When I witnessed Gibson’s humiliating encounters with law enforcement and his ex-wife when I was younger, I would think of the embarrassment of his seven children, several of whom are close in age to me. Today, I think of his silent, smiling wife Robyn. I don’t assume to know the heart of Robyn Moore, but I can imagine that it took an almost pathological commitment to forgiveness and patience to last as long as she did. She stood by for such events until at last they were too much. I wonder, too, what the weight of keeping Mel Gibson’s secrets costs her. Robyn’s particular brand of retribution goes mostly undetected by the crude radars presently policing women’s behaviors because it is so tremendously skilled. Were it detected, she might be among the most vilified of all the crazy exes because of the nature of what she walked away with.
The common thread that weaves throughout these stories spanning time and socioeconomic stations and even international borders is not that these women’s actions were crazy, even loosely defined. Their crimes were in committing actions and seizing assets that are considered the exclusive entitlements of men. These are the objects that are believed to transfer status and prosperity to men. When women take them into their own hands out of either destructive impulses or wills to power, they must be dismissed as insane. They violated the sacred and highly gendered order of things and must be dismissed as aberrations. Diana smashing china to bits with a hammer looks irrational only when a woman’s body performs the destructive deed. When men destroy property in a fit, it is considered an acceptable expression of male rage. Some even find it arousing. Lorena Bobbitt took perhaps the most literal entitlement from a man: his own penis, which doubled as a weapon in their relationship. She seized control of it and deflated its power by removing it from the source of its power. And though Aaliyah never famously feuded with R. Kelly, I still like to think that it was something of a slap in the face that she did not let his manipulation and control define her and went on to an all-too-brief but still brilliant career.
Lopes’s burning a house down was not just a subversion of the fact that most arsonists are men but was the destruction of property, that precious commodity that for so long was owned exclusively by men. She burned his birthright to the ground. Taylor Swift has no literally destructive impulses, but her active destabilization of the music industry expectation that women are to be pining and lovesick by being sneering and hell-bent on revenge is another kind of destruction. It certainly wounded the egos of men like John Mayer, who went crying to tabloids over Taylor’s betrayal; this from a man who famously called Jessica Simpson “sexual napalm” and wrote a song about Jennifer Love Hewitt’s anatomy. That Taylor has amassed far more wealth in the process is still another way she has gone insane, turning men into muses that profit her rather than the other way around. And then there are the strong, silent wives like Robyn whose hearts are the safe havens for the secrets of men who have likely done far more unspeakable wrongs than we could ever know. They sacrifice much by not exposing the terrors of these men, but they are handsomely rewarded with the massive fortunes that men have controlled and used to nurture their own power for centuries.
I think of these women often when a man calls a woman a crazy ex-girlfriend as an insult, unaware that identifying a woman this way elevates her to a rogue hero of her gender rather than a disgrace to it. This growing cohort of crazy exes have sacrificed much to get where they are and to be given what they are owed. Many of my personal heroes from this particular canon are no longer alive. May they rest in power. But I am hopeful, too, that as more baby girls come up in the world, they will accept the burden of power we deserve and nurture it well so that it becomes undeniably their own. And then when no one is expecting them to, they will crack it open and take everything they were owed from it. I want these baby girls to live in a world where they know that once “bitch” and “crazy” have been taken back into our custody for good, it is time to come for the world.
Emparadised
On Joan Didion and Personal Mythology as Survival
EMPARADISED” IS A WORD USED to describe how the deserts of Southern California were transformed into the lush tree-lined cities we know today by enterprising gardeners and city planners. I read it once on a gardening website I don’t know how I got to because I have never gardened, but I liked the word and kept it with me to describe the place I come from. Memories of my adolescence in San Diego were of people with good looks and bad politics, impossibly bronzed residents dotting a landscape of adobe tract houses, endless highways, and strip malls designed by people whose experience of Mexican architecture is limited to the “It’s a Small World” attraction at Disneyland. I used the word to describe Southern California when I was vowing never to return.
The first time I reconsidered this vow I was lying on the beach at Silver Sands State Park in Connecticut. I had checked out a stack of books by mystical poets and a selection of women writers whose only shared characteristics were tasteful aloofness and thinness that lingers at the border between elegance and illness. Joan Didion, the reigning queen of this literary class, naturally featured heavily in the stack. It was the summer between my first and second years as a graduate student at Yale Divinity School where I was pursuing a Master of Arts in Religion, but it was by accident that I selected Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays, a book whose primary tensions center on evil and nothingness. The decision to apply to and enroll in divinity school was one of many haphazard attempts to seek the substance of my own suffering in books, though exploring questions of evil was a secondary benefit to my expensive exercise in self-discovery. My roommate there had once told me that hell, that infernal holding cell for evil, is simply the absence of God. It is nothing. Play It as It Lays more or less corroborated this explanation. It satisfied me.