| | | Our co-founder goes down the Instagram rabbit hole, five silver linings to this god-awful election, and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | November 29, 2016 | Letter No. 62 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys,
It's week three of our new post-election lives and I still don't feel like things are back to normal. I'm not sure I ever will. When people ask me how I'm doing these days, I either reply, "Hanging in there like, like a kitten," or, "You know, well, considering…" And everyone gets it.
Anyway, the most important thing to do right now is to keep busy. Keeping busy in useful ways like staying informed, and constantly trying to find new ways to help, and making sure I see friends, read, and exercise — because the alternative is becoming a puddle of mush in my bed. The one thing that has changed for the positive in my life since the election is that I feel less and less like being an anti-social hermit at home. Being with the people I love — or even those who I really, really like — makes me feel less like we are getting through this alone.
Looking at silver linings can still feel hella weird and privileged, but, I mean, every bit helps, right? In this issue, writer Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl tell us about the women who did make history this election. You might already know new senators Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth from old issues of Lenny, and others may be new to you, but they are all amazing and inspirational.
Another thing that I find myself thinking about is the small ways we can make a difference. Donating to places like the National Network of Abortion Funds and buying something that the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters are sorely in need of from their wish list are good places to start. Whatever your skills are, they can be put to use. That is just what photojournalist Adriana Zehbrauskas did when she went to Mexico to report on the disappearance of students in the state of Guerrero. While she realized she could not bring those 43 missing students back, she could help them keep the memories of their family members alive by taking their grieving portraits and giving them a print of the image. Something small, but with lasting emotional impact.
Also in this issue, we have an essay by Leslie Bennetts, the author of Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers, about Joan and how she was groundbreaking even in her sometimes horrible personal contradictions. We also have our own Lena finding real meaning behind a fantasy Instagram avatar named Lil Miquela.
Finally, continuing with our posi-vibes, I am super-stoked to bring you a series of daily affirmations by Amy Rose Spiegel. I have known Amy Rose for a few years, and if there is one thing that she always brings to my life, it is her unflappable ebullient energy. She has been a beacon of light and hope for me so many times, and I think these affirmations will help, even in a little way, to make you feel good about yourself and ready to do the work we need to do out in the real world.
Sending you all my love and strength,
Laia | | | | | | | | | | | | The Picture of Health | | | | By Lena Dunham | | |
I've spent much of my year in bed. When I wasn't working — something I do constantly, powered by a heady mix of adrenaline, passion, and fear — I was supine, feet up, heating pad on, recovering from three successive pelvic and uterine surgeries that rendered me unable to explore the world beyond my apartment, or maybe just angry and unwilling. I was also that kind of hazy, aching, embarrassed sick that makes even bingeing sixth-season Friends a nauseating chore. That's where Instagram came in: like a series of trompe l'oeil windows painted on my bedroom wall, at its best Instagram allowed me to feel like I was a part of the world, high-fiving friends around an artisanal pizza. At its worst, it rendered me a voyeur, jealous of picnics and parties I didn't even want to go to.
During this time I gravitated to the accounts of women whose curated authenticity was both transportive and humiliating: @hateboy2, a radical Rainbow Brite–like model whose world seems to put both race and gender on blast; @chiaraferragni, whose following worships her ability to rock a pair of leather shorts at breakfast; @palomija, whose curvy body manages to be both political and blithely sexy. I would go back as far as I could on their feeds, piecing together their living arrangements, friendships, and professional ups and downs.
It was during one of these episodes of bottomless searching that I first came across Lil Miquela. Her face was arresting — bright, catlike eyes, impossibly pillowy lips, and a tooth gap to rival Lauren Hutton's. She was racially ambiguous with heavy freckles and had the kind of baby bangs I've spent twenty years striving for. She had cool friends who she got ice cream with on the Venice boardwalk and met up with in photo studios around LA.
Oh, and she wasn't real.
Upon further inspection, it becomes apparent to anyone who has ever laid eyes on a human woman that @lilmiquela is not, strictly speaking, alive. She is some kind of simulacrum, well-made and remarkably present but a simulacrum nonetheless. That in and of itself didn't disturb me, but what was disorienting was the fact that her many thousands of followers seemed to think it was still up for debate.
