The Ethics of Self-Interpretation

The polemical intensity that made a set of radical ideas about race and gender seem, for a time, to be the new moral consensus of media, academia, and corporate management, is over—maybe. Kamala Harris’ losing presidential campaign was muted in its identitarian appeals, at least compared to Hillary Clinton’s clumsier efforts (remember “7 Things Hillary Has in Common With Your Abuela”—because, surely your abuela also traded sex for the bombing of Serbia?). Yet it is worth noting that Clinton came closer than Harris did to winning against Trump—and that Trump himself, through his nomination of JD Vance as running mate, makes his own appeals to identity. (Vance, a mirror image of many “woke” strivers, came to national prominence by telling an appealing narrative about his personal suffering and membership in an oppressed class.)

Whether or not “peak wokeness” has passed, identity, with its claims and confusions, will be with us for some time to come—and no one sheds more light, with better humor and grace, on the stories we tell about and the ambivalent feelings that thrum around identity than Phoebe Maltz Bovy. She is at work now on what promises to be an exciting and provocative new book on an identity category that holds up almost half our sky: straight women. She has written a number of sharp, funny essays on the way toward the book, the most insightful of which addresses what she calls "straightness studies,” the (surprisingly large!) body of academic and popular literature that treats female heterosexuality as a baffling, tragic problem.

Judith Butler (a theorist Bovy does not take on directly), for example, has since the 1990s analyzed female subjectivity as basically “melancholic” insofar as it depends on a renunciation of desire for a fellow woman … which, clearly it doesn’t, since there are in fact lesbians (even if many of them nowadays no longer identify as women). And, one would like to say, it cannot be that all straight women are unhappy. Some of them may, in fact, like men.

The notion that there is something wrong with heterosexual females is not simply a patronizing delusion on the part of lesbian academics eager for more converts (as if there weren’t enough late-in-life lesbians, with babies and bad memories of male exes, hanging around any given trailer park, just waiting for a butch to treat them right!)—or a nasty smear by right-wing commentators seething that women’s unwillingness to settle down is responsible for men’s angst. Straight women have been in recent years increasingly solicited to make sense of their ambivalent feelings toward men, sex, and their own desires and bodies (nothing of course is more normal, inescapable even, than feeling ambivalent about these things—and nothing more common and perverse than pseudo-solutions that promise escape from our ambivalence into a shiny new body, category, or ideology) by expressing that they are not, exactly, straight or women, or do not straightforwardly desire men. They are invited to identify their way out of a condition that they cannot bear to identify with.

As Bovy puts it:

Most women are into men, and most people, regardless of gender and sexual orientation, do not reinvent any relationship wheels. We know we’re full human beings with complex inner lives, but also that the world doesn’t see it that way. We’re also not entirely sure about those other straight ladies, who have nothing going on. This leads, unsurprisingly, to hypocrisy. I mean some women’s practice of declaring their hatred of men on Twitter while announcing how much they love their boyfriend on Facebook. Or some women’s insistence that their hetero life is somehow different from those of other straight married ladies because, unlike those other ladies, they kept their maiden name or wore a red wedding dress or had both parents walk them down the aisle … at their wedding, again, to a man. Something similar happens when such women gesture at an unspecified, and certainly unconsummated, queerness.

Women who insist that they are “bisexual” or “nonbinary” or “misandrist,” while living lives of consistent sexual normalcy (rather than get that septum piercing or posting something edgy on X, reader, listen for a moment to the howling weirdness within!) may seem, OK, are, risible, but these women’s problems are real, and our own.

For straight women—and members of many other demographic categories—“identity” seems desolate and unsatisfying unless somehow enchanted through a personal work of finding that one is, and securing social recognition as, something more excitingly complicated and unique. Where “identity” might be what links us to other people from whom we inherit what we are and might become, it comes to mean rather an endless process of anxious self-marketing—a process that is as much at odds with the aspirations of traditional feminism (women’s collective empowerment) as of the happiness of heterosexual coupling.

In the past decade, writers from a range of demographic categories—into which they have been born or into which their desires have moved them—have described their identities as vacant, unsatisfying … and nevertheless as objects of endless unhappy ruminations (and essays), the stuff of their careers. From Wesley Yang writing about his “Asian face” (and Asian American identity) as an unlovable void, to Andrea Long Chu writing about her self-invented femininity and her “mixed Asian” identity as different sorts of blankness, critics on the left and right of today’s culture wars find, just behind aggressive assertions about the importance of “identity,” an impossibility of satisfyingly inhabiting the social categories to which one, more or less, could be said to belong.

We are, it seems, torn between a need for connection that these categories seem to offer, and a desire for distinction that might be found in adding enough qualifiers and asterisks to make them express that we are not like the others: We are special. The work that Bovy is undertaking in thinking through the contradictions of contemporary heterosexual femininity, then, is of relevance to all of us who aren’t straight women, but who, like them, live in a society (and in psyches) unhappily organized by opposing, impossible demands placed on the categories by which we cannot but group ourselves. How to live within our categories with a bit more ease—and how to treat other people’s categorizations and self-categorizations with neither obsequious deference nor rageful refusal—what we might call the ethics of self-interpretation, is what Bovy’s analysis (even at its most light-hearted, ludic, and concerned with pop culture, sitcoms and fashion) points toward, although she would, I suspect, eschew any such jargon.

