ritterwriter1

Or, What Taylor Swift Means to Me

The first time I spent the night in a strange man’s bed in New York, he told me I was there because I was smart, not because I was pretty.

The comment was, in some ways, my fault: with stereotypical writerly hunger for praise, I had been fishing for a compliment on my appearance.

“There are lots of pretty girls in New York. You’re not here because you’re pretty; you’re here because you’re clever.”

I almost left. I stayed. I even chased via text in the following days. It might have been the first time, but it certainly was not the last.

_

Tomorrow, Taylor Swift will jump on her jet and fly from Tokyo to Las Vegas to watch her boyfriend win the Superbowl. A week ago, she announced the release of yet another album as she accepted yet another Grammy for Album of the year; in a month, Greta Gerwig will depart yet another Oscars ceremony without a golden statuette for the Barbie movie she wrote and directed.

All this would have been unfathomable to me the last time I put pen to paper four years ago. Taylor Swift was happily dating Joe Alwyn, ensconced away from the world with him after the cancellation of her Lover tour. Greta Gerwig had just released Little Women, a story whose heroines were neither plastic nor porcelain but bruised, blushing women. And I was in Arlington, Virginia, having failed to secure either a proposal or a PhD acceptance, sobbing my way through listen after listen of “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and yearning to follow Jo’s footsteps to New York City.

Back then, I would have regarded both the NFL boyfriend and the Barbie movie as a betrayal. My feelings about Taylor up until that point had largely followed the tide of public opinion. They didn’t have a word for “pick me” behavior when I was in high school, but that’s exactly what I did. I proudly declared myself “Team Kanye” when our youth group leader jokingly asked us the Sunday after the infamous 2009 VMAs debacle whose side we were on.

I of course couldn’t have named a single Kanye song besides “Gold Digger” and secretly adored the Jane Austen world of the “Love Story” music video, but performed derision for her doe-eyed, injured appeal to country-girl tropes. She was, I felt with increasing disdain, the girl in Tom Petty’s “Freefalling” – a good girl who loved her mama, horses, Jesus, Elvis and America – put behind the microphone.

This intuition slowly grew into righteous indignation as I heard through the grapevine that the football players at college listened to Red on repeat in the shower. How dare those clods – I fumed to myself amid feverish late-night essay writing with Beethoven thundering in the background – relish the kind of pain they themselves inflicted – how dare they first, eroticize; then, trivialize; and, finally, idealize that plaintive simplicity – and how dare she prop up this vision of sweet, simple American girlhood that left weird Barbies like me out in the cold.

Later, in the 1989 years, Taylor would, in her own words, become “a national lightning rod for slut shaming.” I didn’t partake in this particular form of shaming – I was too busy trying to whittle down my thighs so they looked like hers – but I gleefully cast another kind of stone: not slut shaming but simplicity shaming. Just as the good girl judges (but secretly envies) the slut for her ability to enjoy her body without the constraints of her heart and its attendant longing for romance, connection, and commitment, so the smart girl judges (but secretly envies) the simple girl for her ability to enjoy her emotions without the constraints of her brain and its attendant desire for intricacy, texture, and depth.

She was, in a word, too easy – albeit in a different sense than that insult is usually meant – and I regarded her with the vague suspicion with which I regarded the blondes I saw on Fox News. Ostensibly, the family values vision of America united us, but instinctually, I felt that the artificial sameness of their beauty – the white body, bronzed by the bottle; the blonde hair, bleached by the box; the voluminous locks disciplined by the iron – had more to do with giving men something sweet and digestible than it did with celebrating women’s delight in their beauty, their homes, and their families as such.

Then I had a breakup.

The timing of it truly couldn’t have been worse. My ex and I ended things in October 2019, just before COVID-induced funding cuts at research universities booted me from the top of the waitlist at my dream PhD program and COVID-induced budget constraints at the PR firm I worked at part-time meant they could only afford to keep me on through the end of the summer. With the twin time bombs of an expiring lease and an expiring contract ticking, I hurled job applications New York-ward and wept through listen after listen of Lover.

My ex was the one who had precipitated my turn towards Taylor; he had played “Cruel Summer” for me in the final few months of our relationship and, for all my (justified!) contempt of “Look What You Made Me Do,” I couldn’t resist the former, perhaps the most perfect of all her pop songs. Predictably, he and I cycled back to each other in the early months of lockdown before he moved away to start grad school, and even though I knew – as I had always known – that he wasn’t for me, I clung to him with the flailing, self-defeating grasp of the castaway.

“Can I tell you I love you?” I sobbed during our final facetime. “Because I do, I do.”

The next morning, I woke up, rolled over in bed, and grabbed my laptop to begin working from home and streaming the album that Taylor had unexpectedly dropped the night before. I was greeted with those wistful opening piano chords and a voice that, though long-familiar, was wielded with new deliberateness and poignancy:

“But we were something, don’t you think so?

Roaring 20s, tossing pennies in the pool,

And if my wishes came true

It would’ve been you.

In my defense, I have none

For never leaving well enough alone,

But it would’ve been fun

If you would’ve been the one.

The next few tracks passed in a haze and I eventually slammed my laptop shut, unable to finish the album. I couldn’t until a few weeks later, when I fled the punishing humidity of DC by driving into the dank, dark cool of the Blue Ridge mountains.

That drive changed me. If you’ve ever driven along the highway during an East Coast summer, you know the technicolor radiance that comes after a thunderstorm – how the break in the heavy August air emblazons the blue of the sky with new brilliance and breathes new effulgence into the green drooping of the trees – this, as Taylor sang of a lover who showed her colors visible only with him – this, as she sang of a raucous girlhood echoing through the Pennsylvania woods – this, as she sang of a time when better lives were possible and hunger itself a fullness – this drive bound me to her and revealed me to myself. A decisive break with the hard, glistening surfaces of pop and the bleached, sanitized mawk of country, folklore gave us a soft but subtle Taylor – a woman who fled the doll’s house of blonde Americana she had, unnoticed, allowed to imprison her into a world where shadowy emotions malingered until words at once dispelled and hallowed them.

Our bond only deepened with the release of evermore, folklore’s wintry cottagecore sister album. The witchily mischievous “willow” kept me company on frosty runs through the East River Park that lonely first winter in New York, and I’ll never be able to listen to the mournful “coney island” without thinking of the time I sat on the Q train, watching the distant primary colors of the amusement park gleaming dully in the winter light the morning I ventured out to Brighton Beach in quest of a free vacuum to clean the tiny East Village apartment I could barely afford at the time.

