Everybody gonna shine
You learn so much watching reality television
Dear Writer,
I’m about to be out of commission for a couple of weeks while I travel to help my kid move from one apartment to another, but before I leave you for a short while (I’ll be back Aug. 6) I thought I’d chat with you a little bit about something I noticed while watching Survivor.
Here’s the thing about me; it doesn't matter what you’re watching with me, I will absolutely not shut up about how women are portrayed. I can’t help it; I’ve got these little antennae that go up whenever some gender-fuckery glides across the screen at me, and if you’ve got antennae tuned to gender-fuckery, engaging with anything is pretty much like this:
Because I chose well, my boyfriend is totally into it. I’ll bring up something and he’ll be like, “Really?” and then he’ll think about it for a bit and say, “Yeah, I see what you mean.” And then like a week later, he’ll mention seeing something similar in something else he watched, and he will explain back to me how the dynamics worked in what he saw. It’s like he’s doing homework I never assigned him. Pretty soon, he’s going to be pointing gender dynamics out to me that I didn’t even see.
He’s amazing.
Anyway, lately, we’ve been on this Survivor binge. For story critics, sometimes reality television is the only TV you can watch without exhausting yourself with analysis. You can just sit down and enjoy it without overthinking it.
But then I noticed… because of course I did… that almost every single woman on the show, at some point during her interviews, expressed a lack of self-confidence, or at least made a joke at her own expense. I’m such a dummy or I have no sense of direction or No one wants me in charge, and I don’t blame them.
And the men? Almost never do.
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We’re only on Season 6 right now, so I have to keep my antennae up for it and see if I’m seeing something that’s not there, but both Ian and I are noting when it happens, and so far, it’s been pretty consistent. The men have a lot of unearned white male confidence (the show is not very diverse in the early seasons, so whiteness is most of what we’re seeing now) and the women exhibit almost without exception a particular brand of self-doubt that I’ve seen way too much of in my time.1
NOW AS I GET STARTED HERE… let me just say this:
Typically, when we discuss race, we talk about blackness or brownness or Asianness, and that’s good. We need visibility and compassion for those of us who have gotten the short end of an ugly, murderous stick for many centuries now. But we also need to talk about whiteness, because whiteness is why that stick is so murderous and ugly.
I know discussions of whiteness make some people uncomfortable, and that’s exactly why we need to have them. That said… I lack the energy to talk in-depth about all of it right now, because in my head, all I hear is every bad-faith argument that these discussions often get, even though I know y’all are better than that. I just get tired. But I am also tired of tiptoeing around it because I’m so afraid of offending anyone.
(That’s some more white woman programming right there, but we’ll talk about that another day.)
(Maybe.)
SO ANYWAY while I will absolutely claim and be accountable for the fact that white women have done and are doing a lot of damage, I also have empathy for us (well… most of us) because we are forged in the fires of white hell. From jump, we are levied with ideals of beauty, sweetness and sacrifice (a.k.a., be pretty, shut up, and gimme) that we exhaust ourselves trying to achieve, so we’re too tired to question the nonsense bath with bubbles formed from gaslight that we’re soaking in. In hopes of escaping the constant stream of criticisms and degradations, we chase those unattainable ideals, hoping that once we achieve them, we will finally be safe. But, since the goals are unattainable, we are NEVER safe, so we throw each other in front of the firing squad and try to avoid stray bullets.
It’s not pretty. It’s what we do. It sucks. There are reasons for it, but it sucks.
Anyway, this is how chasing unattainable goals set by a force outside of us warps us into weapons, and we take out ourselves and everyone around us while White Supremacy and Patriarchy go play golf.
And most of the time, we don’t even know we’re doing it.
So when I come at white women, understand that it’s with accountability—for myself included—but it’s also with empathy and love. White women, the world lied to us when they said we had to be perfect to be worthy. We’ve been used as weapons against ourselves and others, and even though it’s not our fault, it is our responsibility to take a good look at ourselves, with love and compassion, and de-weaponize ourselves.
And we’ll have the energy to do that once we stop taking ourselves down.
SO THAT SAID, from my experience, white women are trained from jump to take each other out at the knees the second any of us display any sense of self-confidence. It’s done to us, and then we in turn do it to each other. Many of us, in a preemptive strike, turn to the strategy of taking ourselves out before anyone else can get a whack at us. My theory is that we think we’ll take less harm from ourselves than from other white women if they catch us openly displaying even a smidge of self-worth.2
It’s evil, but you gotta hand it to WS&P—it’s also fucking genius. They trained us to weaken ourselves and attack each other so they can go out and play golf.
Anyway, I can’t speak to any other culture aside from white feminine culture, I don’t know how this works in other racial groups, but for white women...
That said, it was a white woman who corrected this bullshit in me.
I remember when my first book came out, I went on a writer’s board and told everyone the book was maybe okay, but don’t spend actual real money on it, go to the library, I’m not that good, blah blah blah, and Jennifer Crusie—who was then and is now one of the people I love most on this planet—came at me.
“People will line up ten deep to tell you you suck,” she said. “Don’t do their work for them.”
And then she made me say, “I’m a great writer” over and over again until it stopped feeling so uncomfortable. Now, at the end of every workshop and keynote I give, I tell everyone that story, with full credit to Crusie. I make everyone shout, “I’m a great writer!” multiple times in her honor. I was once reprimanded by a casino because we were making so much noise in Ballroom Room D that it disturbed the gamblers.
In a casino.
If you haven’t been in a casino, it’s basically a screaming riot of slot machines, cigarette smoke and despair. 300 (mostly) women in a ballroom claimed their awesome so loudly it overwhelmed that ungodly din.
Imagine what else that power might do.
BUT NOW HERE IS MY POINT.
White women have not cornered the market on preemptive strikes; whoever you are, however you identify, if you are engaging in that shit, this is your call to cease fire.
If you find yourself doing that to anyone else, take a breath, apologize, self-examine with love and accountability, and at your next opportunity to not do that, don’t do that.
If anyone in your circle takes you down for being confident, and you cannot exclude them from your life entirely, set some tall-hedge boundaries around that person.
Be strong.
Be awesome.
Sing along with Lizzo.
Go shine. Go write. Claim your awesome so loud it drowns out the casino.
See you in three weeks.
Everything,
L
There is so much to unpack with regard to this that I cannot even begin to do it with any kind of depth in today’s newsletter, because there are issues of race and culture involved, and I haven’t done an exhaustive analysis of how this presents in Survivor and I won’t so if anyone needs a thesis topic, feel free to take it and run and may God bless your sneakers.
Now if you say you don’t do that, I believe you. I make a habit of surrounding myself with people, be they white women or otherwise, who don’t do that shit. But I would bet dollars to doughnuts, if you’re a white woman raised in America, you’ve been sliced at least once by this particular knife. We’ve been trained to do it. We don’t all comply with that training, but a lot of us do. Less now than before, and hopefully less in the future than now, but if you are a white woman raised in America who hasn’t had this experience, then hallelujah. I name thee Hope.