The Problem Isn't Polyamory. It's Lindy West.
on the lindy west discourse and why i couldn't look away
Lindy West is a talented writer. I think that’s actually the most frustrating thing about reading her, because you keep expecting the writing to arrive somewhere, and it never quite does, because she can’t stop getting in her own way. Every observation that approaches real insight gets immediately undercut by a joke at her own expense, or a hedge, or some bit of self-deprecation that’s supposed to read as disarming but mostly just feels sad. The exception is when she writes about her father’s death, which is the unspoken thread throughout her new memoir, Adult Braces, and, oddly, the one thing nobody online seems to be talking about. But everywhere else: she sees the thing, she names the thing, and then she makes a joke about how she’s too much of a mess to do anything about the thing, and you’re left holding the insight she abandoned
And so, I haven’t actually finished it. I probably never will. I want to be honest about that.
One of the reasons that West’s work is hard to get through is because she hates herself – and relentlessly so. West tells you – in no uncertain terms – that she hates herself, and then she tells you again, and then she tries (and fails to) make it funny, and then she tells you one more time in case you missed it. She describes her childhood dentist telling her she had “perfect teeth” and clings to it because she “wasn’t the kind of girl who heard ‘perfect’ a lot as an assessment of her body,” and connects this, in the same breath, to begging boys to kiss her. She explains her low self-esteem partly through “jante,” a Scandinavian concept she links to her family, which in one reading is just Midwestern humility, but the way she writes about it reads less like a cultural disposition than a justification for why she keeps underselling herself in every paragraph
All of this is presented as “charm and character,” which is the thing realtors say about houses that are too old and too broken but need to sell anyway. I don’t think West realizes the way she comes off – that her self-descriptions are deeply depressing. Maybe a third of the way through the book, it becomes clear that the reason West agreed to a relationship structure she didn’t want is that she didn’t believe anyone else but Aham would want her (which, by the way, is a much different thing than she didn’t believe she’d want anyone else but Aham).
This is my entire problem with West. I don’t care that she’s fat or polyamorous or a progressive in the Pacific Northwest. My problem with West is that she hates herself, and she sees herself through the same lens as her worst critics, and she expects you to find this funny. She’s not asking for pity – this is just a fact of life for her. Of course she hates herself; there’s no other option if you’re Lindy West. She agrees with you guys. When it’s not depressing, it’s grating.
And yet I see myself in her. Because this thing West does, where she pre-empts your criticism by hating herself first, is the oldest trick in the book.
In college I had a friend, Claudia, who continuously put herself in sexual situations she wasn’t fully comfortable with. She was convinced she had “sex like a man.” She was “just horny.” And sometimes she was genuinely horny; I believe that. It can be hard to disentangle these things. But even though Claudia hid behind horniness, she would still text these men manically, hundreds of times, and then show me the messages, scrolling and scrolling through a wall of blue with no reply. She’d be gutted by rejections in ways that didn’t match the story she was telling about herself. She’d cry about a guy she supposedly didn’t care about and then, the next weekend, do it again with someone new. She wasn’t having casual sex. She was having desperate sex and calling it casual, because casual was the version of herself she wanted to be: unbothered, cool, free, needing nothing from anyone. I watched it for years, and I never knew what to say, and I think a lot of women have a Claudia in their lives, or have been Claudia, or have at least felt the pull of becoming her.
I think of this as trainwreck feminism.
The problem with a lot of millennial-coded “choice” feminism was not that it had delusionally high standards. No, the problem was the standards were so low as to be a form of self-destruction. As someone who lived it, the reality was simpler and sadder: women were in pain, and they knew they were in pain, and the only cultural vocabulary available to them turned that pain into a kind of performance. Best case scenario, you could sell it for $50 a pop to xoJane. Maybe you’d become Cat Marnell or Lena Dunham or something. Maybe your Tumblr would get you a book deal.
All this to say, millennial women leaned into their flaws. The posture was something like: the world is a trash heap and so am I, isn’t that hilarious? It’s the same impulse you see now in women who perform misogyny, the ones who want you to know they’re not like other girls because they both see and agree that women – women, including themselves – are awful. Out of the millennial version of this stance came the valorization of fast food as aesthetic, of hangovers as personality, of sexual misadventure as confessional essays as minor celebrity. Sleep with the gross guy at the food cart or the bar or for one of my college friends, “the docks” for the story. It was never empowering. It was more like a preemptive strike; if I hurt myself before the world can hurt me, at least I chose it.
