Vox - The Purity Chronicleshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2023-02-21T06:30:00-05:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/222168872023-02-21T06:30:00-05:002023-02-21T06:30:00-05:00Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle
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<figcaption>Efi Chalikopoulou/Vox</figcaption>
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<p>In the biggest tabloid love triangle of the 2000s, there was never a right kind of woman to be.</p> <p id="qOZfg7"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="PpWzZ5">There was a moment in the 2000s when you could tell the world exactly what kind of woman you were trying to be by who you were rooting for in the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie-Jennifer Aniston love triangle.</p>
<p id="o2xaPy">Being Team Aniston meant you believed in the sanctity of marriage; that you aspired to an achievable, girl-next-door glamour; that you wanted to be cool in a “hottest prom queen of the decade” kind of way. </p>
<p id="dnviX6">Being Team Jolie meant you believed that love was stronger than marriage; that you aspired to an otherworldly glamour; that you wanted to be cool in a “cosmopolitan global citizen with lots of tattoos” kind of a way. </p>
<p id="BHxMRW">It felt as though one of those women was the right kind of woman, and if we could all just decide who she was, then we would know what kind of woman we should be, too. But which one was it?</p>
<p id="oraPQ4">Nobody rooted for Brad Pitt in that love triangle, exactly, because that wasn’t what he was there for. Brad Pitt didn’t have to prove he was the right kind of man; that was already assumed. He existed to choose the right woman, and to prove her rightness with his approval. </p>
<p id="sNaMDS">But if the past few years of headlines prove anything, it’s that in the long term, none of the women in this story ever really got to be right. </p>
<p id="1AdSuU">Pitt and Jolie divorced in 2016, and now their messy custody battle has been dragged into the courts, with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/movies/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-lawsuit.html">Jolie alleging that Pitt behaved violently toward her and their children</a> and Pitt’s supporters accusing Jolie of a smear campaign. Meanwhile, Aniston revealed in <a href="https://www.allure.com/story/jennifer-aniston-december-2022-cover-interview">a December interview with Allure</a> that she struggled with infertility throughout her marriage to Pitt. The stories are sad and disturbing, but they’re also oddly familiar.</p>
<p id="HiLAtt">When Pitt ended his marriage with Aniston in 2005 to enter a relationship with Jolie, he launched what would become one of the most potent and profitable tabloid narratives of the era. The storyline was set subliminally before anyone even confirmed the basic events, <a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie">when Pitt masterminded a photo shoot with Jolie in W magazine</a> that showed the two of them together presiding over a house full of children, while the press darkly implied that Aniston had chosen a nascent film career over kids. That story was: One of these women deserves to have Brad Pitt’s babies. (“I’ll have your baby, Brad,” <a href="https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/2947313.html">said Eva Longoria’s T-shirt</a>, while “Team Aniston” and “Team Jolie” shirts <a href="https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/which-way-will-you-go">flew off the shelves</a>.) In a way, that’s still the story we’re telling now: One of these women deserves to mother Brad Pitt’s children. Which one are you rooting for? </p>
<p id="Ur9ntA">Questions about fatherhood, meanwhile, become significant by their absence. The issue of which woman Brad Pitt deserves to have kids with is rarely asked. Instead, we assume that he deserves whomever he happens to want. </p>
<p id="s2kz2o">The big question of this story is who is the winner, but you don’t need to struggle to win if you’ve already won. The only person involved to whom that applied was Brad Pitt. He needed no trophy of his own because his trophy was his whole life.</p>
<p id="p7UkHg">Aniston and Jolie never actually got to win. They were always on the brink of having won, always on the brink of having proven themselves worthy of love, always contingent. They were never allowed to have won.</p>
<p id="mpWHLR">As Pitt, Jolie, and Aniston return to their old tropes, each of them is trying to rewrite the narrative in their own favor, just like they did last time. To see how they’re doing it now, we’ll have to look at how they did it the first time around, and what they stand to gain now.</p>
<h3 id="OG2ZC2">“Is Brad to be blamed here?”</h3>
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<cite>Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic</cite>
<figcaption>Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt during the 54th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, 2002.</figcaption>
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<p id="6pjSYA">In 2004, the world seemed confident that Jennifer Aniston was a woman made for motherhood. She was just coming off <em>Friends</em>, where she spent the last few seasons playing a single mother who is also successful in both her career and in love. Sunkissed and golden and effortlessly likable, Aniston seemed poised to follow in her character’s footsteps. Only in real life, she would have Hollywood’s greatest male sex symbol at her side all the while. </p>
<p id="d0jg6o">In 1999, a year before Aniston and Pitt were married, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1999/12/tabloids-1999-secrets-exposed.html">the Globe announced</a> that Aniston was “about to become a bride and a mother.” “Jennifer Aniston: Brad, Babies & a Breakout Movie” read <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TwentyYearsAgo/comments/wy15mq/people_jennifer_aniston_brad_babies_a_breakout/">the cover of People magazine</a> when Aniston appeared — not pregnant — in 2002. She and Pitt would, W magazine reported in 2003, be having somewhere between two and seven children together. When Aniston hosted <em>SNL</em> in 2004, she appeared in a sketch <a href="https://snltranscripts.jt.org/03/03iphotographers.phtml">hounded by paparazzi</a> who shrieked in chorus, “When are you gonna have a baby?!”</p>
<p id="sFB0Zx">Aniston was, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/10/jennifer-aniston-fertility-obsession-ivf">as Guardian columnist Zoe Williams argued in 2022</a>, an ideal woman for the post-feminist ’90s, which is to say she was most exceptional in how deeply, sweetly approachable she appeared to be. Williams argues you can see Aniston’s perfection for the era in her famous hair: “not too long (attention-seeking), nor too short (feminist/independent), not too blond (conventional) or too dark (vampy), not too shiny (airhead) nor in any way dull (frigid), [it] was the perfect, man-pleasing hair for the late 20th-century woman.”</p>
<p id="7pwJMj">Aniston was considered a little bit lowbrow, too, which made it all the more obvious that she was meant to be a mother. Aniston was America’s sweetheart, sure, but she was a TV actress in the era before people started talking about TV shows like they were serious art. If she wanted to put her career on hold to have a baby while Pitt was off making movies and trying to land an Oscar, who would it hurt? </p>
<p id="lbIMfm">Angelina Jolie was another story altogether. For years, she had been in many ways the Mary Magdalene to Aniston’s Virgin Mary, a wild child who seemed to be all sex appeal and taboo-breaking. Sure, she won an Oscar for <em>Girl Interrupted</em>, but then she followed it up by <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/angelina-jolies-oscar-kiss-with-brother-james-haven-turns-20/">smooching her brother</a>. In 2006, <a href="https://archive.ph/ayhVk#selection-737.0-744.0">Vanity Fair would succinctly sum up Jolie’s image</a> in this era as “a tattooed vixen with a taste for bisexuality, heroin, brotherly incest, mental institutions, and wearing her husbands’ blood.” Also her hair was long (attention-seeking) and dark (vampy).</p>
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<cite>Ke.Mazur/WireImage</cite>
<figcaption>Angelina Jolie poses with her Oscar at the Academy Awards in 2000.</figcaption>
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<p id="V5aR3G">Jolie, unlike Aniston, did not seem born to be a maternal figure. If Aniston’s most iconic role of the 2000s saw her navigating single motherhood with a devoted team of friends at her side, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDtyR3PeB8w">Jolie’s saw her shooting up a mall</a> to fully express her disgust with the idea of becoming a housewife in the suburbs.</p>
<p id="uypfB9">Moreover, Jolie was a figure of worrying ambition. She had an Oscar. She didn’t seem likely to put her own career aside to raise children while her husband went off to try to win his own Oscar.</p>
<p id="TV7toC">But in 2002, Jolie adopted her first child, Maddox, an orphan from Cambodia. <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/angelina-jolies-perfect-game">As Anne Helen Petersen documented in BuzzFeed</a>, she began to tweak her image, at first a little, and then a lot. She got herself photographed playing with her kid in the park, and she started to talk to the press a lot about her humanitarian concerns. She became a UN goodwill ambassador. At the time that she became involved with Pitt, Jolie was, <a href="https://archive.ph/ayhVk#selection-737.0-744.0">as Vanity Fair put it</a>, morphing into “a globe-trotting humanitarian who seemed to be channeling Audrey Hepburn.”</p>
<p id="dJ1oei">At the beginning of 2004, Aniston and Pitt <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-baby-narrative-madness-decades-150936562.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGMS_4UqVveGRMISmpNDsPSnV5wyhGMaEwybyDGeMrxkdkuLHnMBwE8TpGi6MzFVN7CLcc02w-TGKuu2-fBNa158X5jwq5-4qjmnVHPkIN_a2kc7bbOx9e29au6FM9hlkHxGlux9BdDDZVk4u2SJJ0CM0tBljS3Uqi8j_T5boSDx">began to tell the press</a> they were planning to have a baby soon. <em>Friends</em> was winding down in January of 2005, and Pitt would wrap <em>Mr. and Mrs. Smith</em> in February of the same year. Their schedules were lining up. Everything was falling into place. </p>
<p id="JVjMkK">Instead, in January 2005, Aniston and Pitt announced their divorce. That April, Us Weekly published <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-split-pic-that-confirmed-romance-w441093/">photographs of Pitt with Jolie and Maddox</a> on a beach in Kenya, looking every inch the family unit. Pitt, clearly, had swapped one would-be mother for another.</p>
<p id="ggB0IZ">Wild, sexy, unpredictable Jolie was tailor-made for a villain narrative, for the idea that she stole the hottest man in Hollywood from the beloved star of <em>Friends</em>. But her years of image reshaping meant that she also had a counternarrative ready and waiting for her to step into. She was a serious person with serious concerns, and it wasn’t her fault if she also happened to be so gorgeous there was no way Brad Pitt could resist her. For the first time, the possibility emerged that perhaps Aniston was not, after all, the right sort of woman.</p>
<p id="PUNbk9">As the divorce progressed, onlookers took sides (see: the above T-shirts). <a href="https://forum.detik.com/angelina-jolie-vs-jennifer-aniston-t26351.html?highlight=aniston%3F%3F%3F%3F%3F?&page=595">A 2008 item for Yahoo</a> was able to work both sides of the story at once: Aniston “comes across looking a tad bit pathetic at times,” but Jolie was “a mastermind manipulator ... willing to do whatever it takes to get her way.”</p>
<p id="rRSOS9">By the close of the decade, with three adopted children and three biological, Brangelina were no longer adulterers but saints. They were A-listers who gave the power of their wealth and attention to worthy causes, an Oscar winner and an Oscar hopeful and their gaggle of beautiful children. In the end, motherhood was to be the ruin of the Betty and the redemption of the Veronica.</p>
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<cite>Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and kids arrive at the Venice Film Festival in 2007.</figcaption>
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<p id="jBWC9i">Aniston, childless and unmarried and with her biggest hit fading into the past, was painted as the loser, the spinster: poor, pathetic Jen. Dark rumors swirled that maybe she hadn’t even wanted children, that maybe she’d picked her career over kids, but her fan base didn’t believe it. Part of loving her became wishing she would finally find happiness, which meant true love and children. The perennial questions tabloids began to ask of Aniston was: When was it going to happen for her?</p>
<p id="vboOvM">The question of Pitt and his culpability or lack thereof in the whole story was, noticeably, missing. In the narrative of the tabloids, Aniston and Jolie are the agents acting upon Pitt, while he and his golden beauty, his charm, his credibility all rest inviolate and whole. He was the trophy for whoever proved herself worthy of him.</p>
<p id="ClPE9l">“Is Brad to be blamed here?” <a href="https://www.koimoi.com/hollywood-news/when-angelina-jolie-ditched-wearing-an-underwear-to-tease-brad-pitt-in-a-sx-scene-while-he-was-already-married-to-jennifer-aniston/">demanded the gossip site Koimoi as late as 2020</a>, after alleging that Jolie “was a temptress on the set” of <em>Mr. and Mrs. Smith</em>. “Angelina is one of the most beautiful women in the world, it might be hard to resist.”</p>
<p id="FNdEBO">The moral of this story: You can be a good woman, but if you’re not a mother, your goodness is sad. You can be an unruly woman, but if you are seen mothering in public, your unruliness has been tamed and we no longer have to worry about you.</p>
<p id="1nq50F">To be a mother is to be a woman fulfilling her duty. Then we may consider you tamed, passive. We tell you that you win, but in fact you have been won.</p>
<h3 id="MwxpWZ">“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one”</h3>
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<cite>Christopher Polk/NBC via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Brad Pitt at the 2023 Golden Globes.</figcaption>
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<p id="fXQKM8">Pitt and Jolie divorced in 2016, uncoupling the elements of Brangelina to be a portmanteau no more. At the time, there were vague stories about an altercation on the family’s private plane, but the story was difficult to follow and seemed to make little impact on Pitt’s reputation. What we knew then was this: Pitt, apparently, had been drunk, and he’d had some sort of confrontation with Jolie and with 15-year-old Maddox, which Jolie said had gotten “physical” and <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/angelina-jolie-and-brad-pitt-split-source-responds-to-abuse-allegations/">Pitt insisted had not</a>. The FBI investigated and filed no charges.</p>
<p id="VDn7ov">In September of 2016, Jolie filed for divorce and demanded sole custody of their six children. Pitt countersued for full custody for himself. By the end of the year, they’d reached a provisional agreement in which Jolie would have full custody temporarily. Meanwhile, battle for control of the narrative played out in the press.</p>
<p id="R0xblb">Jolie initially took her story to TMZ, which loves a scandal and knows no loyalties. But the print tabloids, which know where their bread is buttered, were immediately Team Pitt. “Her Plot To Destroy Brad,” <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/angelina-jolie-vows-to-destroy-brad-pitt-in-divorce-war-w442275/">screamed Us Weekly</a>, in an article that claimed Jolie was running a vicious and untrue smear campaign. Meanwhile, <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/angelina-jolie-and-brad-pitt-split-source-responds-to-abuse-allegations/">People had “Brad’s Side of the Story</a>.”</p>
<p id="MPCDaw">In May 2017, <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-gq-style-cover-story">Pitt sat for a soulful cover story in GQ</a> and talked about “looking at my weaknesses and failures and owning my side of the street.” He had, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/07/angelina-jolie-cover-story?mbid=social_twitter">Vanity Fair concluded</a>, “won hearts and minds.”</p>
<p id="CW8uS8">Jolie, meanwhile, was keeping her side of the story close to the chest. She declined to comment on the circumstances of the divorce, but profiles about her increasingly dwelled on her rich-lady kookiness, the sense that her many foreign adoptions were the result not of an admirable global consciousness but rather of a <a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/hollywoods-white-savior-obsession-colonialism">white savior complex</a>. Pitt won the day.</p>
<p id="1zMWDM">The story probably would have stayed vague and amorphous and easy for Pitt to talk his way through had he not chosen to drag it into the courts. </p>
<p id="O1M0y0">In February 2022, Pitt sued Jolie <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/brad-pitt-and-angelina-jolies-winery-lawsuit-everything-to-know/">over the vineyard they used to mutually own</a>. They bought it together in 2008 and married there in 2014. Pitt claims that when they divorced in 2016, they agreed neither one of them would sell their shares without the other’s permission. However, in 2021, Jolie sold her shares to Tenute del Mondo, the wine division of Russian liquor company Stoli. Pitt’s suit says the sale undermines his own investment in the business.</p>
<p id="tfWZH8">Jolie, meanwhile, says the no-sale agreement never existed. According to Jolie, she tried to get Pitt to buy out her shares in 2021. When sales negotiations failed, she went over his head, talked to a judge, and <a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/tmz-reports-brad-pitt-suing-angelina-jolie-for-selling-miraval-shares-but-they-dont-present-full-picture/70385">got legal approval to sell her shares</a>. Tenute del Mondo took over Jolie’s shares and promptly sued Pitt for mismanaging the vineyard, and then Pitt countersued them and sued Jolie for good measure, too.</p>
<p id="NT9Mgk">As for why those sales negotiations between Pitt and Jolie failed: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/movies/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-lawsuit.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes">The New York Times reported in October 2022</a> that the sale fell apart because Pitt wanted Jolie to sign a nondisclosure agreement pledging never to publicly discuss what happened on that plane ride in 2016. When she wouldn’t do it, he refused to buy her out.</p>
<p id="q3bO6v">Now Jolie is publicly discussing the plane ride in detail for the first time as part of her countersuit against Pitt. She has also anonymously filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI (<a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2022/04/19/white-house-wonders-to-mask-or-not-to-mask-00026178">first discovered by Politico in April</a>) seeking more information on the FBI’s report on the plane ride from 2016 and its decision not to press charges against Pitt.</p>
<p id="ZDHe8C">The redacted FBI report <a href="https://www.etonline.com/brad-pitt-and-angelina-jolies-2016-jet-incident-all-the-revelations-from-the-fbi-report-189286">first leaked to the public in August 2022</a>, and its contents are disturbing. The report describes a drunk Pitt describing one of his children (likely Maddox) as a “fucking Columbine kid,” grabbing and shaking Jolie, punching the ceiling next to her head, and pouring beer over her as she slept. The report says he menaced one of the children (again, likely Maddox) and injured Jolie when she prevented Pitt from attacking the child. It also states that the investigative agent has provided the US attorney’s office with “copies of a probable cause statement related to this incident.”</p>
<p id="2CJAgY">As the report’s story filtered out, Pitt went on the offensive against Jolie in the print tabloids. The story had already been investigated, he argued, and Jolie was only making it public now in order to hurt him. “What are the motivations of a person to take up court time and public resources in filing an anonymous FOIA request for material they have had for years?” <a href="https://people.com/movies/brad-pitt-source-angelina-jolie-trying-to-inflict-the-most-amount-of-pain-by-reviving-plane-incident/">demanded a “source close to Pitt” in People magazine</a>. “There’s only one: to inflict the most amount of pain on her ex.” (<a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/himpathy-for-brad-pitt-dominates-after-fbi-report-about-violent-incident-against-angelina-jolie-on-private-plane-made-public/71525">Jolie’s attorneys maintained</a> she was only trying to find out why no charges were ever filed against Pitt.)</p>
<p id="LkytLB">In October, Jolie filed her countersuit, which made her accusations against Pitt more explicit than they were in the redacted FBI report. The countersuit alleges that Pitt choked one of the children and struck another across the face, and that in addition to pouring beer on Jolie, he poured red wine on the children.</p>
<p id="ZwjxdZ">“Angelina Jolie is on a smear campaign against Brad Pitt, hashing and rehashing the same allegations she’s made for years — allegations that have fallen flat with authorities — this according to sources close to Brad,” <a href="https://twitter.com/TMZ/status/1577570228355174400">reported TMZ</a>.</p>
<p id="nZmdom">Pitt is the legal aggressor here: He sued Jolie. But his allies in the press continually argue that the reason their custody battle has made it to the courts is that Jolie is caught up in some sort of vengeful campaign to destroy Pitt’s life. In the popular narrative of this lawsuit, Pitt’s own culpability is erased, even as he loudly congratulates himself on his ability to own his mistakes.</p>
<p id="iTUW94">“Brad has owned everything he’s responsible for from day one — unlike the other side,” <a href="https://pagesix.com/2022/10/06/brad-pitt-wont-own-anything-he-didnt-do-lawyer-says/">Pitt’s lawyer told Page Six</a>. “He’s not going to own anything he didn’t do. He has been on the receiving end of every type of personal attack and misrepresentation.”</p>
<p id="y5jMx2">This move is in many ways a return to the narrative of 2005. “It’s hard not to notice how the current moment is replaying early images we associate with Brangelina — Jolie as the bad influence, Pitt as the innocent charmer caught in the drama,” <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-brangelina.html">mused Angelica Jade Bastién in New York magazine</a>. Back then, Jolie was able to turn her image around, to win the PR battle against a marginalized Aniston. This war, though, is different.</p>
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<cite>Demetrius Freeman/Washington Post via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Angelina Jolie during an event celebrating the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in the East Room of the White House on March 16, 2022.</figcaption>
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<p id="Ac07QB">In the early 2000s, Pitt and Jolie were at close to equal levels of fame, celebrity peers. Now, Pitt has far more power than Jolie. His acting career has flourished and he finally got that Oscar, while Jolie no longer seems interested in her own acting and hasn’t made a notable hit since <em>Maleficent</em> in 2014. Pitt’s second career as a producer has paid off with multiple credible hits (<em>Twelve Years a Slave</em>, <em>Moonlight</em>, <em>Promising Young Women</em>, <em>She Said</em>), while Jolie’s second career as a director has stalled after a series of <a href="https://www.projectcasting.com/blog/news/by-the-sea-flops-in-the-box-office/">flops</a> and <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/angelina-jolie-first-they-killed-my-father-audition-game-1201861576/">credibility-sapping misfires</a>.</p>
<p id="yCS3Yn">When Jolie turned her image around in the 2000s, she did so through the performance of motherhood: picture after picture of Jolie as a loving parent with her brood of children. For Pitt, such a performance doesn’t seem to be necessary. No one has photographed him with his children or indeed has any proof he has been in their lives since that plane ride in 2016, but that doesn’t seem to matter for this fight: Pitt can still earn <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-moms/news/brad-pitt-reacts-to-daughter-zahara-going-to-spelman-college/">glowing</a><a href="https://people.com/parents/brad-pitt-re-la/"> headlines</a> from the tabloids just by remarking that he’s proud of his kids. Fatherhood or the lack thereof does not have the same iconographic power that motherhood does.</p>
<p id="A3dOIN">And in this era of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23581859/me-too-backlash-susan-faludi-weinstein-roe-dobbs-depp-heard">Me Too backlash</a>, Pitt’s side of the story gets an extra leg up from an internet army eager to burnish his claims. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-allegations-amber-heard-chasing-scandal-rcna51959">An NBC News study</a> found that social media figures who built up a following bashing Amber Heard to their followers now have Jolie in their crosshairs, and that they’re calling Pitt and Jolie’s legal battle “the next Depp v. Heard.”</p>
<p id="YY6vlM">At the heart of Pitt’s strategy, though, is an attack on Jolie’s motherhood. Pitt, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/3/26/21194396/woody-allen-memoir-apropos-of-nothing-dylan-farrow-sexual-abuse">like Woody Allen before him</a>, is claiming that his ex-wife is turning their children against him in a baseless bid for vengeance. “BRAD PITT SOURCES: ANGELINA HAS POISONED KIDS AGAINST HIM ... She’s On A Hate Campaign,” <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2022/09/08/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-paparazzi-relationship-rolling-stone/">declared TMZ in October</a>. It went on to quote an anonymous source claiming Pitt has a “limited and strained relationship [with his kids], because of her campaign of alienation.” Pitt is saying that Jolie is not a good mother, that her love for their children is unnatural and manipulative. Angelina Jolie, according to Pitt’s current narrative, no longer deserves to have Brad Pitt’s babies.</p>
<p id="Z69ywb">The moral of this story: You can be a good mother, but without power, that doesn’t mean people consider your story worth believing. You can be a good mother, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything if a man questions your goodness. </p>
<h3 id="29w8HO">“I don’t have anything to hide at this point”</h3>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZKV7aZ4vvB2UAzS5I6e_gy8Hhy8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24357492/1427974229.jpg">
<cite>James Devaney/GC Images</cite>
<figcaption>Jennifer Aniston filming on location for <em>The Morning Show</em> at the Mercer Hotel on September 26, 2022, in New York City.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="ERpeP7">If Jolie’s star has fallen since the 2000s, Aniston’s has risen. <em>Friends</em> nostalgia only keeps growing, and HBO Max’s reunion special last May <a href="https://hiddenremote.com/2021/06/22/friends-cast-crazy-reunion-paychecks/">was a blockbuster hit</a>. With the success of Apple TV’s <em>The Morning Show</em>, on which she both co-stars and works as a producer, Aniston now has another big hit — and since this one isn’t a comedy, she’s been able to expand the public’s perception of her range.</p>