Like the protagonist of a Victorian novel, I found myself baffled and delighted by this unexpected kinship. Taylor borrowed metaphors from Jane Eyre to describe her love for the British boyfriend who took her on trips to the Lake District; she sold a song whose story was ripped straight from the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel to the producers of a miniseries about her distant cousin, Emily Dickinson;* like Catherine Earnshaw, she strained towards shipwrecked, long-lost love through open windows on freezing winter nights; and like Gerwig’s Jo March, she yearned after the long-gone days of feral girlhood and rejected the rich suitor.

She was one of us. The curly-haired girl in the Regency ballgown lifted from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice emerged as a woman writer in her own right, consciously assuming her place not – as might have been expected back then – next to Dolly or Britney, but instead closer to Joni and Brontë. Some even began to speculate – in hushed, embarrassed tones – that her expectations might be even greater; slowly, you began to hear her name in the same breath as Michael, as Bruce, as the Beatles, as Bob.

_

The first time I straightened my hair, boys, open-jawed, said I looked like Barbie. I can remember the exhilaration coursing through my body as I walked down the stairs from my homeroom to the history classroom, aglow with the power of everybody looking at me.

Some of it was, no doubt, the shock of the sudden contrast, but I intuited an admiration that the Barbie comparison only confirmed. This delight was only sweetened by the thrill of the forbidden; my mother had warned me that the flatiron would damage my hair and promised punishment if I ever dared straighten it.

In a rare show of rebellion that I now regard as one of my greatest acts of youthful courage, I snuck to the bathroom over lunch break and let a kind girl named Alex go at my hair as she had been begging me to do for months. When I returned to the classroom, my homeroom teacher confronted me:

“Did you do that just now?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“You have a silent lunch.”

When my mother came to pick me up after school, I gingerly approached the car, bracing myself – but I was met only with a gasp of surprise and delight.

“You mean I’m not in trouble?”

“No, no! It looks wonderful.”

I should have done it over and over again, as often as I pleased. I should have figured out how to use the blow dryer instead of the flatiron so it took half an hour instead of two, should have taken oodles of photos, should have allowed the pleasure I saw in others’ eyes seep into my bones.

I didn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it very well might have been the last.

_

Unlike Taylor, Greta Gerwig announced herself to the bookish girls as one of us immediately. Her movies focus not on women’s career success, nor their acquisition of material goods, but their relationships to one another – relationships that deepen through scenes of reading. The opening montage of Frances Ha shows Frances and her roommate Sophie curled up on their couch, reading passages of their respective books aloud to each other; the opening montage of Lady Bird shows Christine and Marion mopping their eyes as an audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath ends; Little Women shows Jo reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss to the dying Beth on the seashore.

So what the hell was she doing making a movie about the Barbie doll? That bright, cheerful, plastic icon of American femininity was even more ghastly to me than the young Taylor. At least Taylor forced listeners to reckon with the sticky awkwardness of her emotions; Barbie, barren of emotion, met you not in the soft, mutable world of relationships but instead in the hard, stable world of objects and achievement.

And what a dreadful world it was: pastels and ponytails, sedans and Supreme Court seats. I tried to fit words around this revulsion at a work lunch with the women on my team last summer, grasping between sips of iced tea and bites of sushi at why watching it sounded so miserable.

“It’s not that deep,” one of my coworkers said. “It’s pretty. Barbie world is pretty. Margot Robbie is pretty and I like looking at her.”

There it was again: simplicity. Why was it so uncomplicated for everyone else and so fraught for me? Why was it so easy for millions of other women around America to put on pink sparkles, grab their girlfriends and gather en masse at the movie theatre? How did every woman on my feed manage to jump on board the marketing bandwagon – “This Barbie is ready to party!” “These Barbies are going to the movies!” – with such effortless grace?

“That is not for me,” declares Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe when her godmother threatens to put her in a pink dress to attend a concert that the entire town – including Lucy’s longtime crush, Dr. John – will attend. So I felt about Barbie, about pink, about summer, about selfies and self-optimization and simplicity – that is not for me, and, infuriatingly, I had thought it wasn’t for Greta either. Part of the reason Greta’s movies resonate so deeply with women is the painstaking, even painful accuracy with which they document the tensions, ambivalences, and envies in our relationships with one another. You can read the fracturing of Frances and Sophie’s friendship in Frances Ha either as Sophie’s betrayal – failing to confide the full extent of her feeling for the affable, uninteresting Patch so that when she refuses to renew their shared lease, it hits Frances with the sharp surprise of a slap – or you can read it as Frances’s Peter Pan syndrome, clinging with childlike insistence to a rapidly fading past, refusing to handle her friend’s unfolding evolution with the delicacy it deserves.

You can read Jo’s cry – “but I’m so lonely!” – as the defeated gasp of a woman ahead of her time, smothered by a world that corseted women in the cult of domesticity – or you can read it as a genuine cry for romantic love from a woman whose refusal to settle for anything less than the marriage of true minds leaves her alone far longer than her peers.

And perhaps most painfully, you can read the mother-daughter relationship in Lady Bird either as the fumbling, often failing attempts of an imperfect mother – fretted by the constraints of a paycheck-to-paycheck life after decades of public policy eviscerating the middle class – to love her churlish daughter – or you can read it as a straight story of emotional abuse, with Lady Bird flying away from a self-involved, manipulative mother to New York.

After these triumphs of subtlety, how could the anthemic feminism of Barbie, professing to sweep all women to new heights of representation in a wave of pink paint and power pop, be anything less than a disappointment? Simplicity, it seemed, was to rule the day – but I recoiled from it as Lucy recoiled from the pink dress: “That is not for me. I thought no human force should put me into it. I knew not it. It knew not me. I had not proved it.”

_

The first time I was in love, my best friend bought me a pale pink off-the-shoulder sweater to wear when he was around. She had been reading about color theory and was convinced I was a spring, best suited to pastels and not the dark jewel tones I preferred.

“Nancy really likes to show off her shoulders, and I think she’s a spring, so this is what I got her for her birthday,” she explained to a knot of coltish guys at youth group that warm September evening. “Doesn’t she look great?”

My boy quietly murmured his agreement, his eyes darting up to meet mine. I still remember the blush that crept up my neck when, a few minutes later, he found me on a bench in the church garden, came up behind me and said in a low voice, “Could I have a word?”

I should have worn it again. I should have bought a million others like it. But when I found out months later that my friend – tiny, tan, blonde, a cheerleader, a track star, a drummer, an actress, adored by every single guy that crossed her path – had started dating this guy behind my back, my preference for jewel tones was quietly reaffirmed.

