“The word complaint derives from plague, in a vulgar sense, to strike at the breast. A complaint: sick speech. Maybe she is heard as speaking from ill will: not only as being ill, but as spreading infection, as making the whole body ill.”–Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
In Kate Zambreno’s Heroines–a feminist-literary-history-slash-memoir-slash-critique-of-marriage (which never quite musters radicalness beyond naming the institution as a stultifying cage)–women complain. Their apartments, bodies, doctors, clothes, spouses, and careers are the subjects of complaint; these grievances are often critical and engaging examinations of what is wrong exactly. Zambreno sets out to investigate the sometimes glamorous, often talented, and unusually troubled “wives of” the so-called Great Men of modernism, while simultaneously examining her own status as a “wife of” an academic. The fairer sex doesn’t fare too well in these marriages–in fact they have many complaints, both in the physical sense, and also, when they’re able to vocalize them, in the vernacular sense. Vivienne Eliot gushes menstrual blood for years, Zelda Fitzgerald’s once charming alcoholism sloshes over into something dark and ugly, Leonard Woolf’s journal is described as a litany of Virginia’s physical and mental complaints, including violence against others. Zambreno herself exists in a sort of depressed fog, snarling against the shackles of a marriage she all but names as oppressive but can’t seem to disentangle herself from. The book for all its flaws has many virtues, but one of the most vital stories it tells is of the gendered vilification of complaint. Zambreno writes, “A definition, I think, of being oppressed, is being forbidden to externalize any anger.” T. S. Eliot, once ready to move on to a younger model, sees to it that his first wife Vivienne dies in asylum. “Hysteria” and “nerves” and all the other pathologizing words we use to describe women’s emotions are on full display. These women are full of complaint–headaches, too-long colds, uncontrollable menses. The psycho and the somatic have slipped together; the pathologization of giving voice to anger and true mental illness have been blurred. They embody the feminization and bourgeoisification of complaint.
Something rankles me about the privileged yet wretched lives of these women; perhaps there is a feeling of the navel-gazing of these distresses, but I also locate it in something ugly and unempathetic within me, some fraught internalized misogyny. Is this the origin of the demonization of complaint? Is it the same misogyny that kept various “wife of”s in comparative disrepute? Whenever I think of picking up a new hobby at the crusty old age of 31, I think of poor Zelda Fitzgerald, a late-in-life inelegant ballerina, she of the slowly pickling insides, demanding small audiences sit in their vicarious embarrassment to watch her dance. No one wants to be Zelda.
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Speaking of vicarious embarrassment, I was surprised to see Katie Roiphe’s name in the bibliography as I flipped through the final pages of Heroines. Roiphe has recently had something of a resurgence in interest following what has been dubbed for better or worse, “the #MeToo moment.” For millennials, Roiphe might have some vague familiarity as a Slate columnist, but she was far from a household name when she burst onto Twitter like the anti-feminist Kool-Aid man. In what can only be described as showing very questionable ethics, Roiphe was writing an article for Harper’s that revealed the creator of the Shitty Media Men List. When the news broke that she was making moves to do so, she provably lied about her intentions–something that has garnered surprisingly little attention, and did not stop Harper’s from running the piece. Roiphe’s appearance in Heroines was due to a book on literary marriages (sadly worth only a theatrical yawn on closer inspection), but in some ways a more generative foil for understanding why complaint is treated as a menace is her book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, which was published in 1993, when Take Back the Night rallies and sexual harassment trainings were first beginning to erupt on campuses.
Both the occasionally brilliant Heroines and the flimsy The Morning After help illuminate various mechanisms that cause “complaint” around gender, race, and class to be treated as not simply a companion to the problem but in fact the origin of a problem itself. The problem only exists when someone names it in complaint. If no one names it, the institution, organization, culture, or other body of individuals, does not need to acknowledge it exists. Complaint is usually cast as something simultaneously silly and destructive. The origins of this come in part from the “complaint” as a feminized vice, something that comes through again and again in Zambreno’s brief vignettes on moments in her subjects’ lives. Whereas in Zambreno’s book we spend time with the complainers, Roiphe’s book shows a great deal about how the logic of anti-complaint works.
While Roiphe’s book is easy to read (oh, what a good editor and some clarity of thought can do), it so often fails on its own logic in the most self-aggrandizing ways that the feminist reader might feel a frisson of excitement somewhere between schadenfreude and a shared shame. Roiphe tries to address various separate threads of feminism–from sexual assault awareness to sexual harassment to anti-pornography feminism–under one large umbrella. Picking up the book, I was sure I would see the normal lines about miscommunication, the chilling of real experience, and the inclusion of date-rape as rape as a denial of feminist agency. Some of these ideas are certainly includedm but the claims are more confused than the standard concern-troll response to what has unfortunately been called another “sex panic.”
