Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

One afternoon in March, about midway through my crowdfunding campaign for The Sex Myth play, I popped out to my local deli to pick up some food for lunch.

As I waited at the crossing, a guy who looked to be in his forties approached to ask me for money. Absentmindedly, I told him no, and he grabbed me and tried to kiss me.

Then I did something I had never done before: I shoved him off and told him to leave me alone.

He didn’t, instead sidling up again to ask me what my name was, and again I told him to leave me alone. “I don’t like being grabbed by strangers.” Every time he took a step towards me, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone.” Then he turned his attention to another woman who was standing at the crossing. “And leave her alone, too! Women do not want to be harassed by you!”

I crossed the road to the deli and went to buy my food, and when I got to the register he was standing there. “That guy just tried to attack me!” I shouted. “And another woman, too!” He laughed, and told the cashiers I was crazy. “They know I’m not crazy!” I replied, “I come here every day.”

He was taken outside and continued to loiter there, while the deli staff talked about calling the police. “It’s one thing to have men shout things at you on the street,” I said. “It’s another thing to have them grab you.” A college-aged woman who was eating in the shop came over to offer to walk me home, and I accepted her offer.

It was a scary experience - especially since it happened so close to where I live – but it was also one that ultimately left me feeling more powerful.

I thought of all the times I had passively deflected in the similar situations. All the times I had walked past cat callers with my head down, hoping that if I behaved as if I hadn’t heard them they would disappear. The time that I sat in park in Paris reading a book an old man had leaned in as though to kiss me, and I had limited my protest not to words but to a raised hand and a shaken head. All the times when I hoped that strangers would pick up on my lack of interest in talking to them by my non-responsiveness, rather than simply telling them I didn’t want to be hit on.

Now, I don’t have time for that bullshit. I don’t know if it’s getting older, or being pregnant, or just having lived in New York for three years, but my patience for people who cross my personal boundaries is at an all-time low. I am less flight, and more fight.

When I first stayed with The Sex Myth founding director Hanne Larsen last May, these were the words that were hung above her desk: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”

The quote — from Winston Churchill, it turns out — resonated with me immediately.

I had told my young cousin, who was working towards a career as an actress, that she should be prepared to face failure after failure on the road to achieving her dreams, but that it was only through persisting through those failures that anyone found success. And I knew from experience that even the things we think will finally make us feel like we’ve “made it” don’t always feel that way when they actually show up in our lives. Neither success nor failure are final; both are just temporary conditions.

The Churchill quote has been on my mind again recently, as I’ve prepared to launch the next iteration of The Sex Myth play and movement into the world.

And here, I take a quick break from our scheduled straight-from-the-heart, uncomfortably honest essay to ask you to join our movement and contribute to our crowdfunding campaign: https://startsomegood.com/the-sex-myth

Over the last couple of weeks, as I’ve reached out to friends and colleagues to ask them to support the play, I’ve received some lovely messages from people in my life, many of them along the lines of, “I’m so happy for you” or “I’m so proud of how much The Sex Myth has grown.”

To which my internal response has been, “But the project is not actually a success yet. I am just throwing myself out on a terrifying precipice trying to make it one.”

Launching a new project is exciting and filled with possibility. But it also means staring the possibility of failure in the face. And in the case of running a crowdfunder, as my friend Erin Bagwell wrote on her blog Feminist Wednesday last week, it means staring the possibility of failure in the face for 30 days.

But to get back to Churchill for a moment, I think it’s this willingness to stare failure in the face that matters most.

Launching a book or a play, running a successful crowdfunding campaign, earning enough money to pay the bills without institutional support or a salaried job — none of these things are easy.

But it’s not the lines on a resume or the achievements you put in your bio that matter.

It’s the courage to continue that really counts: to keep going to auditions, to keep writing and revising even when no one is reading what you’ve created, to keep talking about whatever social issue you care about until you convince other people to care too.

And that’s the true measure of success, I would argue… even if a lot of the time it feels like the opposite.

Besides, as the huscat pointed out to me last night when I talked to him about this, a lot of this project already has come to fruition — even if, to me at least, it feels like everything hangs in the balance right now.

The playbook exists, ready to help people around the world put on their own productions, and we already have people in six communities and four countries talking to us about putting on the show. We have dates and an awesome venue for our New York show in August. We’ve spent the last six months creating a fantastic suite of products to help people get involved in the movement. And in less than 18 hours since we went live, we’ve raised more than $3000 from 40+ contributors.

You can learn more about The Sex Myth play, what we’re doing with it, and why it matters at https://startsomegood.com/the-sex-myth

And please, if the project resonates with you, help us get it off the ground by contributing and joining our movement.