<p id="Gm8jmw">Now twice-divorced and still childless, Aniston is no longer America’s girl next door. She’s been promoted.</p>
<p id="HOysaw">“At 50 years old, Jennifer Aniston’s brand is Boss,” <a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/the-work-and-power-era-of-jennifer-aniston-instyle-cover-feature/57463">declared Lainey Gossip in 2019</a>, as Aniston posed for the cover of InStyle in heaps of gold jewelry, face stern. “She’s been a boss for years with her own projects but it was never actively part of her image then. Now? Boss is the message now. And it looks great on her.”</p>
<p id="hsS7dQ">In interviews, Aniston has begun positioning herself as an ambitious striver who still has more to show the world. “I was the girl next door, the damsel in distress, the brokenhearted — your traditional rom-com themes. And at a certain point, it was like, ‘Can’t we do something else?’” <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/feature/jennifer-aniston-interview-morning-show-friends-murder-mystery-sequel-1235058142/">she told the Hollywood Reporter in 2021</a>. “There are still certain directors I’d love to work with, ones who have their pick of who they like, and sometimes I want to go, ‘I’d love to be part of that club.’” Wes Anderson, she thought, would be interesting.</p>
<p id="XCVkyG">Pitt, <a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/brad-pitt-participates-in-own-mythology-gq-cover-interview-by-award-winning-author-ottessa-moshfegh/71186">whom Lainey Gossip calls</a> “cunning as a Kardashian” in his subtle understanding of the publicity game, seems to have picked up on the shifting heat metrics. One of his hottest publicity moments since his divorce from Jolie came in 2020, when he and Aniston ran into each other backstage at the SAG Awards: Pitt there on the Oscar trail for <em>Once Upon a Time in Hollywood</em>, Aniston there for <em>The Morning Show</em>. Both would win trophies that night.</p>
<p id="MBjjYj">In photos they can be seen beaming at each other with delight and embracing. Then Aniston turns to walk away — and Pitt, gazing wistfully after her, keeps holding on to her wrist. The moment was so celebrated it instantly earned a name: <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2020/01/brad-pitt-and-jennifer-aniston-embrace-at-2020-sag-awards.html">The Hand Clasp</a>.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CGzs9kmGrgR2ZReFT3Bt6fdzuaw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24357446/1200626222.jpg">
<cite>Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Turner</cite>
<figcaption>The Hand Clasp.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="916Ckx">“I’m already writing the fanfic in my mind and I’m not even sorry about it,” <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a30611054/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-body-language-sag-awards-hand-hold/">said Cosmo</a>.</p>
<p id="3bKO6v">“I don’t think there is a person in the world that doesn’t want to be grabbed by Brad Pitt that way,” opined <a href="https://theblast.com/c/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-hand-grab-photo-sag-awards-fans-lose-it-angelina-jolie/">Blast</a>.</p>
<p id="sinTVb">“Now you must leave us to die in peace,” <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2020/01/brad-pitt-and-jennifer-aniston-embrace-at-2020-sag-awards.html">decreed The Cut</a>.</p>
<p id="KFLgNM"><a href="https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-brangelina.html">As Bastien has noted</a>, Pitt seems to frequently remind people of how much they like his exes whenever his image could use a little extra zhuzh; just last summer, he did <a href="https://goop.com/style/outfitting-ideas/gwyneth-paltrow-brad-pitt-interview/">a friendly sit-down with Gwyneth Paltrow</a>. A moment with Aniston on her upswing makes for a particularly potent reminder of why the fantasy of Brad Pitt is so compelling: Here is a man who is secure enough in himself to date interesting women, and to remain good friends with them after it all ends.</p>
<p id="dLmUJf">But Aniston’s success can also be a reminder of what is available to women who do not win the motherhood races. She’s divorced (twice), and she’s still happy. She doesn’t have children, and she is still successful. In her 50s, she’s revitalizing and reimagining her career.</p>
<p id="9syLgd">So <a href="https://www.allure.com/story/jennifer-aniston-december-2022-cover-interview">when Aniston told Allure about her infertility struggles this fall</a>, she did so from a place of strength, as the boss who doesn’t need a man and doesn’t need babies.</p>
<p id="8W6eHa">In the 2000s, she told Allure, there was a narrative “that I was just selfish. I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.” She doesn’t have anything to hide because she has the power now.</p>
<p id="Be1831">This entire story is, in the end, a story about power: who has the power to win America’s love. When Aniston was young and hungry and coming off a hit show, she didn’t have the power to keep the tabloids from rendering her pathetic, but she does now. Back then, Jolie had the power to salvage her image from a press intent on painting her as a homewrecker, but now, she’s lost enough standing that she’s falling prey to the same misogynistic rumor-mongering that took down Amber Heard.</p>
<p id="Rdw9Lu">In 2004, Brad Pitt had the power to render his own presence in this story invisible, unremarkable, hegemonic. He’s trying to pull off the same trick here. Mostly, it’s working.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23380475/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-angelina-jolie-divorce-love-triangle-tabloidConstance Grady2022-07-14T09:00:00-04:002022-07-14T09:00:00-04:00How the world changed its mind on Tracy Flick
<figure>
<img alt="A brightly colored illustration shows Tracy Flick in blue button-up shirt and sweater vest sitting at a desk with hands folded; a glass bowl of votes and a plate of personalized cupcakes are next to her. Behind her, a yellow banner that says “Tracy” hangs against a green chalkboard and a pink wall. The banner has been torn in half." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oGQXrtGs1XMD8qUcnnxoTGrZ8og=/399x0:4399x3000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71114502/Reese_witherspoon_VOx2__1_.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Tracy Flick never wins. | Michelle Rohn for Vox</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The new Election sequel shows how far we’ve come in handling ambitious women — and how far we have to go.</p> <p id="qOZfg7"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="SJxEoy">In 1999, as the black-hearted comedy <em>Election</em> slunk its way onto movie screens across America, the film critic MaryAnn Johanson made a prescient prediction. This was going to be one of those movies, <a href="https://www.flickfilosopher.com/1999/04/election-review.html">Johanson wrote</a>, that would see a huge generation gap in the way audiences responded to it.</p>
<p id="ZAkPcI"><em>Election</em>, directed by Alexander Payne and based on the 1998 novel by Tom Perrotta, stars Matthew Broderick, the slacker Gen X hero of <em>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off</em>. Here, Broderick plays a high school teacher named Mr. McAllister, or Mr. M. He’s scheming to foil the plans of go-getter Tracy Flick, played by a young Reese Witherspoon with her chin thrust permanently, belligerently forward.</p>
<p id="wd28kN">Tracy, who dots the <em>i</em> in her last name with a gold star, wants to be president of the student body, is qualified to take on the role, and moreover, is running unopposed. But Mr. M. finds her so annoying that he ends up ruining his own life in his quest to take her down. Adultery, voter fraud, and 200 personalized cupcakes ensue.</p>
<p id="IGagic">While Mr. McAllister is the point-of-view character, <em>Election</em> doesn’t exactly take a side in his epic battle against Tracy Flick. Still, film critics at the time sided almost universally with the erstwhile Ferris and against good-girl Tracy. “One wonders if this Tracy might not really be a monster, a kind of Hitler in the crib,” <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Election-Gets-Results-Teen-black-comedy-hits-2933339.php">mused the SFGate</a>, speaking for the crowd.</p>
<p id="Ti64he">Johanson wasn’t so sure that consensus would stand the test of time. “Tracy’s not actually a bad person,” <a href="https://www.flickfilosopher.com/1999/04/election-review.html">Johanson reasoned</a>. “It’s only in McAllister’s head that she’s dangerous, and as a fellow misanthropic Xer, I see his point — Tracy is annoyingly eager, determined, and devoted to her school to the point of self-sacrifice.” Yet everything that made Tracy seem so annoying and even malicious to McAllister could, Johanson pointed out, be considered heroic — especially by the generation that was at the time just beginning to be called millennial.</p>
<p id="zPcIaa">More than 20 years later, Johanson has been proven correct, up to a point. As Tracy makes her return to pop culture in the form of Perrotta’s new <em>Election</em> sequel, the novel <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>, she’s being greeted with the form of pop culture mea culpas that we have become used to rolling out for most of the prominent women of the Y2K eras: <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2022/06/tracy-flick-cant-win-election-book-reese-witherspoon.html">think piece</a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/tracy-flick-cant-win-tom-perrotta-review/629635/"> after</a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/books/review-tracy-flick-cant-win-tom-perrotta.html"> think piece</a> about how we were wrong about Tracy Flick way back when. She has become a sort of fictional amalgam of all those wronged women, Britney and Hillary and Monica rolled into one obstreperous package.</p>
<p id="03lIhw">“How despicably does a man have to behave before he forfeits our sympathy?” asked New York Times film critic A.O. Scott <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/movies/tracy-flick-reese-witherspoon.html">in a 2019 reevaluation of the film</a>. Scott found himself appalled by his old instinct to read Tracy as a villain and Mr. M. as a monster. “How much does a woman — a teenage girl — have to suffer before she earns it?”</p>
<p id="gu9Inw">Perrotta asks a similar question in <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>. In this new sequel, Tracy is once again thwarted by those who would deny her the honors she deserves, and once again she suffers enormously in the process.</p>
<p id="o9RXwr">Contrary to the title, Tracy does, in the end, win the day. But her win is vexed, fraught, and shaded with ambiguities. It seems ripe for nearly as much misinterpretation as <em>Election</em> itself was.</p>
<p id="cXycof">Tracy Flick is a Rorschach test for how we think about women, ambition, and the power dynamics of sex. To understand how Tracy transitioned from baby Hitler to symbol of wronged women everywhere, we’ll have to go all the way back to 1998. We’ll see what led audiences to read her as a villain then, what makes them think of her as a hero now — and what biases might still be hiding in the way we read Tracy Flick.</p>
<h3 id="pDv0jh">“Tracy Flick is one of the most complex female characters to run riot through an American movie in memory”</h3>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Am9AE_qaVSaJAM9wa3MEbpBigjQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23759379/Election_poster.jpg">
<cite>MTV Productions via <a class="ql-link" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126886/" target="_blank">IMDB</a></cite>
<figcaption>The original poster for Alexander Payne’s 1999 <em>Election</em> shows a disconcerting close-up of Tracy Flick’s beaming smile, with Mr. M. scowling out at the camera from the inside of her mouth.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="WhSrwH">There are two things about Perrotta’s <em>Election</em> that have largely been discarded or ignored in its cultural legacy that are crucial for understanding Tracy Flick.</p>
<p id="i7IYgr">The first is that the events of the novel take place in 1992, and are explicitly framed as an analogue to the 1992 presidential election and Bill Clinton’s affair with Gennifer Flowers. <em>Election</em>’s high school student body president race features a George H.W. Bush candidate, an establishment figure who should be a lock for the presidency but who isn’t exactly popular: Tracy. There’s an affable Bill Clinton figure, the popular jock Paul Metzler, whom Mr. M. manipulates into running against Tracy. And there’s a Ross Perot, a third-party candidate who runs on a platform of nihilism and ends up picking up massive amounts of support. That’s Paul’s sister Tammy, who runs against him as an act of revenge after he steals her girlfriend.</p>
<p id="KBXne3">The big twist in <em>Election</em> is that Paul, the Bill Clinton, isn’t the one who has the dark secret. Tracy does.</p>
<p id="X87JO8">Tracy is a good girl with a squeaky clean reputation and unstoppable forward drive. She empathizes with a pundit’s description of George H.W. Bush as a man whose “fire-in-the-belly” is “all he has.” Her smoldering sexuality leaves Paul incapable of thinking straight around her. “She’s got this ass,” he confides to us. </p>
<p id="gy3RBL">Tracy’s secret, the Gennifer Flowers peccadillo waiting in the wings to come out and destroy her, is that she had what she describes as “an affair” with her English teacher, Dave, a close friend of Mr. M.’s. (Confronted with the term “sexual harassment,” she says simply, “I don’t think it applies,” on the grounds that Dave never threatened her GPA.) And although Mr. M. never comes right out and says so, it’s clear that he decides to go after Tracy as a way of punishing her for this affair: for looking like a good girl and acting like someone else.</p>
<p id="EiM1Sx">“Looking at her,” he complains, “you’d think she was just a sweet teenage girl who deserved every good thing that had ever happened to her.” In fact, he considers Tracy guilty: first of sleeping with Dave, then of dumping him and letting her mom tell the principal about their relationship, so that Dave lost both his job and his marriage. Tracy, in Mr. M.’s eyes, has displayed a failure of character.</p>
<p id="m8oiKI">Contemporary critics had no trouble picking up on the tension between Tracy’s good-girl image and her jailbait actions. The contrast was delicious, and part of what made Tracy such an instantly iconic character. “Tracy Flick,” <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/19/reviews/980419.19lasallt.html">ran the New York Times book review</a>, “is a self-conscious overachiever who defies labeling as a goody-two-shoes: she once had an affair with a teacher — ‘even if he did turn out to be as big a baby as any 16-year-old.’”</p>
<p id="DhMVoi">The contrast was only heightened a year later, when Payne’s version of <em>Election</em> hit theaters. As played by Witherspoon, Tracy’s no longer a charismatic sexpot. Now she’s prim in her headbands and Peter Pan collars, and pointedly childlike. When we first meet her, she’s sitting in a chair and swinging her legs because she’s so short that her feet don’t quite touch the ground. When we see her seduction by her teacher — now renamed Dave Novotny — she’s perched on his couch, guzzling root beer through a straw, eyes giant.</p>
<p id="lyOjiL">Still, the film treats Tracy’s perky precocity as something seductive in its own right, and an object of intense fascination for Mr. M. In Mr. M.’s head, Tracy’s lips are red and luscious as they hover over his ear and whisper about how excited she is to be working <em>very closely</em> with him. When he has sex with his wife, he sees Tracy’s head superimposed over hers, headband and all, and hears her say, “Fuck me, Mr. M.”</p>
<p id="u8N0Pn">There’s a vast, dizzying divide between the prudishness of Tracy’s looks and the raunch shown both in her relationship with Dave and in Mr. M.’s fantasies. For most critics in 1999, that divide was key to the layers of her character.</p>
<p id="WzqOW4">“Tracy Flick,” <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/high-school-high/">LA Weekly declared</a>, is “one of the most complex female characters to run riot through an American movie in memory. The character is so rich, so contradictory and so deeply, enduringly unsettling that it’s almost a shock — if she weren’t so obviously homegrown, Tracy Flick could be French. (In some scenes, she comes across like a slightly sturdier Lolita, though one as shanghaied by her own ambition as she is by men.)”</p>
<p id="feQfB9">The idea that Tracy carries as much responsibility for her relationship with her teacher as Clinton did for his adultery with Flowers, and that this relationship should be a source of shame for her, is embedded in the text. But it would also be contradicted by the second forgotten plot line of Perrotta’s <em>Election.</em></p>
<h3 id="mNMYaF">“It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was 15” </h3>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zrk0ZlsEcwedzB6MxE4wuZmW7Kg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23759446/election_still_1.jpeg">
<cite>MTV Productions</cite>
<figcaption>Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in <em>Election</em>.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="aWCtuK">Mr. M’s trusty current events class doesn’t only discuss the 1992 election. It also discusses a horrific local news story. The football stars of a neighboring high school, we learn, have sexually assaulted a girl Mr. M. describes as “mentally retarded” with a broomstick. Their defense in court is that the assault was consensual.</p>
<p id="hLsuGL">Mr. M.’s students overwhelmingly side with the boys. So does much of the rest of the town, which we see gossiping over the girl’s “major pair of hooters.” Mr. M., disgusted by the town’s response, prides himself on knowing better than the high schoolers when it comes to this case. But the rest of <em>Election</em> makes it clear that he doesn’t, really. While Mr. M. doesn’t want to admit it, the football player rape case and Dave’s seduction of Tracy are analogous: both sexual abuses of power. Tracy is a child, her teacher takes advantage of her, and Mr. M. blames Tracy for it.</p>
<p id="mFpDra">Mr. M. is even prone to gossiping about the bodies of his teenage students, including Tracy’s, in the same way that the rest of the town gossips about the football players’ victim. “It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was 15,” says Mr. M. of Tracy and her much-discussed ass. “Spend enough time in a high school, and you forget what 15 <em>means</em>.”</p>
<p id="Oh0kPb">Perrotta won’t let the reader forget what 15 means, though. When we see Tracy’s rendezvous with Dave, it becomes painfully clear just how teenage she really is.</p>
<p id="qcnKTd">“It’s a bad dream,” she tells us: “my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he’s reading aloud in class and wants us to think he’s moved by the passage.”</p>
<p id="9PAMjb">Tracy is very young, Dave is very middle-aged, and the whole situation is sad and gross. If Tracy thinks she’s consenting, the novel implies it’s only in the way the football players’ victim did: as someone powerless feeling obligated to do what someone stronger asks her to do.</p>
<p id="WaupFM">There’s an ambiguity here that is fundamental to the way Perrotta approaches the world. Tracy’s relationship with her teacher is on the one hand a source of shame, a dark secret that threatens to negate all her hard work and render her unelectable. On the other hand, it’s also straightforwardly a case of sexual harassment.</p>
<p id="9yLLY9">This sort of double-think speaks to a vexed confusion of the era, a sense that sexual assault can on the one hand be very bad and something to be condemned, but on the other hand really is pretty shameful to the victim if you think about it. The critical response to <em>Election</em> shows that the first half of that idea wasn’t anywhere near as compelling as the second, especially when you’re looking for reasons not to like someone.</p>
<p id="DJSIaU">Tracy was already annoying: so self-centered, so ambitious. “Something in those flashing, sanctimonious eyes portends the worst,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/reviews/electionhowe.htm?movieslede=y">the Washington Post mused</a>. With critics already in an amenable frame of mind, it was easy to seize on the idea of her relationship with her teacher as one of many reasons audiences should consider her a villain. If her teacher preyed on her, well, didn’t she deserve it?</p>
<h3 id="8h81wS">“I tried to turn it into a funny story, but no one ever laughed”</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/w6mdnw8rkMpkj9PkGRYP_qhXUbk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23759455/tracy_flick_cant_win_9781501144066_xlg.jpeg">
<cite>Courtesy of Scribner</cite>
<figcaption>
<em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> by Tom Perrotta, a sequel to <em>Election</em>.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="xQ5V45">Perrotta’s new <em>Election</em> sequel, <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>, turns on the question of which interpretation of <em>Election</em> is correct. Is it the interpretation of 1999, or that of 2019? Was Tracy the hero of the story all along? Or was she the villain?</p>
<p id="1IVppM">Like <em>Election</em> before it, <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> is framed as an explicit response to a major cultural event. While the former took on the 1992 election, the latter is Perrotta’s Me Too novel.</p>
<p id="uHgxAr">As the book opens, Tracy Flick finds herself living in a world in which it’s now mainstream conventional wisdom that teenage girls who have relationships with their teachers are not the responsible parties. She finds the transition as jarring as many of the rest of us do.</p>
<p id="f5UKH4">“The thing you had to understand,” she tells us, “is that I wasn’t a normal high school girl.” Tracy saw herself as exceptional: smarter and more ambitious than any of her peers, a mini adult who deserved to be treated as such. So even after she became an actual adult, it still made sense to her that when she was a teenager, her teacher had instigated a relationship with her. Wasn’t he only doing what she wanted and treating her as the adult she thought she was?</p>
<p id="GJAdsf">Then Me Too arrived, and with it, story after story of girls who, like Tracy, considered themselves to be exceptional and who, like Tracy, were abused by an adult who took advantage of that belief. “You can’t keep reading these stories, one after the other,” Tracy admits, “and keep clinging to the idea that your own case was unique.”</p>
<p id="ppJ1II">To the adult Tracy, just as damaging as the memory of her relationship with Dave is the memory of Mr. M.’s betrayal. “For a while, in my twenties, I tried to turn it into a funny story, but no one ever laughed,” she muses. “I think it just made people wonder if there was something wrong with me, and I couldn’t help wondering that myself, because why else would a teacher hate me so much that he’d ruin his life just to stop me from getting something I desperately wanted and totally deserved?” Who, after all, could inspire such rage but an infant Hitler?</p>
<p id="qxGIGn">But that girl — who was so ferociously ambitious that she terrified her teacher — is gone in <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>. Now chastened, Tracy has been stripped of much of her alpha dog swagger. Although she long planned to be the first female president, her dreams were derailed when her single mother developed MS while Tracy was in law school. Scholarship student Tracy dropped out to help, and eventually got a job as a substitute teacher to make ends meet. As the novel opens, Tracy’s mother is dead, and Tracy is now an assistant principal at a school not dissimilar to her old high school. Her great ambition is to take over as principal once the incumbent retires.</p>
<p id="eFLhfc">Tracy’s new position feels at once both redemptive and humiliating. For once, her status as an underdog isn’t up for debate: No one could feel the need to bring this version of Tracy Flick down a peg because she’s already been brought down so far. It’s a position designed to evoke the reader’s sympathies, not their rage.</p>
<p id="nK9Lnc">Still, in another sense the move feels as though it’s stolen Tracy’s <em>Election</em>-era win away from her once again. So what if she finally did manage to become student body president despite all Mr. M.’s worst efforts? She’s still seen her dreams dashed more thoroughly than Mr. M. could manage on his best day.</p>
<p id="kxkMTI">Tracy’s redemption does eventually arrive — but it comes in a way that is, within Perrotta’s low-stakes world, tonally pretty weird. I won’t spoil the details here, but I will say that the climax of <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> sees Tracy performing a highly dramatic, highly dangerous act of self-sacrifice that ends with her whole community lauding her as a hero.</p>
<p id="Rzo8do">When Tracy tries to explain her actions, she does so with an elevated tone that once again sounds foreign to Perrotta’s grubby, venal little world. “I still can’t tell you why I did that,” she says, “except to say that that’s me, that’s who I am, that’s how I’ve tried to live my life. Going where I’m needed, doing what I can to make things better, trying to be of service.”</p>
<p id="yBB65o">For the most part, the critics of 2022 have both taken Tracy at her word and suggested that they are a little disappointed with Perrotta that they feel compelled to do so.</p>
<p id="xWfO9W">“Her exoneration thrilled me; I imagine that many readers will feel the same. But the effort of recuperation wears on the book,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/tracy-flick-takes-on-the-world-again">wrote Katy Waldman in the New Yorker</a>. “The aftertaste of a voguish feminism, one that casts all women as misunderstood saviors, lingers. Perrotta’s step seems surest when his characters’ saintliness — or, better yet, their miscreance — doesn’t lie quite so close to the surface.”</p>
<p id="JNfqa8">“You will not close this book commiserating with the likes of Mr. M. Nor will you wonder whether you missed the nuances,” <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/tracy-flick-cant-win-tom-perrotta-review/629635/">declared the Atlantic</a>. “<em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> is frankly didactic.”</p>
<p id="zibDR3">It is worth considering, however, that Perrotta’s narrators are all highly unreliable. When, at the end of <em>Election</em>, Mr. M. congratulated himself for knowing that sexual violence was bad, there was plenty of room to doubt his version of his self-image. Should we be so sure now that Tracy is right about herself?</p>
