Finalist: Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic

Rape culture permeates adolescence. The lessons that it teaches girls cast long shadows.

Girlhood, Melissa Febos writes in her new essay collection of the same name, is “a darker time for many than we are often willing to acknowledge.” The overall impression she creates is a collage of discomfitingly familiar rites of passage, all distinct and yet all tied together by a thread of learned self-abnegation. The book reads at moments like a meme built from various half-buried abuses and indignities, in which you pick the ones that apply to you—“Tag yourself. I’m Sexually Harassed as a Teenager by My Middle-Aged Boss, but also Stalked on the Way Home From School and Consented to Acts I Didn’t Want to Do to Avoid a Worse Outcome.” Febos is an intoxicating writer, but I found myself most grateful for the vivid clarity of her thinking. During girlhood, she argues, “we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful, what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others over our own.”

The week I read this book, seven women and one man were murdered in Atlanta by a man who seems to have resented his desire for women so much that he decided to kill some of them, privileging his comfort over their lives. That same week, a document drawing from hundreds of reports alleging rape, assault, and harassment at my London high school and its brother institution was made public. The file, an open letter to the headmaster of the boys’ school, Dulwich College, is filled with stories of violations both large and small that girls minimized because, like Febos, they were taught extremely early on to protect boys from the reality and the consequences of their behavior. The document is painfully long; each story tore at my heart and made me burn with useless rage.

I haven’t vetted the stories and don’t know whether they’re all true. (The school’s headmaster responded by condemning the attitudes and behavior detailed in the letter, and he has since passed on allegations against specific students to the police.) But they track with my experiences, and with those of the women I’ve spoken with who attended my school over the past three decades. Woven throughout the accounts is an ingrained acceptance among all parties that this is just the way things are, and that questioning it is pointless. “I pretended I was asleep,” one young woman recalls about realizing that a group of boys had surrounded her in a bedroom after she had passed out at a house party, “as I didn’t want to make it awkward for some stupid reason.”

The story that girls are taught to adopt, as Febos puts it, is not a logical one. To internalize it requires a lifetime of careful conditioning, and an absence of anyone trying to counter it. I graduated 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell, the culture I remember remains intact without a corrective—only now those who have been conditioned to abuse have more tools with which to do so. When I was 16 (puts on senior voice), texting was still so new that you had to request it as an upgrade; not one week after I did, some friends of my first boyfriend, an arrogant kid on the hockey team, sent me a string of misspelled messages calling me a frigid bitch for not sleeping with him, and detailing exactly how far he’d gone with a different girl to get what they saw as his due. If they could have, I’m sure they would have sent proof. A decade later, when my sister was attending the school, she told me that nudes and revenge porn had infested its culture as silently and damagingly as moths colonize a closet. Misogyny will always occupy any space it’s given. Expecting girls to be able to stanch its creep by themselves is too much.

To be a girl is to be perfectly vulnerable to predation: sexual, emotional, and even intellectual. It isn’t just one school—a slew of others have begun addressing charges that current and former students have raised in recent weeks. And to be clear, a culture of institutionalized misogyny also puts queer people in danger, and people of color especially so; the Dulwich document contains a whole section on how the alleged “discriminatory worldview” of certain students encouraged homophobic abuse and racialized violence. In the absence of specific lessons that emphasize self-worth and autonomy, internalizing the things some boys say they’re entitled to becomes disturbingly easy. As teenagers, we were taught how to put condoms on bananas, but not how to ask boys to wear them. We were taught trigonometry and Catullus and the history of feminism, but not how to apply the idea that we are equal human beings to social situations in which we are seen as prey. We were also taught to prickle with shame for being frigid, or being easy—a taxonomy so reductively designed that it leaves little room to simply exist. For decades, Febos notes in her introduction, “I considered it impossible to undo most of this indoctrination. Knowing about it was not enough. But I have found its undoing more possible than I expected.”

Progress, Thoreau wrote, is when we “unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before,” which is likely the most insight Thoreau ever had into the hostile state of female adolescence. Unlearning is what Girlhood is all about. Febos is a memoirist whose previous books, Abandon Me and Whip Smart, laid bare her history as a professional dominatrix, a writer, and a heroin addict. Girlhood, though, struck me as more of a treatise. It’s disquisitive and catalytic—it doesn’t demand change so much as expose certain injustices so starkly that you might feel you cannot abide them another minute.

When Febos was 11, a girl growing up on Cape Cod, her body began to change. “Before puberty,” she writes, “I moved through the world and toward other people without hesitance or self-consciousness.” But the metamorphosis of her physical self changed the way the world related to her. Her mother bought her a book, The What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Girls, which explained the hormonal changes but not, Febos writes, “why grown men in passing cars, to whom I had always been happily invisible, now leered at me.” Or why an older boy at her bus stop now repeatedly chased and spat at her, or why a 25-year-old man followed her into a bathroom. That event became a story passed around by Febos’s friends, one eventually reclaimed by Febos. In hindsight, Febos is an obvious victim, a child devoid of power. In her friends’ reading at the time, her new physicality was responsible for what happened, and something for which she deserved to be shamed. The scene exposes how insidiously childhood logic twists events into a kind of poisonous pretzel, infinite and self-perpetuating.

This upside-down logic pervades the accounts of things Dulwich College boys are alleged to have done. At 13, one girl recalls, she went to a party with boys who encouraged the girls to take shots, even though they’d rarely had alcohol before. “Soon I was being pressured and essentially forced into giving one of them a blow job with my friend,” she writes. “We both reflect on this in horror now but at the time were labelled slags and felt we deserved it.” There is, and always has been, a trap within the bafflingly short virgin-whore continuum: Girls are shamed into doing things they don’t want to do and then shamed for doing them. Another girl, too drunk to consent to sex with the boy she says raped her, recalls how she later overheard him excoriating her to his friends for being too lazy to get on top. When I read this, I thought about the first season of Game of Thrones, and how Daenerys Targaryen compels her rapist to be nicer to her by essentially putting on a more exciting performance when he rapes her.