As you think about how you plan to be active throughout the Trump Administration, Molly Crabapple's words are worth considering. How do we create infrastructure that protects and supports those who will be most vulnerable under this administration? How do we create a world in which people like Trump are unelectable? How do we support and magnify the people and institutions who are already doing this work?

Lobbying our representatives and making our voices heard on the streets matter, but we can't be reliant on big-p politicians to do all of this for us. Even if they wanted to, in their current numbers they can't.

In today’s America, everyone’s a little bit gay... and that’s awesome

Flying back to New York from Sydney in March, I watched the entire fourth season of Girls. (Behind the eight ball on that one, I know, but I don't have HBO.) Five months later, the scene that still sticks out to me is the one where Hannah is holed up in her old bedroom, google searching her new romantic rival Mimi-Rose Howard and watching a video of her giving a speech on YouTube. Not just because, well, we've all been there, but because of the way that Mimi-Rose Howard carries herself in that 10-second snippet of speech. Calm. Warm. And seated. "I want to be like her," I thought. And I couldn't help but suspect a lot of it had to do with the sitting. So somewhere towards the end of my spring campus tour, I decided to try it out for myself: to sit rather than stand when I delivered my talk. And whether it was a placebo or not, it worked. I felt calmer. More connected to the people I was talking to. Less like I was talking at you, and more like I was speaking to you. Which when you're leading a conversation about the kind of intimate, consciousness raising subject matter involved in The Sex Myth, is exactly the kind of vibe you want. I'm doing a couple of big, multi-hundred person events in the Fall, so not sure how the whole seated, intimate thing will play out there (I'll probably just decide to stand). But all of this is to say that I'll be requesting a stool for my event in London next week. I'll be speaking on Thursday night at Cafe 1001 in Shoreditch, working with online events org Funzing and the bookstore Pages of Hackney. Tickets need to be purchased in advance, and you can buy yours here.

I started wearing makeup when I was 15, surreptitiously sneaking into the bathroom to apply lipstick between classes. At sixteen, I coloured my hair for the first time, lured by the promises laid out by Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, Cher from Clueless, Sandy from Grease and the lyrics of Blondie’s “Platinum Blonde.” 

At 20, I had my head held over a toilet bowl and a Britney Spears poster on my wall for “thinspiration.” Beauty, as I experienced it, was a cultivated mirage: an attempt to trick people into thinking I was better than I believed I was. It was a pursuit of a white-supremacist, fat-phobic, gender-normative ideal so elusive and impossible that even white, cisgendered  women could aspire to be nothing more than second-rate facsimiles of it. In her classic work The Beauty Myth, author Naomi Wolf calls this ideal “the Iron Maiden,” named after a medieval German casket which was painted like a beautiful young woman on the outside, but served to torture and suffocate the person on the inside. As a young woman, Wolf’s work resonated deeply with me – so much so, in fact, that basically I named my own book after hers. In my worst moments, The Beauty Myth was a book I carried close to my heart; a book that proved that my feelings and experiences weren’t unique to me. That they were a product of a bigger, toxic culture – which taught us that the most important thing a woman can be is beautiful, and that “beauty” is achieved by looking one, particular way. Lately, though, I’ve felt like that culture is starting to change. Sure, you’ve got selfie culture, Instagram filters, thigh gaps and pornified vulvas… but the images of beauty I see – in magazines and on the internet – aren’t the identikit skinny blondes I grew up with (or the even more identikit skinny blondes I wrote about for women’s mags as a baby journalist). It’s Amandla Stenberg covering Teen Vogue with natural hair, and Refinery29’s campaign to Take Back the Beach. It’s my friend Jacob rocking bright pink lipstick, an evening gown and stubble, and the girl in my dance class who looks herself in the eye when she moves, as though she not just believes but knows she is beautiful. It’s the staff at Sephora who tell you not that you “need” X, Y or Z to look presentable, but who show you ways to enhance what you already have.

One afternoon last September, I went to visit a close friend for the first time since The Sex Myth had been published. It was a week or so after the book had been reviewed in The New York Times, and my friend’s mother was visiting at her house as well. 

“You must be on top of the world with all the success you’re having!” she said. “Not really,” I replied, knowing that my friend’s mother had raised my friend and thus was well equipped to deal with expressions of millennial neuroticism. “To be honest, I feel kind of anxious and depressed.”

I share this story because last week another friend emailed to say that she’d achieved one of her big goals: she’d been invited to contribute to a prestigious magazine in her field. “I didn't think I would achieve that for another 3 to 5 years,” she wrote, “after pitching at least 3 times.” And yet it didn’t feel the way she thought it would.  