<p id="r9MgAa">There is plenty of evidence that the Tracy of <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> is a woman who “tries to be of service.” In this book, Tracy spends most of her page time attending to the minutiae of public school administration with a focus that borders on the maniacal. But in <em>Election</em>, part of Tracy’s charm is how little she cares about being of service, and how much she cares about her own furious and tremendous ambitions. As a teenager, the great object of Tracy’s fantasies is power: accumulating it, winning it, taking it for herself, and doing so unapologetically. There is something thrilling in reading it, watching it, in seeing this girl want so much so badly.</p>
<p id="KJZiDx">Perhaps Tracy’s assertion that “who I am” is someone who spends her time “doing what I can to make things better” is, in its way, as much of a piece of self-deception as Mr. M.’s laudatory self-image as the guy who knows you don’t mock the rape victim at the end of <em>Election</em>. After all, Perrotta’s books are peopled with characters who lie to themselves. And an ambitious woman has as much reason to lie as anyone else.</p>
<p id="nL8J4r">What made the critics of 1999 find Tracy Flick so villainous was not just her position as her teacher’s victim but her straightforward, cold-blooded ambition. It would suit Tracy’s purposes now to think of herself not as someone who wanted power for her own purposes, but as someone whose ambitions were always in the service of something bigger than herself. </p>
<p id="fiFsLF">Such a revisionist reading, like the reading of Tracy as a sexual harassment victim, makes her a character who’s much easier to sympathize with than the craven power-snatching teenager of <em>Election</em>. But we take Tracy at her word here at our own peril.</p>
<p id="SVj1oh">What Tracy Flick seems to understand instinctively in <em>Election</em> is that power will protect her. It will make it not matter that she is friendless, that no one likes her enough to write a genuine in-joke in her yearbook, that she can’t even get her cousin to ask her to the prom. It will make her a person who would not be targeted by a predator like Dave, who sees that she is lonely and weak and so considers her easy pickings. It will make her never again be the girl who is, as she discovers humiliatingly in <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em>, exactly like every other precocious teenager whose teacher preyed on her.</p>
<p id="l2yc78">The misreadings of <em>Election</em> of 1999 revealed a culture that was all too willing to despise a teenage girl, no matter how much she suffered, and pity a middle-aged white man, no matter how despicable his actions. Perhaps what the misreadings of <em>Tracy Flick Can’t Win</em> reveal is a culture that is still unwilling to let girls long for power enough to protect themselves. It reveals a culture that will celebrate an ambitious woman, as long as her greatest ambition is to be a high school principal. </p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23159969/tracy-flick-cant-win-election-tom-perrotta-reese-witherspoonConstance Grady2022-02-16T07:30:00-05:002022-02-16T07:30:00-05:00When celebrity nudes were everywhere
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<img alt="A drawing of people standing around and discussing a blurred-out representation of a nude photo of a celebrity taking up the entire wall behind them." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eF2QBw0TPBQAYPnq-wqTCQJmPRI=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70515897/VOX.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Efi Chalikopoulou for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>In 2007, Vanessa Hudgens had a giant nude photo scandal. It left no cultural footprint.</p> <p id="lbR7UR"></p>
<p id="T54kZY">In 2007, <em>High School Musical</em> star Vanessa Hudgens, the new darling of the Disney Channel, had her personal nude photographs leaked to the internet. One of the oddest things about what ensued was how loud the outrage was when the leak occurred in 2007, and how little anyone seems to think about it now.</p>
<p id="vEgWDm">Hackers first leaked Hudgens’s private photos after the release of <em>High School Musicals 1 </em>and <em>2</em> but before <em>3</em>. The world was shocked. Disney moms <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/televisionNews/idUSN0746838620070908">pronounced</a> Hudgens “ruined.” OK! <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071017191515/http://ok-magazine.com/news/view/2031">confidently reported</a> that she would be dropped from <em>High School Musical 3</em> and replaced by one of the Cheetah Girls. <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/vanessa-hudgens-talks-about-dealing-with-her-nude-photo-scandal/">Hudgens released a chagrined statement</a> taking responsibility for the photos (“I want to apologize to my fans, whose support and trust means the world to me”), and Disney made its own statement regretting Hudgens’s “lapse in judgment.” Days after the pictures leaked, <a href="https://www.justjared.com/2007/09/13/vanessa-hudgens-church/">Hudgens was photographed by paparazzi at a church</a>, as though to cleanse her reputation. “Baby V she is no longer :(” <a href="https://www.justjared.com/2007/09/06/vanessa-hudgens-nude-photo/">lamented Just Jared</a>.</p>
<p id="rvl6Bv">But today, the moment barely figures in Hudgens’s public image. Now 33 years old, Hudgens is remembered as that girl from <em>High School Musical</em>, from <em>Grease Live</em>, from <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/11/16/18097764/netflix-princess-switch-review"><em>The Princess Switch</em></a>. Most people associate her with singing and dancing, with her luminous smile, with <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-51941986">lightly offensive TikToks</a> about how we should just let some people die of Covid, with a bunch of direct-to-streaming movies that you know ahead of time are going to be as bland and weirdly satisfying as a fast food burger. So many other female stars have had nude photo scandals by now that who can remember Vanessa Hudgens’s? It barely rates.</p>
<p id="vgriqm">Looking at how fast and furious the flame of public reaction burned in the response to Hudgens’s photos makes for a vivid illustration of just how fast and how drastically the ways we talk about women’s sexuality have changed over the past 15 years — and, in small and crucial ways, how they haven’t.</p>
<h3 id="Vp1HlA">“A woman’s worth lies in her ability — or refusal — to be sexual”</h3>
<p id="AZ2sHq">When Vanessa Hudgens’s nude photos leaked, we were in the penultimate year of the Bush administration, and one year away from the publication of the book that best chronicled the sexual mores of the era: Jessica Valenti’s <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-purity-myth-how-america-s-obsession-with-virginity-is-hurting-young-women/9781580053143"><em>The Purity Myth</em></a><em>: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women</em>.</p>
<p id="tZSpXV">“More than 1,400 purity balls, where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers at a promlike event, were held in 2006 (the balls are federally funded),” Valenti reported. “Facebook is peppered with purity groups that exist to support girls trying to ‘save it.’ Schools hold abstinence rallies and assemblies featuring hip hop dancers and comedians alongside religious leaders. … Whether it’s delivered through a virginity pledge or a barely dressed tween pop singer writhing across the television screen, the message is the same: A woman’s worth lies in her ability — or refusal — to be sexual.”</p>
<p id="F97Sun">Hudgens was one of the girls whose worth lay in her refusal.</p>
<p id="d8qvBM">She became famous at age 18, when she starred opposite a baby-faced Zac Efron in the Disney Channel original movie <em>High School Musical</em>. The flick, a quasi-retread of <em>Grease</em> in which absolutely everyone was too pure to be pink, became a massive hit, picking up <a href="https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-08-09-high-school-musical2_N.htm">160 million viewers</a> after its premiere in 2006. And Hudgens’s palpable innocence was at the center of it.</p>
<p id="MLTx3I">Hudgens played Gabriella, a sweet nerd newly arrived at East High. Terrified of being boxed in as the scary math genius at her new school the way she had been at her last, Gabriella instead finds herself accidentally auditioning for the winter musical, facing down East High’s intimidating theater kids in the process. Inspired by Gabriella’s beauty, innocence, and bravery, Zac Efron’s Troy, the macho school jock, admits that he, too, loves to sing and dance, and he, too, auditions for the winter musical.</p>
<p id="mws8Md">Gabriella is an icon of sorts for Disney’s ideal of femininity at the time, an example of the kind of girl Disney thought the little girls in the audience should aspire to be. We are told she is smart, a quality mainly demonstrated by her offscreen win at academic decathalon, and that she is kind, a quality mainly demonstrated by her ability to be nice to other boys when the plot demands that Troy become jealous. She is afraid of the spotlight because nice girls are not ambitious, but when pushed into it against her will, she performs admirably. She is unfailingly supportive of Troy’s hopes and dreams, because <em>High School Musical</em> is very much a showcase for Troy in which Gabriella features mainly as a lovely trophy. At the start of the third act of each movie, she breaks up with him to teach him that he has strayed from the path of goodness, and then she sings a sad ballad and then Troy sings an angry ballad.</p>
<p id="xPIISW">Disney Channel’s key demographic was and remains kids between the ages of 6 and 14, so any suggestion of sex was out of the question. So pure is Gabriella’s relationship with Troy that they don’t even kiss onscreen until the end of <em>High School Musical 2</em>. Gabriella wears sensible mid-length skirts and one-piece swimsuits. (Efron, it must be admitted, does take off his shirt in the final movie, in a moment that caused audible yelping from the audience when I saw it in theaters in 2008. As ever, boys get more leeway in these things.)</p>
<p id="hkAgby">Like many of pop culture’s good girls, Gabriella’s goodness is emphasized by a bad girl foil, Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale). Sharpay, too, is sexless. Her badness is emphasized not by any suggestion of Rizzo-like sluttiness, but by her hyperfemininity, her girly obsession with pink, and her <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22391942/paris-hilton-sex-tape-revenge-porn-south-park-stupid-spoiled-whore-video-playset-pink-stupid-girl">Hilton-esque</a> tiny dog. Sharpay is the reckless striver to Gabriella’s passive achiever. While Gabriella eschews the spotlight unless pushed, Sharpay issues her demands each movie in a rapid-paced “I want” song, and her vindictive scheming is always what sets the plot in motion. At the end of each movie, Sharpay is punished for her high-maintenance ways, while Gabriella is rewarded for her passivity and sweetness.</p>
<p id="AE2DAZ">Gabriella’s passivity and her sexual purity are closely linked. As Valenti lays out in <em>The Purity Myth</em>, the virginal ideal of the Bush era was essentially an ideal by absence: absence of desire, of provocation, of wants of one’s own. “We’re defined by what we don’t do,” Valenti concludes. “Our ethics are the ethics of passivity.”</p>
<p id="kEHwAL">Disney’s good girls were often held up as the role models families needed in the age of <em>Girls Gone Wild</em> raunch culture, a wholesome and much-needed antidote to the Disney-gone-bad <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22565683/britney-spears-conservatorship-testimony">Britneys</a> and Christinas of the world. But Disney’s virginal ideal was less a counter to the midriff-baring bad girls of the ’00s than she was the other side of the same old virgin/whore coin. Valenti cites Lakshmi Chaudhry’s <em>In These Times</em> on this issue.</p>
<p id="RJPuYi">“Make no mistake, raunch is Republican,” wrote Chaudhry. “The sexuality that reigns supreme in Bush World bears the basic imprimaturs of right-wing ideology: gross materialism, sexual hypocrisy, and acquiescence in the name of empowerment. It is in every sense a conservative wet dream come true.”</p>
<p id="gVtWJh">It doesn’t take much, in other words, to flip the switch from a good girl to a bad girl. Which is why when pictures leaked of Vanessa Hudgens posing naked, effectively giving the lie to the Gabriella persona, watching moms knew immediately what was going to happen to her: She’d be ruined.</p>
<p id="0tQhnM">And she almost was. But then, faster than you would have thought, the story died away.</p>
<h3 id="jkBe2M">“Who do you want to see naked?”</h3>
<p id="y996q3">Hudgens’s nude photographs were first reported by the National Enquirer in September 2007, and within a week they were scattered across the internet on different sites. The reaction was as bad as by now we should know to expect.</p>
<p id="Age0U2">The conventional wisdom of the era was that only sluts and stupid girls took nude photos of themselves, and that once the photos existed, no one could reasonably expect to keep them out of the public’s hands. While from the perspective of the 2020s, Hudgens was clearly the victim of a gross invasion of her privacy, in 2007 Hudgens was expected to take the blame for the photos.</p>
<p id="B3edm2">Hudgens took her medicine. She accepted the blame, kept her head down, and finished out her term in the <em>High School Musical</em> franchise with a minimum of scandal. But while she sweated out the consequences of her hacker’s actions, the context of this whole story was about to change very rapidly.</p>
<p id="Oy9sRM">The Hudgens photo scandal didn’t only emerge at the tail end of the virginity-obsessed Bush era. It also emerged at the beginning of the camera phone era. The development in technology meant that nude photos were in the process of becoming an increasingly common part of modern courtship — and celebrity nude photos showing up on the internet, in turn, were about to become a staple of the gossip press.</p>
<p id="394Blf">The same year that Hudgens’s nudes leaked, Kim Kardashian saw her sex tape hit the internet after her boyfriend intentionally leaked it. In 2009, hackers leaked nudes of Rihanna, Leighton Meester, and Ashley Greene, among others. In 2010, nudes leaked of Hayley Williams, Blake Lively, Jessica Alba, Kat Dennings, Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera, Amber Rose, and Kesha. In 2011, it was Lady Gaga, Scarlett Johansson, and Madonna.</p>
<p id="MTNeeG">“Now we’re to the point where two celebs can have nude leaks in one day and no one hardly bats an eye,” <a href="https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/05/the-complete-history-of-nude-celebrity-photo-leaks_401061/">mused the pop culture website Complex in 2012</a>. (Olivia Munn and Christina Hendricks were the celebs in question.) “We have it so easy these days. Who do you want to see naked?” All you had to do was wait. The internet would deliver.</p>
<p id="ykxsbD">As this veritable flood of nude celebrity photos made its way onto the internet, the stories we told about those photos began to shift. At a certain point, people had to admit, taking nude pictures seemed less like a particularly kinky perversion and more like just a thing a lot of people were doing these days. It might not even be particularly shameful.</p>
<p id="q3JuBf">WIth this change in the narrative, a new and more uncomfortable question began to emerge. Was it possible that it was not the women who were wrong for photographing their own naked bodies, but instead the hackers who stole those pictures and distributed them across the internet? Was it possible that it was even wrong for regular people on the internet just to look at the pictures, even if they weren’t the ones who stole them?</p>
<p id="aXpGrq">In 2014, hackers released a massive photo dump of nude celebrity selfies. The private pictures of dozens of famous actresses raced across the internet, including photos of Jennifer Lawrence, then at arguably the height of her fame. By now, there was a new conventional wisdom in the air when it came to the subject of nude photos.</p>
<p id="z4ghb0">“Consider this,” <a href="https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2014/09/celebrity-nude-photo-leaks-essays">instructed Complex</a>. “These women, regardless of their public persona, are entitled to privacy and to express their sexuality however they wish. It’s their basic human right. These women have lives, too.” We were a long way from, “Who do you want to see naked?” and it had only been two years.</p>
<p id="yeuRNK">The scandal that had once threatened to ruin Vanessa Hudgens drifted gently out of public consciousness. What young female celebrity hadn’t had a nude photo scandal by now? And who didn’t realize that the fault lay with the hackers and not the celebrity?</p>
<p id="VW9LZu">By the time Me Too rocketed into public focus in 2017, the idea that only sluts and morons took nude photos of themselves and that the public was entitled to see all the naked pictures of actresses it wanted had well and truly died. But the other half of the binary Hudgens represented — the Gabriella half, the archetype of innocence and virginity and passivity — that half would be harder to shake.</p>
<p id="BFn1aU">Gabriella is still a beloved archetype of teen innocence and youth. She still represents a powerful ideal of who girls should be: unambitious and unneedy, undesiring and uncomplaining, smart and kind but only insofar as those traits remain unthreatening to men. And she lives on in a thousand network police procedurals and children’s TV shows, in web series and YA novels, in Hallmark movies and Netflix rip-offs of Hallmark movies alike. In the <em>Princess Switch</em> franchise, one of those Netflix rip-offs of a Hallmark movie, Hudgens plays three characters, and she only meaningfully departs from the Gabriella archetype in one of them. (Fiona’s more of a Sharpay.)</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="coSGpa">This character is good less because of what she does than because of what she doesn’t do, her virtue inscribed in the negative space where her character should be. She is, as Valenti argued, good by default, good by virtue of her passivity. She’s what girls learn, still, that they should aspire to be. And it’s hard to imagine that she will ever die.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/22906981/vanessa-hudgens-nude-photo-leak-disney-high-school-musical-princess-switch-purity-mythConstance Grady2021-12-22T09:00:00-05:002021-12-22T09:00:00-05:00Sex and the City said it would stand for friendship over men. It didn’t.
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<figcaption><em>C<span class="ql-cursor"></span>armelle Kendall for Vox</em></figcaption>
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<p>On the classic HBO series, love has a market value.</p> <p id="qOZfg7"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="trMOMY">Like low-rise jeans, Bennifer, and other artifacts of the 2000s, <em>Sex and the City</em> is back. The HBO classic, which ran from 1998 to 2004 and saw two feature film sequels in 2008 and 2010, has returned to TV in the form of a revival, now titled <em>And Just Like That ….</em> Which means now is the perfect time to look back at the original series, and at the bizarre, glamorous vision of the sexual marketplace it championed.</p>
<p id="4CkzMU"><em>Sex and the City</em>, which follows the lives of four 30-something women as they date their way through New York City, is often thought of as frothy and aspirational, all cupcakes in the West Village and Manolo Blahniks on the Upper East Side. When it premiered, however, it was lauded as an unusually frank depiction of the inner lives of women: It was the show that dared to tell it like it was. As such, <em>Sex in the City</em> is a model of one mainstream way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman from 1998 to 2004. </p>
<p id="ZYctLp">Under that model, women are assumed as a default to be white, wealthy, and heterosexual; people of color and queer people exist primarily to be cute accessories to those wealthy white women; and — above all — selfhood, relationships, and life are all built according to the logic of the free marketplace.</p>
<p id="WGQ5Kx">One way of understanding the plot of this show is as watching the fluctuations of an erotic commodities market. Under the neoliberal system of <em>Sex and the City</em>, a woman must prioritize her sexual market value at all times. Her value may be pledged to either one man with whom she is in a monogamous relationship or simply to the marketplace itself, but always she must optimize it. The priority is to be thin, beautiful, charming, and available; to never become sad, ugly, or in any way undateable. And what makes <em>Sex and the City</em> both frustrating and great is how much time it devotes to luxuriating in and problematizing that model.</p>
<p id="tBNPIL">It is always clear on <em>Sex and the City</em> that the neoliberal sexual marketplace is a chilly, alienating place to live your life; when one character bursts into tears because she’s been dating since she was 15 and she’s tired of it, it’s a thoroughly understandable statement. So the show compensates with friendships, arguing that at the center of a woman’s life is her found family of girlfriends. The central quartet of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte is the emotional heart of the show. They frequently call each other their soul mates, and they insist that while men may come and go, female friendships are forever.</p>
<p id="Qenn3u">But this compensation becomes a contradiction that cannot sustain itself. Watching <em>Sex and the City</em> in 2021, I found myself thinking of <em>Little Women</em>, and of the problem that <a href="https://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/07/18/sister-lovers/">critic Lara Langer Cohen once described</a> as “the bitter tragedy” of that novel: “It tells a story about the bonds that knit together a family of women — of love nurtured with exquisite care — only to break up that family and transfer its bonds to an array of frankly disappointing men.” </p>
<p id="RlC4iY">What <em>Sex and the City</em> teaches its audience to care about is its friend group, its ensemble. That’s where all of its emotional and libidinal forces are concentrated. Then it shows us all those exquisitely nurtured bonds repeatedly ripped apart, all that emotional energy redirected toward a set of frankly disappointing men.</p>
<p id="ehUlWq"><em>Sex and the City</em> sometimes makes the case that women don’t need to choose between intense romances and intense friendships<strong> </strong>— that Carrie can marry her central love interest, Big, <em>and</em> maintain the intensity of her friendship with Miranda and Samantha and Charlotte. But what the sequel films and the new revival make clear is that there is no convincing way to depict this proposed reality. If Carrie really can have it all, <em>Sex and the City</em> doesn’t know how to show us that.</p>
<h3 id="Xj3RCj">“It’s just exhausting”</h3>
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<cite>HBO</cite>
<figcaption>Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) finds being with Big (Chris Noth) exhausting.</figcaption>
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<p id="mH3qv0">The women of <em>Sex and the City</em> track their value on the erotic commodities market with scrupulous care — their own value, and the value of their friends, which they guard jealously. </p>
<p id="L3wm9p">“Your stock is up!” Samantha crows in season 6 when Carrie juggles dates between two men. When Charlotte gets a vibrator and decides she’d rather get her orgasms by using it than by taking her chances to “go out and deal with men,” her friends hold an intervention and confiscate the vibrator for her own good. </p>
<p id="ekc1Pz">“With a little help from her friends, Charlotte decided not to settle for herself,” Carrie remarks approvingly in voiceover. For Charlotte to fulfill herself both sexually and emotionally would be unthinkable, impossible; it would mean she would be taking herself off the market without having been bought.</p>
<p id="QNSs3X">When Samantha is stuck in an unhappy relationship during the 2008 film and gains 15 pounds, her friends host another intervention. It becomes clear Samantha must leave her boyfriend not because she is unhappy, but because her unhappiness makes her undesirable. For a woman to lose track of her own market value is to commit a dangerous and irresponsible sin. </p>
<p id="BmqjtF">Should a woman happen to survive this cold and transactional landscape, she cannot count on the man she lands to offer her emotional fulfillment in return. Carrie’s love interest, Big, is the most valuable man within <em>Sex and the City</em>’s marketplace: wealthy, powerful, and because of his wealth and power, sexy. Carrie finds herself optimizing almost against her will to land him. She tells Miranda in season 1 that for Big, “I’m, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It’s just — it’s exhausting.” Big responds by toying with Carrie’s emotions, repeatedly suggesting he’s on the verge of being ready to commit to her and then refusing to do so.</p>
<p id="RXPY4s">Instead, Carrie gets her emotional fulfillment from her friend group. It’s they, the show repeatedly suggests, who are her true love. “Maybe we can be each other’s soul mates,” says Charlotte in season 4, in <a href="https://www.bustle.com/p/19-quotes-from-sex-the-city-that-are-still-amazing-13-years-later-2909300">one of the show’s most frequently quoted lines</a>. “And then we can let men be just these great, nice guys to have fun with.” </p>
<p id="pvm0ll">When Carrie gets engaged in season 4 (to Aiden, emotionally available and hence no great catch according to the marketplace), each of her friends by turns selects an engagement ring to give her. Miranda chooses Aiden’s first-choice ring and Samantha his second. Then Charlotte gives Carrie her own engagement ring — left behind from a now-finished marriage — to help Carrie buy an apartment. </p>
<p id="fUCPMv">Symbolically speaking, they’re all proposing. And while Carrie ends up leaving Aiden, she says yes to her friends every time. Until she doesn’t.</p>
<h3 id="fTbQn7">“I’m so bored I could die”</h3>
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<cite>HBO</cite>
<figcaption>Kristen Johnson as Lexi Featherson, not yet so bored she could die.</figcaption>
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<p id="O7Ow35">Ideally, the <em>Sex and the City</em> model allows women to have it all. An independent life, friends who are soul mates, and great, nice, fun guys. Selfhood, emotional fulfillment, and high sexual market value. The show, however, continually frets over the idea that it may be impossible to ever truly achieve all of those things.</p>
<p id="2zWC2O">The fundamental tension between these two models of life is best typified by two bookending episodes: “The Baby Shower,” toward the end of season 1, and “Splat,” which takes place in season 6 just before the two-part finale. Each depicts a different kind of death: the married death, of constraint and Connecticut and boredom; and the single death, of loneliness and Manolos and boredom. </p>
<p id="gJFFDH">“The Baby Shower” sees the four friends visiting former party girl Laney at her baby shower. Laney used to love to drink and date and flash her boobs at parties, but now she’s married to an investment banker and is expecting a child with him in Connecticut. When Carrie arrives, Laney asks her condescendingly whether Samantha is still going out partying every night. “It’s so <em>sad</em>, isn’t it?” she asks. “When that’s all you have.”</p>