"'Sim or human?' Model with cartoon-like features sends Instagram into a frenzy as fans debate whether she's real or not," said the Daily Mail. Some Instagram users insisted she was a real woman using technology to enhance her features. Others proclaimed she was a promo for the coming Sims 9 game. Yet others just said that her hair was goals and her outfits were fire.
The second-wave feminist in me was enraged — teenagers don't even know what a real woman looks like anymore! They are more used to computer augmentation than to the texture of human skin! But something about this argument, the moralizing and the judgment, seemed disingenuous or, worse, basic. I knew Miquela wasn't real, that her hair was a smooth auburn helmet and her eyes were looking toward nothing, but she mesmerized me. I could look at the same picture for eons, trying to fill in the spaces I couldn't see, to imagine her legs tucked under her, on the bed where she dreamed her dreamless Westworld sleep.
My inner Nancy Drew needed to understand who Miquela was and how she was operated. Somewhere between surgery two and surgery three, I broke my elbow and kept on scrolling, iPhone resting on my sling, analyzing Miquela's low breasts and delicate wrists while I sat in an overflowing bath.
I read everything I could online, but even Reddit was absent of any compelling theories. Chelsea Jones at Dazed Digital offered a smart, academic take: "Lil Miquela is a female cyborg, the Android's android, whose servitude is confined to our phone screen, and a specific space therein. Miquela is one that satisfies more completely and wholly the desire you'd have for an Instagram Girl — because she can't live beyond projection. You get every part of her on your screen and can just as easily erase her by scrolling up." This was a thoughtful and nuanced meditation on the lure of the Instagram model (especially one who couldn't fuck up or pose wrong), but it wasn't doing what I needed: explaining who the fuck Miquela was and what she wanted with us.
My first play was to contact everyone I knew who had appeared on Miquela's page, or who knew someone who had. Miquela has clear connections to Los Angeles indie fashion and music culture, often standing next to real people or referencing them in her super-cool-slangy captions, which made her accessible, like she was a friend of a friend. But as I asked around, my sources were tight-lipped.
"She's a real girl who uses technology to hide her face, a Sia type thing," said one acquaintance.
Another told me she might be a failing music manager's pop-stardom experiment.
Another said, simply, "I can't tell you."
My determination to "bust" the story only became more aggressive when she started liking my pictures, commenting: "cutie!" under an image of me in a tank top and choker (willing myself to look healthy despite my sling and aching left groin) and even direct messaging me to comment on a table of Japanese-inspired tarot cards I'd posted: "I need a read, plz!" She knew I was onto her and she was taunting me. Gently. Adorably. Dressed in Alexander Wang with a slash of liquid eyeliner, Miquela was my white whale.
The next step was to reach out to some of Miquela's most frequent commenters, asking simply, "Who and what do you think Miquela is?"
"She is a real person, but the one she shows on Instagram is a CG rendering of herself, it's an art project," said @larsonisst, echoing a version of the Sia theory.
@imen280903 "found it really weird and kinda annoying that I can't tell if she's real or not." She DMed me that she's asked tons of followers and no one will confirm or deny Miquela's existence. She said that if Miquela does turn out to be real, she'll be really impressed by how fake she's made herself look.
I noticed one of my girl's most frequent defenders was an account with the handle @eatingboys, who boasts 17.6k followers to Miquela's 125k. Her page is a carefully collected mixture of appropriately moody innocence-lost images (stills of Sherilyn Fenn from Twin Peaks lying back in teen angst contemplation, uniformed school girls with their underwear around their ankles) and videos of a girl, her face made cartoonishly childlike using some kind of challenging Japanese app, as she strips slowly to a matronly pink bra or blinks, flirty but anxious. Her captions nod to Catholic worship and letting men jerk off to her on Periscope while she weeps, painting a picture of a tortured sexual entity making (glowing, pink) light of her own dysfunction.
"There is an Instagram subculture of girls with alter egos. We only really exist on the Internet. Lil Miq is sort of our mom," she told me via direct message.
I asked her: But how can she be your mom if you don't know what or who she is? "She feels very real," she said. @eatingboys insists they talk, affirm, and support each other just like any pair of girlfriends would do. But does she care who's on the other side?
Maybe not, because Lil Miquela has been an agent of liberation for @eatingboys. "I work in a male dominated field," she told me. She's always covered her body in oversized sweatshirts, hidden her sexuality. None of the people at her job know about her social media (when they ask, she says she's just not into the Internet), and so her account serves as a place where she feels free and safe despite all the warnings we've been given about making friends online. She describes her account as a high schooler's locker-room shrine to a teen idol, only the idol is herself. She's got friends (online friends, natch) working a similar angle.