Again and again throughout the slim volume (you can read it in one distressing night), Roiphe’s arguments range from thin to self-nullifying. In the introduction to the paperback, she bemoans that people have accused her of being privileged with the usual attendant worries of valuing experience too much, but very quickly in the body of the book, she’s flinging the same sloppy privilege politics at the women who speak at Take Back the Night. In one chapter she takes to task the number “one in four” women are sexually assaulted via statistical improbability while also bemoaning the definition of rape they use. Later she admits that by many people’s standards she herself has been date-raped. She doesn’t reflect on it. At one point, I thought to myself that I would get through this entire book on the date rape crisis–which she introduces as impressionistic and anecdotal–without her sitting down with a date rape survivor to talk one on one. Unfortunately she does–in a chapter where she spends a great length of time simply profiling and making fun of her fellow graduate students, who clearly don’t like Roiphe much. It’s embarrassing for everyone. Read Roiphe if you want to hear from the type of writer who will go into rich detail about rape survivor’s outfits, who is sure to mention the pudginess of a college student talking about her assault. We know more about the pearls and ripped jeans of women in Roiphe’s book than their interior lives–interior lives that seem to matter little to the author.
Roiphe wants the definition of rape to be different, but she’s not clear what that is. Twice she holds up stranger rape where the offender has a knife as “legitimate,” but she takes pleasure in imagining Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa–who is drugged and raped–at a Take Back the Night rally. Even the squarest, most emeritus professor would consider Clarissa a rape victim. But Roiphe locates conservative sexual politics not in the violence, manipulation, and material situation of Clarissa, but in her response to the rape. It’s clear that Roiphe isn’t talking about the muddying waters of consent, which was raised recently to prominence again by the Aziz Ansari case. What she is actually concerned about is quite different. She would, for the most part, just like women to stop complaining, regardless of their experiences.
Since Roiphe rarely talks directly to survivors or other people who actually think date rape is a problem, she treats their actions as somehow indecipherable. It’s amazing how threadbare her analysis is–focusing on the methods of complaint, the words chosen. She doesn’t like that women feel defiled by rape–it’s old fashioned. She describes seeing a Take Back the Night March, “I remember an older student from my high school, whom I’d always respected, always thought particularly glamorous, marching, her face flushed with emotions, and I wondered what it was about.” She doesn’t think to herself that maybe something awful happened to this woman; she just marvels at her participation. Likewise she talks about students at Wesleyan interrupting tours in the 1990s by saying “they successfully planted the fear of rape in the minds of prospective students.” She doesn’t say that students had been told by their counselors that 20-30 sexual assaults happened on campus per semester. She also doesn’t include that the students who interrupted were themselves charged by the schools judicial board with harassment. She is more worried with the problem of complaint than with its cause, or its ramifications. Roiphe is infatuated with the surfaces of women, their roles, not their material conditions or interiors.
It is thus telling that she spends more time laying out the plot of David Mamet’s wildly misogynistic play Oleanna than on any actual story of rape. In this play, a female student misconstrues her professor’s platonic sweetnesses for harassment and ruins his life. According to Roiphe, after the seemingly powerless professor has had too much, he “hits her, throws her to the ground, calls her ‘you little cunt.’… The student’s charges are seen what they are: a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The logic is clear: abuse victims are the authors of their own abuse. Later in the book she says it more directly, “To create awareness is to sometimes create a problem.” For Roiphe, using a fiction as an example of truth, complaining about sexual violence is the origin of sexual violence. Roiphe claims to be fighting for women’s agency when they are alone in the room with men (I will phrase this heteronormatively because queer women are not featured in Roiphe’s book), but not with the agency to formulate their own politics. Young women are agents in the moments when they feel most vulnerable but outside of them, the chorus of complaint has muddied their politics to such an extent that they need an intervention from Roiphe to help them.
Roiphe positions herself against the status quo–she imagines that her voice weaves together with Germaine Greer and Camille Paglia to form a taut hot thread of dissent within the feminist movement. Together they seem to ask: “What is wrong with these women?” Roiphe’s answer is that their young heads have been filled with the wrong kind of feminism. The solipsism of victimhood has been as cunningly offered to them as an apple by a witch. Her account makes the elite complainants of Zambreno look suddenly appealing. And importantly, other writers (Bari Weiss leaps forcefully to mind) pull the same trick as Roiphe. Roiphe is here positioning political counter-narratives (women who are raped do not deserve it, rape should not happen even when a victim knows her attacker) as hegemonic–a ridiculous notion for anyone who just sat through the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. She then positions herself as an intrepid and brave voice–the only one–who has the guts to take on the her fabricated, false hegemony of feminist discourse. The so-called “intellectual dark web” pulls this trick every time–saying the most embedded conservative principles as though they are Socrates about to drink hemlock.
Next week I’ll talk about the understanding of complaint offered to us by Sara Ahmed and how that leads us to more thoughtful treatments of complaints within our organization and movement, with particular attention to race and sexual harassment.
Political Theory & a Peony 