Untangling the lessons of girlhood from the cultural works that teach them to us is impossible; they are often our most committed teachers. Febos lucidly scrutinizes the movies that taught women to accept stalking as a gesture of devotion. In 2004, when she was in her 20s and living in Brooklyn, she was reading one night when she heard a male voice outside her bedroom window. “Pretty girl,” the voice said. “You touching yourself?” She froze; she pulsed with terror; she realized he couldn’t actually see through the window shade, which was drawn. That meant he’d been watching her long enough to know who she was. She wondered what she might have done in the past to catch his attention. “How brazenly uncareful I had been to stand naked in my own bedroom,” she thinks. “We all know,” Febos writes, with irony, “the ways women invite their victimization by walking after dark, wearing short skirts, or having big breasts. The pathology of victimhood would also claim that self-blaming and shame were my very ordinary attempt to explain what had happened to me, to assert control over it by assuming responsibility.”

But then she thinks about Brian De Palma’s movie Body Double. The homage to Rear Window and Vertigo is about a man who begins watching a woman who dances every night in front of her window wearing only panties. This voyeuristic act is presented not as a violation but as an appropriate response to a woman who is clearly performing. This kind of narrative, absurdly common in popular culture, exonerates men, Febos writes: “If we want it, where is the crime?” She flits through some of the stories that have reinforced this pernicious myth: Revenge of the Nerds, American Beauty, Animal House, Porky’s, The Girl Next Door. “What a powerful message it is,” Febos continues, “that your body ought to be available to any man passing by. It will only inconvenience you to protest. Better to tolerate it. Reframe it as nothing memorable, as a joke, as journalism, as privilege, even as a precursor to love.”

What is a demand for nudes if not an enforcement of the belief that women are supposed to perform for male pleasure, and even to want to do so? One girl in the Dulwich College document recalls how, while she was having sex with a boy, she turned around and saw that he was filming her without her permission. “I started crying and felt even more uncomfortable and scared that he had that power of the video over me,” she writes. Another girl remembers being filmed without her consent in a compromising position at a party, and the resulting videos being posted all over social media. “Since then,” she writes, “I have been incredibly paranoid in any kind of intimate situation or party, I feel as though I can’t enjoy myself without the fear of being watched or ridiculed.”

When I was thinking about this story, I asked my sister whether she remembered receiving any meaningful education about consent as a teen; she said she didn’t, and asked her friend’s sister, who graduated high school three years ago and remembered a single video with no follow-up discussion. (In recent weeks, petitions have been circulating in the United Kingdom demanding that the government build into the national curriculum better education on consent, sexual violence, and harassment.) One bizarre lesson my sister did recall involved policemen coming to school to teach internet safety. The assembled girls were told to imagine that they were chatting online with “Nadia,” a supposed peer, only to have an adult man surprise them from behind a door at the back of the auditorium, saying menacingly that he was Nadia. When I heard this, I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s exactly the kind of slapstick, quaintly uncool scenario that cops would dream up to terrify teenage girls, and that teenage girls would entirely ignore. Not trusting the Nadias you’ve never met is, mostly, obvious. Not trusting the people you know, the ones you’ve grown up with, is much harder. To do so is to reject your own instincts, your entire history of being. I still struggle with it. And I am so tired.

School is where you learn what you are worth. Not your actual value as a human being, which is a much more complicated blend of the person you’re trying to be and how you treat others, but your social worth, an arbitrary appraisal by others that’s inherently flawed and yet hard to shake, even in adulthood. It’s a construction, and a trap. Febos refers to Foucault’s panopticon, Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze, and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as she analyzes how women are constantly surveyed in the world—how, often, their response is to begin surveying themselves through the same defective lens, and to find themselves unworthy. This kind of self-scrutiny, Febos writes, “is an integral part of the mechanism that induced my own bifurcated self-image at eleven years old, at fourteen, at twenty-three.”

Enough, we should say. Male pleasure is not paramount. Boys do not get to keep shaming and bullying girls into doing things they don’t want to do. Boys should want not to do this. Not incapacitating girls until they’re beyond refusal or blackmailing them into sending nudes should be a point of pride. And girls should learn to resist those who propagate the lie, as Febos writes, that “women’s bodies are inherently defective, aesthetically defective … We are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding, too assertive, too weak, or too strong.” We should question why, as Febos puts it with bracing simplicity, “both men and women prioritize the comfort and wellbeing of men over women’s safety, comfort, even the truth of their bodily experience.”

To do all this isn’t easy. The established, false metrics of self-worth are insidious and serpentine. Jumping out of a door in an auditorium is easier than explaining the nuances of consent and self-love. But changing the lessons of adolescence is important. I never once needed trigonometry and I couldn’t find Catullus in a crossword these days, but Febos’s education is a kind I surely could have used.

A spate of recent works—some memoiristic, some fictional—points to how uniquely teachers and mentors can manipulate their power.

At the end of april, Eve Crawford Peyton published in Slate her account of being groomed and assaulted by the author Blake Bailey. Bailey, she wrote, had been her English teacher in middle school before he held her down and raped her when she was 22, years before he was hand-selected as the most simpatico candidate to tackle a biography of Philip Roth. (Bailey has forcefully denied this and other allegations against him, including that he raped a publishing executive in 2015.) Peyton’s account is harrowing, emotive, and masterfully written.