<p id="pjKdlK">By the end of the episode, the tables have turned. Laney, we learn, misses the freedom and fun of her single life. She shows up at one of Samantha’s parties, still pregnant, and tries to psych herself up to flash her boobs at everyone and reclaim her old self. But it doesn’t work. She feels too vulnerable and uncomfortable to go through with the stunt, and all the party guests stare at her with pity. “It’s so <em>sad</em>,” Samantha says gleefully.</p>
<p id="04VgEc">“No one warned me this was going to happen!” a shocked Laney tells Carrie. “One day you’re going to wake up and you’re not going to recognize yourself.” </p>
<p id="RyqvXL">Laney has lost her old self. Sex and the city are both gone for her now, and so she is left pathetic, humiliated, as good as dead. Carrie considers her an avatar of what her own possible future might look like, and regards her with mingled fear and longing.</p>
<p id="BNn44m">But Laney sees a kind of resurrection in “Splat.” There, we meet the Laney-like figure Lexi Featherston, another party girl, this time played by Kristen Johnston. </p>
<p id="0cJGhC">Lexi, unlike Laney, has chosen not to move to Connecticut and settle down. Instead, she’s still single and still partying in her 40s, smoking and doing coke after Carrie and her friends have left their vices behind and are beginning to pair off into long-term monogamous relationships. </p>
<p id="3HO1kI">“When did everybody stop smoking?” Lexi moans when Carrie meets her at an elegant Condé Nast party. “When did everybody pair off? This used to be the most exciting city in the world. And now it’s nothing but smoking near a fucking open window. New York is over. O-V-E-R. Over. No one’s fun anymore. What ever happened to fun? I’m so bored I could die.”</p>
<p id="OWyrnN">Then she trips over her own Manolo Blahniks, falls through the open window she’s been smoking next to, and dies.</p>
<p id="dM4c45">Carrie, as it happens, stopped smoking because a man asked her to, and she wanted to pair off. Carrie sees Lexi as an avatar of herself, the way she saw Laney — Lexi is Carrie’s future if she makes the choice Laney didn’t, if she doesn’t pair off, if she doesn’t stop partying, if she doesn’t make a man her first priority. And the consequence of making that choice isn’t a symbolic death by humiliation, like it is for Laney. It’s literal, actual death.</p>
<p id="mvwX4k">You have to pair off to survive, <em>Sex and the City</em> argues — but pairing off is, for women, a sort of spiritual and emotional death. None of Carrie’s avatars ever really gets to have it all.</p>
<h3 id="mkwqkc">“I cannot stay in New York and be single for you!”</h3>
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<figcaption>Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) in <em>Sex and the City: The Movie</em>.</figcaption>
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<p id="6rQ1lV">As a fictional character, Carrie seems to be designed to make sense of this problem. She has no family, but only exists sui generis, out of context. She briefly mentions that her father left her life when she was young; her mother never comes up, and neither do any other relations. (A short-lived prequel series, <em>The Carrie Diaries</em>, attempted to fill in some of the blanks of her past while contradicting the main show’s established canon.) Alone in the world, she’s free to devote her whole life to her friends and her romantic relationships — and her job makes it essential she do as much. As a sex and relationship columnist, Carrie must date (and pilfer from her friends’ dating lives) for material in order to make her living. When she goes through a romantic dry spell, she panics that she’ll be fired. She is in a sense a professional dater.</p>
<p id="qDeG2b">But Carrie’s profession only dramatizes the position in which all women find themselves in the <em>Sex and the City</em> universe. It’s not that far off from the 19th-century marriage market of <em>Little Women</em>, but it’s been bowdlerized by neoliberalism. Women are no longer obligated to optimize their value because their economic survival depends on marriage — but they still find themselves compelled to optimize, in search of something they consider almost as important. The reward they earn now is social capital. </p>
<p id="YOenNE">The line between social capital from men and literal capital from men is frequently blurry, especially for Carrie. That’s a problem the show plays with repeatedly. In season 1, a wealthy foreigner leaves Carrie $1,000 on her nightstand after they spend the night together; Carrie decides to keep the money but stay away from the friend who introduced them. </p>
<p id="c7GdXO">Each time Carrie gets engaged, it’s primarily to solve a real estate problem. Aiden proposes after Carrie’s apartment building goes co-op and she can’t afford to buy her unit, so he buys it for her, and then suggests that they might as well just get married. Big proposes after Carrie falls in love with a lavish Fifth Avenue penthouse that she can’t afford but that he can. Carrie may not have to literally marry in order to keep a roof over her head, like the girls in <em>Little Women</em>, but she somehow seems to find herself doing it anyway.</p>
<p id="svggeP">Her most coldblooded decision to choose the security of marriage and a man over her own desire for freedom comes at the end of season six, after she witnesses Lexi’s death. At the time, Carrie is dating Aleksandr Petrovsky, a super-wealthy older Russian artist who casually condescends to her, isolates her from her friends, and makes it clear that he doesn’t take her work seriously; a <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/27/21037870/little-women-greta-gerwig-ending-jo-laurie-amy-bhaer">Professor Bhaer</a> if ever there was one. </p>
<p id="YK3ncG">Aleksandr asks Carrie to move to Paris with him, and while at first she refuses, Lexi’s death pushes her to say yes. She quits her job, says goodbye to her friends, and moves to Paris to be a full-time girlfriend to Aleksandr.</p>
<p id="AWXCGP">“I don’t understand why you have to move away and give up your life,” Miranda says before Carrie leaves.</p>
<p id="ctHKD9">“I cannot stay in New York and be single for you!” Carrie responds viciously. Friends may be soul mates, but soul mates only go so far when the specter of Lexi Featherston is dancing before your eyes.</p>
<p id="pUUHFK">But at the end of <em>Sex and the City</em>’s broadcast run, Carrie’s coldbloodedness no longer matters. Big rescues her from herself, in what is surely one of the most unsatisfying copouts of an ending ever to make it to the screen. (Aside, maybe, from <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/27/21037870/little-women-greta-gerwig-ending-jo-laurie-amy-bhaer"><em>Little Women</em>’s famously unsatisfying ending</a>, and all the screen adaptations that tried to make it work.) He comes to Paris to take Carrie away from Aleksandr and bring her back to New York, ready at last to commit. Carrie gets to have social capital, emotional fulfillment, and an independent life, all in one neat package.</p>
<p id="c4bDT6">In <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/difficult-women">her seminal 2013 essay on the show</a>, New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum argues that <em>Sex and the City</em>’s ending “showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine, or to trust themselves to portray, any other kind of ending — happy or not.” It’s a betrayal of what Nussbaum calls the show’s “realpolitik,” its forthrightness in exploring the limitations of the neoliberal market system it espouses. </p>
<p id="bpcdAS">That betrayal is perhaps nowhere clearer than the scene in which Big asks permission from all of Carrie’s friends to go rescue her from Paris. “You’re the loves of her life,” he tells them. “And a guy’s just lucky to come in fourth.”</p>
<p id="PO5eP8">And Miranda, pragmatic Miranda who understands the show’s realpolitik and doesn’t much care for it, who repeatedly tells Carrie that Big will only hurt her, who is more protective of her friendship with Carrie than any of the other three, says, “Go get our girl.”</p>
<p id="AOYxPk">The scene offers the ideal of a world in which Carrie gets both friends and man. But it rings fundamentally false and dishonest. The twin ghosts of Lexi and Laney belie Carrie’s happy ending.</p>
<p id="yUlvlE">And <em>Sex and the City</em> seems to understand, on some level, that the ending is a lie. The first episode of <em>And Just Like That</em> ... ends with Big’s death. There seems to be no way for the show to keep producing story with him still around. </p>
<p id="BQp7Ti">That’s because when <em>Sex and the City</em> is being honest with itself, under all the sparkly cupcakes and the designer labels and perfect hair, it exists within a screamingly nihilistic world. The landscape of this show is one in which being a woman means losing either emotional fulfillment, social capital, or both. The only escapes you get are through death. </p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/22832700/sex-and-the-city-purity-chroniclesConstance Grady2021-11-11T08:00:00-05:002021-11-11T08:00:00-05:00Janet Jackson’s Wardrobe Malfunction erased an icon of unapologetic sexuality
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<img alt="An illustration of a newspaper showing a Janet Jackson photo and the headline “janet’s dirty trick,” with furious scribbling of pink highlighter on the Janet photo." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9q_aPL2nXe0k8PT-5excGCBQqDs=/375x0:2626x1688/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70126307/JanetJackson.0.jpeg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.helene-baum.com/" target="_blank">Hélène Baum-Owoyele</a> for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>Janet Jackson was able to transcend America’s misogynoir — until the Super Bowl.</p> <p id="MJtNXw"></p>
<p id="qOZfg7"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="uZYWpq">There was <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22350286/2000s-pop-culture-misogyny-britney-spears-janet-jackson-whitney-houston-monica-lewinsky">something in the air in the 2000s</a>. It was as though American culture was obsessed with ripping away women’s clothes and then blaming them for it. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22391942/paris-hilton-sex-tape-revenge-porn-south-park-stupid-spoiled-whore-video-playset-pink-stupid-girl">Paris Hilton</a>, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian. Upskirt photos, leaked sex tapes, leaked nudes; teary-eyed apologies, snide jokes on late-night television, righteous op-eds in the newspapers. Every day we were acting out literally what was happening in the cultural marketplace, where women faced commercial and structural pressures to market themselves with highly sexualized images and then were called whores and sluts for doing so.</p>
<p id="YcqwyE">Perhaps no event more clearly captures this moment in cultural history than what happened to Janet Jackson after the Wardrobe Malfunction of 2004. </p>
<p id="erPbr2">The Wardrobe Malfunction (also known as Nipplegate) occurred on February 1, 2004, during the Super Bowl 38 halftime show live on CBS. Pop supernova Janet Jackson had finished performing her 1989 classic “Rhythm Nation,” and the young up-and-comer Justin Timberlake had just joined her onstage to croon his new single “Rock Your Body.” As Timberlake arrived at his final line — “Gotta have you naked by the end of this song” — he reached for Jackson’s black leather bustier and tugged. The leather collapsed, and Jackson’s breast, partially obscured by a silver nipple shield, appeared on TV for nine-sixteenths of a second.</p>
<p id="FT96ha">For that fraction of a second, <a href="https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10333439/wardrobe-malfunction-beginning-there-was-nipple">the FCC would receive a record 540,000 complaints</a> and fine CBS a record $550,000 (the fee was later voided by a federal appeals court, which noted that advocacy groups may have been behind many of the complaints). Jackson would see her career go into a tailspin from which it would never truly recover.</p>
<p id="KyMWdP">She was disinvited from the Grammys. Her new album was panned. When she showed up on TV for interviews and performances, many stations made a point of announcing they had adopted a five-second delay, lest she be tempted to show her breasts to America again. Her songs stopped playing on the radio, on MTV, on VH1. Sales of her music plummeted. </p>
<p id="je82vC">The consensus at the time was that Jackson brought all this on herself on purpose — that she had cunningly plotted to expose her bare breast on TV in a tacky publicity stunt, a sleazy demand for attention from an aging pop star past her prime. </p>
<p id="6os6Ku">Jackson herself maintained otherwise. What actually happened, <a href="https://www.eonline.com/news/46762/first-look-the-news-in-brief-february-3-2004">she said</a>, was that Timberlake was supposed to have removed part of her bustier to reveal a red bra in a sort of PG-13 striptease — but he ended up accidentally ripping the bra along with the rest of her top.</p>
<p id="99CXeN">This story made little impact. Neither did photographs of the aftermath of the so-called Malfunction, which saw Jackson huddling into her torn clothing and trying desperately to cover herself, with the face of a woman who very much did not intend to show America her nipple.</p>
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<cite>Kevin Mazur/WireImage</cite>
<figcaption>Janet Jackson covers herself post-Malfunction as Justin Timberlake looks on at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.</figcaption>
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<p id="Ayev1y">Everyone seemed to instinctively know, back then, that when a woman’s body and sexuality were violated, the person to blame was the woman, especially if she was a woman of color. She brought it on herself by having a body.</p>
<p id="65I2mC">From the vantage point of 2021, the racial and gender overtones of that credo look fairly clear. Even Timberlake, who despite doing the actual clothes-ripping received almost none of the blame for the malfunction, acknowledged as much. “America’s harsher on women” and “ethnic people,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAOen_7Vz3g">he explained to MTV in 2006</a>. (Earlier this year, Timberlake offered <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/arts/music/justin-timberlake-statement-britney-spears.html">an apology to Jackson</a> for letting her take the fall.) </p>
<p id="hodB7B">But it’s worth taking a closer look at how the controversy interacted with what had been Jackson’s image up until the 2004 Super Bowl. For much of her career, Janet Jackson was an exemplar for an unusually carefree model of the sexuality of Black women, an icon of a Black woman whose sexuality was neither predatory nor shameful but only unapologetically focused on her own pleasure. The Wardrobe Malfunction ripped that image to shreds, in ways that still have consequences today.</p>
<h3 id="74imwF">“She’s one cool girl, this Janet Jackson” </h3>
<p id="WcXJvD">Janet Jackson debuted her first album in 1982. She was 16 years old, managed by her father Joe Jackson, and at Joe’s insistence just beginning to transition away from her child star acting roles into the sort of music Joe approved of for a young lady: sweet bubblegum pop. </p>
<p id="YCyr4u">Two weeks after <em>Janet Jackson</em> came out to modest critical and commercial success, another Jackson dropped a record. Janet’s older brother Michael released the instantly iconic <em>Thriller</em>, and from then on it looked as though the story of Janet Jackson was set. She would be one of the also-ran Jacksons, one of the siblings who wasn’t Michael. She was, <a href="https://www.spin.com/featured/janet-jackson-control-january-1987-cover-story-damn-it-janet/">the public seemed quick to conclude</a>, riding on his coattails to fame with a passable voice, admittedly impressive dance skills, and a few forgettable tunes.</p>
<p id="6nwr82">Instead of accepting this second-rate status, Janet Jackson changed the narrative. She fired her father, brought in new producers and a new image consultant, and in 1986 she released the album that would be her commercial breakthrough. It was called <em>Control</em>, as in <em>Janet Jackson is in... </em>. It sent the message that Janet Jackson was no longer an also-ran. She was one of the Jacksons to watch.</p>
<p id="i4QHgS"><em>Control</em>, for which Jackson took a co-writer and co-producer credit, was her first bestseller. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=PNMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false">It would go on to sell over 10 million copies</a> and earned Jackson approving press blurbs about how she was “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=z70DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q&f=false">more than a little sister</a>.” Along with its 1989 follow-up <em>Rhythm Nation</em> (<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=PNMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false">12 million copies</a>), <em>Control</em> established the paradox that would come to underly Jackson’s star image for the next decade.</p>
<p id="RQME0j">Jackson seemed to represent coolness. With her sharp, confident dancing, her swagger, her style, she was right at the cutting edge of all that was in vogue. But the second she stepped off a stage, her screen presence would turn in on itself. All of a sudden, she would become utterly reserved, sweetly shy and apparently eager to please.</p>
<p id="nooEOR">That quality was endearing, a New York Times critic wrote in a 1990 review of a Janet Jackson concert. It kept her from seeming threatening. “Miss Jackson herself is clearly diligent and eager to please,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/17/arts/review-pop-janet-jackson-fleshes-out-her-own-video-image.html">critic Jon Pareles wrote</a>. “She’s pushing herself onstage — she sweats — and her relative inexperience keeps her from seeming arrogant. Trying to replicate the unearthly perfection of a longtime trouper like her brother may be impossible, and it’s not exactly a good long-term strategy. But in her first tour, she works hard enough and comes close enough to make a listener want to root for her.” </p>
<p id="nLLyuQ">“She’s cool and <em>very</em> self-possessed,” <a href="https://www.spin.com/featured/janet-jackson-control-january-1987-cover-story-damn-it-janet/">wrote a reporter for Spin in 1987</a>, in a paragraph that conflated Jackson’s social restraint with her refusal to eat during a photo shoot. “Janet gives off the kind of keep-your-distance signals that can chill any attempt at overfamiliarity. … While everyone else stuffs his face over the course of the three-hour shoot, Janet doesn’t eat much. Just an apple, an occasional grape. She’s one cool girl, this Janet Jackson.” </p>
<p id="wJ5fgk">If you like, you could read Spin’s both approving and somewhat mystifying argument that Jackson’s cool temperament and cool appetite are connected as a way of talking about a different appetite: a sexual appetite. The classic racist trope in American pop culture is to imagine Black women as sexually voracious and predatory, their bodies lustful and out of control. But it was clear early on that Janet Jackson kept a firm lid on her desires: She was one cool girl. That would be important when she began developing her image further. </p>
<p id="n62Let">With 1993’s <em>Janet</em> (officially stylized <em>janet.</em>), Jackson introduced a major new element to the star image she had begun to build: sex. Jackson’s early albums had included chastity ballads about waiting for marriage, but <em>Janet</em> featured songs about oral sex, masturbation, and general good old-fashioned fucking (within the confines of a monogamous heterosexual relationship of mutual affection and respect).</p>
<p id="5S0DBW">“Sex has been an important part of me for several years,” <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/janet-jackson-the-joy-of-sex-56099/">Jackson explained to Rolling Stone</a>, in a cover story that showed her then-husband René Elizondo Jr. cupping her bare breasts with his hands. “But it just hasn’t blossomed publicly until now. I’ve had to go through some changes and shed some old attitudes before feeling completely comfortable with my body. Listening to my new record, people intuitively understand the change in me.”</p>
<p id="JtCAFE">Improbably, the critics went wild. Even in 1993, it was clear that Jackson’s move was a very big deal. American culture was rarely willing to see Black women as fully sexualized and fully human at the same time — but Jackson had managed to pull off the balancing act without letting anyone rob her of her dignity in the process.</p>
<p id="z8YI02">“<em>Janet.</em>’s Janet is a more complete sexual being than most of pop’s black women are allowed or allow themselves to be,” <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/janet-245726/">Rolling Stone acknowledged in its review</a>. “A significant, even revolutionary transition in the sexual history and popular iconography of black women — who have historically needed to do nothing to be considered overtly sexual — is struck as the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? girl declares herself the what-I’ll-do-to-you-baby! woman. The princess of America’s black royal family has announced herself sexually mature and surrendered none of her crown’s luster in the process. Black women and their friends, lovers and children have a victory in <em>Janet.</em>” </p>
<p id="M353ls">Jackson’s transition from sweet teenybopper to sexual woman was a game changer. It established the template that generations of pop stars would follow in the decades to come: not just Beyoncé and Rihanna, but also white singers like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. They know what to do as they set themselves up to perform maturity because they saw Janet Jackson successfully pull it off first.</p>
<p id="6v6Ik6">And part of what made Jackson’s unapologetic sexuality in her albums and on the dance floor so palatable to critics was that she was so shy whenever she wasn’t performing. </p>
<p id="aq3tHT">In the Rolling Stone cover story, journalist David Ritz describes watching Jackson shoot <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTSd4vqnMwo">the music video for her new single “If,”</a> which features some mock cunnilingus. “I’m stimulated,” Ritz admits — but he finds to his apparent dismay that he is unable to say as much to Jackson’s face.</p>
<p id="DOPNKn">“As silly as it sounds, I sense myself protecting her from the brashness of my own balls-out approach,” Ritz muses. “What is it? Wholesomeness — that’s what it is. Femininity. Up close, in the flesh, she’s being so damn sincere, I question my own sincerity; Janet Jackson gives off a good-girl vibe that only a cad would challenge. Despite this new album and its preoccupation with carnal knowledge, despite this battery of sizzling videos, Janet silently demands decorum on the part of an interviewer.” </p>
<p id="OLUB8W">Embedded in this passage is the general idea that by dancing in an overtly sexual manner, Jackson has put sex on the conversational table. But what Ritz calls Jackson’s “good-girl vibe” has prevented that transition from actually taking place. Her endearing diligence — that underdog A-student good girl reserve the New York Times spotted in Jackson in 1990 — seems to be somehow protecting her from any prurience. </p>
<p id="rscjMI">It was this contradiction, Ritz would conclude, this “tension between the erotic and the innocent” that was “the essence of Janet Jackson.” </p>
<p id="KATf9A">Perhaps no one without the status of a Jackson, part of R&B’s royal family, could have walked such a fine line. Regardless, Janet Jackson did it. She managed to unapologetically perform a Black female sexuality that was joyous and unashamed, and the critics didn’t even try to condemn her for it. </p>
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<cite>Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Janet Jackson at a children’s charity gala at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in 1991.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Janet Jackson performs in concert at Madison Square Garden in 1993.</figcaption>
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<p id="5bVMkY">They didn’t feel the need to, because Jackson’s image when she wasn’t performing was so icily pure, so wholesome, so palpably flinching away from the spotlight. No one could consider soft-spoken Janet a predator when her eyes went wide and her voice shook every time she gave an interview. Her shyness seemed to give her plausible deniability: It turned the sexuality of her music into a fantasy, something playful and fictional and largely theoretical.</p>
<p id="vHw8zd">Then her bra ripped on national television, and Jackson’s body and sexuality were catapulted into the realm of the real. Immediately, everything changed.</p>
<h3 id="tussHz">“Something about Jackson — her impenetrable demeanor, her candy-apple face — doesn’t jibe with her image at its sauciest” </h3>
<p id="sxmwMb">Because it was a cardinal belief of the press in the 2000s that any woman who was the victim of a sexual violation did it on purpose, for the attention, observers of any given scandal could demonstrate their savviness by loudly proclaiming this opinion. The rule held as true for the Wardrobe Malfunction as it did for anything else.</p>
<p id="UiNRve"><a href="http://publicapologycentral.com/apologia-archive/celebrity-2/janet-jackson/">Jackson issued a public apology</a> for what had happened, but it seemed to have little effect. Rapidly, conventional wisdom emerged: Janet Jackson shamelessly arranged to have her clothes ripped off on national TV as a cunning, hyper-sexualized ploy for attention, which she needed because at 37 she was a dried-up old hag whose career was failing. As such, she was proof of the degradation of our cultural values and had personally violated the innocence of America’s children.<strong> </strong></p>
<p id="b0CljX">“You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/arts/my-hero-janet-jackson.html">wrote Frank Rich</a> in the New York Times, in a column ostensibly written in Jackson’s defense but with a sneering, condescending tone. “She was out to accomplish a naked agenda — the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album’s release — and so she did.”</p>
<p id="yFqWVf">“Of course, Janet was baiting us with that ‘costume reveal,’” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2004/03/31/damita-jo-desperation-is-her-middle-name/4c211aca-9dfe-44de-8137-a4cfeb1ce005/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2cf2f684bb65">argued the Washington Post knowingly</a>, “and just as obviously she didn’t realize at the time how much chum she was throwing in the water.” The Post, like Rich, thought that Jackson had planned the whole thing to promote her new album, <em>Damita Jo</em> — slated for release the month after the Super Bowl — in an attempt to compete with R&B’s younger singers as she neared 40. “Janet has decided that the only way to fight her imitators is get even racier than they get,” the Post concluded. “Even if that might cost her a little dignity.”</p>
