The Women Destroyed

Sasha Frere-Jones considers the appeal of Amy Winehouse in this week's New Yorker, an article notable for the fact that Winehouse's actual music receives more attention than does her substance abuse and personal life. Americans just love self-destructive women, don't we? Sure, David Hasselhoff gets drunk and makes out with a cheeseburger on a bathroom floor and we all laugh, but we don't send the tabloid press out to stalk him. Meanwhile Brittney Spears shaves her head and it's a clear sign that she's come completely undone (not that she isn't undone) and something that deserves 24-hour coverage. In other words, men get drunk and make mistakes, while women become deranged and need to be institutionalized.

There's really nothing new here; Western culture has always provided correctives to any power women have acquired or wielded. Male Medieval mystics became saints, while the female mystics were burned for heresy. Some have said the Salem witch trials were in part caused by a demographic imbalance that favored the women. "Hysteria" was invented as a disease that only affects women (it used to be called "female hysteria," and the term is derived from the Greek word for "uterus") in the late 19th century. Women who were considered "sexually dis-functional" were so diagnosed. The rise of frigid women conveniently coincided with increases in female education and literacy, the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement, and an increase in the numbers of working women who came from immigrant backgrounds. Whenever women appear too powerful, it seems to be important to remind ourselves that women are also crazy.

In Hollywood as in porn, it's the starlet who drives the machine. The female star appeals to both genders, while the man appeals mainly to women. Sure, the men get paid more to "carry" a movie, but it's the star power of the women that dives all ancillary marketing. They sell clothes, cosmetics, magazines. They sell sex. And that's why they must be taken down, and why nothing sells more magazines than their "hysteria." Women themselves participate in this. The tabloids that weekly expound upon the travails of Brittney and Lindsay are aimed at and purchased by a female audience. We don't want them to have what we can't, I suppose.

In short, Amy Winehouse smoking crack belongs to a continuum where women are raised up so that their downfall can be an example to us all. Perhaps Hillary's implosion has something to do with this. Her campaign got a burst of energy once she cried in public, but in general we don't believe that she'll fall apart, don't believe that she'll self-destruct, don't believe that she will suffer from a malady of the uterus. And so in the end she can't win.