Mything Facts: Some Thoughts on Naomi Wolff's "The Beauty Myth"

Yes, I've only gotten around to reading the 1990 opus The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolff, recently. As a feminist I have to say it is definitely worth reading and that I wish I had read it earlier, but as an editor I must say it reads like a PhD thesis that has the potential to be excellent but needs a lot more work. The book is poorly written in a graduate student style (read: dense, clunky prose that's a chore to get through), and Wolff makes a lot of sweeping generalizations and uses statistics with an inexcusable sloppiness. According to her "the majority of middle class women in the United States suffer from some version of anorexia or bulimia"; the actual facts are that anorexia affects 0.9% and bulimia 1.5% of American women at some point in their lifetime. Her predictions for the future are, well, hysterical (i.e., she claims poor women's breasts may be transplanted onto rich women).

Her scathing comments about Retin-A and insistence that is a dangerously untested product aroused in me a guilty consciousness of the prescription tube of Retin-A in my bathroom cabinet. I googled the matter to find that while it is true that there have been no long-term clinical studies done on Retin-A, it has been in widespread use since its invention in 1969 and thus far there is no indication it is not safe for long-term use.

Still, this is an important work, and Wolff's central thesis of an artificial societal ideal of beauty that is being imposed on women in order to keep them poor, shamed, distracted, and powerless is one that should never be allowed to fall off the political progressive's radar. If you haven't read The Beauty Myth and aren't planning to read it, I recommend that you at least check out the GoodReads list of selected quotes from the book.

Lindy West and Radical Goodness

I first became aware of Lindy West via Twitter several years back because my friends would often retweet some of her bon mots. I followed her myself after checking out her page, and the finesse burns West serves to the idiots who troll her made me reconsider my own online policy of not bothering to engage with anyone who didn't seem worth talking to. Then I began to read the columns she writes for The Guardian, and I admired her grasp of social issues and the way she consistently looks beyond individual bad behaviour and into the possible causes and solutions of the larger cultural problems they symptomize. In her September 2015 "The 'Dear Fat People' video is tired, cruel and lazy – but I still fight for the woman who made it" piece, she told the "Dear Fat People" YouTuber, "I fight for you in your capacity as a complex, fully formed human being with the right to autonomy over your body, even if that body gets fat." In "Now Roosh V and his band of sad men in dark rooms know how it feels to be bombarded with bile", a February 2016 piece written after Roosh V, a self-styled "pickup artist" who posts photos of himself standing by expensive cars and brandishing fistfuls of cash, and who with the help of his online minions has been doxxing and harassing women (including Lindy West) for years, was himself doxxed by the internet vigilante group Anonymous and revealed to be living in his mother's basement by the Daily Mail, West wrote that she took little pleasure in the blowback Roosh was facing, because "I want actual change, not whack-a-mole with a grandiose troll." She's a better person than I am by far. My reaction to Roosh V's outing was more along the lines of a tweet I saw that said, "I want to fly around the world and systematically arrange floodlights so 'ROOSH LIVES IN HIS MOM'S BASEMENT LOL' is visible from space," and any Guardian essay I'd have written on the topic would have mentioned that the photos of Roosh at his mother's door show him in a sweat-stained t-shirt.

When I saw West's tweets about her forthcoming first book, Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, I was quick to put a library hold on it, and very eager to read it. I thought there was a good chance it would be one of those consciousness-expanding reads that permanently changed the way I saw the world. It wasn't, but then few books are, and then too as a feminist who is fairly well-informed about most of the issues West writes about, I am among the converted rather than among those for whom her perspective would be new or challenging. For me, reading Shrill was much less a revolutionary reading experience than one of deep recognition.