It’s also awfully familiar. Bailey, Peyton writes, “was a fantastic teacher; he was a sexual predator.” In a 2019 article for LitHub, the author Rachel Cline writes about her “groovy, revolutionary, married, draft-evading, girl-raping former teacher,” who “taught me how to write,” and whom she fictionalized in her novel The Question Authority. In her devastating memoir, Consent, released in English earlier this year, the French writer Vanessa Springora alleges that a feted French author sexually exploited her as a 14-year-old girl. At one point, she refers to a specific psychological injury: He began to dictate her English homework, replacing her authorial voice with his own in an act she likens to “dispossession.” (The author in question, scheduled to stand trial in September for promoting pedophilia, has called the book “unjust and excessive” while praising “the beauty of the love” that he says he and the teenager shared.)

Suddenly, this kind of abuse seems to be everywhere—in the real world and in fiction inspired by it—abuse by men who allegedly found girls who loved books, girls who were conspicuously vulnerable to the written word, and then manipulated and mangled that love in enduring ways. I don’t know what to call this new genre, in which women seem to use writing to separate their understanding of abuse from their understanding of language itself. But a genre it is, one whose authors confront a clichéd setup—the predatory teacher or mentor—before they even begin. In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel, My Dark Vanessa, published last year, yet another English teacher grooms a student by giving her books and poems that supposedly remind him of her, offering her “different lenses,” she thinks, “to see myself through.” In the lead-up to My Dark Vanessa’s release, the author Wendy Ortiz noted on Twitter that the book’s plot bore striking similarities to her 2014 memoir, Excavation, about an English teacher she says exploited her sexually for five years, starting when she was 13 years old. That teacher, like Bailey, and like the man who taught Cline, had his students write journals for class, allowing him to rifle through their innermost thoughts and scrawl in the margins of their imagination. The books aren’t similar, in other words; the men depicted in them are.

This is a tricky genre, too, because truth and invention can become so intimately enmeshed. Cline’s novel is directly modeled on her experiences with her seventh- and eighth-grade teacher. Russell, after the commotion over My Dark Vanessa’s origins led to calls for her to reveal how much of the book was fictional, wrote on her website that it was inspired by her experiences as a teenager, even though she didn’t believe that victims should be compelled to share details of traumatic events. Springora’s, Ortiz’s, and Peyton’s accounts are the stark, carefully composed testimony of nonfiction. In Kate Walbert’s 2018 novel, His Favorites, a charismatic English teacher preys on a student recovering from a tragedy, and his influence on her use of language becomes as insidious as his abuse. Walbert, as far as I can tell, hasn’t specified how much of her novel was drawn from real life, but as a teenager she attended the boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall; I can’t help but wonder what she made of its begrudging acknowledgment in 2017 that some of its former teachers had abused students for decades.

With narratives like these, the boundaries between truth and fiction are inevitably slippery. “Memory, as you may recall,” states Jo, the narrator of His Favorites, “is a revision of a revision of a revision, the fortieth draft, or the forty-first.” Ortiz echoed this sentiment in an interview with The Rumpus: “As soon as I tell a story about a memory, then I’m painting over what actually happened with what I recall.” The cloak of a novel can be a kind of self-protection. Meanwhile, biographers, like Bailey, as Ruth Franklin argued in The New York Times, “aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn.” Readers have always relied on writers to interpret the world, to organize it, to humanize its characters, to shape its mordant chaos into something meaningful and enduring. We’re only now beginning to see how fragile that trust is, and how easily abused.

As she describes in consent, Vanessa Springora met the writer Gabriel Matzneff (she refers to him throughout only as “GM” or “G”) at a dinner party in Paris to which she’d tagged along with her mother, clutching a copy of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. “With my blind veneration of the Writer with a capital W,” she writes, “it was almost inevitable that I would conflate the man with his status as an artist.” In His Favorites, the teacher who torments Jo first notices her while she’s clutching a Tolstoy novel in a diner. On the opening page of Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry—whose first section many readers have presumed was drawn from the relationship Halliday had in her 20s with Philip Roth—a young woman, Alice, is sitting on a park bench, reading a novel “made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs, and no quotation marks whatsoever,” when a very famous, much older writer sits down next to her. “Is that the one with the watermelons?” he asks. Alice hasn’t yet come to that part, but a few lines later her cheeks are described as “watermelon pink,” as if his influence is already bleeding into her story.

I read Consent and Asymmetry recently, and I have to note how different they are in scope and style. Consent is a blistering indictment of Matzneff—who has written and talked openly about his pedophilia—and of the French literary establishment that tacitly enabled and encouraged his exploitation of children. Springora, who met Matzneff as a 13-year-old who loved to read, has come as an adult to view books with suspicion, she explains in her introduction. “I know they can be poison. I recognize the toxic load they can contain.” Matzneff violated her sexually, but he also distorted her relationship with language, art, and education. “At the beginning, G. took me to museums and to the theater, gave me records, told me what books to read,” she writes. In his attic apartment, “he would … call me his ‘beloved child,’ his ‘beautiful schoolgirl,’ and softly recount the long history of illicit love affairs between young girls and middle-aged men. I now had a private tutor entirely dedicated to my education.”

Asymmetry is distinct, not least because it’s fiction. But it nevertheless expands the idea of what it means to be a young woman in the orbit of a literary legend. Ezra Blazer, the Roth-like elderly author who encounters Alice on the park bench, is written with the lightest of nostalgic touches. He’s avuncular and wry. Alice is in her 20s, and fully willing and able to consent to a sexual relationship. Aware of how the pair of them might appear to strangers, she observes that “everything was still more interesting with [Ezra] than without.” And yet Ezra woos Alice like a child, with Mister Softee ice-cream cones, boxes of cookies, and Barnes & Noble bags stuffed with books he considers fundamental to her literary education. The novel’s title refers to all the power imbalances contained within it—Alice is Ezra’s willing companion but not his equal. Although Ezra is not Roth, Halliday explained at a talk in 2018, she wanted to invite readers to think of him, and possibly imagine how a 20-something woman might have her literary ambitions pruned by what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence.”