<p id="hQKdiW">“One of the reasons it is difficult to believe in the ‘wardrobe malfunction’ story is because, on the evidence of this album, Jackson is an extremely savvy operator,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/mar/26/popandrock.shopping">mused the Guardian</a> in a review of <em>Damita Jo</em>. “You can see what Jackson is straining for on [the songs] Warmth and Sexhibition, just as you can see why, at 38 years old, she would feel the need to flash her nipple at a television audience of 90 million. The world of R&B is obsessed with novelty and packed with lubricious ladies and lothario lovermen. Jackson is trying to send out a signal: you may be younger than me, but I am prepared to go further.” </p>
<p id="kUTsnH">Before the Super Bowl, Jackson’s palpable shyness had signaled that her sexuality was not a threat. After the Super Bowl, her shyness became proof that she was dishonest. “In retrospect, the most startling aspect of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl-flasher moment was how unstartling it was,” <a href="https://ew.com/article/2004/04/09/damita-jo/">argued EW</a>. “As amply demonstrated that evening, she works so hard at being sexy and provocative that she’s rarely either. Something about Jackson — her impenetrable demeanor, her candy-apple face — doesn’t jibe with her image at its sauciest.” </p>
<p id="vTh9CD">This theory that Jackson had intentionally flashed the audience in an attempt to juice up a fading career doesn’t hold up under much examination. Jackson was invited to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show precisely because she was <em>at the top</em> of her career. Her most recent album, 2001’s <em>All for You</em>, had <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1443354/janet-jacksons-all-for-you-beats-em-all/">debuted at No. 1 on Billboard</a>, tallied <a href="https://digital.abcaudio.com/news/all-you-janet-jacksons-blockbuster-2001-album-turns-20">one of the biggest opening sales weeks of any of Jackson’s albums</a>, earned <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/janet-jackson-all-for-you-album-appreciation.html">three Grammy nominations</a>, and gone double platinum. Her career wasn’t flagging, and she didn’t need extra attention. She was at the top. She was the establishment. </p>
<p id="mbFrfv">Moreover, the carefully fine line that Jackson had been walking for the past decade proved that she was very savvy indeed: far too savvy to think that a Black woman flashing her breast on live TV would ever work out well for her.</p>
<p id="GKwpzS">Predictably, it didn’t work out well. Les Moonves, then newly installed as CEO of CBS Corporation, apparently considered the Wardrobe Malfunction a personal embarrassment. <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/les-moonves-janet-jackson-career_n_5b919b8ce4b0511db3e0a269?5kh=">According to a report in HuffPost in 2018</a>, Moonves gave Timberlake a pass because Timberlake called him in tears to personally apologize. Jackson, meanwhile, only apologized publicly, never in private — and so Moonves, declaring her insufficiently unrepentant, vengefully blacklisted her. </p>
<p id="55llC1"><a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/5/18127261/les-moonves-dr-anne-peters-bobbie-phillips">Moonves was forced to step down from CBS in 2018</a>, after multiple accusations of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and abuse. But in 2004, his word was law at CBS Corporation, whose sister companies at the time included Viacom properties VH1, MTV, and BET, as well as multiple radio stations and the book publisher Simon & Schuster. All of them were instructed to stop working with Jackson. </p>
<p id="gUD4qx"><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/les-moonves-janet-jackson-career_n_5b919b8ce4b0511db3e0a269?5kh=">According to HuffPost</a>, when a Simon & Schuster imprint signed Jackson’s memoir <em>True You</em> in 2011, Moonves was furious. “How the fuck did she slip through?” he demanded.</p>
<h3 id="bPOXw7">“She’s morphing into an aging porn starlet of the most tragic type”</h3>
<p id="alPViA">Whether Jackson planned the Wardrobe Malfunction or not, those nine-sixteenths of a second at the Super Bowl destroyed her carefully guarded plausible deniability. Her body and sexuality surged past the boundaries of performance to become something viscerally present, potentially threatening. Simultaneously, her body and sexuality became laughable, ridiculous, an object of mockery. That narrative would spread to the reception of Jackson’s 2004 album, <em>Damita Jo</em>.</p>
<p id="2qkRKQ">In 1990, the sexuality of <em>Janet</em> had been a revelation, a liberation, something to celebrate. In 2004, critics considered the sexuality of <em>Damita Jo</em> to be self-evidently something to mock.</p>
<p id="0BlqaO">“It’s not just that there’s no depth to her boudoir insights and philosophical musings, or that the bulk of her lyrics manage the unimpressive feat of being explicit and banal,” <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/fear-of-a-black-titty/">opined the LA Weekly</a>, “but that she’s morphing into an aging porn starlet of the most tragic type — chasing relevance with ever bigger hair, ever bigger boobs, and a willingness to fall to her knees in mirthless, monotonous mimicry of sexual ecstasy. It’s like, after all the fucking and talking about fucking that she’s done, she has almost no idea what true liberation — or even pleasure — really is.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="oHrIWv"><q>The world was determined to see Jackson as shameless, past her prime, clawing desperately for attention and relevance she had not earned</q></aside></div>
<p id="1U7k4D">“A youngster can get X-rated and come across as a wayward kid who has plenty of time to straighten out her act. Ms. Jackson is 37,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2004/03/31/damita-jo-desperation-is-her-middle-name/4c211aca-9dfe-44de-8137-a4cfeb1ce005/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2cf2f684bb65">tsked the Washington Post</a>. “When she moans and boasts through ‘Warmth’ — one of the more explicit paeans to oral sex you’ll ever hear on a major label — she sounds like she knows better and is pretending that she doesn’t.”</p>
<p id="eihy6p">In the time since 2004, <em>Damita Jo</em> has enjoyed a critical reevaluation. After Jackson’s fan base pushed <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23justicefordamitajo">#JusticeForDamitaJo</a> to trend on Twitter in 2019, a new narrative emerged that argues for <em>Damita Jo</em>’s status as a landmark album within Jackson’s storied career, and as another chapter in her long history of celebrating Black women’s sexuality without apology. </p>
<p id="elh30h">“<em>Damita Jo</em> deserves our attention and, yes, <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23justicefordamitajo">justice</a>, not just as a reparative formality but because its specific depiction of sexuality in a mainstream forum — a superstar’s major-label, highly anticipated album — is extraordinary,” <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/janet-jackson-damita-jo/">declared Pitchfork in 2019</a>. “<em>Damita Jo</em> is not just rare for being a piece of mainstream erotica authored by a black woman — it’s also mainstream erotica that isn’t mired in darkness or shame.” </p>
<p id="fBXFQG">That Pitchfork reevaluation was part of a larger post-Me Too redemption of Janet Jackson. In 2019, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/arts/music/rock-roll-hall-fame-inductees-janet-jackson.html">she entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame</a> and launched a well-received <a href="https://variety.com/2019/music/news/janet-jackson-launching-las-vegas-residency-1203149714/">residency in Las Vegas</a>. She continues to tour and release albums, and she has lasted long enough to see the popular consensus on the Wardrobe Malfunction shift from “She did it on purpose” to “It’s a shame that happened to her.” </p>
<p id="ixGHco">Still, Jackson has never again achieved the height of ubiquity, the understanding that her albums would as a matter of course be played on every Top 40 radio station out there, that she had before the 2004 Super Bowl. That level of fame and success was forever stripped away. </p>
<p id="bQbq3c">And within the context of 2004, <em>Damita Jo</em> existed not as an album worthy of critical appraisal but as evidence for Jackson’s supposed sex-mad deviance. The world was determined to see Jackson as shameless, past her prime, clawing desperately for attention and relevance she had not earned with tacky, trying-too-hard attempts at shocking sex appeal. <em>Damita Jo</em>, along with the rest of Jackson’s career to that point, was all interpreted to fit the argument.</p>
<p id="l0obKH">It is worth remembering that this argument was molded by, among others, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/06/les-moonves-and-cbs-face-allegations-of-sexual-misconduct">a white man with a reported history of sexual harassment</a>. And in order to mold that argument, he allowed the white man who actually ripped Jackson’s clothes off to skate through the controversy with minimal consequences. But the overall narrative was produced and disseminated by a culture in which the bodies of Black women are considered inherently sexual, inherently threatening, and inherently humiliating. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="34LPEv">It took all of Janet Jackson’s star power combined with all her fiercely held private reserve to force America to treat her as an exception to that rule. The moment her reserve broke — even when Jackson was not the one to break it — she became subject to the normal rules of racism and misogyny once again.</p>
<p id="Q7mEGa"></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/22739035/janet-jackson-wardrobe-malfunction-controversy-explainer-sexuality-damita-joConstance Grady2021-10-05T08:30:00-04:002021-10-05T08:30:00-04:00Every version of the Monica Lewinsky story reveals America’s failure of empathy
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://elianarodgers.com/" target="_blank">Eliana Rodgers</a> for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>Twenty-three years later, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is a tale of cultural sadism.</p> <p id="4RxArQ"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em><strong>.</strong></em></p>
<p id="dcR5ca">All famous women are symbols of something in American pop culture. But Monica Lewinsky is singular for being, among other things, a symbol of a symbol.</p>
<p id="ymwuV4">When the story broke in 1998 that President Bill Clinton had carried out an affair with young former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the media eagerly prepared to make Lewinsky the face of the scandal. In newspapers and on cable news and talk shows she became, variously, a slut, an innocent victim, a liberated woman, someone sexy, someone fat, someone feminine, someone unwomanly. Her name became synonymous with a sex act. Her humiliation became a national spectacle.</p>
<p id="xy2j9o">“I became a social representation,” <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2014/06/monica-lewinsky-humiliation-culture">Lewinsky would later write</a> for Vanity Fair, “a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion about women, sex, infidelity, politics, and body issues.”</p>
<p id="LvO4rj">With that essay, Lewinsky also became one of the first people to help construct the framework for our current reevaluation of the mores of the ’90s and 2000s. In 2014, she reemerged into public view as an anti-bullying advocate, first with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_8y0WLm78U">a well-received TED talk</a> and then with the Vanity Fair article, in both, asking the country to reconsider its eagerness to shame her.</p>
<p id="ITpUqg">In the public eye, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2014/06/monica-lewinsky-humiliation-culture">Lewinsky wrote</a>, she had become, “America’s B.J. Queen. That Intern. That Vixen. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, ‘That Woman.’” But, she added, “It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.”</p>
<p id="ShVUgT">Many reacted with a surprising amount of remorse. “I started to feel bad,” <a href="https://time.com/100887/david-letterman-barbara-walters-monica-lewinsky/">David Letterman said on the air</a> after he read Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair article. “Because myself and other people with shows like this made relentless jokes about the poor woman. And she was a kid, she was 21, 22. … I feel bad about my role in helping push the humiliation to the point of suffocation.”</p>
<p id="yzBWyP">Lewinsky had made a mistake, the consensus came to be, but that was no excuse for the way the world humiliated her. People should be allowed to make mistakes when they’re 22 without becoming the object of vicious scorn the way she did.</p>
<p id="6J2Djb">As the Me Too movement took off in 2017, the Monica Lewinsky story evolved once again, and Lewinsky became a symbol of how liberals got feminism wrong in 1998. The new line of thinking was that responsibility for the mistake had rested with Bill Clinton all along. He was the one who had all the power in his relationship with Lewinsky. He was the leader of the free world, and she was a 22-year-old intern. He was the one who had a responsibility not to pursue a relationship with her. The fact that he did anyway was an abuse of his power. </p>
<p id="jHRBR9">“Fifty-something leaders of organizations shouldn’t be carrying on affairs with interns who work for them,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/15/16634776/clinton-lewinsky-resigned">wrote Matthew Yglesias for Vox in 2017</a>, “regardless of whether the affair is in some sense consensual.” Clinton, Yglesias argued, should have resigned.</p>
<p id="uelQsK">Part of this more recent consensus is the idea that liberals and feminists got it wrong back in 1998 by rallying behind Clinton instead of publicly supporting Lewinsky, that they focused all their attention on the fact that Lewinsky said the affair was consensual rather than on the vast power disparity between Clinton and Lewinsky. Back then, we didn’t really understand about power and consent, but now we do, because as a culture we have gotten better. That has come to be the new conventional wisdom about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.</p>
<p id="AVdukp">However, if we revisit the reactions people had to Monica Lewinsky in 1998, it becomes clear that few were actually ignoring that power disparity back then. It was central to the story being told about Monica Lewinsky, though the associations it carried were far different from those it carries today. </p>
<p id="sjeTK1">“Readers of Kenneth Starr’s report,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/monica091498.htm">the Washington Post opined in September 1998</a>, shortly after independent counsel Ken Starr released the infamous details of his investigation into Clinton, “imagine her as the star of either ‘Fatal Attraction’ or ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ — or ‘Dumb and Dumber.’” Starr’s 453-page report went into explicit detail about the sexual relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky in a “blow-by-blow account,” as contemporary commenters were prone to note with a chuckle. And the Post was correct in its summary of the Starr report’s reception: Those movie narratives were the dominant reads playing across America at the time. </p>
<p id="CHyEbU">But regardless of whether you’re reading her as the star of <em>Fatal Attraction</em>, <em>Seduced and Abandoned</em>, or <em>Dumb and Dumber</em>, it’s obvious Lewinsky isn’t a wicked and powerful seductress. She’s very clearly the one with no power. That’s part of what made the story so salacious, according to the mores of the time, and Lewinsky’s humiliation so delicious as well.</p>
<p id="IPS8Mn">From the vantage point of 2021, Lewinsky’s comparative powerlessness makes her a clear victim in Interngate — mostly. In contrast, the media narratives of the late ’90s, both feminist and anti-feminist, translated Lewinsky’s comparative powerlessness into an ever-shifting status of submissive slut, innocent victim, liberated woman, and unwomanly shrew. </p>
<p id="ZHcpgV">As we track the way those narratives played out in the press throughout the late ’90s, we can see the way our culture has evolved since 1998. What’s changed, however, is not that we’ve all developed a better understanding of how to read shifting power dynamics; instead, we’ve honed our ability to read the sadism and the misogyny of our first impulsive reactions to those dynamics.</p>
<p id="scH7VP">Here’s how the public in 1998 interpreted the fact of Monica Lewinsky’s powerlessness — and how those interpretations continue to operate subliminally in the ways we talk about Lewinsky today.</p>
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<cite>Margaret Norton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Jay Leno sitting before a picture of Monica Lewinsky on <em>The Tonight Show</em>, July 24, 1998.</figcaption>
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<h3 id="PBFLKE">Narrative 1: Lewinsky was the one with no power, which made her a stupid, submissive slut unworthy of respect</h3>
<p id="gb1sXs">The right-leaning<strong> </strong>Drudge Report was the outlet that broke the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. And its founder, Matt Drudge, had a very clear sense of what Lewinsky’s place in the story was.</p>
<p id="qDcDRV">Lewinsky was, <a href="http://drudgereportarchives.com/data/2002/01/17/20020117_175502_ml.htm">Drudge reported</a> in January 1998, “a young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president’s sexual preference.” </p>
<p id="XqNzjy">The narrative this report sets is almost pornographic in its erasure of Lewinsky’s personhood. She exists in this story solely to “indulge the president’s sexual preference,” with the only nod to her personality being that she considers the president “the love of her life.” She is, in this framing, powerless and easily manipulated — and therefore ripe for mockery.</p>
<p id="AxkNdS">The public happily followed Drudge’s lead and set to mocking Lewinsky, creating what would become the dominant cultural narrative of the moment.</p>
<p id="9qYMHt">In a man-on-the-street report, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/monica091498.htm">the Washington Post spoke to women</a> who called Lewinsky “a naive little ho, actually,” and a “spotlight vampire.” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/women091498.htm">Another Washington Post report</a> quoted a woman who said of Lewinsky, “We all know the profile — a little fat girl out there trying to seduce powerful men.”</p>
<p id="aNfl0O">“Hey look at me, I’m Monica Lewinsky,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL5Nn3bwdIA">began a jingle on Howard Stern’s radio show</a>. “They print pictures of my fat face and my ’do. Though I’ve barely finished school, I still know the golden rule: Do unto others then have them do you too.”</p>
<p id="GQLPFZ">This early narrative was durable enough that versions of it were able to persist well past the beginning of Lewinsky’s redemption. “She’s America’s favorite beret-wearing former intern, whose very name has become a synonym for a sex act she eagerly performed on her knees, a dame who rocketed to fame for failing to dry-clean a blue dress stained with the seed of the then-leader of the free world,” <a href="https://nypost.com/2014/05/07/a-plea-for-self-pitying-tone-deaf-monica-lewinsky-to-go-away/">wrote Andrea Peyser in the New York Post in 2014</a>, after Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair article was published. “Now, Lewinsky, 40, wants our pity and, perhaps, a job she can perform while sitting upright. And — drum roll, please — she doesn’t blame former President Bill Clinton, the alpha male before whom she famously knelt.”</p>
<p id="nvH88u">There’s a sort of <a href="https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/the-just-world-theory/">just world fallacy</a> at the center of this narrative: Lewinsky allowed herself to be treated badly by the president, therefore she deserved to be treated badly, so therefore we should treat her badly. Lewinsky, through her powerlessness, identified herself as an acceptable target for our culture’s sadism, and thus it was appropriate for us to direct it at her. She had it coming.</p>
<p id="jegFCB">This version of the story is the one we are mostly thinking about when we suggest that American culture has moved past such outright vicious cruelty in the years since 1998. But there were other versions of the story floating around at the same time.</p>
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<cite>Craig Herndon/The Washington Post via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Monica Lewinsky leaves the US District Courthouse with her attorneys on August 6, 1998.</figcaption>
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<h3 id="qg0q1f">Narrative 2: Lewinsky was the one with no power, which made her a victim who deserved our sympathy</h3>
<p id="a7SElg">The idea that Lewinsky’s comparative powerlessness makes her a victim of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal has become the dominant narrative of our own era. It also existed in 1998, albeit as a minority view. </p>
<p id="RzyE1O">It was, strikingly, a viewpoint held both by feminists on the left, where the opinion was politically unhelpful and hence unpopular, and by the conservative religious right, where the opinion was politically very useful indeed. </p>
<p id="5CZaYW">Linda Hirshman, a feminist<strong> </strong>lawyer and professor of philosophy and women’s studies, called on Clinton to resign at the time, citing the fraught power dynamic between Clinton and Lewinsky and the idea that the relationship would have been inherently damaging to Lewinsky.</p>
<p id="uiYOIz">“I think it’s wrong,” <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/1998/1/26/clinton_and_packwood">Hirshman said</a> on the radio program <em>Democracy Now</em> in 1998. “I think the fact that presidents have done it since the beginning of the republic is not an excuse. … The ways he interacted with her, if it’s true, is indeed a violation of our contemporary ideas about the moral and proper way to deal with other human beings in our world.”</p>
<p id="VWChvr">“You don’t have such fraught relationships with people who are so fragile,” <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/slow-burn-season-2-episode-7-transcript.html">Hirshman told Slate’s <em>Slow Burn</em> podcast in 2018</a>. “I just went back to her grand jury testimony, and it is really wrenching. I mean, and what her friends were saying at the time, and what her mother was saying. Obviously there was available to objective observers evidence of how painful this was for her no matter what she was saying about how she was fine. Any mother of a teenage daughter knows that they’ll always say they’re fine.” </p>
<p id="q4FByT">In that viewpoint, Hirshman found an unlikely ally in conservative then-Sen.<strong> </strong>John Ashcroft. In her 1998 <em>Democracy Now</em> interview, she approvingly cited Ashcroft’s analysis of the power dynamics at hand. “Ashcroft was on the news yesterday, saying — I thought quite movingly and convincingly,” she said, “that the disproportion of power between the chief executive of the United States, a notoriously and legendarily persuasive Bill Clinton, on the one hand, and a young woman two months out of college on the other, would at least give you some pause.”</p>
<p id="9G830a">Notably, this argument didn’t exist only on the right and in the extreme reaches of feminist discourse. Other feminists made similar cases. </p>
<p id="GLfOlb">“<em>Clearly</em> the Monica Lewinsky scandal is not a case of illegal sexual harassment,” columnist <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1998/05/williams199805">Marjorie Williams allowed in Vanity Fair in 1998</a>. There had been no quid pro quo; Lewinsky had by her own account consented. “But if Clinton had the relationship with her that the available evidence suggests he had, it flew in the face of the law’s spirit and reasoning.” </p>
<p id="GR4uod">Williams considered the willingness of mainstream feminists to stand by Clinton, and especially the common feminist argument that Clinton’s marriage to the brilliant Hillary Clinton showed him to be a friend to women, to be a betrayal of the cause. “There’s an awful affront to women in the apparently sharp distinctions that Clinton draws between the kind of woman you marry and the kind of woman you seek out for pleasure,” Williams wrote. “We were supposed to be doing away with the Madonna and the whore — or at least trying to integrate them.”</p>
<p id="JwUWHi">Clinton also faced disapproval from women within his administration. At a private Cabinet meeting in September 1998, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala <a href="https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/09/11/cabinet.reax/">spoke out against Clinton’s actions</a> directly to his face. Shalala was a former college president, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/slow-burn-season-2-episode-7-transcript.html">she explained to <em>Slow Burn</em> in 2018</a>, and she used to fire people for doing more or less what Clinton had done to Lewinsky.</p>
<p id="TxV3Ko">“If you’re a college president, the last thing you do is let people hit on students,” <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/slow-burn-season-2-episode-7-transcript.html">she said</a>. “I mean, we have rules about these things. And it was just unacceptable, and everybody was being a bit of an apologist for him in the room and I just blew up.”</p>
<p id="9YqSrC">In August 1998, one of Clinton’s supporters in Congress vented on the issue to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/19/opinion/liberties-saturday-night-bill.html">New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd</a>. “It’s the grossest kind of infidelity,” the anonymous woman said, “just sheer constant physical relief and satisfaction, really using in the crudest way somebody who was obviously extraordinarily gullible and obviously madly in love with him, somebody who would have done anything for him, and doing this in the Oval Office. I’m having a very hard time with it. I don’t want to be an enabler.”</p>
<p id="SKIXm4">It’s striking that Dowd is the figure who publicized this view. In her early coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Dowd was sharply critical of Clinton’s abuse of power and sympathetic to Lewinsky as a victim. Yet in her later columns, Dowd would begin to criticize Lewinsky, too, in ways that show how this second narrative of the scandal could contain within it a cruel and vicious third narrative.</p>
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<cite>Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Monica Lewinsky rides in a car driven by one of her lawyers in downtown Washington, DC, August 1998.</figcaption>
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<h3 id="17ZMEp">Narrative 3: Lewinsky was the one with no power, which made her a victim, which is extremely funny and a reason to further humiliate her</h3>
