Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (20 page)

I was just starting to get catcalled on the street, that year; I already knew at least two girls who’d been raped when they passed out at parties. At twelve, I’d given my phone number to a grown-up over AIM and gotten heavy-breathing phone calls; at sixteen, I had been asked to kiss a twenty-something man’s girlfriend on a “dare,” and I was still trying to figure out how I felt about the look on his face when I followed through. I was also used to the more routine indignities—being groped, being leered at, being flashed—though that didn’t make them any less awful. Britney and I were both
virgins, and like Britney, I told people that I intended to stay that way until I was married, but in my case, it was less about virtue than terror: Every experience I’d had of sex, or of men’s desire for sex, had been hostile and unwanted. I didn’t plan to “save” my virginity for my husband because I wanted to please Jesus, but because I was scared of being naked and alone in the presence of someone who didn’t love me. The last thing I was prepared to deal with, that year, was the idea that grown-ups could find my reticence and inexperience
sexy
; at seventeen, I didn’t want any adult men thinking about my chest size, let alone my potentially honeyed thighs.

Yet, somehow, I didn’t blame the guys themselves. The person I blamed and hated was Britney, the girl who stoked their appetite; the girl who was my age, tasked with representing girls my age to the world, and who let men think we liked the attention. Somehow, in my heart of hearts, I believed that if Britney Spears were not famous, I could walk down the street without hearing a single catcall. Without Britney, other girls would be safe.

It never occurred to me to wonder whether Britney herself liked the attention. I never stopped to think that she might have been frightened, too: that being asked to pose in your underwear, by a group of adults, might be just as strange as being asked to kiss some grown man’s girlfriend, or that having your breasts lovingly described for an audience of thousands might be far more invasive than hearing
a few words thrown from a moving car. I didn’t read the interview she gave
Rolling Stone
in 2000, in which she worried about the number of grown men in her audience, and described being attacked by one of them:
“This guy jumps up on the stage, takes his shirt off and comes running. I think the crowd thought it was supposed to happen, but security jumped on the stage and got him off.” Later, in the same interview, she told the reporter that
“I don’t want to be part of someone’s
Lolita
thing. It kind of freaks me out.” For that matter, despite the fact that I hate-read the first
Rolling Stone
profile at least three or four times, I somehow managed to miss the part where Daly mentioned that Britney was being routinely assaulted:
“Alone in the house one night, she hid from a prowler lurking at the window; her mother surprised another as he was hailing to her through a locked bedroom window.” I was so unhappy, and so afraid, that I never thought about whether Britney Spears was safe or happy, nor did I consider any of the plentiful evidence that she was not.

Worrying about Britney would have required seeing her as a real girl my own age, capable of experiencing the same trauma, subject to the same pressures. And I couldn’t do that: In my mind, she was an icon, a symbol, a teenager-shaped screen onto which I could project all my own frustration with how I was expected to behave, or how men saw me. And, moreover, I managed to convince myself that seeing her in that light—as an object, a problem rather than a person—was
an act of feminism. I didn’t hate Britney Spears. I hated being a seventeen-year-old girl. But, because she was a seventeen-year-old girl herself, and visible, she was an ideal scapegoat; she was someone I could punish for the crime of being female.

Which is to say: We rarely love or hate public figures for who they are. We can’t; we don’t know them. At a certain point, the media narrative surrounding celebrities stops being about the specifics of their lives or personalities and enters the realm of myth. Stars are only stars because they represent something larger than themselves, some archetype, or a story we enjoy telling. From the moment Britney became a pop star, “Britney Spears” rather than “Britney from
The Mickey Mouse Club
” or “that cute little girl on
Star Search
,” she was burdened with the weight of representation, made to mean something more or other than herself. She was the “Queen of Teen,” the face of what we expected from young girls in America, and she reflected back those expectations faithfully, with all their inherent problems and contradictions kept intact. Britney was only, ever, what all girls should be, even if it didn’t make sense for one girl to be all those things, and even if asking girls to be all those things would hurt them.

Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters
and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting
her
. But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used-up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women. (A common moral: Kylie Jenner is the latest to be
DESTROYED BY FAME
, according to my supermarket check-out counter. Apparently, this entails
COCAINE, MORE SECRET SURGERY, & SEX WITH HER BOYFRIEND
’
S ENEMY
, though some time later it also entailed a clip of Jenner running into the magazine cover at a drug store, and collapsing into mortified laughter). Or, she was the price of thinking for oneself, as a woman whose attempts at adult independence had (supposedly) driven her insane.

But the tale of the Virgin Queen dethroned is a story with tremendous resonance, in a culture that loves youth and hates women. It’s powerful, especially, for women, who are taught to fear and delay their own aging process from
the moment they hit puberty. Just as I was able to project all of my own fears and insecurities onto the image of the virginal-but-hot teenage girl, adult women had a tremendous amount of culturally instilled self-loathing to bestow upon grown-up, washed-out Britney: Whether as a too-perfect girl or an imperfect woman, a vehicle for the anxieties of adolescence or the self-loathing of adulthood, she got it from both ends, a target for every age-based insecurity any given woman could summon up.

In fact, that particular story of virgin sacrifice is so salable that we’ve kept finding new people about whom to tell it, changing very few details in the retelling. In the late 2000s, just as Britney’s “meltdown” was reaching its peak, we created a new teenage dream, a kid named Miley. She, too was a Disney Channel alum, who made her name playing the wildly popular Hannah Montana. (All-American girl by day, pop star by night!) She, too, was Southern, conservative, possessed of plentiful aw-shucks charm, a self-declared virgin—in fact, she upped the ante by wearing a purity ring, signifying that she’d sworn before God not to have premarital sex—but still, maddeningly, sexual. She had a course to run. And she ran it, in Britney’s footsteps.