To be ensnared by a powerful writer can mean having your sense of self defined by the glare of someone else’s commanding gaze. Matzneff, who published diaries and essays as prolifically as novels, wrote about Springora and cast her as yet another character in his work. He encouraged her to write him love letters, which she eventually realized sounded similar to all the other letters from girls he published in his work. “These weren’t words of contemporary young women, but the universal and timeless terms taken from the epistolary literature of love,” Springora writes. “G. whispered them to us by stealth, breathing them onto our very tongues. He dispossessed us of our own words.” All the while, he was also crafting a defense against allegations that might stain him in the future. “All these declarations of love were proof that he was loved, and better still, that he knew how to love,” Springora continues. “What a hypocritical way it was of going about things, deceiving not only his young mistresses but also his readers.”

Alice isn’t trapped within Ezra’s fiction in Asymmetry, but he imposes constraints on her work before she’s even confessed a desire to make it. “I know what you’re up to,” he tells her one day in the park. “I know what you do when you’re alone … You’re writing. Aren’t you?” He assumes immediately that she’s writing about their relationship, because who wouldn’t? Why write if not to develop and enshrine one’s own ideas, experiences, and impressions? But Alice’s interests lie outside the scope of her own psyche. “Writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough,” she tells him. Ezra’s gaze is turned inward; whether you, the reader, assume that he is Roth-inspired or merely Roth-like, you know he’s never found himself lacking in importance. The second section of Asymmetry, which abandons Ezra and Alice entirely to feature the first-person narrative of an Iraqi American economist detained at Heathrow Airport, by contrast, feels like nothing so much as a scrupulous rejection of Ezra’s advice; when readers learn that it’s written by Alice years later, it comes off as an act of authorial empathy and imagination. Alice’s relationship with Ezra may have been pleasurable and consensual, yet her writing, and Halliday’s, is an act of literary sedition.

Consent, too, is an expression of rebellion, and power. Springora had dreamed of revenge against Matzneff, she writes, and one day “the solution finally presented itself to me, like something that was completely obvious: Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?” Methodically, with brutal emphasis, she also savages the people complicit in her abuse: her mother, who eventually seems to have sanctioned her 14-year-old daughter’s “relationship” with a famous writer because of his cachet; the publishers and editors who fostered and funded a self-confessed predator; the police who she says investigated at the time and did nothing; the doctor who offered to surgically sever her hymen so that Matzneff could penetrate her; the teacher who cornered her in a bistro one day and told her of his admiration for Matzneff while ogling her breasts; the famous writer who told her that her role was to bow to Matzneff’s impulses and help him create. “Literature is all about lying, my dear young friend,” the writer tells her. “Didn’t you realize?”

The manipulation of language is the common thread sewn through each of these books. Springora includes a quote by the novelist Chloé Delaume at the beginning of her memoir’s final section: “Language has always been an exclusive domain. Who owns language owns power.” In one scene in His Favorites, Jo reports her teacher to the headmaster, who dismisses her. She thinks in hindsight that she should have responded by blasting his patriarchal fossilization into powder, but remembers that she was only 15 at the time. “I could no more have formed those words, those thoughts, than flown to the moon.” Springora describes in one chapter feeling as if she’s no match for Matzneff because she doesn’t yet have the words she needs to challenge him:

I wasn’t familiar with the terms ‘narcissistic pervert’ and ‘sexual predator.’ I didn’t know there was such a thing as a person for whom the Other does not exist. I still believed that violence was only ever physical. And G. manipulated language like others manipulate swords … It was impossible to do battle with him on equal terms.

Similarly, in My Dark Vanessa, the influence of the teacher who abused Vanessa is so profound even in adulthood that it’s obvious to the reader when she’s parroting his words in her narrative instead of forming her own assessments. “There was something about me that made it worth the risk,” she thinks. “I had an allure that drew him in.” She rejects the word abuse to describe what happened to her, because “in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.” The simple integrity of a word cuts through the fog of her self-delusion too painfully. But she also twists language to deceive herself. To be groomed, she thinks, suddenly pedantic about definitions, “is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.”

Peyton’s account of how Bailey allegedly groomed his students includes the information that he required his students to keep personal journals and submit them to him; he would respond in red ink, positioning himself as a kind of omniscient narrator, armed with all the intimate details of his students’ psyches. In one girl’s yearbook, according to a reported Slate story that accompanied Peyton’s essay, Bailey wrote, “Mr. Antolini to Holden; me to you,” a reference to The Catcher in the Rye that implied she had disappointed him by distancing herself from him. (In The Question Authority, Nora, the central character, recalls how she once tried to write like J. D. Salinger in the journals she turned in for class; her teacher, Mr. Rasmussen, scribbled, “Nice try, Phoebe,” in the margins.) Bailey also reportedly told the same student to “unfasten your gaze from your own navel,” perhaps a caustic way of suggesting that she herself bore no value as a subject or as a person.

What I take from Consent and its cohort of books—and from the ways they play with language, with perspective, with myopia and clarity—is how neatly they balance exposing abusers with a radical reframing of subject and object. The New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in March about the “predatory dimension of one person telling the story of another.” But when you’re telling a story about a predator, this dynamic gets fundamentally subverted. When Roth, in the last interview he gave before his death, was asked about the #MeToo movement, his response was to explain how consistently over the course of his career he’d written about “men enveloped by sexual temptation.” He had, he said, “stepped not just inside the male head but into the reality of those urges whose obstinate pressure by its persistence can menace one’s rationality, urges sometimes so intense they may even be experienced as a form of lunacy.” I don’t know whether Roth was a misogynist. (It is fascinating that he supposedly chose Bailey after a shared backslapping moment over the sexual appeal of Ali MacGraw.) But it is easy to say who attracted Roth’s interest, and who didn’t. Men in compulsive sexual thrall: interesting. Women violated as a result: far less so. And yet here are women, writing books, forcing their perspectives into the light, and proving what potent, insurgent art can be made in the process.

