jane’s “felicity” and also at the idea of her being “settled in that very house”—you know, the nice one. She might not play the hustler, marrying without love, but neither does she play the revolutionary, nor the martyr. She does not live as if the utopia were already here, just the Regency era, as it was actually lived. Elizabeth weighs the universally acknowledged truths of her day, deciding which are superfluous and which essential to her life. Her realism pins her, I suppose, a little to the ground. It limits the scope of what she might imagine for herself. Yet is it not a step forward when, in knowing the game but playing sincerely, she gets not just what she needed, but wanted and deserved?
These stories are not sticks of dynamite, burning down the system, but they are not inert. Today, we have different universal truths; tomorrow will bring newer ones; but I’d put money on Elizabeth remaining a model. If our world is any better than Austen’s, we can’t dismiss the role of such stories, the fact of our reading them, the fact of Austen, who won so little in her lifetime but so much after, writing them down. Here is a realism capable of delivering female characters from stereotype, from caricature, from sure fates of tragedy or farce. And also of delivering something to them: the real power that comes not from sleights of hand or strategic silences, but from speaking candidly about our lives as women and girls. The only dependable basis, I think, for the kind of political action it has always taken to improve them.
They say the truth hurts. Yes and no. I grew up hearing about labor pains, misogyny, the bosses who would grope you and the dark alleys you couldn’t walk down, menopause, postpartum depression, the grief of leaving a baby at home, the grief of leaving your work at the office because there was a baby at home. And yet I learned also of certain joys available to me on account of my sex. No one ever handed the promise of perfect equality to me like a present, and then one day took it back. Perhaps, despite my best efforts, I may never live as freely as men, not according to the same metrics at least. And yet there must be a reason why, when I ask my friends if they would like to be a man, they shake their heads and laugh at me.
Art credit: Zoe Hawk, The Stairway, 2020. Oil on panel, 24 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.