In a book that's half memoir and half polemic, West writes about growing up in a society that indicated in so many cruel ways that she should not be taking up space or expect to be a success or to be loved or even treated with basic respect because she was "a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered by men", and about her journey towards confidence, towards not only owning the space she occupies but enlarging her sphere until she became a force for helping others reclaim theirs. It's a journey I recognize because it's so similar to the one I've made myself. The abuse I experienced growing up destroyed the sense of self-worth I needed to combat it, to protect myself from further bad treatment at the hands of others, and even to live my life with any real enjoyment, and I was a long time acquiring a sort of hothouse confidence and learning how to fight the instinctive reaction that if someone treated me like shit, it must be because I am shit. As I read Shrill I kept thinking of a minor but telling incident from when I was 21. One summer day I got on a TTC bus and sat down near a couple of boys in their late teens. One of them said, "What about...?" and inclined his head towards me. The other made a disgusted face and snorted, "No!" I'm 42 now, and if something like that happened to me these days, I'd tell the boys that if they don't learn to treat women with more respect, they are going to be virgins until they die, and then move to another seat, but at 21 I had no defenses against that kind of garbage, and I just sat where I was and felt terrible.

West writes about growing up fat in a world where being fat is considered "not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing", about the painful shyness it created in her, about the lack of media representation for fat girls (she provides a scraped-from-the bottom-of-the-barrel list that includes Miss Piggy and Lady Cluck from Disney's Robin Hood), about how she stopped doing ordinary things like going swimming or hiking with her friends, about being so revolted by her own menstruation cycle that she could never bear to tell her mother she was running out of tampons, about the men who wanted to have sex with her but didn't want to be seen in public with her. Then she writes about becoming a woman who decided that, screw it, she was valuable and that she was damn well going to not only wear crop tops and bathing suits but also write and publish a piece about being fat illustrated with a full-length picture of herself and call out not only the guy next to her on a plane trip for being a dick but also her boss (who was, by the way, Dan Savage) for the "obesity epidemic" pieces he was publishing. It's glorious and inspiring, and I love the fact that what proved to be West's salvation, and her prescription for anyone who's uncomfortable with their own or anyone else's fatness, is so simple and down-to-earth: look at pictures of fat people online until you get over it.

But it wasn't as though West's acquired confidence broke down all barriers and made her bulletproof. Her chapter on what it's like to fly when you don't fit into the airplane seats made me first want to shed a few tears for her and then force every airline executive in the world to read it. She continues to face obstacles and to receive bad treatment from others, she writes about it all and about the systemic misogyny it stems from... and then she faces a barrage of online and offline harassment for it. But she pushes back against that too and she's had the satisfaction of seeing a resulting change not only in some of the individuals she interacted with but also in the larger cultural milieu. Dan Savage changed the way he wrote about fat people. One of her most abusive trolls (he set up sock puppet Twitter account for West's father, who had very recently died) actually backed down and apologized to her after reading an essay she had written about how his specific behaviour made her feel, and he didn't stop with only an apology, but also changed his own life. Twitter's CEO told his employees that they needed to get serious about preventing abuse on their platform. Some of the comics she's criticized for misogyny have started to rethink the kind of rape jokes they make.

Shrill isn't a landmark book, but it is a very worthwhile one that should be read and discussed, as the documented lived experiences of all marginalized people should be. We'll never improve this society of ours until we start really listening to those who are most affected by its failings. The man who is now West's husband told her that during their first moments of real connection, "I started to realize that you weren't just funny--I'd always thought you were funny--but that you might be a really, really radically good person." He was absolutely right, and I can't be thankful enough that Lindy West's particular kind of radical goodness, with its unflinching honesty, compassion and respect for humanity, will be shining a light on and before us all for many years to come.

The Story of an African Farm... and of a Life

Olive Schreiner’s book The Story of an African Farm is one of those books that are more important and interesting for its cultural and historical significance, or for the always fascinating relationship between writer and what is written, than for their own literary merits. An African Farm is one of the earliest feminist novels, and one of the earliest South African novels, and perhaps the earliest example of the “South African farm novel”, which I gather is considered something of a sub-genre. I was startled by some of its content, which must have forced some of its Victorian readers to recourse to their sal volatile. One does not expect to find a transvestite in a Victorian novel. But for all An African Farm’s remarkable qualities, it’s not an artistic success. There is good material in it, but it’s something of a mess.