Bovy has been on this beat for a decade. Her 2017 book The Perils of Privilege: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage was a prescient critique of what had already become by the mid-2010s a ubiquitous feature of both online discourse and everyday life: framing everything from the cruel pervasive inequalities of our society to trivial instances of apparent good luck as examples of “privilege.” Bovy demonstrated the political mess that this interpretation of the world brought on, showing how talk of privilege distracted from genuine injustices. It derailed the left into a culture of bizarre recriminations (“your privilege is showing!”) and self-abasing apologies for one’s own privilege, while enticing the right into its own spiral of absurdity organized by denials that the massive insidious legacy of racism ineptly named by “white privilege” even exists but also by complaints that white men, as the truly unprivileged, are entitled to their own ethno-narcissist tantrums.

The concept of “privilege,” Bovy warned, is particularly destructive for feminist politics. Women, God bless them, are for whatever reason susceptible to a kind of moral blackmail-bargain that promises a sort of power, or at least a relative protection, in return for ritualized self-humiliation. While in previous moments American women channeled these desires into say, Phyllis Schafly’s Eagle Forum on the right or the Symbionese Liberation Front on the left, in the 2010s they embraced a logic whereby true feminism consisted not of women’s unapologetic demands for collective power to transform their material conditions, but of ever more finessed expressions of apologetic deference to truly disadvantaged (Black, disabled, trans, etc.) women—or as a phrase hopefully on its way out went, “non-men.”

To do otherwise—to attempt the first thing—was, women told themselves, white feminism, “white” being self-evidently terrible, not least for being privileged. What had so recently been gassed-up in the media as inspirationally girl-boss boss-bitch “leaning in” was quickly reframed as “being a Karen”—acting entitled, demanding, not knowing your place. Accusations of privilege worked to present a whole range of feminist demands—and even of things a woman might just be happening to do, like, say, asking to speak to the manager, or not wanting a stranger to threaten her dog—as stupid and wicked acts of violence against the truly vulnerable.

While feminists wrangled over privilege, the concept also, Bovy shows, threw Jewish politics into warped arguments of its own. Tracking a debate in Tablet and other Jewish publications over the relationship between Jewishness and white privilege, for example, Bovy finds that commentators struggled to hold on to what ought to be the rather straightforward idea that, as a group, Jews—and for that matter whites, men, etc.—can be both relatively economically well-off in the United States today and be a markedly “other” minority with a history, present, and (not to be overly pessimistic, but …) probable future of vulnerability. Neither of which negates what ought to be the equally obvious point that there can be other vulnerable groups in rather worse circumstances that may merit redress. It is foolish, Bovy contends, to try and rank all these groups relative to each other along a scale of “privilege,” as if it were the status of historical victim (and not, you know, jobs, health care, security, etc.) that were the really valuable resource our politics could distribute.

In The Perils of Privilege, Bovy is remarkably sensitive to the socioeconomic and psychic conditions out of which “privilege”-talk emerged (and which it so frustratingly covered over and confused), a sensitivity that sets her work apart from the innumerable critiques of wokeness from the right and left that have been written over the past decade. Much of the appeal of the privilege framework, she observed, came from its transformation of simple, stark problems (there are worsening inequalities in American society, and many people even in the upper middle class are only an emergency away from destitution) over which individuals have little control into exquisite ethical dilemmas that allow them to demonstrate their sophistication and virtue. (I, for one, would never patronize a white-owned pho restaurant.)

Conservative commentators rightly point out that there is something “elite” (or rather, striving, desperately and usually ineptly, toward higher status—that is, something pathetically middle class) about the display of such apparently tortured awareness of one’s own privilege, the artful handling of which becomes a marker of moral superiority. But too often they evince no knowledge of the dire, real conditions to which individuals may unfortunately respond with this form of pseudo-progressive piety. Even the right’s efforts to advocate for the identity groups that compose its own base tend to quickly elide the material problems of the white working and middle class into demands for the address of often entirely imaginary culture-war grievances. It’s easier (and more fun!) to fume about, say, cat-loving childless millennial liberals—and to imagine them, rather than billionaires, as the privileged elites who lord it over us—than to close the border or cure the drug addiction, obesity, sports betting, etc. that are wrecking millions of white men’s lives.

Bovy addresses privilege with an intellectual seriousness that reminds readers she was, in a former life, a scholar whose dissertation explored debates about marriages between Christians and Jews in modern France. She brings to even the most apparently frivolous aspects of what was then contemporary culture an attention that reveals an enduring depth (less in what they say than in what she says about it)—although some of her most annoying targets are still with us today (left or right, you can’t, sadly, keep a good shit-poster down). Her prose, however, is distinctly unacademic, shaped by her years as a prolific blogger and podcast co-host who practices the sort of Jezebel­- and Gawker-informed snarky asides you either enjoy or disdain (or disdain yourself for enjoying).

Bovy’s 2017 insights into our cultural politics, remain, sadly, timely, as our current election resembles nothing so much as a bad rerun of the Clinton-Trump contest that formed the ominous background to Perils. Her new book, which will appear, like the first, in Trump’s America, promises to help clarify why the most obvious facts about ourselves, the ones that put us in groups smaller than all of humanity but still bound to the rest of our species, seem harder and harder to live sanely and decently within.