The model and actor’s new book of essays is a fascinatingly solipsistic portrait of the tension between empowerment and objectification.

Rewatching the music video for “Blurred Lines,” the totemic Robin Thicke song, is an interesting project. In 2013, when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture, or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. (“I know you want it,” Thicke croons presumptively over and over, even though honestly, no, I do not want it at all.) In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props (a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe) while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T.I. dance, goofy and fully clothed, around them.

As an artifact of its time, it’s a remarkably deadened and nonsensical thing. But what most surprises me now is how pitiable the men seem, pulling at the models’ hair and playing air guitar for attention, less musical superstars than jejune dads who don’t exactly know what to do with the women they’ve paid to be naked. This is the raw power of the female body, and yet what kind of power is it, really? At one point, Thicke seems to push the model Emily Ratajkowski against a wall, hollering into her ear while she gazes away from him, a picture of barely suppressed disdain.

“Blurred Lines” instantly made Ratajkowski a star. She commands the video in both the PG-13 and unrated versions like a supernova, a vortex of pulchritude and screen presence and sticky red lip gloss. “They were the talent; we were more like props,” Ratajkowski writes of the men in her new book, My Body, and yet the women are the ones viewers can’t look away from. They’re so casual in their nudity, so composed, so unperturbed by the antics of the men objectifying them. Their sexuality seems to exist somehow outside the range of the camera’s gaze, outside the atmosphere of mortal men. But, of course, it doesn’t. In My Body, a collection of essays in which Ratajkowski scrutinizes the blessing and the curse of her physical self, she writes that Thicke groped her during filming that day, and that she said nothing; the incident was, in her eyes, a reminder of “how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.” (Thicke has not publicly responded to the allegations.)

This book is Ratajkowski’s attempt to come to terms with her existence as a person who is, in the words of Derek Zoolander, really, really ridiculously good-looking. This experience is, she knows, particularly fraught for women and girls. Starting in middle school, Ratajkowski writes, she received mixed messages about her body—whether it provoked offense or pleasure, was too big or too small, made her strong or vulnerable. Commodifying it as a model at first brought her satisfaction. She writes: “All women are objectified and sexualized to some degree, I figured, so I might as well do it on my own terms. I thought that there was power in my ability to choose to do so.” Now? She’s not so sure, but nor has she entirely changed her mind.

My Body sits in this liminal space between reappraisal and self-defense. It’s a fascinating work: insightful, maddening, frank, strikingly solipsistic. Ratajkowski admits in her introduction that her awakening is still a half-finished one, and that the purpose of the book wasn’t “to arrive at answers” about the contradictions of selling her own image as a model, actor, and Instagram influencer with 28.5 million followers, but rather to “examine the various mirrors in which I’ve seen myself.” She senses, maybe, that she’s caught in an age-old quagmire (what the academic Sandra Bartky called “the disciplinary project of femininity”), but not that she’s become, by virtue of her fame and self-presentation, potentially complicit in the things she critiques. Writing, for Ratajkowski, seems to let her assert the fullness of her personhood and interiority, a rejection of the world’s determination to make her an object. But the narrowness of her focus—her physical self, essentially, and everything it’s meant for her—is limiting. Even her title, My Body, suggests conflicting things: ownership and depersonalization. What do you do when the subject you know best, the topic upon which you are the ultimate authority, is the same trap you’re trying to write your way out of?

The day I read most of this book was also the day that Ratajkowski uploaded to Instagram a series of photos published by the French magazine M. In the first, she holds a flesh-colored lollipop against her tongue. The third reveals her midriff, her nipple, and her leopard-patterned nails, but not her face. The cover line for the shoot reads: La Feminité à l’Offensive, with faux cils et ongles longs in smaller type, just to clarify that the aesthetic for the revolution is false eyelashes and long fingernails. Ratajkowski’s waist is tiny; her ribs are visible; her lips are pursed.

She has the right to find these pictures, this self-presentation, empowering. (“I love these images so much!” her caption reads.) But we also, as observers, have the right to interpret them—to wonder if doubling down on archaic tropes of female sexuality and the “tyranny of slenderness,” as Bartky put it, is actually good for anyone else. In her book’s epigraph, Ratajkowski pulls a quote on vanity from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a seminal BBC series and book that, among other things, crystallizes the bind women find themselves in as objects to be surveyed. The M pictorial made me think of a different Berger argument: Portraits are organized to reinforce the hierarchical status quo, and the women within them are arranged, he wrote, “to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.” Whose appetite is the lollipop feeding? Does it matter?

Ratajkowski doesn’t say much in the book about how women and girls might respond to images of her. That myopia is frustrating, because she’s so astute on the subject of how her body is interpreted by men. The project that became My Body began as an essay published last year in New York. In “Buying Myself Back,” the magazine’s most read story of 2020 (not exactly a quiet news year), Ratajkowski wrote about being sued by a paparazzo who took a picture of her on the street after she subsequently posted the photo on her Instagram, and buying half a Richard Prince “Instagram painting” based on an image of herself. She also alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a photographer who later published a book of nude photos of her without her consent. (The photographer denied the accusations to New York, saying, “You do know who we are talking about right? This is the girl that was naked in Treats! magazine, and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?”)

The essay was bracing and sharp. It distilled in careful prose the absurdity and powerlessness of being a product in the internet age. “I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own,” Ratajkowski writes. To cope, she starts to think of herself in split form: the “real” Emily and the one whose picture is appropriated by men in ways she can’t control. If Marx were alive, he might refer her to his theory of alienation: Under capitalism, Ratajkowski has essentially lost control of the work she produces, and her sense of self is fragmenting as a result. (Even Marx might be stunned by the audacity of Prince charging $80,000 for a picture he ripped right off Instagram and modified merely with the addition of his own sleazy comment.)