When I asked @eatingboys who the most radical women she's met through her secret Instagram life are, she mentioned @lunalovebad, a striking colorful confection who refers to herself as a "Compton Princesa" and was so bored on Thanksgiving she asked, via Instagram stories, if anyone was going out that night. She appears to use real-life spackle and grit to create her own Bambi-eyed web identity, but who the fuck knows anymore.
It's hard to separate the aesthetic from the message: the girls are dressed like centerfold fantasies. Their mission is self-actualization, a sense they are their own heroines, freedom. And Miquela, unbound from sexist office politics or true rejection by dint of having no real body, is the freest of them all.
At my sickest I walked into the street in a summer skirt, leaned on a mailbox "casually" (aka for support), and snapped an image to promote my glittery shoes, my idyllic summer, my own blessed life. Pain pulsed across my back and down my legs. I smiled, flashed a peace sign, and posted, content that the people who didn't know me but thought they did wouldn't be feeling sorry for me that night. I went back to bed. Once there, I scrolled Instagram, wondering what it felt like to be healthy in jean shorts drinking prosecco, to be dancing on a rooftop, to be going to Drake's show with a touch of fur on display, to be standing at a booth at a design fair picking out a new purse. To be splayed sensually on a bed rather than living in one.
There, in the iPhone-lit semi-dark of 4 a.m., I found Miquela. And I returned to her, again and again, trying to understand. And unlike the women wearing reconstructed vintage to Coachella, she didn't make me feel ancient or weak or impossibly sad. Because, like me, she didn't have a body. She was everywhere and nowhere, making herself known only after the fact, appearing places she never seemed to be like an Aura photograph.
On the one hand I wanted to out her, to be the Andrea Dworkin hero, demented and screaming, who explained reality to the tweens who will someday rebuild our world. On the other, every time Miquela appeared in my feed I felt happy. I was glad she was doing well. I liked her new skirt. I was thrilled she'd made it to Art Basel. She was my friend.
I did end up getting the backstory on Miquela, at 8 a.m., at a random café in Hollywood, surrounded by exhausted parents who didn't know or care that an avatar was haunting the hippest enclaves of their city. I got the details of her identity and the plans for the continuation of that identity. If it hadn't been radical, compelling, and distinctly feminist, I wouldn't feel the need to protect it. But there's no reason for me to ruin her for you. She is not yet ruined for me.
Today I'm having a down day. I'm in bed, trying to meditate away the referred pain and also the guilt that comes with admitting what your body can't do. But in Miquela terms, I am everywhere: a Drake concert, the farmers' market, a beach. I am an idea, a tank top, a body without limits. I am whole, except for this irrelevant flesh.
Lena Dunham is trying to understand her own Instagram persona. Is it sexy aunt? Political toddler? Lying cunt? You decide! | | | | | | | | | | | | Five Silver Linings | | | | Text by Kate Schatz and papercut portraits by Miriam Klein Stahl | | | "I will promise you this, I will be one hell of a check and balance on him."
—Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, on Donald Trump
November 8, 2016, was a dark day for, well, pretty much everything. We have a lot to mourn, and much work to do, but we also have good, progressive things to celebrate. On January 20, 2017, the number of women of color in the US Congress will quadruple, going from one to four. Of the eight women newly elected to the House, five are women of color. Altogether, there will be 38 women of color (35 Democrats, 3 GOP) representing the United States in Congress. While it is still not enough (in 2016, women make up just over half of the US population, but just under 20 percent of Congress), and while they will be up against tremendous odds, we celebrate their victories. These are women whose backs we all need to have.
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris continues California's recent legacy of female senators: she joins Senator Diane Feinstein and takes the seat that Barbara Boxer has held for 23 years (additionally, her opponent was Representative Loretta Sanchez, a prominent Latina politician). As a biracial woman, Harris makes history on several fronts: she's California's first African-American senator and first Asian-American senator, and America's first-ever Indian-American senator. Harris was born in Oakland to immigrant parents: her father came from Jamaica, and her mother came from India. After graduating from law school, she rose up through the ranks of public law, serving as San Francisco's district attorney from 2003 to 2011 and then becoming the state attorney general in 2010. Harris is seen as one of the Democratic Party's biggest rising stars, and her name was bandied around DC as a potential Supreme Court nominee. While the chances of that occurring in the next four years are nil, don't be surprised to see more of her on the national stage.
