More and more these days, I’ve been thinking about sleeping with one of my professors. I finished Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts semi-recently and have been rereading Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir, there seems to be a contemporary literary motif of terrible women sleeping with their teachers. In TikTok’s favorite girlboss book, My Year of Rest & Relaxation, the protagonist sleeps, not with her teacher, but with some weird, slightly douche-y Wall Street guy, which is…not un-teacher-like. The common theme seems to be about women holding onto control. In Boy Parts, Irina, the protagonist, does actively like sleeping with her teacher; she calls her mom a bitch for breaking them up, which is…a choice. Irina, despite her artistic “genius” (if you want to go there) is horribly out of control. She can’t do anything properly, so she bastardizes everything to the point of her own elevation. By choosing to sleep with her teacher, she is still the victim (bastardized teacher), but by choosing to enjoy and enable him, her mom is the villain for getting in the way of her own life (bastardized mother).
Books starring women that are terrible, not necessarily in the traditional Disney-character way, but rather in a morally ambiguous way. One that is flawed, but not too much so; sexy and sultry, but not enough to be off-putting. My instinct (like any good D-tier substacker) is to say something about Fleabag and dissociative feminism and the like, but I already wrote about that. I don’t really have anywhere to go from here, just put a pin in all of this.
Recently though, I read Mikkel Rosengaard’s piece “Age of the Femtroll, or the Based It Girl” in Flash Art (which ironically I found on the Red Scare subreddit, but it doesn’t matter). It’s got some fun bits like:
The femtrolls and Based It Girls I meet downtown are all angry at the erosion of the American middle class. They are frustrated with the corrupt plutocracy and a corporate media that is distracting us with vapid cultural wars. The femtroll wants real material change — not diverse Disney characters and rainbow flags on Wall Street. The femtroll knows she is not being represented by a diverse figurehead at the helm of the neoliberal ship of death. She is being marketed to.
and
We were witnessing the emergence of an important new cultural figure, a female role model unlike anything we’ve seen before. We were witnessing a group of grown women so down on American hypocrisy they said, YOLO, fuck my life. If we can’t be free, at least we can be based.
In conclusion, femcel.
Although as someone who has listened to more than enough Red Scare in their lifetime, I will say, the article carries a strangely sincere unjudging edge. A lot of people like to take shots at the Red Scare and “femtrolls” and Ottessa Moshfegh, but there is something deeply relatable about them.
When people analyze incels the conclusion is often: white, cis/het men who are, from birth, promised the world, when this privilege is confronted then they crumble and collapse, blaming women, progress, and the like for their failure. The femcel paradox is that none of these women blame progress for their failure.
In fact, they rarely are failures to begin with. The Red Scare is one of the most popular podcasts around, making (almost) $55,000 a month. In Boy Parts, Irina is a successful artist, her spiral is caused by an offer from a major gallery to show her work. My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s protagonist is a Columbia graduate (as mentioned several times) and lives a fairly comfortable lifestyle complete with an art history degree and a cushy gallery job. The only protagonist who gets close to actual hardship is the narrator of Vladimir, whose husband (maybe) raped a graduate student, but even then, the narrator makes note of how little she cares about this fact. She spends most of the book trying to cheat on her husband with the titular Vladimir and the only suffering she experiences is when her students express their discontent with her. Terrible women are not failures but feel like failures in spite of their success.
Where men can quantify their failure in a lack of sex (although this does see women as objects—their own sexual desire is quantified as success, but whatever), women have very little to signal their own failure. Women have already been systematically placed as the losers, so those who can articulate their discontentment, categorizing them as something other than “patriarchy” are often the ones who are most successful. That being said, there is a cruel juxtaposition where you have achieved, and still, there is something unaccounted for. I don’t want to say patriarchy because I think that implies that it’s men keeping them down, but rather, I think that success, for women, often comes at a cost. Anna Khachiyan, the other Red Scare host, has a truly phenomenal quote:
“I wish I could writhe around in bed all day wearing some slutty getup a man bought me, but instead I have to be an ideological freedom fighter because no one else will do it”
which I think speaks to the whole of successful/terrible women. Women are often forced to compromise between careers and family (and the men who come with the latter), and there is a bitterness in not being able to have both. Khachiyan would hate that interpretation though.
SIDE NOTE: I don’t think it’s coincidental that most of the women in these books are nameless. Red Scare hosts themselves are almost always referred to by their podcast first, then their names. In ‘capitalism’ success is defined by how well you can mesh with your success and identity, making the two things irreparable. Because I’m a disgusting literature major, the lack of names seems to symbolically prevent women from being in their own narratives. They are removed from their own lives. They are reduced to bodies. Anyway.
Back to my earlier professor proposition. There is a cloying, frankly desperate need to be seen as good—one where identities fade away into ideas fade into oblivion. It’s really easy to judge femcels or terrible women or whatever, but all anyone ever wants is just to feel a little good, and ‘society’ often gets in the way of women being truly content. Everything is a coping mechanism (including but not limited to my professors).