_

Convulsed in sobs, clutching my friends to me, I stood under a purple-pink sky, my straightened hair streaming down my back and my gushing eyes lined in a cat-eye sharp enough to kill a man, and roared with 85,000 other women at a tiny figure in a sparkly pink bodysuit.

The concert came at the end of the most wonderful spring of my life. A cherished friend from high school got married on an 80-degree April day at a rooftop venue in Greenpoint, and festooned in a sparkly pink dress, I twirled and gossiped and laughed with all the old faces as the sun set over the Manhattan skyline.

My mom came to the city for the weekend to see Lea Michele in Funny Girl, and I wore a perilously tight pink backless dress that I worried made me look like a fool – worried, until we took our seats in the theatre and a gaggle of girls behind us smiled and said, “I like your dress.”

And the days leading up to the concert felt like one long slumber party. Two friends flew in from Canada to stay with me and we gallivanted full-tilt into the summer, applying lipstick and swapping dresses, swanning around Cornelia Street, eavesdropping at cocktail bars, analyzing text threads curled up on air mattresses, and preening for pictures in the opera box.

And it wasn’t just us: the whole city became a carnival of recognition that weekend, the Memorial Day streets overflowing with women costumed in glittery garters, Junior Jewels t-shirts and red lipstick. We’d wave at each other, we’d compliment each other’s outfits, we’d press each other with urgent questions. “Have you gone?” “Are you going?” “How was she?” “How was it?” “What were your secret songs?” “How long were you in the merch line?”

Halfway through the concert, Taylor strides to the middle of the stage and falls to her knees, white dress billowing around her as she leads us in the gut-wrenching bridge of her most devastating song:

“And you wanna scream,

Don’t call me ‘kid’

Don’t call me ‘baby,’

Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me.

You showed me colors

You know I can’t see with anyone else.

Don’t call me “kid,”

Don’t call me “baby,”

Look at this idiotic fool that you made me.

You taught me a secret language

I can’t speak with anyone else,

And you know damn well

For you I would ruin myself

A million little times.

In a paradox that, to my mind, is nothing short of miraculous, those words – written in the deepest isolation of 2020 – taught me a language to speak with other women and showed me the bright colors of a world that I had blocked out. She gave them back to me, that tiny figure with the dazzling smile and the white cowboy boots – she reconciled 85,000 other women to me on that glorious Pentecost Sunday. Suddenly, I found myself akin to other girls who without her would have terrified me. “The worst song on the album,” I said in passing to one girl as she and her friends sang “Question…?” in the East Village streets the weekend Midnights came out.

“How can you say that when ‘Dear Reader’ is on there?” she shouted back as I continued wending my way home.

“Ooooh, she’s on her vigilante shit!” I cooed at a girl who wore an incredible replica of Swift’s costume for the song, down to the sparkly blue garter, on Halloween.

“She made it herself!” her friends beamed back at me.

“Not for me,” no longer – I was in it with millions of other women, and I had the friendship bracelets to prove it.

There were, as I realized when I started this essay nearly two years ago, many reasons why it took me all of my twenties to claim what comes to so many women as a birthright. It begins with a family culture suspicious of all things embodied, womanly, and sexual, while valorizing in all things masculine, intellectual, and spiritual.

It was exacerbated by an evangelical Christian church that, among its other investments in patriarchy, took the power of beauty away from women by exhorting them to hide the lamp of their young and beautiful bodies under a bushel.

It strengthened as I encountered shitty men who were plenty happy to discuss the beauties of Kierkegaard and transubstantiation with me until dawn, but when the time came to choose a girlfriend, found themselves fascinated by beauties that said far less.

It was confirmed by terrified women who, through eating disorders and situationships, taught me that beauty meant making yourself small.

It was cemented by a culture and an economy that preys on women’s insecurities – forcing them, as Jia Tolentino so brilliantly writes, into a rat race of self-optimization where we ruthlessly compete and compare in hopes of coming out on top as the thinnest, chillest, sexiest.

I wanted nothing to do with this, taking what I thought was a principled stance borne of Christian conviction and third-wave feminism against the cruelties of – variously – the makeup tax, online dating, workout classes, clean eating and selfies. I spent my twenties letting my physical beauty lie – untouched and untended – and focused on finding it in the world around me.

I thought this made me deep, and I also thought it made me special. If I was beautiful at all, it was a beauty that was illegible to men. Trained to prize sleek, straight hair, my unruly, bushy curls might be beautiful – but none of them could see it. Trained to salivate over tiny, thin girls, my height and my curves might give me elegance, consequence – but since when did guys give a shit about elegance, and how many of them even knew that “consequence” could mean something other than “punishment”? Trained on bronzed and bikinied bodies, my pale skin might make me look like the paintings I saw in museums – but the last time I checked, no men were reacting to Rossetti with fire emojis.

I might be beautiful – it was, I admitted to myself on certain days, a distinct possibility – but even if I was, no one recognized it as such, so what was the point? The beauties I had hoarded in my mind – the playful, workaday duets of happy couples in Mozart operas; the smoke of incense further obscuring the distant, shadowy Baroque bodies on the ceilings of Oxford college chapels; the sensuous, almost perverse pleasure I took as Dostoevsky’s novels tightened the strings my already-anxious nervous system to a finer, higher pitch – these beauties were safer, more certain, and I hid in a cave of my own making, counting them over, gnashing my teeth in rage and contempt at anyone who – either by basking in their beauty or calling me into my own – dared disturb me. I once admitted in a group of girls that I hadn’t bought new mascara in two years.

“Nancy,” one wrinkled her nose at me. “That’s gross.”

Taylor saved me from this. Others have said she “baptized” them; others have said that their favorite Taylor Swift album is  the Old Testament; still others have found in the ten-minute “All Too Well” a journey parallel to Christ’s during Holy Week.

This last resonates most: to me, she is the harrowing of hell. She entered fearlessly into that cave where I was and made herself at home, brewing herself a cup of moods steeped until the taste turned bitter and the fortune dissolved into a blank, laying herself a table spread with the most exquisite of perceptions cut with the sharpest of knives.

But she wouldn’t let me stay there. She showed me the path out of the shadows and back into the light, showed me that it was okay to straighten my hair, it was okay to enjoy it when boys’ eyes followed me down the hall, it was okay to wear pink and red lipstick, it was okay to want the simplest thing of all: being wanted in return.

