Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why by Sady Doyle Read Free Book Online

reported false incidents to the police and gave their victims’ address as the source, thereby causing armed SWAT teams to show up at the target’s door. Developer Caroline Sinders, another target, was not SWATed herself—but SWAT teams were sent to threaten her mother.
    It would be tempting to conclude that society is moving away from the hysteria and unprocessed, raw sexism that defined the upskirt-crazed, sex-tape-centric turn of the century: When dozens of female celebrities had their private nude photos leaked in 2014, the response was largely angry and concerned for the women in question, rather than gleeful, with sites like Jezebel (a Gawker property) and Salon joining with victims like Jennifer Lawrence in calling it “a sexcrime.” Twenty-three U.S. states have laws against revenge porn—the non-consensual leaking of sexual tapes or photos—and Google will now remove it from search results at the victims’ request. As my colleague Amanda Hess wrote, declaring the death of the celebrity sex tape,“the Internet masses [have] found a new vice, outrage, to replace our voyeurism.”
    Not so fast. For one thing, outrage and voyeurism have never been distinct vices. The trainwreck lies straight in the center of the Venn diagram where the two overlap, converting hatred, anger, and scorn into an almost hypnotic fascination with the subject, an inability to look away from her, and an increasing need to see her exposed.
    In fact, sex scandals are marvelous for their ability to turn the realities of prurience into the language of highflown morality or pseudo-progressive politics. Watching Hilton’s video, as Hess herself writes, was framed as a form of “class warfare,” a way to “knock the princess down a peg.” Making a TV episode that depicted the victim of a sex crime as constantly gagging on semen was more acceptable if you first took the trouble to call her “spoiled.”
    Similarly, the cruelest commentary aimed at trainwrecks often takes on a veil of pro-woman, pro-girl righteousness. The revulsion at Cyrus’s real or (mostly) perceived sexuality was consistently framed in terms of high-toned objection to rape culture; Cyrus was accused of either “molesting” male pop stars or of giving actual child molesters ideas. The Daily Mail can justify calling Rihanna a“whore” in a headline by claiming that her videos’ “crudity and dancing, combined with money-focused lyrics, are telling Rihanna’s fans—many of them still children—that it is good for women and girls to sell their body.” One might even call them a scripture for propagating whores.
    It’s not all trumped-up dudgeon, either. As with Wollstonecraft’s exile, even genuinely feminist women can participate in the cycle. Consider feminist Elinor Burkett, taking to the pages of The New York Times to kick Caitlyn Jenner out of cisgender feminism’s lunch table, citing Jenner’s“idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular ‘girls’ nights’ of banter about hair and makeup.” It ostensibly meant to reclaim feminist purity from mainstream beauty standards, but it sure did sound like she was calling Jenner a slut.
    At times, leftist sexual critique and conservative prudery can be nearly identical. When Milo Yiannopolous mocked Beyoncé’s self-identification as a feminist in the UK Independent , declaring that“sexual titillation for men [is] … perhaps the least effective route to female empowerment imaginable” and calling Beyoncé “what men demand of her, less than the sum of her body parts,” it was hard to tell him apart from the feminist Ms . readers who were offended by the magazine’s Beyoncé endorsement, and who swarmed its Facebook page to complain about her“wearingthese stripper outfits onstage while dancing like a stripper all for men.”
    The nasty but unavoidable truth is that political outrage and the good old-fashioned desire to punish “bad”