<p id="AxvVpc">In June 1998, six months after the story broke, Monica Lewinsky posed for <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/05/throwback-Thursday-monica-lewinsky-december-1998">a series of portraits in Vanity Fair</a>, wearing <a href="http://ronbeinner.com/portfolio/monica-lewinksy/">red lipstick and designer gowns</a>. In a New York Times column, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/10/opinion/liberties-feathered-and-tarred.html">Maureen Dowd argued</a> that the portraits were “pornography” and that they were “sickening.” (Lewinsky was fully clothed in every picture.) </p>
<p id="LC4yAs">What Dowd seemed to find pornographic and sickening about the photos was the way they played against her sense that Lewinsky was a victim and hence properly deserved to be in a state of humiliation. That she wasn’t humiliated in those pictures — that they were glamour shots — Dowd seemed to find both jarring and offensive. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ThrowbackThursday?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ThrowbackThursday</a>: Monica Lewinsky in 1998, styled by L'Wren Scott <a href="http://t.co/xlTwLbOGeW">http://t.co/xlTwLbOGeW</a> <a href="http://t.co/pgCQHcfUuG">pic.twitter.com/pgCQHcfUuG</a></p>— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) <a href="https://twitter.com/VanityFair/status/464415986180186112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 8, 2014</a>
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<p id="WsJcmW">“The weird thing about <a href="http://ronbeinner.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ml3.jpg">the shot of Monica clutching the feathers</a> is that it’s not sultry. It’s saddening,” Dowd wrote. “Stubby and white, her hand looks disturbingly childlike. Her short nails are painted red, like a little girl who has put on her mother’s polish. Shades of JonBenet Ramsey.” The photographs, Dowd concludes, show that “there’s one thing Monica has immunity from: brains.” </p>
<p id="JOcFxk">This was the third narrative of the Monica Lewinsky story, and it functions as a synthesis of the first two. Lewinsky was unquestionably taken advantage of, goes this version of the story, and Clinton was unquestionably in the wrong. But the fact that Lewinsky could be so easily manipulated proves that she was foolish and childlike. Her victimhood means that she deserves contempt and scorn.</p>
<p id="pdLLVO">At times, this narrative is able to veil itself in apparent pity for Lewinsky. Yet even then, there’s always a sort of delighted lingering on all the ways her failings make her a victim, on all the ways that she must have been silly and unsophisticated for falling prey to Clinton. “She is typical of the nihilism of female sexuality at this point,” a 25-year-old spokesperson for the Independent Women’s Forum, an anti-feminist group of women intellectuals, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/monica091498.htm">told the Washington Post of Lewinsky in 1998</a>. “I think it’s tragic someone in his position so brutally exploited her lack of understanding and sophistication. This poor little girl thought this was going to be like ‘Dynasty.’”</p>
<p id="qQ8liW">The same logic also emerged on the feminist left. <a href="https://observer.com/1998/02/lets-separate-the-women-hillary-from-the-girls-monica-linda-paula/">In the New York Observer</a>, the feminist writer Susan Faludi linked Lewinsky, along with Clinton accusers <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/1/6/10722580/bill-clinton-juanita-broaddrick">Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick</a>, to the “Girl Power feminism” she rather incoherently identified with such disparate cultural figures as the Spice Girls and Fiona Apple. </p>
<p id="kjYxmA">Girl power, Faludi argued, “is derived only by celebrating yourself, ideally via your injuries; gaining power by talking about what was done to you. It is, by definition, only a destructive power, aimed at bringing down the bogeyman by having a sulk ‘n’ sob in front of the adults. It’s the power available to a girl whose only recourse is tattle. The many plaintiffs of the Clinton scandals are cast, or cast themselves, as girls.”</p>
<p id="SSK0zm">Faludi did not dispute, in this particular article, accounts that Lewinsky, Jones, and Broaddrick had been injured by Clinton. (Elsewhere <a href="https://www.deseret.com/1998/12/3/19415998/scandal-casts-harsh-light-on-feminists">she would famously argue of Lewinsky</a> that “if anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him.”) Her argument is rather that by speaking out about their injuries, Clinton’s accusers had been acting like victims and hence children. To be a victim of a sexual predator is, according to this narrative, to be worthy of humiliation.</p>
<p id="pIlRRw">But Faludi, like Linda Hirshman and Marjorie Williams, wasn’t expressing the mainstream feminist narrative about Monica Lewinsky. That idea lay in the fourth version of the Monica Lewinsky story.</p>
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<cite>Timothy Clary/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Monica Lewinsky leaves the Cosmos Club in DC with her attorney William Ginsberg, left, 1998.</figcaption>
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<h3 id="PEageW">Narrative 4: In seducing the president, Monica Lewinsky grabbed for power when she properly had none, which made her a liberated woman — and an object of contempt</h3>
<p id="QmWzio">In 1998, when feminists like Hirshman made the claim that Clinton took advantage of Lewinsky, they were met with outrage from other feminists. </p>
<p id="GMFdBd">“We want the right to be sexually active without the presumption that we were used or duped,” <a href="https://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/poli/monica.htm">argued Amelia Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner in the Nation</a>. “If feminists hold Lewinsky up as a violated naif, then we don’t believe that an adult woman can take responsibility for her own desires and actions. In other words, we will have gone a long way back, baby. Feminists should support Monica Lewinsky not as a victim of a rapacious man but as a young woman with a libido of her own.” </p>
<p id="Nah9BK">This fourth Monica Lewinsky narrative made the case that, regardless of any disparity in power between intern and president, Lewinsky was fully capable of making her own sexual choices. It turned away from Clinton’s responsibility to say no to focus on Lewinsky’s right to say yes, and it treated that right as empowering — almost as empowering, in its own way, as a female president would have been.</p>
<p id="fPBEmP">“It’s like every girl’s dream,” said Elizabeth Benedict, author of <em>The Joy of Writing Sex</em>, in <a href="https://observer.com/1998/02/new-york-supergals-love-that-naughty-prez/">a feminist roundtable on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal for the New York Observer</a> that famously ran under the headline “New York Supergals Love That Naughty Prez.” Benedict celebrated the feminist dream of the ’90s: “You can be the President, but you can fuck the President, too.”</p>
<p id="HHvvQZ">“And you get a dress,” added former <em>Saturday Night Live</em> writer Patricia Marx. </p>
<p id="eBf8Pf">In 2018, the Observer editor who put together that roundtable, Lisa Chase, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/slow-burn-season-2-episode-7-transcript.html">told Slate’s <em>Slow Burn</em></a> that she had felt the roundtable was a productive feminist response to the scandal. Host Leon Neyfakh summarizes her reasoning as: “Feminist thinking about sex can be divided into two strains — one that’s all about a woman’s right to sexual agency, and one that’s about a woman’s right to be free from sexual predation. Chase thinks that maybe the supergals who met at Le Bernardin 20 years ago were more focused on the former because they were that much closer to a time when women didn’t have sexual autonomy and self-determination.” </p>
<p id="GaInTu">But two decades later, that Observer roundtable and its lascivious glee at the delight of sex with the president are understandably remembered as a symbol of all the ways feminists failed Lewinsky. </p>
<p id="eizrMn">Shortly after discussing all the ways in which it would be a dream to sleep with the president, the panel turns to the question of what Lewinsky might do next. Nancy Friday, author of <em>The Power of Beauty</em>, has a constructive suggestion. “She can rent out her mouth,” she says.</p>
<p id="jQ0xha">“But, you know, men do like to get close to the mouth that has been close to power,” muses <em>Fear of Flying</em> author Erica Jong. “Think of the fantasy in the man’s mind as she’s going down on him and he’s thinking, Oh, my God.”</p>
<p id="EIeJtx">After further debate as to whether Lewinsky spat or swallowed after oral sex, Jung comes to a conclusion. “I think if we were old-fashioned women, we would be saying she should be burned as a witch, basically,” she says. “And I think it’s a tribute to how far we’ve come that we’re not trashing Monica Lewinsky.”</p>
<p id="5gL2fN">Jung’s belief that it is liberating for the panel not to trash Lewinsky lines up with Chase’s sense that the panel is nothing more than a group of feminists celebrating all the ways women have come a long way, baby: Not only can a woman become the president (although then, as now, we’re short on practical proof of that assertion), but she can also have sex with the president (although then, as now, it seems unlikely that question was ever in doubt). </p>
<p id="QRTi6k">In 2000, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5aswPYTql8">the short-lived satirical WB comedy <em>Grosse Pointe</em></a> would parody this idea, that to celebrate Lewinsky’s sexuality was to celebrate her. The show sees a young airheaded actress audition to play Lewinsky in an upcoming prestige biopic. </p>
<p id="Pyp9Hk">“Monica Lewinsky is <em>the</em> defining woman of our generation,” breathes her friend. </p>
<p id="dquP6W">“She knew what she wanted, and she went after it,” the actress says. “She brought this whole country to its knees.”</p>
<p id="hs2uUI">“And still kept her dignity,” the friend adds. </p>
<p id="S1De9t">The double entendre of the conversation makes clear what the gleeful salaciousness of the Observer panel also revealed: how little distance there is between this celebratory feminist narrative and that original mainstream narrative that Lewinsky was nothing more than a slut who deserved to be humiliated. It’s the same sadistic impulse all over again.</p>
<p id="7AI1Dg">Lewinsky allowed herself to be treated badly by the president. Therefore she deserves to be treated badly. Therefore we should treat her badly. All that the celebratory feminist narrative defends is Lewinsky’s so-called choice to be humiliated.</p>
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<cite>Rich Fury/WireImage</cite>
<figcaption>Monica Lewinsky attends the Hollywood premiere of FX’s <em>Impeachment: American Crime Story </em>in September 2021.</figcaption>
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<h3 id="Uw1UCj">Every story we tell about Monica Lewinsky holds the possibility of humiliating her. We still haven’t fully found our way out of that trap.</h3>
<p id="jvQhYz">Today, the national consensus lies more or less with Hirshman in casting Lewinsky as a victim who deserves our sympathy: Lewinsky was Clinton’s subordinate, and he took advantage of her, and that was wrong. We have a collective sense, moreover, that we failed her in our endless national slut-shaming of her. <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/15/16634776/clinton-lewinsky-resigned">Matt Yglesias’s simple and correct assertion</a> from 2017 more or less lines up with the consensus on sexual morality today: “Fifty-something leaders of organizations shouldn’t be carrying on affairs with interns who work for them regardless of whether the affair is in some sense consensual.” </p>
<p id="M5E3KY">Still, over and over again, as America delves into the details of this story, discomfort lingers. There is some awkward snag that seems to exist around the idea that by her own account, Lewinsky eagerly pursued Clinton. We seem to have trouble believing that both this fact and the idea that he never should have allowed himself to be seduced may be true at once. </p>
<p id="ZEU8es">In 2016, the podcast <em>You’re Wrong About</em> <a href="https://rottenindenmark.org/2018/06/02/monica-lewinsky/">ran an episode on Lewinsky</a>. Hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall were speaking after Lewinsky’s first comeback essay but before Me Too mainstreamed the idea that Clinton was absolutely wrong in his conduct toward Lewinsky. At the end, Hobbes mused over how difficult he found her to analyze as a subject, in part because of how enthusiastically she pursued Clinton. </p>
<p id="A3EkvZ">“I kind of wanted to reclaim Lewinsky as a feminist hero and a total victim of all this. And obviously she is,” he said. “But it’s also just amazing to me that she did some really stupid shit. She was calling him 20 times a day at the end. She had convinced herself he was in love with her. I don’t think the punishment fit the crime. I think what she went through in the ’90s was wildly disproportionate. … But she did some stupid shit.”</p>
<p id="y8u3se">On <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/transcript-of-slow-burn-season-2-episode-4.html">an episode of Slate’s <em>Slow Burn</em> podcast in 2018</a>, host Leon Neyfakh begins laughing with Hanna Rosin, a journalist who covered the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, about how absurd it was for Bill Clinton to have pursued an affair with his intern while he was actively being sued for workplace sexual harassment. Rosin laughs, too, and then seems to catch herself.</p>
<p id="PeaPP9">“Oh, it’s not funny. It’s really not funny. God, we think of this so differently now,” she says, still laughing. “It’s not funny. I’m actually amazed that in my conversation with you I’m still laughing. Because I did think in my head, the Monica Lewinsky scandal really does mark a moment in feminist shame. It is genuinely the thing I look back on and think, God, the way — I mean, everyone says this — but the way we talked about her, the way we treated her, how blind we were to the power dynamics. We talked about them but in this kind of superficial way, you know? It just wasn’t prime in our minds, the power dynamic and the position she was put in and how her life was absolutely ruined by this and how she got dragged into it. And yet you and I still find it funny. Why is that?”</p>
<p id="YDsiyJ">I recognize this discomfort in myself. </p>
<p id="Ne5RjJ">Intellectually, I know that it was Clinton’s responsibility, as the 49-year-old president, to refuse advances from a 22-year-old unpaid intern. Moreover, I’m aware that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/1/6/10722580/bill-clinton-juanita-broaddrick">Clinton has been accused multiple times of sexual assault and sexual harassment</a>. Within that context, Clinton’s decision to carry on a sexual relationship with his young intern appears less like a one-time lapse of judgment than like part of a continued pattern of predatory behavior.</p>
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<img alt="A dark-haired woman in a blue beret and red lipstick stands in a crowd, applauding an unseen figure." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/93rX88dTD5sI40LFsYAafme1Hto=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22885481/ACS_402_2475.jpg">
<cite>Tina Thorpe/FX</cite>
<figcaption>Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky on <em>Impeachment: American Crime Story</em>.</figcaption>
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<p id="2DcygV">Yet I recently sat down to watch Ryan Murphy’s <em>Impeachment: American Crime Story </em>miniseries, which debuted in September on FX. And when I saw Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky flash Clinton her thong in the office shortly before their first sexual encounter, for a split second I felt a sort of defensive shock. A bizarre thought appeared in my mind: Wasn’t it blaming the victim, I wondered, to suggest that <em>she</em> pursued <em>him</em> so brazenly? </p>
<p id="P5eVMs">Of course, Lewinsky did pursue Clinton. The flashed thong is a matter of historical record. It has been more thoroughly investigated than possibly any other sexual advance in history. </p>
<p id="IZYMb3">What my brain tripped on, I think, is some still-present inability to reconcile Lewinsky as a woman with her own sexual desires and agency and as a figure who was taken advantage of. We have made this binary an either/or proposition, when it is entirely possible for it to be a both/and. That’s where the discomfort lies. </p>
<p id="99vROu">Lewinsky herself, as she begins to take more and more control of her narrative, seems to often recognize the discomfort people feel around the question of her complicity in the affair, and the extent to which they might find it funny. For most of her public life, she has maintained that her relationship with Clinton was fully consensual and that the true villain of the story was Ken Starr and the media witch hunt she experienced after he published his report. But in 2018, in the midst of a resurgent Me Too movement, she expressed a few other thoughts.</p>
<p id="RIyzyT">“Now, at 44, I’m beginning (<em>just beginning</em>) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot,” <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/monica-lewinsky-in-the-age-of-metoo">she wrote for Vanity Fair</a>. “‘This’ (sigh) is as far as I’ve gotten in my re-evaluation; I want to be thoughtful.”</p>
<p id="T2xLdh">It was Lewinsky who, serving as a producer on <em>Impeachment</em>, told the show’s writers not to elide her decision to go after Clinton and to show the thong flash on camera. “I just felt I shouldn’t get a pass,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/arts/television/monica-lewinsky-impeachment-american-crime-story.html">she told the New York Times</a>.</p>
<p id="aseGbB">It makes sense that Lewinsky is being so cautious and so thoughtful about this question, so unwilling to commit to one particular interpretation of the facts. Every version of the story we tell about her, even the good ones, contains within itself the possibility of another story in which she is humiliated. That’s a fact of which she is fully aware. </p>
<p id="el9tcU">“So often have I struggled with my own sense of agency versus victimhood,” <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/monica-lewinsky-in-the-age-of-metoo">she explained in her 2018 Vanity Fair essay</a>. “In 1998, we were living in times in which women’s sexuality was a marker of their agency — ‘owning desire.’ And yet, I felt that if I saw myself as in any way a victim, it would open the door to choruses of: ‘See, you did merely service him.’” </p>
<p id="zRaNoI">In 1998, we excoriated Lewinsky for being a woman adjacent to the idea of sex. Not having sex would not have saved her from our scorn, not as long as there was a sex scandal happening within her vicinity. (<a href="https://me.me/i/proudly-wears-hillary-sucks-but-monica-swallows-t-shirt-hugely-offended-2399384">As right-wing sloganeers are happy to remind you</a>, “Hillary sucks but Monica swallows.”) </p>
<p id="OMXC9x">Part of the project of feminism over the past 20 years has been to broaden the narrative, to create space for a world in which a woman may exist in proximity to a sex scandal and not be understood as deserving of humiliation. Yet despite a widely held desire and ongoing effort to distinguish between the two, we can find ourselves caught in this vexed sort of purity test: Is Lewinsky enough of a victim for our sympathy? How much of a victim must she be to deserve respect? Can she be both a victim and a woman expressing sexual agency?</p>
<p id="1D4oRX">America’s intellectual understanding of consent has evolved and matured by leaps and bounds since the Starr Report first arrived. But for many of us, this intellectual understanding is still not quite equal to the engrained sexual morality we grew up on.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="RuXJWt">So if we find ourselves, despite our better judgment, longing to demand proof of victimhood from the women we extend our empathy toward, maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised at our own thought patterns. After all, that’s the sexual morality millennials grew up on. We learned it from the same place we learned what a blow job is: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/22672346/monica-lewinsky-bill-clinton-impeachment-american-crime-storyConstance Grady2021-08-30T09:00:00-04:002021-08-30T09:00:00-04:0020 years after Aaliyah’s death, her story only feels more tragic
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<img alt="An illustration of the face of singer Aaliyah wearing sunglasses." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_xODHJw3DsbZM6RQFk9TbRR3tAw=/375x0:2626x1688/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69792598/aaliyah_vox_final.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://blackpowerbarbie.com/work-flatiron" target="_blank">blackpowerbarbie</a> for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>R. Kelly groomed Aaliyah in plain sight, and the world let him.</p> <p id="2iGpWl"></p>
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<p id="ydzl1g"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em><strong>.</strong></em></p>
<p id="iKL4Bc">This month marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Aaliyah. The R&B singer, born Aaliyah Dana Haughton and nicknamed Baby Girl but best known by her first name, died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, at 22 years old. Alongside that anniversary comes a notable milestone: On August 20, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/08/20/aaliyah-streaming/">Aaliyah’s music catalog began making its way to streaming for the first time</a>. </p>
<p id="rY5JUd">In her lifetime, Aaliyah was celebrated as one of pop’s most forward-looking and futuristic artists. She still is: A <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/3174924/aaliyah-self-titled-20-years/">2021 MTV News article</a> declared that listening to her 2001 self-titled album “still sounds like the future.” Yet until this month, the only Aaliyah album available to stream was her 1994 debut, <em>Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number</em> — which meant that listening to any Aaliyah song on streaming meant automatically sending royalties to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/30/18192932/lifetime-surviving-r-kelly-documentary-sexual-abuse">R. Kelly</a>, the album’s producer and Aaliyah’s alleged abuser.</p>
<p id="ZxrA4d">Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, is at the center of the other big Aaliyah milestone of this month. On August 18, opening statements began at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/r-kelly-trial-explained.html">Kelly’s trial on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking</a>. Aaliyah appears as Jane Doe No. 1 on Kelly’s indictment, and she is likely Kelly’s first known victim. </p>
<p id="7hcXrC">For a very long time, however, that’s not how the world told their story. Instead of a story about abuse, the story of R. Kelly and Aaliyah was framed as a love story.</p>
<p id="O0YN4o">Court records show that Aaliyah and Kelly were married in an illegal ceremony in 1994, when Aaliyah was 15 and Kelly 27. The wedding was quickly annulled, and Kelly and Aaliyah both denied it ever took place. (<a href="https://www.complex.com/music/r-kelly-attorney-backtracks-declining-deny-sexual-contact-with-aaliyah">Kelly has continued to deny it at his trial</a>.) </p>
<p id="UtmOpL">Since Aaliyah’s 2001 death, stories that have filtered out from Aaliyah’s friends, family, and boyfriends suggest that Kelly abused her badly. Additionally, since <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/25/17248084/r-kelly-sexual-misconduct-allegations-timeline">news of Kelly’s continued abusive relationships and his so-called “sex cult” broke in 2017</a> amid the Me Too movement, discussions about what he did to Aaliyah have acquired a widespread moral outrage that they lacked just a few years ago. </p>
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<cite>Steve Grayson/WireImage</cite>
<figcaption>Fans of Aaliyah turned a record store mural of the singer into a shrine after her death.</figcaption>
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<p id="SPhBAh">“Theirs wasn’t a love story that defied age,” writes journalist Kathy Iandoli in her 2021 biography <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/baby-girl-better-known-as-aaliyah-9781797128061/9781982156848"><em>Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah</em></a>; “it was a tragedy that Aaliyah endured and somehow moved past to become an icon in her own right without him.”</p>
<p id="rGO9TR">Even in 1994, it should have been clear just from the sheer age difference and power differential between Aaliyah and Kelly — Aaliyah 15 and a child, Kelly 27 and her professional mentor — that any romantic relationship between them would most likely hurt her. It also should have been clear that the responsibility for any such relationship rested with the adult in the room: Kelly.</p>
<p id="augN5T">Instead, in the aftermath of the relationship — both before Kelly’s 2006 arrest for the possession of child pornography and throughout his professional rehabilitation in the years that followed, all the way up until the news of his so-called “sex cult” broke in 2017 — their secret marriage was treated as an amusingly soapy celebrity scandal. Moreover, R. Kelly’s abuse of Aaliyah has been treated as something shameful about Aaliyah rather than something shameful about Kelly. </p>
<p id="HyrcFZ">Aaliyah worked hard to move on from Kelly after news of their marriage went public. She stopped working with him, embracing a new sound with Missy Elliot and Timbaland. In the seven years between distancing herself from Kelly and her death, Aaliyah skillfully played down the whole incident with the press every time it was mentioned in public.</p>
<p id="G2Gu1A">But in an odd way, the story of what R. Kelly did to Aaliyah would set her image. As her star rose, her youth and innocence would become central to the way the world understood her sexuality, and her sexuality, in turn, would be central to what the world loved about her. </p>
<p id="lzV54w">So when we talk about Aaliyah today, 20 years after her death, we find ourselves faced with the task of untangling Kelly’s abuse from Aaliyah’s image — and the question of whether it’s even possible for us to do so.</p>
<h3 id="sUWBxo">“It was basically like listening to an R. Kelly album, but with a little girl singing”</h3>
<p id="ZlQwGQ">Aaliyah and R. Kelly met through Aaliyah’s uncle Barry Hankerson. Hankerson was Kelly’s manager, and when Aaliyah was 12 years old, Hankerson brought her into the studio and had her sing for Kelly.</p>
<p id="1WdIMj">At 12, Aaliyah had already been pushing for years to break into the industry. She <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl19QapsUWA">appeared on <em>Star Search</em></a> at age 10. She sang with her aunt Gladys Knight at one of Knight’s Las Vegas concerts at age 11. By age 12, she was, Hankerson thought, ready to start thinking about an album. Kelly agreed. In 1993, when Aaliyah was 14 years old, she and Kelly began work on her debut: <em>Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number</em>.</p>