The feminist wisdom of Instagram preaches that girls need to be told that they’re brave and smart and kind, not because they’re not pretty, but because they’re so much more than that. This is good but incomplete advice. As a wise friend once said to me, for every girl who gets told all the time that she’s pretty but desperately needs to hear that she’s kind and smart and brave, there’s a girl who knows she’s smart and kind and brave, but desperately needs to hear she’s pretty. This girl needs someone who, when she confesses this longing to them, doesn’t prevaricate with platitudinous band aids – don’t be shallow! beauty is fleeting! what’s on the inside matters so much more! – but instead names specific things about her appearance that are beautiful and calls her into paying attention to them, to caring for them, to loving them.

Taylor was that girl for me. My high school English teacher said that Bruce Springsteen felt like an older brother to him; Taylor Swift was the same for me: the older sister I craved but never got, the high school friend I had but lost. By being smart and kind and brave – or, more precisely, by being crepuscular and lambent and observant – she showed me that I could be pretty, that the workouts and makeup made me feel powerful, connected me to other women, and opened up new sources of beauty and joy. I even mustered the courage to venture into the last place I’d’ve expect to find myself back in 2020: chatting up strangers at dive bars in my neighborhood on Superbowl Sunday– and in the suspenseful final quarter discovered, as Taylor put it in her Person of the Year interview, “Football is awesome, as it turns out. I’ve been missing out my whole life.”

It’s the inverse of the journey most women go on – a turning outward rather than inward, a resurrection of the body rather than a sanctification of the soul – but the end of the wandering is nevertheless the same.

_

If you’re still with me at this point, you’re probably furious that you’ve been suckered into reading yet another “how Taylor Swift healed my internalized misogyny” piece. Four months into 2024, the genre already feels dated and – as a growing body of think pieces have noted – was in retrospect spectacularly ill-timed. The summer of girlhood came on the heels of Roe’s repeal and, with abortion on the ballot in states around the country and the self-reported mental health of actual girls in the toilet, our retreat to the doll’s house came at the precise moment when we should have filled the streets as we did in 2017.  

Fear not, dear reader: that would be too simple. The Barbie movie was absolutely right that women crave complexity; its error was to tell me rather than show me, to – and I quote – “giv[e] voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy” rather than showing me a heroine who actually lived in it.

In 2020, my complaint was that the Oscars cut Gerwig’s signature complexity. The clip of Saoirse Ronan’s monologue that they showed for her Best Actress nomination included her anger that, for all women’s talent and ambition, all anyone cares about is their beauty, but excluded the “But I’m so lonely!” that made her a complex human woman rather than a simple feminist icon.

But in 2024, I couldn’t even complain when America Ferrara’s monologue wasn’t enough for Rita Moreno to hand her the Oscar. I couldn’t complain when Ryan Gosling stole the show with his ebullient performance of “I’m Just Ken.” I couldn’t complain that the star of the feminist blockbuster only appeared on camera at the ceremony when she was wordlessly giggling at a man’s antics. I couldn’t complain that neither she nor Greta were nominated. I couldn’t complain at the elision of complexity because there was no complexity to cut.

I wanted the movie where Barbie actually liked Ken and had to decide what to do when he came back from the real world, flush with the power of the patriarchy and determined not to connect with her but to use her.

I wanted the movie where Barbie’s tears at the physical beauty of the older woman she sees – the sole moving part of the film for me – slowly morph into tears for herself as it dawns on her that growing into this beauty will make her invisible to men.

I wanted the movie where Barbie finds out that going to the gyno sucks and that the pain her body visits on her each month is a sign not that things are going wrong but that things are going right – yet learns to cherish that body nevertheless.**

I wanted the movie where Barbie discovers that she just doesn’t like some of the other Barbies – not because they’re bad, not because they’re weird, not because they’re inferior – and learns to respect, support, and advocate for them anyway.

That movie would have helped me live my life. That movie would have made me feel more alive. But it bounced off me that grey December afternoon as I finished streaming it in the basement of my father’s empty house on my ex-boyfriend’s brother’s account (sorry, Matt) and left me hungry, hunting for other means to connect with other women.

In a few short days, I’ll have one. But despite being the exact audience to whom The Tortured Poets’ Department is pitched, I find myself less than thrilled by its impending advent. There is, of course, the fear that many of us share: that the album will only be good gossip and not good art.

But more broadly than that, I find myself frustrated by what strikes me as the insufficiency of Taylor’s education to the depth of her emotion. She feels more keenly than most, but at times, she seems to me like one of those people who self-describes as “such a nerd omg” but when you press them on it, you find out that the last book they read was Harry Potter.

This, to be clear, is not to impugn Harry Potter; Hogwarts was a welcome escape from the tiny private Christian schools where my peers quickly branded me as a weird Barbie, and I dutifully dressed up for every premiere and showed up at all the midnight release parties. But I didn’t stay there. Thanks to encouraging adults, I grew, finding myself equally enraptured and more lastingly satisfied by other authors. The Easter eggs, the anagrams, the symbolic outfits at awards shows – all of these feel to me like the work of someone who learned what foreshadowing meant in freshman English and ran with it as far as virtually limitless capital would allow her to go.

Then, too, there’s her gift for twists on idioms – sometimes deployed to great effect, as in “champagne problems,” but in others, cheapening her rhymes to the point where the excruciating pain of being slowly starved of love by the one who should love you best gets reduced to the vacuous sing-song of an advertising jingle – “my muses, acquired like bruises”; “i wish that i could unrecall/how we almost had it all”; “all’s fair in love and poetry,” as the social media posts announcing Tortured Poets read.

But then, there’s something else – there is the realization that femininity, like any other performance, can be weaponized. Swift powerfully models that femininity does not preclude feminism but, as many others have noted, she often martials that achievement to deflect any legitimate critique. If I were a man, she says – and sings! – no one would bat an eye at the number of people I’ve dated.

Speaking as a Spotify-verified top 1% of Swifties: I would. I wouldn’t want to shame her for it, but I would want to know what pain the serial dating masks and perpetuates. I’d wonder if each partner was being given their full due if she can move on so quickly. I found Matty Healy reprehensible – a puckish tool whose racist taste in pornography revealed a callous indifference to women’s humanity that should have made him incompatible with a woman whose entire body of work proclaims it – and I’m puzzled by Travis Kelce. Refreshingly, he appears to appreciate that he’s dating a superstar, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate that he’s dating a melancholiac. (“Do we think he yearns?” I ask my friends whenever their names come up.) That we ask these questions of men less doesn’t mean we should never ask them of women; it means we should ask them of men more.

I too have found myself weaponizing in recent months. I still smart over snide things girls in New York said to me – how, when we compared notes on our dates, they’d say that my type wasn’t the type who would pick up the check; how viscerally I registered the hesitation in one girl’s voice when I said to her, “I could pull off a backless dress – right?”; how angry and small it made me feel when I told one girl that a guy had taken me to The Carlyle for dinner on a first date and she said, “Oooh, that’s a me date” – meaning, as I knew from many hours of conversation, that it was the type of date she could regularly command but I could not.