Miley’s “downfall”—her transformation into the tongue-wagging, joint-toking, Robin-Thicke-“molesting” outrage factory we covered in the first chapter—was practically planned from the start of her career. After years of rehearsing the narrative (not just Britney, but Lindsay Lohan,
Amanda Bynes, Winona Ryder, Drew Barrymore; one early iteration featured Judy Garland) it can now be executed with the relentless professionalism of a Broadway musical. For example, in order to accomplish the 2013 image reboot that saved her flagging album sales—the image reboot that resulted in her album
Bangerz
and the birth of the Miley we know—Cyrus hired a new manager, Larry Rudolph. He’s best known as the man who launched the career of Britney Spears. Miley Cyrus still doesn’t have any drug convictions, DUIs, institutionalizations, high-profile firings, or, really, any of the misfortunes we associate with the story; in a way, her train never wrecked at all. She might as well have hired Michael Bay and Industrial Light & Magic to create an incredibly realistic scene of a train derailing, so that she could walk away in slow motion, coolly donning sunglasses, as it exploded.

Celebrities’ lives are their own, and individual, but their stories are not: They’re manufactured by entertainment and media professionals who know how to hone a narrative for maximum impact, people who are hired specifically for their skill at creating marketable personas out of mere people, or transforming data and detail into character and plot. Stars and publicists can and do cooperate in the construction of plot points, by providing stories under cover of anonymity—if you see “a friend” cited, it may well be the celebrity’s PR wing, trying to keep their client visible between projects; when Kim Kardashian worked for Paris Hilton, one of her
jobs was providing stories to
InTouch Magazine
—or permitting the publication of a less embarrassing story to avoid the publication of a more embarrassing one. (Harvey Levin of
TMZ
reportedly keeps a “vault” of damaging information; if the target wants to keep something in “the vault,” and unseen by the public, he or she needs to provide Levin with a better story.) Once the raw data has been obtained, it is then finessed by people with an eye for drama; the editor in chief of
InTouch
came to the magazine from
Soap Opera Update
, and, according to a profile by Anne Helen Petersen,
“former employees remember [him] laying out a four-act cover drama for what would happen between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the beginning of each month—a pregnancy, for example, followed by a breakup scare, a reconciliation, and then marriage rumors.”

Trainwrecks are a business. Specifically, an entertainment business. They come to you through people who live and die by how many eyeballs and mouse-clicks they (we) can collect, and who therefore learn to shape even the most gnarled and unruly of biographies into something with the clean, salable power of a familiar story. The trainwrecks, like everyone else, are written in the way that will best connect with the widest number of people at any given time. So they are not only a chance to see our familiar female monsters embodied and serialized—the Slut, the Clingy Ex, the Aging Beauty—but a peephole into the dark undercurrents of the culture at large, the secret fears and lurking menaces of their moment.

For example, in April 1999, at the precise moment that Britney Spears arrived in the public consciousness, the country was tearing itself apart over the question of women, and age, and sex. And this particular wreck wasn’t confined to pop radio and magazine covers; it was happening in the halls of Congress, and concerned the highest office in the world.

•

Anatomy of a Trainwreck

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON & MONICA LEWINSKY

It was not surprising, in 1998, to suggest that President Bill Clinton probably had affairs. Most people assumed he did; if they were smart, they assumed that men in politics, generally, had them. Kennedy had Marilyn; Earl Long had Blaze Starr; the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had left his first wife in the middle of her cancer treatment so that he could marry his mistress. Nelson Rockefeller had served as the vice president of the United States, and had gone on from there to be the governor of New York, and had gone on from
there
to die while having sex with his twenty-five-year-old assistant. When it came to Clinton, there was too much in the way of precedent, and far too many rumors, for the possibility to be entirely disregarded.

And besides, there was his wife. That year, it seemed there was no one—liberal or conservative, male or female—who entirely liked or trusted Hillary Clinton. She was a practicing lawyer, where no other first lady had pursued a postgraduate degree. She kept an office in the West Wing, helped make staffing decisions, and pushed for universal healthcare, where other first ladies had been decorative and far removed from the center of power. When people suggested Hillary might take a more traditional wifely role, she was openly disgusted: In her first
60 Minutes
interview, she rolled her eyes imagining herself as
“some little woman, standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” and scoffed at the idea that she could have
“stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” rather than litigating cases. The
New York Post
called her
“a buffoon, an insult to most women”; there was an episode of
Nightline
devoted to parsing the “cookies” comment. (
OMINOUS VOICE-OVER
:
“The damage had been done. She’d been tagged an elitist and an ultra-feminist.”) Conservative men loathed her for being a man-hating feminazi, women loathed her for calling them “little,” and both groups loathed her degree of influence over the administration, an attitude that could be neatly summed up by one oddly prescient joke during the ’92 campaign:

“Then, there’s Clinton,” incumbent George Bush Sr. said. “A very formidable candidate. But would Mario Cuomo run as Hillary’s vice president?”

The jokes kept coming. Throughout the early ’90s, novelty
shops sold “Billary” T-shirts and mugs, decorated with cartoons of Bill and Hillary merged into a freakish conjoined president. Hillary’s lust for power, the joke went, was so overwhelming that she’d actually inserted herself into her husband’s skin—erasing the distinction between their different bodies, their different jobs, their different genders—in order to more effectively control him.