The Story of an African Farm narrates episodes from the lives of three children as they grow up on a farm in South Africa: Em, the English stepdaughter of Tant’ Sannie, the farm’s Boer owner; Lyndall, Em’s cousin; and Waldo, the son of the farm’s kind and deeply pious German overseer, Otto. The two chapters of the book sets up the characters and conflicts of the three children nicely. We learn of Waldo’s spiritual unrest, Lyndall’s fierce and far-reaching ambitions, and of Em, who is sweet and stolid but no fool, and we are immersed in an evocative description of a different time and place and a unique culture.

Then a man named Bonaparte Blenkins walks onto the farm. We don’t know his back story, but my best guess is that he’s a discarded Charles Dickens’ character who wandered into the wrong novel by accident and stayed because the pickings were good. He’s an ignorant, sadistic, devious, sociopathic, opportunistic man, and a bizarrely out-of-place caricature among the delicately realized children and even the less well-drawn Tant’ Sannie and Otto. He remains on the farm for some years, first as an incompetent teacher of the children and then as overseer and Tant’ Sannie’s accepted suitor, until Tant’ Sannie finally proves herself able to recognize Bonparte’s real nature, and equally able with a barrel of pickle brine when the occasion calls for it.

The whole eleven chapters concerning the impossibly evil Bonaparte Blenkins are basically one long derail from the narrative of the novel, and despite the fact that he was almost its only comic relief, I gratefully watched him walk off the farm for good. Then there was one more digression before the novel got back on track — an entire chapter dealing in the most abstract, meandering terms with Waldo’s transformation from tortured Christian to despairing atheist, which feels more Schreiner’s own spiritual biography than like an integrated part of the novel. Finally Schreiner pulls the novel back on track, and progresses in fine style through Em’s engagement to Gregory Rose, Lyndall’s return to the farm after years away at boarding school, Gregory Rose’s and Waldo’s respective passions for Lyndall, Tant’ Sannie’s wedding to a young Boer, and the appearance of Lyndall’s mysterious correspondent.

I’m not sure what I think of the novel’s denouement. I can’t call it improbable or contrived exactly (though are we really to believe that Lyndall, who is never, ever hoodwinked at any other point in the book, didn’t recognize a disguised Gregory Rose?), but I do have a sense that Schreiner copped out somehow. Lyndall, with her incredible ambition and shattering insight, is a woman ahead of her time whom no social conventions will ever hold — and who, like a rocket explosion in a horse-and-buggy world, leaves others stunned and damaged in her wake. Her character has such sheer force the book can barely contain her, and maybe Schreiner chose to destroy Lyndall rather than try to make the world of the novel a fitting environment for Lyndall.

But it’s entirely possible Schreiner really couldn’t envision a happy ending for Lyndall. Schreiner had finished writing An African Farm by 1880. Born in 1855, she was then only 25. At 21, while working as a governess, she had had a sexual relationship with a young businessman named Julius Gau. The nature of their relationship was known in the village where she then lived, and the village condemned and rejected her socially. Schreiner and Gau became engaged, and Schreiner may have become pregnant, but if so, she miscarried, and Gau broke the engagement. Schreiner then suffered a bout of depression and developed asthma. Over the course of the next four years as she returned to work as a governess and wrote An African Farm, she perhaps didn’t foresee that she would win out, remain her free-thinking, rebellious, corset-rejecting self, and live a successful, meaningful, happy life, and so couldn’t give Lyndall the same gift.

The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner's first published book, appeared in 1883. It was an immediate best seller and attracted much attention. Not all of this attention was favourable, of course, but she had her admirers, among them William Gladstone, who was at that time Prime Minister of Great Britain. Schreiner traveled Europe and participated in various social and political movements (she was way ahead of her time in her views on race, class, colonialism, pacifism and politics as well as in her feminism). At age 39 she married a progressive-minded South African farmer. She published four books in all as well as many pamphlets and essays, some of which she co-wrote with her husband. And so when I look at Schreiner’s life and at her remarkable accomplishments, I can’t be too harsh with An African Farm. The novel is a mess; its author’s life was not. Even though I wish both the book and the life could have been successful, I can’t help being glad that at least the success and failure weren’t reversed.