Yet I began replicating those very same tactics, jabbing women I genuinely cared about with pointed, passive-aggressive darts. It began as early as the Eras tour weekend when, newly sensitive to my own awkwardness, I snapped at my friends when I felt they were being gauche.

It continued when I ribbed one of my oldest friends about how her now-fiancé didn’t pay on the first date. (He has since, I might add, not only given her a gorgeous engagement ring, but a diamond necklace and Eras tour tickets for Christmas – a remarkable precedent I’m fully confident he will exceed in years to come).

And it went on when – knowing full well that other women present were sensitive on these topics – I nevertheless allowed myself to gripe about the loose fit of a dress or men’s preference for straight hair over curly hair. This last irritated a friend so much that she lost her temper at a cocktail party and snapped at me in front of everyone: “Well, I guess you should just wear your hair straight then!”

I went home and cried – not because I was so hurt by the comment per se, but because I realized she was right. I not only believed in my bones that men found me more beautiful when I blew the curl out of my hair, but I found myself more beautiful this way, took greater pleasure in the shape of my face and the curve of my smile when I looked in the mirror. (The fact that my own father asked me if I was “morally opposed” to leading with a straight-haired picture on dating apps didn’t help.)

It takes courage for the smart girl to put down her “pick-me” sword and embrace the fact that she is indeed just like other girls, hungry for acceptance, love and beauty. But it takes even greater courage to thread this needle: that being just like other girls doesn’t mean you have to look just like other girls; that – as this same friend writes – while it takes courage to look beautiful, it takes more courage to look beautiful and look like yourself.

So, too, while it takes strength to rewrite the scripts handed down to you, it takes even greater strength to experience the pain this archival work inevitably surfaces without letting it spill onto those around you. These latter two strengths I did not possess – did not, at times, even endeavor to exercise.  

Seven months into my thirties, I’m in the gym every morning lifting weights. Every evening, I’m rifling through my closet, planning my outfit for the next day. I’m spending more money than ever on makeup and manicures – and I’m spending a few hours each week shampooing, conditioning and styling my curls so their shape lasts for days. I look at my face – newly framed by bangs – and my eyes – once again circled by round spectacles that no longer sit awkwardly under my forehead – with pleasure and pride. And when strangers in the streets stop me to say they love my curls or my outfit, I listen and (sometimes) I can actually believe them.

Last summer, Taylor released her version of Speak Now. The chattering classes made much of the lyrical tweak to “Better Than Revenge”: in the original version, Taylor slut-shamed the actress Joe Jonas ditched her for with a hilariously petty rhyme:

“She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think, she’s an actress,

She’s better known for the thing that she does on the mattress.

But a decade older, wiser and a slut-shaming veteran herself, she knew from experience that a guy could only leave if he wanted to:

“She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think, she’s an actress,

He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.

I liked the subtlety this revision – liked that it acknowledged that the girl was complicit while ultimately placing responsibility on the guy. But that wasn’t the standout on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) for me. The album was – and remains – my least favorite of hers. It not only contains the most skips (“Innocent”, “Superman,” “Never Grow Up,” come on) but it also is Taylor in her Tom-Petty-girl-era without the mitigating millennial nostalgia for Fearless songs like “You Belong with Me” and “Love Story.”

Yet I found myself crying on a sticky summer walk down Park Avenue after a long, hard day at work and texting a vault track to another long-lost friend: “For some reason this makes me think of us in high school and I’m getting all teary. Miss you, my love.”

The song did that, but through it – and with that kairotic magic all her own – Taylor at once took me back to the days of late-night pancakes at the IHOP and post-sleepover coffee in the family room and fit words around the woman I’m trying to grow into in my thirties. I’ll share the lyrics, ending – where else? – at the bridge:

“When Emma falls in love, she paces the floor,

Closes the blinds and locks the door.

When Emma falls in love, she calls up her mom,

Jokes about the ways that this one could go wrong.

.

She waits and takes her time,

‘Cause Little Miss Sunshine always thinks it’s gonna rain.

When Emma falls in love, I know

That boy will never be the same.

.

‘Cause she’s the kind of book that you can’t put down,

Like if Cleopatra grew up in a small town.

And all the bad boys would be good boys

If they only had a chance to love her,

And to tell you the truth, sometimes I wish I was her.

.

When Emma falls in love, it’s all on her face,

Hangs in the air like stars in outer space.

When Emma falls in love, she disappears

And we all just laugh after seein’ it all these years.

.

When Emma falls apart, it’s when she’s alone,

She takes on the pain and bears it on her own,

‘Cause when Emma falls in love, she’s in it for keeps

She won’t walk away unless she knows she absolutely has to leave.

.

And she’s the kind of book that you can’t put down

Like if Cleopatra grew up in a small town

And all the bad boys would be good boys

If they only had a chance to love her

And to tell you the truth, sometimes I wish I was her.

.

Well, she’s so New York when she’s in LA.

She won’t lose herself in love the way that I did,

‘Cause she’ll call you out, she’ll put you in your place.

When Emma falls in love, I’m learning.

_

*Thanks to Kalen Breland for this comparison!

**This concept (of bodily pain as a sign that something is going right as a charism unique to women) is not mine!! It is from a feminist theologian whose name I cannot track down because my old college email booted me out and I cannot find the paper with the citation!!!! But – brilliant lady, credit to you, the insight has stuck with me for YEARS!

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A relic from April 2020.

If Florence Pugh wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, it’ll be for the speech she makes to Timothée Chalamet, defending women’s right to be pragmatic in their choice of a life partner: 

Well. I’m not a poet, I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money, not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we gotmarried. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

If, on the other hand, Saoirse Ronan wins the Oscar for Best Actress, it’ll be for the speech she makes to Laura Dern, proclaiming women’s right to be more than their choice of a life partner: 

I just – I just feel – I just feel like…women, they – they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts, and they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty, and I’m so sick of people saying that – that love is just all a woman is fit for, I’m so sick of it. 

I’ve meditated on these two scenes for the past few weeks, contemplating them as earlier generations of women might have contemplated a diptych of the two Marys. The sisters are certainly counterpoised to each other in much the same way; we’re encouraged to identify with either one or the other. Are you a Jo, running corsetless through the streets of New York, defying the norms of femininity with each pointed stroke of your inky pen? Or are you an Amy, redeemed by Pugh’s delightfully revisionist performance for the millions of women who enjoy being feminine and refuse to be shamed for doing so? 