That Ratajkowski’s response to so much injustice might be to seize back control (and the means of production) for herself is understandable. But burning down a house that you are still very much inside is hard, which is maybe why so much of the rest of My Body feels impotent. It’s less a rallying cry for structural change than a dispassionate series of observations by someone who still sees themselves primarily as a commodity. Its tone is measured and numb. In the essay “Bc Hello Halle Berry,” the author develops headaches during a stay in a luxury Maldives resort paid for by a Qatari billionaire (in return for some Instagram uploads). As she posts a photo of herself wearing a bikini from her own line, only slightly mollified by the hundreds of thousands of likes it receives in under an hour, she ponders the ethics of using her body for profit. “Money means power,” she thinks. “And by capitalizing on my sexuality I have money. The whole damn system is corrupt and anyone who participates is just as guilty as I am … I have to make a living somehow.”

It seems uncharitable to point out that she’s drawing a false dichotomy—that there are options in between trading pictures of herself for free vacations and starving on the street. But that’s not the point. The issue that kept sticking with me as I read was that Ratajkowski so clearly wants to have it all: ultimate control over the sale of her image; power; money, yes; but also kudos for being more than an object, for being able to lucidly communicate how much she’s suffered because of a toxic system—and is still suffering because of her ongoing participation. It is, as they say, a lot to ask.

To her credit, Ratajkowski seems to occasionally sense the innate hypocrisy of her desires, her impulse “to have my Instagram hustle, selling bikinis and whatever else, while also being respected for my ideas and politics and well, everything besides my body.” In the essay “Beauty Lessons,” a recollection of how her priorities and self-esteem were shaped in part by a mother with her own internalized misogyny, Ratajkowski recalls learning as a child that the suffering attractive women endure at the hands of the world “was actually a good thing, a consequence of being beautiful and having access to male attention.” The world, she realizes, “isn’t kind to women who are overlooked by men.” When she starts modeling, she can’t remember ever actually enjoying the process of it, but she does enjoy the money she’s able to make, and the things she can buy. But the industry and its nebulous edges also present new compromises. In the essay “Transactions,” Ratajkowski writes about being paid $25,000 in 2014 to go to the Super Bowl with a Malaysian financier, a deal brokered by her manager at the time. She’s troubled by the “unspoken task I’d been hired to perform: to entertain the men who had paid me to be there.” To be a beautiful woman, she seems to conclude, is to exist in the hustle between obligation and power, this particular “spectrum of compromise.”

Becoming an author allows her to reject this setup. Writing a book that’s effectively a literary portrait of your own physical self, though, is to risk reinforcing all the preconceptions anyone has ever had about you. Ratajkowski is a graceful and thoughtful writer, and as I read her book I longed for her to turn her gaze outward, to write an essay about marriage plots or coffee or landscape architecture or Scooby-Doo. Or, beyond that, I wanted her to risk fully indicting modeling as a paradigm—to not merely note that her career took off after she lost 10 pounds from stomach flu and kept the weight off, but to probe what looking at images of so many skinny bodies all day does to girls as delicate and unformed as her own teenage self. To wonder not just how the inherently flawed bargain of modeling has damaged her, but how it damages everyone. To risk letting herself feel or uncover something that might be a catalyst for not just observation, but transformation.

What would that kind of growth cost her? At the very least, perfection. In her final essay, “Releases,” Ratajkowski writes about how she has long resisted anger because she sensed that anger makes women physically repulsive. “I try to make anything resembling anger seem spunky and charming and sexy,” she writes. “I fold it into something small, tuck it away. I invoke my most reliable trick—I project sadness—something vulnerable and tender, something welcoming, a thing to be tended to.” Thinking about women’s emotions being modulated by the primacy of staying sexy isn’t exactly new, but it’s dismaying all the same. If Ratajkowski still can’t get angry, unpleasantly angry, even in writing, for fear of sacrificing her power, what about the rest of us?

The Apple TV+ series Physical is a reminder that making people hate their body is a thriving pillar of American commerce.

This is supposed to be the season of unleashed, exuberant exhibitionism. Many of us have swaddled our pale bodies in Lycra and terry cloth for more than a year; the theory of Hot Vax Summer is that we’re long overdue to expose them to the cruel light of other people’s eyes. In the music video for “Solar Power,” Lorde basks on the beach in a lemon-yellow crop top, the symmetry of her rib cage its own work of art. “Forget all of the tears that you’ve cried; it’s over,” she sings, shooing away our literal and metaphorical winter of COVID-19. (Predictably, the outfit she wears—$615 plus tax!—sold out immediately.) I watched most of Physical—Apple TV+’s new series about a 1980s aerobics queen-in-waiting—with this in mind, idly running my hand over and over my unsculpted midriff, fighting the impulse to throw on a leotard and sweat joyfully along to “Space Age Love Song.” This is the conflict at the center of American consumerist fitness spectacle: Even when it’s at its most transparently questionable, the promise is almost impossible to resist.

Physical, created by the playwright Annie Weisman, digs into a window of history, when making people hate their body became a thriving pillar of American commerce. It’s a strikingly beautiful show about ugly things: self-hatred, mental illness, rampant capitalism, politics, the Summer of Love gone to seed. The directors, who include Craig Gillespie (I,Tonya; Cruella), render the San Diego setting with sun-dappled luminosity; the overall aesthetic is somewhere between beachy ’70s hedonism and brittle ’80s plasticity. Sheila (played by Rose Byrne) is a housewife with an eating disorder so virulent, it gets its own accompanying monologue, also delivered by Byrne. While Sheila stares at her reflection in the opening scene, her permed curls popping against green patterned wallpaper, the voice calls her pathetic for trying to carry off “the disco-sex-kitten look at your age.” When she runs errands, it reminds her that she’s “pale, pasty, fat, gross, disgusting.” During a discussion about an upcoming dinner party with her uninterested husband, it tells her, “You’re the only one who thinks about food this much, you fucking freak.”