<p id="A5CdRk">The album was a hit. It <a href="https://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard-200/1994-06-11">debuted at No. 24 on Billboard</a> in May 1994, and it earned Aaliyah nominations at the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/tv/1995/01/29/mariah-carey-boyz-ii-men-lead-ama-nominees/089c99dd-2d68-4854-8599-2759eff76057/">American Music Awards</a> and the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=wgsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false">Soul Train Awards</a>. Most critics thought they knew what made it so good: R. Kelly.</p>
<p id="nxFUXk">“Aaliyah’s ‘Back & Forth’ is a fixture in the pop Top 5 partly because of R. Kelly. … He not only produced and wrote ‘Back & Forth,’ but he also does the rapping,” explained the LA Times in 1994. “Getting airplay for a single by a new artist is tough — unless it features R. Kelly doing everything but the lead vocals. Fans love just about anything he does, and ‘Back & Forth’ is the next best thing to a new R. Kelly single.” </p>
<p id="LiXfVc">Even after Aaliyah had established herself and her voice and everyone knew what an Aaliyah album sounded like, <em>Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number</em> still sounded strikingly like an R. Kelly album rather than an Aaliyah album. “It was basically like listening to an R. Kelly album, but with a little girl singing,” <a href="https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/age-aint-nothing-but-a-number-aaliyah-week-448053/">album sequencer Jeff Sledge told Vibe in 2014</a>. “Obviously the subject matter wasn’t sexual, but the overall production and the sound of the record was like a Robert album as a little girl.” </p>
<p id="ifLLAj">Kelly seems to have been intent on presenting Aaliyah to the world as a miniature version of himself, and not just in the way her album sounded. In Iandoli’s <em>Baby Girl</em>, Aaliyah’s stylist Kimya Warfield Rainge recalls that Kelly insisted Aaliyah be dressed like him for her videos, in an oversize sweatsuit that would reveal her midriff, with dark sunglasses. He also produced a leather vest for her, a miniature version of the vest he wore on his album covers and tours, with a license plate for Illinois — Kelly’s home state — on the back. Rainge didn’t feel the vest particularly fit Aaliyah’s look, but both Aaliyah and Kelly insisted she wear it. “He was the influencer,” Kimya said. “They already had an image set for her.”</p>
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<cite>Blackground Enterprises</cite>
<figcaption>On the front and back covers of <em>Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number</em>, Aliyah is wearing the vest R. Kelly had made for her: black leather, with an Illinois license plate on the back. Kelly himself looms out of focus in the background.</figcaption>
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<p id="xJOJnc">Kelly didn’t only insist that Aaliyah dress like him for her videos and album production. In the months following her album drop, <a href="https://twixnmix.tumblr.com/post/169980386502/aaliyah-and-r-kelly-photographed-by-anthony">they began to dress alike everywhere they went</a>, which was quite a few places. They were photographed together in public often. They told everyone they were best friends. The gossip press began to raise a collective eyebrow.</p>
<p id="cKSdYP">“The two are obviously close,” snarked YSB magazine in 1994. “It’s no wonder they were thought to be cousins. NOT!” </p>
<p id="MqT7sT">“Everybody seems to think that y’all are either girlfriend and boyfriend or cousins or friends,” said Sherry Carter on BET’s <em>Video Soul Gold</em>, when Aaliyah and R. Kelly appeared in matching outfits. “Let’s get the record straight.”</p>
<p id="R50vFF">“I better go get me a white Jeep,” Kelly joked, referring to the OJ Simpson Bronco chase. “Uh-oh.”</p>
<p id="ziRxWV">“Well, no, we’re not related,” Aaliyah responded. “At all. We’re just very close. This is my best friend in the whole wide world.”</p>
<p id="Fr9VDo">Later, Carter asked Aaliyah how old she was. She refused to say, and she would continue to refuse until she turned 16.</p>
<p id="vWjZVN">As Aaliyah’s debut album year went on, the “Are R. Kelly and Aaliyah secretly together?” story began to evolve. It turned into, “Are R. Kelly and Aaliyah secretly married?” Both Kelly’s camp and Aaliyah denied the rumors.</p>
<p id="DYYeZX">Then in December 1994, <a href="https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/r-kellys-dec-1994-jan-1995-cover-story-superfreak-629059/">Vibe published their marriage certificate</a>, and the rumor became fact.</p>
<h3 id="UMzg0T">“I had Aaliyah’s mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter’s life was ruined, Aaliyah’s life was never the same after that”</h3>
<p id="VMRTxF">In the nearly 30 years since that clandestine, illegal marriage, there’s been a fair bit of reporting on what occurred, most explosively in <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/30/18192932/lifetime-surviving-r-kelly-documentary-sexual-abuse">the 2019 Lifetime docuseries <em>Surviving R. Kelly</em></a> and from the journalist Jim DeRogatis, who first broke the story of Kelly’s child sex tape in 2000 and has been reporting on Kelly ever since. Here’s what seems to have happened.</p>
<p id="4Cj606">“All but one of my sources said [Aaliyah] and Kelly began having sexual contact during her first recording sessions,” writes DeRogatis in his 2019 book <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/5/18652167/r-kelly-jim-derogatis-interview-soulless"><em>Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly</em></a>. Aaliyah was 14 at the time. In <em>Surviving R. Kelly</em>, Kelly’s former backup singer Jovante Cunningham says that she once saw Kelly in bed with a 15-year-old Aaliyah on their tour bus and that Kelly was doing “things that an adult should not be doing with a child.”</p>
<p id="ST5jVp">Kelly’s former personal assistant Demetrius Smith has said — in <em>Soulless</em>, in <em>Surviving R. Kelly</em>, in his own book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Man-Behind-Looking-Inside-Out/dp/1456870513"><em>The Man Behind the Man</em></a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/nyregion/r-kelly-trial-racketeering.html">at Kelly’s 2021 trial</a> — that Aaliyah and Kelly got married because Kelly got Aaliyah pregnant. </p>
<p id="sQv03c">According to Smith, Aaliyah called Kelly when he was touring in Miami to tell him she thought she might be pregnant. Kelly consulted with his lawyer and accountant, both of whom told him that he should marry Aaliyah. At Kelly’s 2021 trial, <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/r-kelly-trial-aaliyah-marriage_n_61242355e4b07fee0cb08a92?ft7">a Jane Doe testified</a> that Kelly went through with the wedding so that he could legally give Aaliyah permission to get an abortion, since otherwise she would have needed her parents’ consent to access one.</p>
<p id="aJ4Xb6">Kelly and Aaliyah flew to Chicago, where Smith says he bribed an official to obtain false documents showing that Aaliyah was 18 years old, and the pair had a quickie city hall wedding in suburban Maywood. Their marriage license is dated August 31, 1994.</p>
<p id="6yVobj">As Smith’s story goes, Aaliyah returned home to her family in Detroit the day after the wedding and told them what had happened. Her family took charge of the situation, and on September 29, 1994, the marriage was annulled. Aaliyah told her family that she never wanted to see Kelly again, and they set about making sure she would never have to.</p>
<p id="Wn3F2h">The family understanding at the time seems to have been that the marriage, while plainly a bad idea, was just a case of two kids who cared for each other getting in over their heads.</p>
<p id="UOhQug">“Rob made a mistake,” Smith says in <em>Soulless</em>. “That’s how the family looked at it.”</p>
<p id="6U4RXo">“We just thought, ‘This guy is stupid. He’s like a big, dumb 15-year-old hisself,’” an anonymous member of Aaliyah’s family says in <em>Soulless</em>. “It was just, ‘How dumb can you be, boy? You’re lucky we are the family!’”</p>
<p id="XP0oeM">But not long after the marriage ended, the people who were closest to Aaliyah seemed to change their minds about Kelly’s harmlessness. “I had Aaliyah’s mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter’s life was ruined, Aaliyah’s life was never the same after that,” <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2013/12/16/read-the-stomach-churning-sexual-assault-accusations-against-r-kelly-in-full/">DeRogatis said in a 2013 interview with the Village Voice</a>. </p>
<p id="ApUoLs">Damon Dash, who was dating Aaliyah at the time of her death, says in <em>Surviving R. Kelly</em> that Aaliyah was too traumatized by her relationship with Kelly to tell him everything that had happened, and that she would only say, “That dude was a bad man.” In <a href="https://www.nickcannon.com/news/cannons-class-ft-dame-dash">a 2019 interview with Nick Cannon</a>, Dash spoke more plainly: “That ni**a raped my girl,” he said. </p>
<h3 id="E7rUzI">“It’s tantalising to imagine Aaliyah as a beautiful Lolita”</h3>
<p id="4goXOd">Any sexual contact between Kelly and Aaliyah in 1994 would have been at the very least statutory rape. Yet even after the publication of their marriage certificate made it clear that something had happened between them, the media treated the story as at best an unconventional love story and at worst as a judgment on Aaliyah’s so-called “Lolita” image: The little girl assuring a grown man that “age ain’t nothing but a number” got what was coming to her. Often, it treated the story simply as a sudsy celebrity scandal, a fun pop culture reference to break out and dish over. </p>
<p id="mpj9hF">The Philadelphia Inquirer, tongue in cheek, referred to Aaliyah as “the love of Kelly’s life” in a 1994 concert review. “The recording of this disc makes about as much sense as R. Kelly marrying Aaliyah,” lamented the Tampa Tribune in a 1994 review of the swiftly forgotten debut album by a girl group called Y?N-Vee. Neither Kelly nor Aaliyah had anything to do with the album, but the scandal of their marriage seemed to be easy fodder for a buzzy one-liner, something to toss dismissively over your shoulder to establish your own coolness. </p>
<p id="DUCmot">“It’s tantalising to imagine Aaliyah as a beautiful Lolita trapped by a scandalously doomed romance; it adds to the thrill of hearing her love songs,” <a href="https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/aaliyah-little-miss-thing">mused i-D in 1995</a>. “Obviously, performers have been lying about their ages since the dawn of time,” <a href="https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/r-kellys-dec-1994-jan-1995-cover-story-superfreak-629059/">said Vibe</a>. “But that’s show business: smoke and mirrors, mikes and sound checks. Marriage, however, is something else, and if Aaliyah and R. Kelly’s is real, then her pseudo-Lolita image becomes reality. And R. Kelly’s sex-man image gets that much murkier.”</p>
<p id="BC4r2H">Kelly wrote <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRwhm-B6yNI">“Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,”</a><strong> </strong>the song that created Aaliyah’s “beautiful pseudo-Lolita image” in the first place. He dressed her for it and produced it, and the world was happy to give him credit when the song was a hit. Then the song became inextricably linked to a scandal, and responsibility for it somehow transferred to Aaliyah.</p>
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<p id="kIO30E">“Just how old is newlywed Aaliyah?” demanded USA Today in 1994. The article goes on to warn of dire consequences for Aaliyah if she’s underage: “If she’s 15, there are some problems,” says the marriage bureau’s Louis Barnes. “The state says she has to be at least 16 with parents’ consent. She can go to jail.” It lists no potential consequences for Kelly. </p>
<p id="mjTXGN">In <a href="https://www.vibe.com/features/editorial/r-kellys-dec-1994-jan-1995-cover-story-superfreak-629059/">the Vibe article that broke the story of the illicit marriage</a>, Aaliyah is presented paradoxically: so young as to be a wicked temptress, while also more mature than Kelly himself. </p>
<p id="PW8boK">The article quotes Jamie Foster Brown, the editor of Sister2Sister magazine, who had been covering Kelly for years by the time this story became public. Brown is disparaging to Aaliyah and her choices: “I kept hearing complaints from people about her being in the studio with all those men,” Brown says. “At 15, you have all those hormones and no brain attached to them.” Brown goes on to suggest that R. Kelly and Aaliyah might just be a good match, “because Aaliyah has a mature mind, and Robert is such a big kid.”</p>
<p id="fbhBel">Kelly, the big kid, continued to flourish professionally after the scandal. Mature-minded/Lolita-esque-temptress Aaliyah saw her career suffer.</p>
<p id="Xui4NO"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=2MMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA54#v=onepage&q&f=false">Kelly received his first Grammy nominations in 1995</a>. His 1995 self-titled album <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1430768/r-kelly-crowns-himself-king-of-rb/">went quadruple platinum</a>. Meanwhile, when Aaliyah’s picture was shown at the 1995 Soul Train Awards, <a href="https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.funky/c/7FoOGoUxogg">the audience booed</a>. The scandal of their marriage was considered her fault. She was a little girl who tempted a grown man into jeopardy. She was the one to blame. </p>
<p id="faWIJ6">“Aaliyah got villainized,” her cousin and Blackground Records executive Jomo Hankerson said in 2014 <a href="https://madamenoire.com/441983/aaliyahs-cousin-says-villainized-r-kelly-marriage-scandal-dont-understand-upset-baby-girl/">on <em>The Ryan Cameron Morning Show</em></a>. “That’s what made the transition to the second album difficult. … It was hard for us to get producers on the album. She was 16, 17 at the time of the second album. I just didn’t understand why they were upset with Baby Girl.” </p>
<h3 id="wfg4r8">“She didn’t sing like a little girl, and she didn’t act like one, either”</h3>
<p id="hNDMQy">Regardless of the industry’s reluctance to work with her, Aaliyah got that second album together. She recruited then-up-and-comers Missy Elliot and Timbaland to produce for her. She maintained the tomboy image Kelly had built for her but transformed it into something sleeker, less a mirror reflection of her former mentor.</p>
<p id="k3JenC">Aaliyah once again became a massive hit, even bigger than before. Her 1996 album <em>One in a Million</em> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150713200457/http://riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?resultpage=1&table=SEARCH_RESULTS&artist=aaliyah&sort=Artist&perPage=25">went double platinum</a>. Her single “If Your Girl Only Knew” <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/aaliyah/chart-history/rhythmic-40/song/45818">was in the Billboard top 10</a>. This time, no one could credit Kelly with Aaliyah’s success.</p>
<p id="VLDUff">“From the intro, you know,” began the Voice’s album review. “She’s back, and it’s clear — no R. Kelly.” </p>
<p id="qL1xEH">Where <em>Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number</em> had sounded just like Kelly’s Marvin Gaye-inflected branch of R&B, <em>One in a Million</em> was recognizably something new. It was R&B reaching out and meeting hip-hop on its own turf, Aaliyah’s voice cool and precise over Timbaland’s electronic beats. <a href="https://www.slantmagazine.com/music/aaliyah-one-in-a-million/">Slant would call it</a>, in 2001, “undoubtedly one of the most influential R&B albums of the ’90s.” Aaliyah, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/arts/music-spins-a-reminder-of-the-real-aaliyah.html">Kelefa Sanneh would argue in the New York Times in 2002</a>, “helped invent a style that might be called avant-garde R&B,” and <em>One in a Million</em> was where it began. </p>
<p id="YgyU61">Aaliyah’s style, too, was evolving. She stuck to the baggy low-slung pants Kelly had dressed her in, revealing her midriff, but she made the look more feminine, more rooted in her own aesthetic. When she appeared <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJUN8OdRyeg">in a Tommy Hilfiger ad</a> in low Tommy jeans and a tiny bra top, she made the look iconic.</p>
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<p id="PCVvzz">“Aaliyah is … among the few musical icons who is recognizable from just a few items of clothing,” <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/exkxep/15-years-after-her-death-aaliyah-is-as-relevant-as-ever">wrote Vice in 2016</a>. “Michael had the glove and fedora, Sinatra had the stiffly ironed suits, Nina had the headwraps, Prince had the colour purple, and Aaliyah had baggy pants and a crop top. With these two things alone she created one of the most lasting fashion looks of all time, combining femininity, masculinity and androgyny into one trend-setting game changer.”</p>
<p id="F4H6fP">But even as Aaliyah’s sound and image moved away from R. Kelly, he would continue to haunt her career. The idea of Aaliyah and R. Kelly as a cockeyed love story would go on, too, continuing through her death in 2001, and to a certain extent through Kelly’s 2008 trial on child pornography charges.</p>
<p id="wbVBpA">“You know what? The way the story was told, they were in love,” <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/4w78xw/wendy-williams-interview-654">Wendy Williams said to Vice in 2014</a>. “He wasn’t just some old man in love with a young girl even though that was also <em>clearly</em> the reality of what it was. She loved him, and he loved her.” Williams was promoting the Lifetime biopic <em>Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B</em>, which she executive-produced, and which depicted the pair’s relationship as a complex romance.</p>
<p id="Xv9JkP">It seemed that every time the story of Aaliyah and Kelly’s faux-marriage was told, Aaliyah remained the responsible party. She was always the figure granted agency, the one instigating scandalous acts, older than her years, while a hapless Kelly passively accepted her seduction. </p>
<p id="lZ1GHj">“Aaliyah’s career started and ended with people talking about her age,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/arts/a-pioneer-briefly-of-a-new-sound.html">began a New York Times article shortly after her death</a>. “In 1994, when she was 15, she released her first album, ‘Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,’ which sold a million copies. She didn’t sing like a little girl — even then, she had a stronger voice and a more sophisticated approach than most pop singers — and she didn’t act like one, either: the child star was reported to be a child bride, secretly married to her mentor, the R & B crooner R. Kelly.” </p>
<p id="SjXLge">In <em>Baby Girl</em>, Iandoli describes writing a feature on R&B singer Ciara in 2004. Ciara, then 19, had just released a seductive duet with R. Kelly, and Kelly wrote the lyrics. Iandoli thought the collaboration wildly inappropriate and said so: Just two years previously, Kelly’s child pornography tape had reached the public.</p>
<p id="0Th7sZ">Ciara’s team, outraged, threatened Iandoli with a libel suit. “She’s not Aaliyah,” they told Iandoli. </p>
<p id="MTFyOe">“The mention of Aaliyah by [Ciara’s] team, as if it were a mark of shame, felt so wrong,” Iandoli writes. “The blame was again placed upon the teenage girl and not the predator.” </p>
<p id="z6Dfcz">The idea of Aaliyah as the party at fault in her relationship with R. Kelly had by then become baked into her image, where it had expanded until it was near-universally accepted. Aaliyah became positioned in the public eye as a somehow inherently sexual teen — so whenever anyone treated her as a sex object, whether that person was R. Kelly or adults in her audience, it wasn’t their fault. It was Aaliyah’s. </p>
<h3 id="TKr3fv">“I was <em>hot</em> at 10. I had a little sex appeal working back then.” </h3>
<p id="yE13dz">A lot of teen idol pop stars are also sex symbols, and Aaliyah, with her tiny crop tops and her Veronica Lake swoop of hair, was no exception. What was striking about Aaliyah, though, was the way in which the public understanding of her sexuality became intertwined with the public understanding of her as a child. That juxtaposition was fundamental to the way people talked about Aaliyah — including Aaliyah herself.</p>
<p id="y4Pnp8">In an interview on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeXvCmAROoU"><em>The</em> <em>Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn</em> in 2000</a>, when she was 21, Aaliyah jokingly described <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQpdr7r0Rv4">her childhood appearance on <em>Star Search</em></a>. “I thought I should have won,” she says. “I felt hot, I had on this hot little dress.”</p>
<p id="O22E2U">“How old were you?” Kilborn asks.</p>
<p id="diTgXG">She was 10, Aaliyah tells him. </p>
<p id="1D3XsA">“I don’t think you’re supposed to be hot at 10!” Kilborn objects. </p>
<p id="jakTRu">Aaliyah, laughing, overrules him. “I was <em>hot</em> at 10. I had a little sex appeal working back then,” she says. She describes having her mother photograph her for headshots as a child. “She said, ‘Yo, she’s got this kind of sex appeal working.’ It comes through in the pictures and on the camera.” </p>
<p id="OkNaiT">Aaliyah was mostly joking about being hot as a child. Yet the idea that her hotness was somehow intertwined with her childishness was embedded in her image, and she seems to have at the very least absorbed the mindset. So did the rest of the world. The New York Times article breaking the news of her death described her as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/arts/aaliyah-22-singer-who-first-hit-the-charts-at-14.html">precociously sultry</a>.” Even her nickname, Baby Girl, is at once an infantile coo and a lover’s endearment.</p>
<p id="u5AaHt">Aaliyah got her nickname from her father, and it only became widespread after she left Kelly. First, Timbaland and Missy Elliot called her Baby Girl in private, as a mark of affection, because they had all become so close. Then in 1998, it became one of her public monikers after Timbaland rapped “Baby girl, better known as Aaliyah” on his guest verse in Aaliyah’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeCXiC5l0dU">Are You That Somebody?</a>” and laid a sample of a crying baby over Aaliyah’s vocals.</p>
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<p id="qyrv3v">But even this apparently wholesome professional relationship was marked by discordant overtones. <a href="https://www.distractify.com/p/did-aaliyah-and-timbaland-date">In 2011</a>, Timbaland admitted that when he met 16-year-old Aaliyah, he fell in love with her. At 23, Timbaland knew he was too old for her, and he didn’t cross the line Kelly did, maintaining that he always acted as Aaliyah’s big brother. Still, he says, “When I first met my wife, I knew I was going to marry her because she looked like Aaliyah.” </p>
<p id="DGPGTH">There’s no evidence to suggest that anything untoward ever happened between Timbaland and Aaliyah. Nonetheless, their relationship is another case of a youthful Aaliyah being seen as a sexual object, and of the idea of her sexuality becoming entwined with the idea of her youth: hence Baby Girl.</p>
<p id="95gKiv">It is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/parenting/adultification-black-girls.html">often argued</a> that while white girls are expected to be pure and innocent and virginal well into their teens, Black girls are not granted the space to experience a girlhood at all: While <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/21593569/princess-diana-explainer-crown-netflix-marilyn-monroe-britney-spears-innocence">the world obsessed over Britney Spears’s virginity</a>, it <a href="https://twitter.com/craftingmystyle/status/1369763693970432001">expected Beyoncé, at the same age, to be a fully mature adult</a>. But Aaliyah was caught in a different version of that trap, in that her youth was understood to be <em>part</em> of her sexual availability. It’s not that she wasn’t allowed to be young; it’s that her youth wasn’t considered a hurdle to treating her as a sexual object. It seemed, in fact, to make her sexier.</p>
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<img alt="Aaliyah onstage singing into a handheld microphone." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eNTnizYlArKtmOk8FF1A0uE9UvA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22804642/74709082.jpg">
<cite>Chris Walter/WireImage</cite>
<figcaption>Performing in 1997.</figcaption>
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<img alt="Aaliyah sitting at a table holding a champagne flute." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0zN2o-NZPuwbbtHuwjHjDvlAqPI=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22804646/82405395.jpg">
<cite>KMazur/WireImage</cite>
<figcaption>Backstage at the 2001 MTV Movie Awards, about two months before her death.</figcaption>
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<p id="0AWHOf">It’s worth interrogating to what extent the idea that Aaliyah’s youth made her sexy is the result of Aaliyah having her career and her image launched by an alleged child predator. As the scholar <a href="https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/aaliyah-eternal-soul">Jason King put it in Wax Poetics in 2014</a>, “When I’m listening to <em>Age</em>, I’m struggling to try to listen to it out of context, but mostly I’m hearing R. Kelly as an alleged predator presenting to us his sonic and musical vision of how he wanted Aaliyah to exist in the commercial marketplace.” </p>
<p id="Dq52qB">So R. Kelly set a narrative — but then the rest of American culture willingly embraced it. He told the world to see a child as a sexual object, and it obliged.</p>
<p id="O2wNdK">What made this vision of Aaliyah as a Lolita so attractive was that it offered her viewer an out. If there was something inherently seductive about Aaliyah’s childishness, then it was not the viewer’s fault if they found her sexy. <em>She</em> was the one who kept repeating that age ain’t nothing but a number, even if she was only saying so because Kelly wrote the lyrics and told her to sing them. The subsequent shift<strong> </strong>of blame onto Aaliyah meant that the rest of the world could enjoy the spectacle of her sexuality without guilt. She had already taken on the guilt for the rest of the world. </p>
<p id="biuUaB">Part of what made Aaliyah great is that she was able to use her escape from Kelly to launch herself even further into stardom, to remake herself as pop’s most futuristic star, to refashion the tomboy style he established for her into an instantly iconic image that screams <em>Aaliyah</em>, not <em>R. Kelly</em>. And one of the many tragedies of her early death is that we’ll never see what would have happened had she been able to transcend him entirely — and whether the cultural<strong> </strong>reckoning of the past 10 years, and the way it’s changed how we talk about women and about consent, could have helped her while she was still living. </p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/22621692/aaliyah-death-20-year-anniversary-r-kelly-trialConstance Grady2021-08-05T10:00:00-04:002021-08-05T10:00:00-04:00How Gossip Girl broke the fantasy of being the world’s most special girl