I will lay my cards on the table and confess myself a Jo – with the caveat that this comes not by instinct, but by experience. I first read the book sometime in elementary school and found myself drawn to Meg and Amy far more than Jo and Beth. With no sisters and a tomboy chemist mother who preferred Jack Aubrey to Jane Austen, Meg’s experience of having older, more sophisticated girls squeeze her into a beautiful dress and teach her how to charm older, more sophisticated men sounded like a dream, as did Amy’s adventures in the palaces, museums, and gardens of the Continent. Dashing suitors, dance cards, Daisy and Demi, Meg’s darling twins – what were boring St. Beth and poky old Professor Bhaer to these delights? 

Subsequent years and subsequent re-readings, however, have revealed to me that I am far more of a Jo than I thought. In a recent interview, Gerwig spoke of a dawning realization in her teenage years that boys weren’t very impressed by the fact that she knew all the words to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” My experience was much the same. As it turned out, boys didn’t want to fill up my dance card and whirl me across the gym at high school dances, nor did they want to hear me recite “Annabel Lee” from memory. What they wanted to do was grind up against me to loud, incoherent music and whisper dirty jokes in my ear. 

This I found objectionable, both out of both principle and out of discomfort with my womanly body and burgeoning sexuality. A 21^st-century Amy might have acceded to these awkward adolescent advances, but that was not me. And while a 19^th-century Amy would never had been caught dead wearing any kind of makeup, her 21^st-century counterpart would never be caught dead without it. I found that makeup made me feel more insecure, not less – wouldn’t my real face be a disappointment?– and I stopped wearing it within three months of starting high school, retreating further and further into the world of books and writing and study. Many years later, I find myself a graduate student in literature, a pen for hire, and more likely to get in a drunk shouting match on why The Winter’s Tale is better than The Tempest or why Lord of the Rings is better than Star Wars with whomever will listen at a bar than I am to be racking up names and numbers on my dance card – or, rather, iPhone. 

But the reason I keep coming back to these two scenes in my head is because of the ways they’ve been repackaged for the trailers and press junkets. Moments before Amy confronts Laurie’s privileged assumptions about marriage, their conversation meanders to the question of female genius – an important exchange that marketers have overlooked in their quest for the perfect soundbite. Amy admits to Laurie that she has “talent” but not “genius” as a painter. Laurie pushes her on the distinction. “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses anyway?” he asks. “The Brontës,” Amy responds. Surprised at the short list, he concludes that the male gatekeepers to the genius club are “cutting down the competition.” 

In the thick of Oscars season, this dialogue feels on-the-nose – and, more than that, it’s just deeply odd. Gerwig has done a marvelous job of rediscovering some of Amy’s sharpest observations from the book. Why invent a mention of the Brontës when there isn’t one in all of Little Women? 

The awkwardness of their conversation emerges, I think, from Gerwig’s characteristic earnestness; Hermione-like, she’s desperate for us to notice that she’s done her homework. Though she makes no mention of them in the novel, Louisa May Alcott was absolutely obsessed with the Brontës. The plots of both Behind the Mask and A Long Fatal Love Chase, two of her melodramas written under a male pseudonym, are essentially ripped from the pages of Jane Eyre. The first is the story of a governess who successfully marries the master of the house; the second of a lonely young woman swept off her feet by a man who turns out to be a bigamist and whom she flees into the arms of a handsome cleric. 

And it isn’t just the Brontës who get shout-outs in Gerwig’s breathtakingly literate script. Jo reads George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss to the dying Beth as they sit on the seashore. And hidden in the background of Amy’s speech to Laurie about the economic realities of marriage is the portrait of a lady who, though she isn’t Mary Wollstonecraft, looks tantalizingly like her; the empire waist, the turned neck, and the ribbon winding through the hair subtly evokes the face gracing the millions of copies of one of the most resounding calls for a woman’s right to an equal education ever written. 

One of the great triumphs and pleasures of Gerwig’s script is its dense, determined feminist intertextuality. Set in a time when women’s literary productivity was exploding – Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would purchase the home where the teenage Alcott first began writing, complained to his publisher that “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women” – the film, for all its contemporary resonance, honors the moment of its creation. It’s a story that’s not just about four sisters, but one that’s enabled by an entire mob of scribbler-sisters on whose shoulders Gerwig gratefully – if somewhat gawkishly – stands. 

****

But if Amy has been reading the Brontës, she doesn’t seem to have taken their stories to heart. If anyone has, it’s gentlemanly Jo. Though she might not take on a male pseudonym, as they did, she dons a man’s bowler hat and waistcoat for her negotiations with her publisher. 

In fact, I often find myself wondering to what extent Alcott – and Gerwig – modeled Jo not on Jane Eyre, but on the most underrated and overlooked heroine in the entire nineteenth-century canon: Lucy Snowe, protagonist of Villette. Published in 1853, fifteen years before Little Women, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s final and – yes – her best novel. The conflicts Lucyfinds herself embroiled in almost exactly parallel those experienced by Jo. Like Jo, she travels to a bustling metropolitan city far away and works as a teacher. Like Jo, she finds herself sought after both by an irascible older professor and a charming young bachelor beloved by all the women in the area. 

And, like Jo, she finds that her rival for the heart of the charming young bachelor is a spoiled girl with golden curls and a silver laugh. For all of us who have ever felt the injustice Amy getting everything – all of us who, like Jo in Gerwig’s script, have “moment[s] of wanting to strike” the girls who float through life on the grace of good looks and good genes – for all of us who lurk, shadow-like, on the margins of others’ date nights and engagement parties and wedding days, Lucy’s words ring powerfully and painfully true: 

Is it possible that fine generous gentleman—handsome as a vision—offers you his honourable hand and gallant heart, and promises to protect your flimsy person and feckless mind through the storms and struggles of life…? Have you power to do this? Who gave you that power? Where is it? Does it lie all in your beauty—your pink and white complexion, and your yellow hair? Does this bind his soul at your feet, and bend his neck under your yoke? Does this purchase for you his affection, his tenderness, his thoughts, his hopes, his interest, his noble, cordial love…?

These scathing insults that Lucy hurls at Ginevra Fanshawe could well be the words of a Jo to an Amy, who tells her sisterwithin the first five pages that she “detests affected, nimmy-pimmy chits!” 

What strikes me about the passage, however, is how it makes male desire strange again. High cheekbones carry no guaranteeof virtue, nor are shapely lips the mark of good judgment. But the blessed few who bear these gifts – or who purchase them from the surgeon – find these qualities attributed to them in the courtroom, in the boardroom and, yes, on the apps. We listen to Amy’s speech to Laurie and congratulate ourselves that we’re no longer living in that world. Yes, we can make enough money to earn our own living, yes, we can make enough money to support our families, and no, we don’t have to surrender our children to our husbands as their property. 