The writer and body-acceptance activist Katie Sturino calls this kind of inner voice “a self-shit-talking spiral.” It’s almost as unpleasant for viewers to endure as it must be for Sheila; critics have lamented the show’s pitch-black tone and Sheila’s judgmental gaze, which is sharpest when she directs it toward herself. Maybe the popular assumption was that a Reagan-era dramedy about the VHS home-fitness boom would be as tonally giddy as Netflix’s GLOW, or as deliberately nostalgic as Stranger Things. Defined by Weisman, who based Sheila’s interior life partly on her own experiences with an eating disorder, Physical is something else instead. Dark and caustic, it’s also unnervingly clear-sighted about the ways people really see themselves, and the money they’ll spend for just the promise of deliverance. After watching Sheila teach her first aerobics class and shout tough-love slogans at her students, her fellow instructor Bunny (Della Saba) looks reluctantly impressed. “People usually want to be cuddled in this country,” she says. But Sheila, the show promises in a flash-forward to a glitzy VHS shoot, is about to make a fortune by projecting her own insecurities and self-loathing out into the homes of millions.

Byrne plays Sheila a bit like a rubber band stretched to its fracturing point, so tense she almost vibrates. Her husband, Danny (Rory Scovel), is a wormy academic who plays on Sheila’s lack of confidence to get her to arrange a threesome with one of his students; he’s so lazy that he even outsources the seduction to his wife. Sheila spends virtually the entirety of her waking life thinking about wanting to eat. Her 4-year-old daughter is an afterthought; she has no friends. Her only hobbies are going to a ballet studio that closes in the first episode, and renting a motel room where she methodically eats her way through three cheeseburgers, vomits, showers, and then sits meditatively between sheets that still smell of grease.

But when Sheila first discovers aerobics, via a seemingly carefree blond woman whom she stalks from a mall parking lot into a class, something changes. The music, the beat, the quick-changing sequences—they occupy her mind, allowing her to move and forget herself until the class ends. Physical captures the frenetic release that she feels in a montage of cuts back and forth. At home, her fingers drum frantically on the kitchen counter; in the studio, her hips circle around and around in sensuous, undulating bliss.

Sheila seems obviously inspired by Jane Fonda. Both come from wealthy and difficult families (one episode reveals a traumatic incident from Sheila’s past that offers an explanation for why she’s so unhappy); Fonda also lived with bulimia, from her teens until her 40s. Like Sheila, Fonda attended ballet class to keep fit, until she injured her foot on a film set and, in 1978, began practicing aerobics. The workouts, she told Slate’s Willa Paskin in a riveting episode of the podcast Decoder Ring, filled the hole that her eating disorder occupied in her life. In 1982, she released Jane Fonda’s Workout, a groundbreaking video aimed at bringing aerobics to women who couldn’t or didn’t want to go to a studio. It sold more than 17 million copies and spawned a home-fitness empire, not to mention a sticky fitness motto, shouted gleefully by Fonda, mid-lunge: “No pain, no gain.”

Sheila taps into this sentiment, and the show promises that it’s what will make her an icon. (Somewhat irritatingly, the entire season suffers from the Peak TV complaint of prologue-itis, with the real juicy stuff likely saved for Season 2.) The more Sheila channels her destructive inner monologue into her classes, exhorting her students to embrace discomfort, the “sweet spot” where real change happens, the fewer her cruel voice-overs become. It’s cathartic for her, as it clearly was for Fonda. But what about the rest of us? What happens when you grow up internalizing the idea that judging yourself is normal and quieted only with excessive effort? What becomes of an entire culture raised on the argument that our troublesome, too-big, too-weak, too-much bodies can be loved only when they’ve been conquered?

The only certain aspect of the past 15 or so months is that everyone’s experience has been different. The pandemic sharpened inequities in capital, but also safety. It clarified how fragile social-support networks can be, how disproportionately mothers bear the brunt of schools and child care shutting down, how the ability to take optimal care of our bodies is a privilege not everyone has. And yet somehow one of the dominant messages of the current moment, as many Americans are reentering the world, isn’t that society needs to change, but that our bodies do. The pandemic, one New York Times article from March scolded, is “a wake-up call for personal health.” Quarantine weight gain, according to WebMD, is “not a joking matter.” Gwyneth Paltrow popped up in March confessing that she’d gained 14 pounds in quarantine by indulging in bread and alcohol—not to be relatable, but to help hawk a diet book dedicated to “intuitive fasting.”

Here is my story: I gained 37 pounds during the pandemic because I was pregnant, and lost 30 of them the first month after having twins because I was so exhausted and anxious and depressed that I didn’t eat. The other seven pounds stayed with me. In January, I tried “intermittent fasting,” which is basically the same thing as starving, only with a timetable. It worked, in the sense that I lost a few more pounds, but it also became my obsession. I thought about nothing but eating. I inhaled recipe books and food blogs on weekends like a day trader doing lines in a Pearl Street–bar toilet. Eventually there came a point when I didn’t want to waste so much of my mental energy thinking about food, or craving food. My body is fine. It’s strong. I can hold two 20-pound babies at the same time. I’ll never wear an “extreme crop top” (thank you again, New York Times!) but I can eat three meals a day and free my mind for something, anything, else.