Catherine Cortez Masto
Catherine Cortez Masto, the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant and the first in her family to attend college, will be the first Latina in the US Senate and Nevada's first female senator. She will fill the seat vacated by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and she defeated Republican Joe Heck, whose campaign was fueled by immense out-of-state funding, including major donations by the Koch brothers. A heavy turnout among Latino voters likely put her, and Hillary Clinton, over the top, turning Nevada an unusual and lovely shade of blue. As attorney general of Nevada, Cortez Masto worked to combat some of the state's most pressing problems: sex trafficking, home foreclosures, and methamphetamine manufacturing. She has promised to champion a minimum-wage increase and paid family leave, but her biggest cause is compassionate and comprehensive immigration reform.
Tammy Duckworth
Tammy Duckworth is Illinois's newest Senator, and she is many "firsts" — the first Thai woman in the Senate; the first Asian-American woman elected to the Senate in Illinois; the first disabled female Army veteran elected to Congress. And she's the second female senator from Illinois —the first since Carol Moseley Braun. As a Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the Illinois National Guard, she was one of the first women to fly in combat missions; in 2004 she was shot down by an RPG in Iraq and lost both of her legs. After a yearlong recovery, she ran for Congress in 2006 and lost — but clearly, this is not a woman who gives up. She ran the VA in Illinois, and then Obama appointed her assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2009, where she established the first 24-hour suicide hotline for vets. She ran for the House again in 2012, and this time she won. Oh, and she's also finished the Chicago Marathon four times, using a hand-cranked bike to complete the 26-mile trek.
Pramila Jayapal
Pramila Jayapal will represent Washington State's 7th Congressional District, which includes Seattle and a number of its most left-leaning suburbs — it is, in fact, one of the bluest districts on the West Coast, after the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Jayapal is a longtime organizer and Bernie-endorsed progressive who immigrated to the US from India at age sixteen. Several days after the 9/11 attacks, Jayapal founded Hate-Free Zone, which was later renamed OneAmerica and which grew into one of the largest immigrant-advocacy groups in Washington State. In 2014 she ran successfully for state Senate, and she has represented one of the most racially and economically diverse districts in the country. Gun control, economic equality, community-police relations, health care, and civic engagement of low-income and immigrant communities are some of her central issues.
Lisa Blunt Rochester
Tiny Delaware has one seat in the House of Representatives, and for the first time ever, it will be held by a black woman. Lisa Blunt Rochester is a mother of two who has worked for the state of Delaware for many years, as a caseworker for a congressman, as the first African-American female secretary of Labor, and then as the state personnel director — where she was commissioned to investigate the Delaware State Police for racial and gender discrimination. She also served as CEO of a public-policy think tank focused on the empowerment of people of color. Gun violence, equal pay, and debt-free college tuition top her agenda, and she's also committed to job and economic growth.
Ilhan Omar
Ilhan Omar won a spot in the Minnesota State Legislature in 2016. While that's not a national office, Omar's victory is significant for a number of reasons. She is the first Somali-American ever appointed as a US lawmaker. Also: Omar is a Muslim, a mother of three, and a refugee — she spent four years of her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp after fleeing the war in Somalia with her parents and six siblings. When she came to Minnesota, she spoke no English. As the executive director of the Minneapolis-based group Women Organizing Women, Omar is a leading advocate for building community leadership among first- and second-generation immigrants. On Tuesday, November 8, a Muslim immigrant woman won House District 60B in Southeast Minneapolis with 80 percent of the vote.
Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl are the author and illustrator of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Lost Ones | | | | By Laura Tillman | | |
| (Monica, Mariana, Celeste y Yaribet, sisters and friends. Huehuetónoc, Guerrero, Mexico, April 2016. All photographs courtesy of Adriana Zehbrauskas) |
Like millions across Mexico, photojournalist Adriana Zehbrauskas was horrified when, in September 2014, she heard the news that 43 college students had been disappeared en masse from the rural state of Guerrero. Though originally from Brazil, Zehbrauskas had been documenting Mexico for a dozen years, and she quickly began thinking of ways to tell a visual story of absence. The students number among the 27,000 throughout the country who have vanished since 2008, their cases often left uninvestigated, their families left to mourn with no answers and no grave site to visit. Zehbrauskas traveled to Guerrero nine days after the students disappeared.