But when I’m reminded by a cherished female mentor to put on mascara before an interview, when one of my clients praises a female employee for trying to “look her professional best” when she gave herself a bucket shower and headed to work in the wake of a home-destroying hurricane, when I spend my lunches listening to my coworkers swap tips on Botox and moisturizers and exfoliation, I wonder if we haven’t just widened the circle of male desire, if we haven’t just given men even more spaces to mistake beauty for talent and confuse desirability with professional ability. 

My colleagues and friends assure me otherwise, telling me that the hours they spend flat-ironing and cuticle-trimming and the money they spend on yoga and SoulCycle helps them feel like their best selves, gives them of a few hours in a busy week for self-care. But in an age where debt is skyrocketing and wages are stagnant, I – and many others with me – find myself asking if this isn’t just another version of Amy’s “economic proposition.” 

In the book, Laurie expresses puzzlement at the grace and elegance Amy has gained in the years they’ve been apart. She responds, “Tulle is cheap, posies to had for nothing, and I am used to making the most of my poor little things.” That last phrase succinctly summarizes the life of so many women I know, relentlessly optimizing the limited resources they have in hopes of one day securing better ones. It works then, as it works now: Our bosses seek traits like “hunger” and “the willingness to go the extra mile,” and Laurie “admire[s] the brave patience that made the most of opportunity” – and subsequently fills up her dance card with his name. 

Lucy refuses to optimize her assets, as does Jo, and their refusal has caused many readers to speculate that their real interest lies in the very pink cheeks and yellow hair they say they so despise. There’s plausible evidence for both readings. In a letter to intimate friend Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Brontë worries that “we are in danger of loving each other too well; of losing sight of the Creator in idolatry of the creature,” and in an interview, Alcott declared, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body…I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

These queer erotic tensions play out in their work – quite literally. Lucy first attracts the attention of the charming young bachelor when she is abruptly forced to play the male love interest opposite the golden-haired, silver-toned Ginevra Fanshawe in a student production at the all-girls’ school where she works – a role, she finds to her dismay, she relishes. The same dynamics emerge in Gerwig’s Little Women: Professor Bhaer watches, enchanted, as Jo herself watches, enraptured, the moment in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where Viola, a woman disguised as a man, woos Olivia, a beautiful noblewoman. 

As with viewers of Gerwig’s star turn in Frances Ha, readers of Lucy Snowe’s story often find themselves shaking the text, trying to make it confess its erotic secrets – a futile task, inasmuch as the novel, like Little Women, lays smack-dab in the middle a century that begins with the Yorkshire aristocrat Anne Lister writing her diary accounts of seducing women on neighboring estates in code and ends with Oscar Wilde in prison for daring to declare the beauty of “the love that dares not speak its name.” The struggle to name, to articulate, to claim a desire beyond the circle of male desire and the confines of the marriage plot took far longer than the life spans of these two women, who would die before the century’s close. 

****

Judging by the trailers and ads I’ve seen for the films in recent months, that struggle shows no sign of ending anytime soon. If marketers overlooked Amy’s limited list of female geniuses, their cuts to Jo’s speech were far more heinous – and far more telling. Trailers for the film clipped Jo’s speech where I ended it above, focusing on her righteous anger at the narrow constraints of the narratives women are allowed to live. 

We love this shit – and we’ve loved it since 1847. There’s a reason Jane Eyre was a hit as soon as it was published, a reason it’s been adapted even more frequently than Little Women, and a reason that it fills syllabi of English classes to this day. When Jane declares that “it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that [women] ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags,” we snap our fingers and retweet in agreement. 

It’s astoundingly prescient – Jane is literally telling male readers to check their privilege all the way back in the 1840s – and it’s the same ethos that fills the workshops, staff retreats, and conferences of corporate America. We know we can do it just as well as the men can and we’re sick of being relegated to the sentimental, the secondary, the sweet. We’re angry and we fill the streets and the ballot boxes and the board rooms. We support each other and we walk in lockstep towards equal pay, equal rights, and equal representation. 

But what interests me here isn’t Jo’s righteous anger. I joined hands with my girlfriends and marched the streets of Washington at the beginning of 2017, I cheered when AOC won the election in 2018, and I cranked up “The Man” in my car when Taylor Swift dropped the album in 2019. We’ve known for 173 years now the power and force of a woman’s anger; Jane wins her way into Mr. Rochester’s heart and ours not by silently melting into his arms, but by yelling at him. Accepted feminist wisdom holds that we can accept a women’s tears, but not her anger. Given the screen time that our collective rage has received in recent years – and the role it could well play on the debate stage in the coming months – I’m not so sure I buy that narrative anymore. 

What we’re still learning to tell is women’s loneliness. There’s a reason marketers cut that final, heartrending cry – “But I’m so lonely!”— from the trailers and TV spots. There’s a reason that Villette is relegated to the study of grumpy graduate students like me. There’s a reason that Hollywood has never bothered adapting it. The novel is a stark and uncompromising picture of what it means to be lonely in a world that is not kind to unpartnered women. Lucy is, in some respects, far worse off than Jo. No cozy Victorian domesticity for this heroine; her family never appears, and we are left to surmise at some unspecified disaster that leaves her totally alone. 

And even after Lucy travels to the Continent and secures a job at the boarding school, loneliness stalks her: When the school closes up for vacation, she is left alone in its large, empty halls and its quiet, dusty classrooms. As Carrie Hill Wilner observes, the chapter about this vacation is one of the most truthful accounts of depression ever written. Lucy vacillates between the manic highs of walks that take her miles and miles beyond the city walls and the lows of days where she cannot eat, cannot sleep, or, if she does sleep, finds herself terrorized by nightmares so overpowering that she cannot even scream.  

As in Little Women, two men step forth to save our heroine from her loneliness. [Spoilers hereafter]. It will surprise no one that the handsomer and shallower of the two ultimately decides against Lucy. It takes Lucy time to adjust to this loss, but like Jo, she acknowledges to herself that they will always have a place in one another’s hearts: 

I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the sky-lights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends…still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually…he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written “Lucy’s Room.”

How many of us single women feel this – how many of us feel the space in our friends’ hearts and lives gradually growing smaller and smaller as husbands, careers, volunteer work, and children crowd us out until we’re given nothing more than “one little closet”? How many times have we had to text two, three, four times to get a partnered friend to schedule time for dinner or a drink, only to have them cancel at the last minute because of traffic delays, a sick kid, or just plain old laziness? How many times have we wanted to cry – But I’m so lonely! – and how many times have we held our tongues, knowing that to do so risks losing one of the few friendships that has managed to stick since graduation happened or the lease ended?