“It's this feeling of finally realizing that achieving my dream work things will not transform me into the person I wish I was, or cooler, happier, richer, more interesting, less stressed, more creative, more self-esteem, instagram lifestyle or whatever,” she wrote. Had I ever felt that way, she wondered? She felt like I might have.

Hells yes, I responded. In fact, you might say it’s been my major existential challenge over the past five years - through trying to sell the book, through writing it (and rewriting it...), to sending it out into the world. This belief that once I had a certain thing - an agent, a book deal, a book in bookstores that people could buy - I would feel validated. 

Releasing a project you’ve spent the better part of a decade working on is a weird, intense experience. I spent the first few days around publication in a state of fear, bracing myself for waves of social media hate that never really came. I quickly realised that this thing that was all-important and all-encompassing to me was but a small grain of sand in the world of everyone else... and that came with good and with bad. The good? It meant I could relax and enjoy the media I did, realising that most people weren’t waiting to jump on Twitter to talk about how crap I was. The bad? The wave of validation I had been hoping for and anticipating never really came.

On the outside, things looked pretty successful. I got a tonne of media coverage - so much, in fact, I didn’t even share it all on social media, because I didn’t want to annoy people or look too self-promotional. I got lovely letters and emails from people who read my work and connected with it, including a heart wrenching letter from a guy in prison. I got to read awesome essays written by people other writers who had read the book and found it interesting enough to use as a spin off for their own thoughts. I went on a 20-city book tour (which I paid for myself), and Molly Ringwald came to one of my events. I got invited to speak at a festival in my hometown that I watched and admired from afar for several years.

But while most people I knew seemed to perceive me as successful, I was keenly aware of all the ways that my work was not a success. *I* knew, for example, that sales were not as good as I’d hoped they would be. (”I was convinced I would be a bestseller!” an author friend declared dramatically last weekend. “Me too!” I responded, laughing.) *I* had read (and agonised over) the lukewarm reviews on Goodreads. *I* knew that I had paid for my own book tour (as most authors do, it turns out, but we still can’t shake the feeling that if our publishers really loved us, they would have coughed up the cash). *I* had walked into bookstores and died a little inside when I had seen my book misshelved in a section where no one who wanted to buy it would find it.

Most of all, *I* still felt unremarkable, unloved, not good enough. 

Fortunately, I had enough sense of mind to realise that if I felt unremarkable and not good enough in that moment, there was no amount of success that would make me feel that way. I could be Jonathan Franzen or Donna Tartt, heralded as a great literary talent of the early 20th century, or Roxane Gay, greeted by 300 adoring fans at every reading, and I would either be wondering why I hadn’t won a Pulitzer Prize yet, or fixated on the people tweeting about how my work wasn’t nearly as good as people say it is.

I had to accept that I would never feel transformed. That no amount of work, no amount of output, no amount of external validation would save me. So long as I believed that it would, there would always be a hunger for more.

And that has actually been an enormously freeing realisation. If my work can’t save me, that means I can stop expecting it to. Which in turn allows me to enjoy the work for what it is, to appreciate the people who connect with it in whatever numbers they arrive, and to focus on the thing that really drives me to create in the first place: the surprising things that happen when you put something out in the world, the new things that get created in return, and most of all, the people and collaborations it draws into your life.

It means knowing that while throwing myself into my work at the exclusion of everything else might make me marginally more “successful,” throwing myself into it 80 percent will probably get me the same returns in terms of personal happiness and fulfilment - and will make room for other sources of creativity and fulfilment as well. It means pursuing projects because they look fun and stimulating, rather than pursuing them because I feel like I “have to” in order to remain visible and relevant (ie, ego). 

The truth is, I actually do feel pretty happy - and pretty successful - right now, as I write this. I’ve just come off the back of 10-campus tour over the spring, which was emotionally challenging at first, but ultimately bred some really beautiful moments. Hanne Larsen, a student I met when I spoke at Northeastern last Fall, is going to be creating a theatre production of The Sex Myth, which will be playing in Boston at the end of June. The Sex Myth may not be the “rolling bestseller” I imagined it would be, but it is reaching people, helping people, entering the media discourse - and it might just achieve my long term goal for it, which is for young women and men who need it to still be finding and connecting with it ten years after its release, in 2025.

But most of, I am happy because my happiness is not contingent on being “successful” or being a megastar. It’s contingent on creating and watching people create in return, on building friendship and community, and in finding joy in life even in those moments when I don’t feel like a success.