As Zehbrauskas began to work in the poor, rural section of Southwest Mexico where the students had been taken, she realized there was a double loss when someone disappeared. Not only were they missing, but because the families rarely had photographs of their loved ones, they had little to remember them by. Often cell-phone images had been lost — because households rarely had the ability to back up or download their photos, a missing or broken phone signified the erasure of that record forever. Zehbrauskas knew she couldn't retrieve those moments — but she could document the present. She set to work taking family photos.
The project that emerged, Family Matters, is a collection of composed portraits of residents in Huehuetónoc, Guerrero. Reading the images, knowing that any of the subjects could one day be missing, the portraits are as unsettling to behold as they are beautiful. Families pose, often before the town church, in this small, mostly indigenous community near the border of Oaxaca State, wearing their Sunday best. Zehbrauskas provided prints to each family that are now displayed in homes throughout Huehuetónoc, along with showings in Mexico City and New York.
Zehbrauskas and I spoke at her Mexico City home.
Laura Tillman: Can you go back and tell me, how did you conceive of the project to begin with?
Adriana Zehbrauskas: The project began with the 43 students who went missing in Guerrero in 2014. I started working for many media outlets, and for one of them we decided to stick with one of the families and document their lives every month, and through the lives of this one family try to figure out, Who were they? Because you hear the number — 43 students — but who were these people?
I kept hearing, "No, I don't have any pictures. I lost them, they were on my phone." So I started thinking that was a really terrible thing, because these people had disappeared. It's like disappearing twice: from the future with their loved ones, and also from their memories.
We always go there as journalists and we get into the house, we photograph them, and then we leave. And although I know that ultimately the goal with the stories and the photos is to bring attention to their story, it's not always the case. Sometimes nothing happens. We do the story and most of the time nothing happens, nothing changes for them. They ask me all the time, "Is this going to change?" And I can say, "Well, I don't know, we're doing this, but I can't promise you." But I thought, Well, I can promise a picture.
| (Left: Gloria and her grandchildren, Gabriel and Lisanet. Huehuetónoc, Guerrero, Mexico, April 2016. Right: Rosalinda and her daughter Samantha, posing for their first photograph ever. Huehuetónoc, Guerrero, Mexico, Dec 2015.) |
LT: Has that been something that has made you feel uneasy in the past? This sense that you're coming and getting your work and, even though you are bringing awareness, that it's rare to actually see concrete change happen as a result of something that you do?
AZ: Yes, as a journalist that's what we strive for, but sometimes you see change and sometimes you don't. And most of the time you don't. In the beginning, when I started, I was very naïve and thought I could change the world. Now I know I can't. But sometimes you can change a little bit, someone's perception. Nothing happens overnight, and it's kind of like a process of waking up.
LT: When did you start to become aware of this phenomenon that people were taking lots of pictures of each other but they didn't actually have a lot of pictures?
AZ: I have a son, and since he was born I was documenting his life every day, and I was shooting with film, and I was printing it. So I have this album — since he was born to five or six years old, and then nothing. My little film camera broke, and it became so hard to develop it, and I was taking pictures with my digital camera. I have it all stored on external discs, but I don't have it printed anymore. And then one day I was showing the pictures to our son, and he said, "Why don't you have any pictures of when I'm older?" And I was like, "Oh, good question." So that started, you know, the first seed of this project.
LT: How do you feel the value people put on photographs has changed with the digital age of photography? Do you feel like photographs are worth less?
AZ: It's funny because I think it's also a paradox. I think people now relate more to photography. Everyone takes pictures and tells their stories online — pictures of your hair, your nails, what you're eating, pictures of your cat, your dog. So I don't think there's ever been a time in history when photography was so pervasive in society, but at the same time I think it's become so much, it's kind of like taking it for granted. You upload somewhere to a cloud, and who knows what will happen with it. It's a very present thing, it's like a moment-thing. No one is thinking about photography as a way to document things, it's photography for enjoyment in that moment. It's like, I take a picture now and upload it now on my Instagram, and my Facebook, and that's it. It's not about "I'm gonna keep this so I can look at it in twenty years." I don't think there's that thought anymore.
| (Left: Don Gerardo and his horse La Rubia. Huehuetónoc, Guerrero, Mexico, April 2016. Right: Elsi Meredith, Alma Aleli y Daila Gisel. Huehuetónoc, Guerrero, Mexico, Dec 2015. "Rubi, their mom, told me it was the first picture they ever had.") |
LT: Do you feel a certain kind of pull to do projects that are more of a collaboration between you and your subjects?