****

All is not lost, however, when the golden couple floats away to domestic bliss. Another man has had his eye on Lucy. LikeLouis Garrel’s unjustly charming Professor Bhaer, shuffled to the beginning of the film by Gerwig’s non-linear screenplay, Professor Paul Emanuel notices Lucy’s fiery temper and keen mind from very early on. She in turn notices his passionate, outspoken faith, his affection for children, and his deep love ofliterature. They quarrel not infrequently – Emanuel is not shy about telling Lucy when he thinks she’s wrong – but that very quarreling means their relationship crackles with an attraction at once erotic and intellectual. 

After they finally declare their love, Emanuel travels to the new world to build his fortune and plans to come back and claim Lucy as his bride within three years. With what money he has, he buys Lucy the space and supplies she needs to start a school. During their separation, letters fly back and forth across the ocean as rapidly as industrialization and steamships would allow.

But the letters stop and the book ends. “There is enough said,” Lucy concludes. “[L]eave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror…Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.” 

It’s a bullshit ending. Brontë had planned to kill off Emanuel and leave Lucy lonely, the same way Alcott planned to end her book by leaving Jo unmarried. But in both cases, male hands interfered: Alcott’s publisher insisted that Jo get herself a man, and Brontë’s father objected that her intended ending was too sad. 

So they both oblige – in the most maddening, frustrating way possible. Corpulent, prudish, and hairy, Book Bhaer is not a hero destined to send preteen hearts a pitter-patter and fanfiction writers into a fury. But Brontë is, if possible, even crueler. Does the professor come back? Does he marry the plucky young writer? Do they run the school together? 

As with Villette, so with Gerwig’s Little Women: We’ll never know. As others have observed, it’s unclear if Bhaer is Jo’shusband or her employee (or both!), and it’s unclear if the school even exists, or if Jo is just scribbling away, imagining the happy endings she cannot live. The final shot is a woman, steely-eyed and somber, clutching to her chest a book that she’s written in her own name – alone. 

****

Men’s loneliness is an established fact. Study after study shows that men are literally dying from loneliness, and headline after headline shows the effects of toxic masculinity on men’s families and their health. We know that men fail to form robust bonds or express vulnerability in the same way that we know that Martin Scorsese is a good filmmaker. The Irishman might be brilliant, but it’s brilliant in the same way Bruce Springsteen is; it tells us over the course of several long, extraordinary hours, what we already know to be true. 

Women’s loneliness, however, is far less certain. We’re supposed to be better at friendships, at vulnerability, at chasing down our partnered friends and ingratiating ourselves into their family life. We’re supposed to be finding happiness on the ladders we’re finally allowed to climb, the degrees we’re finally allowed to earn, the conquests we’re finally allowed to make, and the recognition we so richly deserve. 

I don’t know that I buy this either. We may not be as bad off as men are – but the cracks are starting to show and the platitudes are starting to wear thin. Dozens of outlets reported a shocking statistic this year: The rate of alcohol deaths for women had jumped by 85 percent between 1999 and 2017. In this particular arena, women aren’t just giving men a run for their money. We’re making them sprint for it. 

There are, of course, dozens of factors contributing to this jump. But if the sniffles and sobs I heard throughout the movie theatre a few days after Christmas were any indication, I’d imagine loneliness has something to do with it as well. 

To speak for myself: I saw the movie with the woman who’s been my best friend since I was fifteen, the girl who pulled the hairpins out of my hair after prom, who spent a week in Paris with me the summer after the semester we were both abroad, who held my hair the first time I got blisteringly drunk. And it hit close – too close. My friend, the gentler and more girly of the two of us, was recently engaged to a good man whom I, like Jo, deeply distrusted at first but who, like John Brooke, made her deeply happy. As the Marches danced around Meg at the Orchard House wedding, I whispered to her, “That’ll be you next fall.” 

Then it was my turn. I watched Jo, terribly single, bitterly lonely, make her speech to Marmee. I watched her brave her way from Concord to New York. I watched her dance, write, and run, uncertain of where she was headed but mustering up the courage to get there all the same.

As we left the theatre, mopping our eyes, I ventured, “I’d ask you to get a beer and talk about the movie with me –” 

Before she could open her mouth to mention her running routine, her new puppy, or her fiancé’s crazy work schedule, I finished my sentence. 

“—but I know it’s late and you’re a lark, not a nightingale. I’ll see you later.” 

I sobbed the entire drive back to my apartment and opened a beer immediately upon arrival. A few years ago, she and another dear friend of ours – now moved to the other side of the country and several years into a happy relationship – had read Villette together. Lucy Snowe guided us through the ups and downs of men who overlooked us, the realities of shitty jobs, and the sheer aimlessness of being 23 and not having a clue where life would take us next. 

We didn’t know to cherish these moments at the time; we were too busy wondering why no guys asked us out. But from where I sat in that empty apartment on a cold December night, those long conversations over cheap wine on our parents’ back porches looked pretty good. Jo laments that Meg’s marriage will make “an end of peace and fun and cozy times together…I shall break my heart and everything will be abominably uncomfortable.” Though in my case it was a combination of careers and men that took these women away from me, I felt their absence as resentfully as she did. 

Reader, I do not think that Little Women will win the Oscar, and I doubt that Ronan or Pugh will either. Women have fought for a long time to tell our own stories. When we’re finally allowed to open our mouths, we feel compelled to speak in solidarity. We support one another unequivocally and angrily defy at those who dare to silence us. We optimize whatever opportunities come our way. 

Gerwig’s Little Women does all this and more. Drawn from the center of the canon of women writers, it directs its attentions to the silenced emotions at the margins. It tells not only of women’s romantic passion, or their care for one another, or their anger at and triumph over the constraints of patriarchy. It also tells of the costs it takes to get there. It takes a long, hard look at the loneliness and despair that is the price of admittance to the club of geniuses. Other feminist projects overlook or obscure these emotions, focusing instead on the pleasures – and they are genuine ones! – of righteous indignation and sisterly solidarity. The hope is to lower the barriers to entry, to tell women they can call themselves feminists with as much as ease they can buy a pink hat on Amazon. 

But if the millions of women who see themselves in the tearful, frightened, lonely Jo tell us anything, it’s time to move on from such lies. Hollywood has shown us that it’s ready to honor women’s stories of lust, friendship, anger, and joy. Whether it is ready to honor women’s stories of loneliness remains to be seen.

“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”