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<figcaption>Carmelle Kendall for Vox</figcaption>
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<p>The original Gossip Girl sold viewers a romantic fantasy — then proved the fantasy was always a lie.</p> <p id="nfz7jG"><em>In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles"><em><strong>Read more here</strong></em></a><em><strong>.</strong></em></p>
<p id="Tsn9FQ">Every time I think about <em>Gossip Girl</em> — the glossy, aspirational, slightly wicked teen soap that ruled The CW in 2007 — I ask myself: <em>You mean the show where the romantic lead sold his girlfriend in exchange for a hotel</em>?</p>
<p id="Jnkjyv">In my mind, “<em>Gossip Girl </em>has been rebooted” becomes “<em>The show where the male</em><em><strong> </strong></em><em>romantic</em><em><strong> </strong></em><em>lead gave his rapist uncle permission to have sex with the male</em><em><strong> </strong></em><em>lead’s girlfriend in exchange for the property deed to a hotel </em>has been rebooted.”</p>
<p id="dFYWuI">“The new version of <em>Gossip Girl</em> has a bonkers premise” becomes “The new version of <em>the show where the male romantic lead sold his girlfriend’s body for a hotel and then manipulated her into thinking it was her idea and then they got married in the very last episode and you were supposed to think it was romantic</em> has a bonkers premise.”</p>
<p id="GjjCCZ">This plot line is emblazoned in my mind, in the spot where knowing how to multiply fractions is probably supposed to be. I can’t escape it. It has baffled me since 2010, when it was introduced during <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s third season: This frothy, sudsy, ridiculous teen soap opera decided to devote multiple episodes to a storyline in which a character sold sexual access to his girlfriend’s body in exchange for real estate — and still expected me to root for the happy couple to end up together. It is wild to imagine how this could possibly have happened!</p>
<p id="MLWCJ6">When <em>Gossip Girl</em> first emerged in the 2000s, it was supposed to be fun and scandalous. Magazines devoted cover stories to the show’s “<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-nasty-thrill-of-gossip-girl-on-the-set-of-tvs-hottest-show-in-rolling-stone-65825/">nasty thrill</a>”; ads for the show featured a cheeky “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO21OZKGm7Y">OMFG</a>.” But where was the fun and scandal in the hotel plot? How did an entire writers’ room come to the conclusion that it could have a character do something so irredeemable, only to somehow bring him back from it? What was the exit strategy? Who thought it was a good idea?</p>
<p id="HaqodU">I was watching <em>Gossip Girl</em> in real time when the episode aired. I was 21, and I went over and over the plot in my head. I had been watching <em>Gossip Girl</em> the way I thought it was supposed to be watched — as a silly piece of froth — and in that spirit, I had come to believe that the lead couple was meant for each other. “Is there some way this could work out?” I thought. “Is there any way I could read this as not as bad as it seems?” I was willing to bend over backward to read the plot line as romantic. I just couldn’t seem to find a justification for it. So I came to resent <em>Gossip Girl</em> — and I bore a special hatred for the hotel plot, known in <em>Gossip Girl</em> fandom as the “Indecent Proposal.”</p>
<p id="CjLsLQ">Yet in the decade since the Indecent Proposal played out, I’ve developed a certain grudging respect for it as a skeleton key to an insidious pop culture trope. It has the virtue of being honest. It is a very straightforward way of expressing the value system which underlies all of <em>Gossip Girl</em>, beneath all the high-fashion gloss and perfect hair — and that underlies plenty of other not-so-honest shows of its era, as well.</p>
<h3 id="GCF2FX">“I told Chuck I’d take either you or the hotel. He chose to give me you.”</h3>
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<p id="USjrXo"><em>Gossip Girl</em>’s Indecent Proposal played out between lead characters Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/four-women-accused-a-gossip-girl-star-of-sexual-assault-now-hes-in-louise-lintons-movie">who would later be accused of sexual assault by four women</a>) and Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester, <a href="https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a2864/leighton-meester-stands-up-to-domestic-violence/">2008 spokesperson for domestic violence awareness</a>). The two made up what was then (and remains) <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s power couple. The shippers called them Chair, and in 2010, there were so many shippers that they went through the Tumblr tag for #Chair and yelled at people posting pictures of actual furniture instead of GIFs of Chuck and Blair kissing.</p>
<p id="utiFBD">Chuck and Blair were <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s power couple in part because they were the “bad ones” in the main cast, which made them the most interesting. Blake Lively’s golden-haired Serena van der Woodsen was ostensibly the show’s lead, but she was so well-intentioned, so unwilling to get her hands dirty in the cutthroat politics of Upper East Side high society. Scheming, vicious Blair, with her doll-like face and an infinite array of headbands she wore like crowns, was a far more compelling main character; oily Chuck, who as a teenager bought his own burlesque club and traveled the streets of New York City exclusively by limo, appeared to be Blair’s perfect foil.</p>
<p id="k8NRKw">The pair spent two seasons deliciously clashing, backstabbing, and plotting their way toward each other, before at last succumbing to their feelings at the end of season two after their high school graduation. In season three, with Blair in college and 18-year-old Chuck taking over his dead father’s real estate empire (look, just go with it), #Chair was at last supposed to be a stable, healthy pair.</p>
<p id="9dJoXW">(In case you are wondering whether Chuck’s dead father would later be revealed as only fake dead, the answer is: Yes, of course he was only fake dead.)</p>
<p id="Bvg8kV">But then: trouble. Into this garden of Eden came Chuck’s wicked uncle Jack, his father’s longtime business rival. Jack manipulated Chuck into signing over his prized new hotel acquisition via an immensely convoluted scheme involving Chuck’s dead mother. Once the gambit was revealed, Chuck was thrown into despair. How could he win his dead father’s posthumous approval now that he lost the hotel that was supposed to prove that he, too, could be a successful real estate mogul?</p>
<p id="Y8DRCS">(In case you are wondering whether Chuck’s dead mother would later be revealed as only fake dead, the answer is: Over the course of the show, two separate women claimed to be Chuck’s not-actually-dead mother. It still isn’t clear to me whether one or both were lying.)</p>
<p id="eITSZU">Jack offers Chuck a deal: He is willing to give back the hotel, he tells his nephew. All Chuck has to do is let Jack sleep with Blair.</p>
<p id="S7dfBV">Notably, both Chuck and Jack are, within the canon of the show, attempted rapists. Chuck assaulted two girls in <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s pilot, both of whom had to physically fight him off. Chuck himself personally pulled Jack off his beloved stepmother when Jack assaulted her in season two.</p>
<p id="QnZix1">The camera cuts away from Chuck and Jack’s meeting as soon as Jack lays out his terms, and viewers are led to assume that Chuck turned him down at once. That’s what each of them tell Blair as soon as they see her.</p>
<p id="WEbXSm">Jack describes his Indecent Proposal to Blair, assuring her that Chuck would never think of going along with such a thing — he loves Blair too much. Chuck stalks around Blair with an air of stoic tragedy, murmuring dark insinuations about how Jack didn’t ask him for anything he would ever consider giving. Jack corners Blair alone and suggests that it is probably her duty, as Chuck’s loving girlfriend, to make this small sacrifice for him, a sacrifice Chuck himself would never ask her to make.</p>
<p id="k277jU">“Chuck opened his heart to you, and now his future lies in your hands,” Jack says. “Well … not your <em>hands</em>, exactly.”</p>
<p id="F0gTAz">Blair, in the end, agrees. She draws up a contract, goes up to Jack’s hotel suite, and gets ready to take off her dress. She is nearly in tears as she does so, and tells Jack that Chuck can never find out about what’s about to happen. The implication to the audience that Blair is doing something very dark by selling herself, and that even though she’s only doing it out of love for Chuck, he’ll probably be outraged and hurt if he realizes she cheated on him by sleeping with his uncle. It will become a grand and tragic misunderstanding, like a particularly perverse O. Henry story.</p>
<p id="8IHReE">That’s when we learn the big twist. Jack starts laughing and tells Blair to keep her clothes on. He doesn’t really want to sleep with Blair, he tells her. He just wanted to get Chuck to do something so awful that Blair would never forgive him for it.</p>
<p id="WEIdPu">“I told Chuck I’d take either you or the hotel. He chose to give me you,” Jack explains. “He knew exactly which buttons to have me push. Said you wouldn’t be able to resist stepping in to save him behind his back.”</p>
<p id="DDAHnO">“Chuck would never do this to me,” Blair says.</p>
<p id="ee5IOG">She goes back to Chuck and asks him if it’s true that he agreed to Jack’s deal, that he teamed up with Jack to manipulate her into going through with it.</p>
<p id="Fmlucf">“You went up there on your own,” Chuck says.</p>
<p id="JA7dVt">(One of the women posing as Chuck’s dead mother was played by Elizabeth Hurley.)</p>
<h3 id="nKVnyO">“Are you sure?”</h3>
<p id="Cdn8YW">Chuck and Blair first got together in the seventh episode of <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s first season, “Victor/Victrola,” way back in 2007. It was a pivotal episode for both characters, and part of what made the show a sensation. At the AV Club — then at perhaps its peak of TV criticism relevance — <a href="https://www.avclub.com/gossip-girl-victor-victrola-1798203470">“Victor/Victrola” was the episode that gave <em>Gossip Girl</em> its good TV cred</a>.</p>
<p id="pVG5B5">Up until “Victor/Victrola,” Chuck had been largely a minor one-note villain. He attacked Serena and another girl in the pilot, and caused chaos in the background of other episodes. He made a lot of jokes about his signature scarf and dispensed drugs to lubricate the plot as necessary. He was a classic love-to-hate character, and more than a little bit flat.</p>
<p id="V6kUMS">In this installment, Chuck purchases the burlesque club Victrola, presenting it to his withholding, not-yet-fake-dead father as a phenomenal investment opportunity. His father, however, turns him down<strong> </strong>cold. Victrola is just an excuse for Chuck to hang around booze and women, he says. Chuck is crushed. He put a lot of work into his business plan, he replies, and really believes that Victrola can change his father’s business.</p>
<p id="tKnAha">Chuck’s father eventually agrees to invest in Victrola, but the period between his disapproval and his change of heart offers us our first glimpse at Chuck’s vulnerability. He is heartbroken, drunk, and lonely; he keeps calling his friends and getting their voicemail. It’s a cue to the audience that this villain is someone we’re meant to begin thinking about sympathizing with.</p>
<p id="EyciS5">Meanwhile, Blair has spent the past six episodes reveling in her image as her school’s virgin queen. She wears her collars done up to her chin and casually slut-shames other girls. She seems to have no sense of her own body; when she tries to stand in as a model at a photo shoot to help her fashion designer mother, the photographer dismisses her as too stiff and awkward. She tells everyone who will listen that she plans to lose her virginity to longtime boyfriend Nate Archibald (Chase Crawford), whom she’s been dating since kindergarten.</p>
<p id="gahqVZ">But as Blair finally accepts in “Victor/Victrola,” Nate doesn’t love her the way that she loves him. So she ends their relationship and then, reeling from the breakup, heads to Victrola to drown her sorrows with Chuck.</p>
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<p id="H9k0B1">At loose ends and ready to establish a new identity for herself, Blair climbs onto Victrola’s burlesque stage, peels off the prudish gown her mother dressed her in, and dances in her slip while Chuck gazes at her in astonishment and admiration. Later that night, as she rides home in Chuck’s limo, she kisses him.</p>
<p id="QFv5GU">“Are you sure?” Chuck asks. Blair nods, they kiss again, and then you see him start to push down the straps of her slip.</p>
<p id="M2EgOf">It’s that “are you sure?” moment that launched the ship. Blair loosening her boundaries and at last getting in touch with her sexuality was hot, and Chuck revealing a moment of human frailty when he was rejected by his dad was romantic, but what made the whole internet sit up and take notice of this storyline was the fact that Chuck asked for Blair’s consent.</p>
<p id="NUJrcd">The character, whose defining trait up until that point was that he was a rapist, wanted to make sure that a sexual encounter was consensual. How exciting. How subversive. How delicious.</p>
<p id="94Mbw0">“Re: Chuck’s ‘Are you sure?’ comment...” wrote one fan on the now-defunct Television Without Pity forums. “I can see how one could think that was sort of out of character, considering his previous date-rapist ways. Since the first episode, however, it’s been pretty clear to me that Blair is supposed to be the one girl Chuck really admires and has a connection with. That is to say, while he’s generally a huge asshole who wouldn’t care if he took advantage of a girl, with this girl in particular he is concerned about messing anything up. … it makes him a more multi-layered and interesting character, and I’m all for it.”</p>
<p id="vxk5nP">For the viewer identifying with Blair, the pleasure of this scene comes from the subliminal suggestion that Blair is so special, Chuck does not want to rape her. Hence Blair is worth more than all those other unspecial girls Chuck <em>did</em> want to rape.</p>
<p id="M5AeRv">The subtext is that those girls weren’t valuable, but Blair was.</p>
<p id="7ttq3e">Shipping Chair means getting to identify with a character who is better and less rapable than all other women, a character who is meant to be safe from the degradations and depredations otherwise inherent to being a woman within the <em>Gossip Girl</em> universe. That’s why the scene works, and by extension, why Chair works.</p>
<p id="purgtM">Until the Indecent Proposal.</p>
<h3 id="2qRXoI">“You’re like one of the Arabians my father used to own: rode hard and put away wet”</h3>
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<p id="HDF74X">Though the Indecent Proposal was shocking, it wasn’t an isolated instance. It fits into two larger patterns spread throughout the entire framework of <em>Gossip Girl</em>.</p>
<p id="1gBZ7q">The first pattern is that <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s two flagship romances — Chair, and the less-beloved ship of Serena and Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), who got married in the series finale — are both straightforwardly abusive relationships. And how these relationships are abusive is supposed to be part of what makes them fun to watch.</p>
<p id="JM2qYw">In the show’s final season, Dan turns out to have been the titular Gossip Girl the whole time, stalking and exposing his classmates due to his obsession with Serena. But Serena decides that this is romantic and marries him anyway.</p>
<p id="mMNCio">Chair, meanwhile, is marked both by Blair’s repeated sexual humiliation and by the idea that Chuck owns her.</p>
<p id="orILKh">The courtship phase between Chuck and Blair features multiple instances of Blair attempting to seduce Chuck with lingerie and candles and Chuck brutally rejecting her. The first time they break up, a few weeks after she loses her virginity to him in “Victor/Victrola,” he tells her, “You held a certain fascination when you were beautiful, delicate, and untouched. But now you’re like one of the Arabians my father used to own: rode hard and put away wet. I don’t want you anymore, and I can’t see why anyone else would.”</p>
<p id="FpRhR2">The pleasure of the ship in those moments comes from the suggestion that Chuck doesn’t really <em>want</em> to be so brutal, but is locked in a power game with Blair. He’ll glance longingly after Blair when she walks away from him in tears, and we’ll understand Chuck is only being so mean to her to win the approval of his father, who told him that human connections made him weak. Or he’ll look troubled, and we’ll realize Chuck only needed to get some of his own back after Blair told him that he was too sleazy for her to want to date him publicly. If he could just wear her down enough to break her pride, we think, he would relent.</p>
<p id="hNO3Am">The viewer’s knowledge of Chuck’s secret vulnerability combined with his outward cruelty is meant to make it even sweeter and all the more satisfying when Chuck finally succumbs to his feelings for Blair in the season two finale, showers her with expensive gifts, and admits that he loves her. Blair had to work for her victory, which, as the show suggests, is what makes it worth achieving. At last, she’s got her man — and he’s got her, which he signifies by spending money on her. Essentially, Chuck is cementing their emotional connection by buying Blair.</p>
<p id="grTd3e">After this grand declaration, Chuck is committed to Blair. He can no longer be cruel to her by rejecting her. So instead, his cruelty toward her takes the form of repeated claims that he owns her, even when they’re not together. When Blair leaves him after the Indecent Proposal, he puts on her what the show calls a “dating fatwa” so that no one else will date her. When Blair eventually gets engaged to someone else, a drunken Chuck muscles her into a corner. As she struggles and protests, he shatters the glass window above her head and a shard of glass slices her cheek open. “You’ll never marry anyone else, Blair,” he tells her. “You’re mine.”</p>
<p id="gTGBqM">That episode aired in 2011. By then, <em>Gossip Girl</em> was no longer the buzziest show du jour, and its ratings had fallen off a cliff, but this moment was jarring enough that mainstream media covered it. There was <a href="https://jezebel.com/violence-as-romance-and-the-latest-gossip-girl-backlas-5798390">a bona fide backlash</a>. The <em>Gossip Girl</em> creative team defended the scene, insisting Chair was not meant to be a depiction of an abusive relationship.</p>
<p id="zH70aa">“They have a volatile relationship, they always have,” <a href="https://www.eonline.com/news/239902/gossip_girl_boss_chuck_has_never_will">showrunner Joshua Safran said in an interview with E!</a>, “but I do not believe—or I should say we do not believe—that it is abuse when it’s the two of them.”</p>
<p id="tto6zt">(The person Blair gets engaged to is a prince of Monaco. They eventually do get married, and Blair is a princess of Monaco for about six months.)</p>
<p id="gfGII7">The second <em>Gossip Girl</em> pattern that the Indecent Proposal fits into is the show’s larger obsession with prostitution. It’s a repeated motif across all six seasons: Chuck repeatedly bonds with other men by hiring them escorts. Minor characters must repeatedly pose as sex workers for one of Blair’s elaborate schemes to work. Blair’s ex-boyfriend Nate has a brief quasi-comic subplot where he sleeps with an older woman in exchange for cash for his family after his father is sent to prison. During their courtship phase, Chuck and Blair make a bet whose terms involve Blair loaning Chuck her beloved maid Dorota, if she loses. (“I don’t want to shine Mr. Chuck’s shoes for a month,” Dorota protests. “Yeah, his shoes if you’re lucky,” Blair replies.)</p>
<p id="BrN9I3">Consuming sex work and tricking lower-status people into sex work is one of <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s go-to signifiers for soapy, amoral rich-person hijinks. What made the Indecent Proposal shocking within that context is it suggested that even Blair — the ice queen of the Upper East Side — could be vulnerable to such ploys. In the end, her wealth and social status don’t seem to protect her.</p>
<p id="NKze93">They <em>couldn’t</em> protect her, because one of the abusive aspects of the Chair relationship is that it turns Blair into a commodity. Within the value system of <em>Gossip Girl</em>, Chuck can trade Blair for a hotel because he has already bought her with all his expensive gifts.</p>
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<p id="Vgeq7t">Chair’s early sexual encounters are repeatedly preceded by scenes where Chuck clasps a jeweled necklace around Blair’s throat. After the Indecent Proposal, Chuck attempts to repeat the same maneuver by putting a diamond necklace around Blair’s neck as a token of his remorse. Eventually, he pays for the dowry that leaves her trapped in a loveless marriage, thus allowing her to get a divorce.</p>
<p id="tsfxsm">“You thought you could buy me back, just like you thought you could sell me for your hotel,” Blair says. “You bought my divorce and you came to collect your prize.”</p>
<p id="jWUCwI">(This episode of the show, “The Princess Dowry,” prominently features <em>The Princess Bride</em>’s Wallace Shawn. Wallace Shawn does refer to Blair as a princess bride, but at no point does he say the word “inconceivable,” which is perhaps the saddest oversight <em>Gossip Girl</em> ever made.)</p>
<p id="h9AoHY">Chuck denies the charge, telling Blair he only wants her to be happy. Yet Blair isn’t exactly wrong when she accuses Chuck of trying to buy her. The fantasy of Chair was always one where Chuck would repeatedly buy Blair. The fact that she was expensive was part of what made it exciting.</p>
<h3 id="3HmEpg">“I never thought the worst thing you’d ever do would be to me”</h3>
<p id="wMrvyf">The emotional underpinnings of early Chair are not unusual for teen soap operas, or for romance in general. Pop culture is full of love stories where good women redeem bad men; where the pleasure of a pairing depends upon the specialness of a woman who, by her very nature, makes a predatory man want to not prey on her; where the epic sweep of a romance depends on the idea that some girls are more special, more worthy of not being raped than others. Likewise, it is full of love stories where men demonstrate their love for women through the amount of money they are willing to spend on them.</p>
<p id="6K7pLd">These stories span decades. The <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/17906644/sixteen-candles-rape-culture-1980s-brett-kavanaugh">fantasy of being the unrapable girl</a> is at the basis of the hit ’80s film <em>Sixteen Candles</em>. On <em>Gossip Girl</em>’s network sibling <em>The Vampire Diaries</em>, it would become a plot point for Damon and Elena, the show’s flagship couple: Elena was the one woman Damon didn’t want to rape <a href="https://too-much-tv.com/2020/02/12/elenas-decision-to-be-with-damon-is-questioned-by-the-sire-bond/">but also the one woman he couldn’t <em>not</em> rape</a>. On <em>Gossip Girl</em> predecessor <em>Dawson’s Creek</em>, there was a plot line where, when Dawson offered to pay for his love interest Joey’s college tuition, she turned him down while tearfully admitting she had lost her virginity to someone else. The implication was that Dawson was trying to buy something no longer for sale, but that it would have been romantic if he had succeeded.</p>
<aside id="iyfNWo"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles","url":"https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/17906644/sixteen-candles-rape-culture-1980s-brett-kavanaugh"}]}'></div></aside><p id="gclgIV">The traditional roadmap of the teen show bad-boy-good-girl love story is that after the good girl redeems the bad boy, usually the redemption sticks. He never stops considering the good girl special. She never descends back into the realm of the rapable girl.</p>
<p id="JbOuvO">That’s not what happened on <em>Gossip Girl</em>.</p>
<p id="G7r6lo">“I never thought the worst thing you’d ever do would be to me,” Blair tells Chuck after he sells her to Jack.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.</p>— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) <a href="https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/654934442549620736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 16, 2015</a>
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<p id="sM6eFw">Blair would have been safe making that assumption on most shows. But it’s a bad assumption for anyone to make because the underlying reasoning is terrible. It’s an ideology where some women are unrapable precisely because other women are so very rapable, where all women are property but some women are special enough to be property that you don’t sell, where one woman’s specialness depends on the degradation of all other women.</p>
<p id="mNfzvx"><em>Gossip Girl</em> was a plot-driven (though not particularly good) show with a habit of returning to the same story well repeatedly. That meant it repeated relationship beats — a lot. Over and over again, Chuck would prove that he did consider Blair to be his property, that he did consider her rapable, that he did consider her to be someone who didn’t deserve to control her own body or her sexuality. He would make his opinion of her completely clear, Blair would cry, Chuck would look brooding and regretful, and then they’d be back to having steamy sex a few episodes later. Will Blair’s love stop Chuck from doing something so villainous and beyond the pale? Find out next week when the same exact thing happens again.</p>
<p id="T8tdbs">The cycle repeated not because it was supposed to be exhausting and nihilistic but because it worked once, so <em>Gossip Girl</em> assumed it would work every time. In the series finale, Chuck and Blair got married.</p>
<p id="BrOmvE">I don’t think <em>Gossip Girl</em> was more clear-eyed about its value system compared with other teen romances, or that it was savvier or wiser about human nature. Instead, <em>Gossip Girl</em> was clumsy enough to let its underpinnings show, whereas other series like <em>The Vampire Diaries</em> or <em>Dawson’s Creek</em> were skillful enough to give themselves plausible deniability by making their redemption arcs stick.</p>
<p id="PXJuuc">What <em>Gossip Girl</em> shows is that as the fantasy of the special and unrapable girl iterates and reiterates itself, it loses its magic. Eventually, you’re able to see what lies at the bottom of it: the notion that some women are more valuable than others, that the way a woman’s value is determined is in a marketplace where men buy and sell them. Under this system, you only know you’re valuable enough to win if you can turn a rapist. It’s a fantasy of empowerment based on the subjugation of all women, and it’s the basis of dozens upon dozens of romances.</p>
<p id="Lgfpcq"><em>Gossip Girl</em> proves that it was always a lie.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/22575875/gossip-girl-chair-blair-chuck-worlds-most-special-unrapable-girlConstance Grady