AZ: I think so. I worked for a newspaper for a long time, and it's news, news, news, going from one story to the other, and that's our job. You're there to tell people's stories, and sometimes you can't go back, there's no time to do it. I think that's fine, and you're already giving back a little bit by telling their stories, but I started feeling that it was not enough for me, it was too superficial. It was very little time. So that's why I started doing these types of projects where I could immerse myself more. You have more access to people and can tell their stories if you're more connected to them. And then it becomes like this organic thing. Like you start photographing the community and then you'll become friends with people and end up establishing a relationship with people there. You give them something, and they give you something. I think it's just like how it is naturally.
LT: You're making these photos and then you have to wonder, Will this be the photo someday when someone disappears?
AZ: I think about that all the time. Working in these places, that's a huge possibility that someone's going to go missing. So, I mean, this project is more about creating memory. It's kind of like a counteraction to a possibility, a risk, or a threat.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Laura Tillman is a journalist living in Mexico City. Her first book, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City, was published in April by Scribner. | | | | | | | | | | | | Daily Affirmations for November | | | | By Amy Rose Spiegel with illustrations by Noa Snir | | | |
Amy Rose Spiegel is a writer and editor and the author of Action: A Book About Sex. Her interests include irises, style guides, and meatloaf. | | | | | | | | | | | | Judge Me, Rank Me, Insult Me, Reject Me | | | | By Leslie Bennetts | | |
Even if you're beautiful, it happens the minute some man decides you're a little less beautiful. Of course he feels entitled to share his critique with the world. "Sadly, Heidi Klum is no longer a ten," Donald Trump told the New York Times when the supermodel was 42 and still a knockout by any standard, even in a bikini. President-elect Trump — then a paunchy 69-year-old — failed to acknowledge that he was never a ten on the best-looking day of his life, which passed half a century ago. We're still waiting to see a picture of him in a bathing suit.
But if you're a woman who's getting older, some guy will be sure to make an issue of it, because God forbid the public should subject its tender gaze to such an affront. The first time Hillary Clinton ran for president, Rush Limbaugh suggested that Americans should elect Mitt Romney because it would be so unpleasant to watch Clinton's face aging "on a daily basis" in the White House. Never mind the ravages of time on the faces of male presidents; wrinkles and gray hair bestow gravitas on men, only enhancing their authority. But from the moment she became First Lady until the devastating night she finally lost her chance to be elected president, Clinton's outfits, hair, makeup, and figure were always open to criticism.
Of course, a woman who tries to forestall the effects of aging is also ridiculed, as Joan Rivers knew only too well. For decades before her death in 2014, Rivers was notorious for grotesque excesses of cosmetic surgery. In 2012, she claimed to have undergone 739 procedures — but no matter how many interventions she subjected herself to, it was never enough to satisfy her tortured self-image.
When Rivers came of age in the 1950s, women were explicitly taught to measure their worth in terms of their desirability to men. A woman's destiny depended on the husband she married, and her market value was determined by her appearance.
But Joan wasn't conventionally pretty, and she was furious that fate had cheated her of such a crucial asset. No matter how smart and talented a woman might be, what really mattered was beauty — and without it, she was sentenced to a lifetime of struggle. Outraged by the unfairness of society's double standards, Rivers launched her career with satirical jokes skewering the sexist expectations of targets that included her own mother, who was allegedly so desperate to find Joan a husband that she put up a sign in their front yard advertising her daughter's availability as the LAST GIRL BEFORE FREEWAY.
Over the next six decades, Rivers became America's Queen of Comedy and achieved success in more than a dozen additional fields that ranged from theater, film, and television to business and fashion. But her humor reflected the stunning contradictions that characterized her entire life: as a comic, Rivers won her greatest fame by savaging other women with precisely the same kind of judgments that caused her such pain.
Equating beauty with stupidity and promiscuity, she tormented celebrated actresses with slut-shaming jokes long before the term was even invented. "You show me a woman with a naturally beautiful body, and I'll show you a tramp," she said.
If a woman was good-looking, she had to be dumb. "You want to get Cindy Crawford confused? Ask her to spell 'mom' backward."
Rivers was particularly jealous of Elizabeth Taylor, who was so beautiful she became a movie star as a child — so when Taylor gained weight in middle age, Rivers attacked her with a barrage of ridicule: "I took her to McDonald's just to watch her eat and see the numbers change. I had to grease her hips to get her through the Golden Arches!"
For the rest of her life, Rivers never let up; her targets changed with the times, but her cruelty toward women who were overweight remained as relentless as her own fanatical determination to stay thin. Her friends described her as anorexic, and she routinely starved herself by living on Altoids — but she never forgave other women who refused to make such sacrifices. When Lena disrobed for sex scenes on Girls, Rivers complained that HBO should be charged with "crimes against humanity" for showing womanly flesh that didn't conform to Hollywood's dictates on what constitutes an acceptable female body.
Gloria Steinem says she viewed Rivers as "a transitional woman" who grew up before modern feminism transformed American society. Rivers and Steinem were contemporaries, and both earned renown and defined historic legacies with their own success, rather than as helpmates to any husband. But unlike Steinem, who worked to introduce more enlightened ways of thinking, Rivers remained a prisoner as well as an enforcer of the values that tormented her youth — even as her courage and determination broke down barriers for other women, paving the way for the enormous success of today's younger female comics.
It's tempting to think we've outgrown the toxic values that blighted women's lives in previous generations — and yet the insulting commodification of women became a hallmark of the 2016 presidential campaign as Donald Trump fat-shamed a former Miss Universe and mocked the appearance of Carly Fiorina, the only woman in the GOP primaries, as well as his rival in the general election, the first female major-party nominee in American history.
From politics to show business, we still live in a culture where the coverage of famous women revolves around public critiques of their appearance and their ability to attract and satisfy men. Jennifer Aniston earned $31 million in 2014 alone and has been a megastar for two decades. And yet she is judged relentlessly on how she looks, with a particularly deranged focus on whether she is pregnant and therefore fulfilling her biological destiny as a woman.
After enduring years of such commentary, Aniston finally issued a scathing reply to the "warped standard of beauty" purveyed by so many media outlets. "For the record, I am not pregnant," Aniston wrote in the Huffington Post last summer. "I'm fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of 'journalism,' the 'First Amendment' and 'celebrity news' … I resent being made to feel 'less than' because my body is changing and/or I had a burger for lunch and was photographed from a weird angle and therefore deemed one of two things: 'pregnant' or 'fat.'"
Aniston's takeaway was uplifting: "We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies," she said.
Aniston isn't the only one who's fed up; with celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and a makeup-free Alicia Keys pushing back against Hollywood's insane standards of youth and female beauty, things may be starting to change. In her first post-election appearance, even Hillary Clinton spoke, at a Children's Defense Fund event, with a face that was defiantly naked — although she didn't risk such a thing until after she'd lost her shot at the White House.
But it's also worth taking a longer view of these values and their significance over time. When Rivers's life was celebrated posthumously, the recognition only highlighted the irony of her lifelong obsession with superficial appearances. For many years, Elizabeth Taylor was known as the most beautiful woman in the world — but her career was virtually over by the time she hit middle age, and today she is remembered chiefly for her looks, and for having married eight times.
Rivers's life was a wild roller-coaster ride that alternated between spectacular triumphs and crushing failures. When she married in her 30s, the husband she had yearned for ruined her career and squandered her fortune before killing himself and leaving her with $37 million in debt. But in her later years, Rivers managed to reinvent her career, restore her wealth, build a billion-dollar company, and make history as a fearless pioneer who helped to create unprecedented opportunities for women throughout the entertainment industry. When she died at 81, she was at the height of her success — and the worldwide tributes made it clear that she had won the love of millions.
Maybe it's time for all of us to reconsider the importance of beauty in defining a woman's destiny. If Joan Rivers were able to look back now and reevaluate her life and legacy, she'd still be aggrieved that Elizabeth Taylor was prettier.
But even Rivers would have to admit that the ugly duckling was the one who helped to change the world.
Leslie Bennetts is the author of Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers, published by Little, Brown on November 15. A longtime Vanity Fair writer and former New York Times reporter, Bennetts also wrote The Feminine Mistake, a national best seller about the lifelong cost of economic dependency for women who leave the workforce to become stay-at-home mothers. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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