Watching Physical, with its access into the exhausting obsessiveness of Sheila’s mind, I kept thinking about the argument that the since-gone-depressingly-conspiratorial Naomi Wolf made in The Beauty Myth that self-loathing is what society uses to keep women from organizing for what they actually desire:

It’s true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want.

Physical tells just one part of this story, from one moment in time. It presents us with a character who finds in exercise a release from her own darkest impulses. But it also exposes how commonplace those impulses are, and how easy it is to capitalize on them. Hot Vax Summer should feel like liberation, not a prescription for what supposedly ails us. I came away from Physical with a question—what if we didn’t want to look the way we’ve always been told we should look by a $78 billion industry with a very vested interest in supplying an unattainable ideal: sinewy and razor-hipped, hairless and waist-trained and uncomfortable? What are all the other things we could want instead? Where would we even begin?

The only real relationship on Succession is a marriage entirely corrupted by the family business.

This article contains spoilers through the sixth episode of Succession Season 3.

The marriage between Shiv Roy and Tom Wambsgans is, at this point, built on mutual ambition and cold white wine, and the wine at least has turned poisonously sour. On tonight’s episode of Succession, “What It Takes,” as the Roys travel to Virginia to anoint a new Republican presidential candidate at a power brokers’ conference, Tom (played by Matthew Macfadyen) opens a bottle from his and Shiv’s vineyard and embarks on an emotional journey. “So it’s biodynamic,” he says to Shiv (Sarah Snook), who appears not to be listening as she absorbs an ATN broadcast on her iPad. “It has quite a funk to it. You kind of have to meet it halfway, right? … There’s lots to unpack. It’s not floral. It’s not sugary, or vegetal. It’s quite agricultural, you know, it’s, it’s, uh …” Finally, Tom gives up. “It’s not very nice, the wine, is it, Shiv?”

As metaphors go, discovering that the fruit of your marital harvest is less Chassagne-Montrachet than eau de dung pile is a pithy one. For Tom, slowly being pulped this season by the weight of an impending prison sentence that he hopes will win his father-in-law’s favor, it’s just one more indignity to add to the list. With Kendall (Jeremy Strong) high on his self-aggrandizing whistleblower tour and Roman (Kieran Culkin) getting nastier the closer he gets to his father’s favor, my sympathies this season have mostly lain with Tom. In private, he seems haunted, less by even the specter of prison than by the dawning realization that he might have made a bad bet in the game of life. When it comes to Shiv, he veers from weak attempts at control—trying to get her pregnant to ensure her fidelity while he’s incarcerated—to melodrama. (“Mondale’s not well. Mondale’s unsettled,” he tells Shiv after the so-named dog eats her pantyhose, his voice trembling with a kind of Joan Crawford–in–Baby Jane creepiness.) The question for the season is, will Tom actually break? Or is the privilege of being even a third-tier Roy so profound that he’d rather be miserable than renounce it?

The point of Succession, the show’s creators and cast have long explained, is to explore how extreme wealth and, by association, power corrupt a family from the inside out. The idea of contamination is usually subtextual, though sometimes overt. Most of the characters on the show, with the notable exception of the Roy patriarch, Logan (Brian Cox), appear to have redeeming qualities somewhere deep down, particularly with regard to caring for one another—Roman rescues Kendall from a meth binge; Kendall roars at Logan for hitting his brother; Shiv pleads with her father not to sacrifice Tom at the end of Season 2, even though it costs her his respect and Tom eventually sacrifices himself anyway. More often, though, they conspire against and even actively damage one another under Logan’s influence. Shiv and Tom’s partnership has the dubious honor of being the only consistent, long-term romantic relationship depicted on Succession, which would seem to separate it at least slightly from the familial wrangling over the company. But their marriage is also inextricable from the family business, which leaves it unable to exist on its own terms. “It’s good to know we don’t have an unbalanced love portfolio,” Tom tells Shiv earlier this season, a cringeworthy statement that’s also gloomily inaccurate.

What this means on the show is that Tom, the child of a lawyer who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, owes everything he has to his marriage, and that Shiv, who for a long time had no clearly defined role or real power inside the Roy empire, wields authority over her husband any chance she gets. Almost three full seasons in, I still can’t decide whether Shiv is fascinatingly sphinxlike or maddeningly underwritten, or both. She often seems to exist less as a character in her own right than as a foil for the men around her. Her initial retreat from the family business and her career in politics feel like an acknowledgment that she’s neither toxic enough nor absurd enough to succeed within the Roys’ company, Waystar Royco. And yet she treats her marriage to Tom—a Waystar executive who’s as buffoonish and grasping as her brothers—as a way to passively gain power without making herself vulnerable. “I’m happy to be Tom Roy,” Tom tells her in Season 1, before their marriage, an admission that her status as a Roy scion supersedes any identity or dreams he might have on his own.

Shiv and Tom’s relationship is so intriguing that real-life marriage counselors and Vanderbilts alike have commented on everything that’s wrong with it. (“There is a concerning lack of communication and openness, not to mention empathy, between these two,” one psychologist concluded.) They have no palpable chemistry. When Tom made sexual overtures to Shiv in last week’s episode, “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” she recoiled, even before he revealed that he’d been secretly tracking her menstrual cycle. Virtually every interaction between them is governed by the exercising or the amalgamation of clout. Shiv has repeatedly tested hers by demanding things Tom isn’t comfortable with: an open relationship, a threesome, even that he visit Logan’s tailor for his suits. Tom, for his part, capitulates over and over, knowing full well that standing up to Shiv on behalf of his own desires means losing her, and losing everything that comes with being a Roy.

And yet, Tom’s association with the Roys is also breaking his spirit. Season 3 has inflicted one wound after another on him, each a reminder of how little he means to anyone. “I haven’t really slept properly in about eight days,” he confesses in tonight’s episode. Shiv says that she’s bored with his obsessive chatter about prison. On the family jet to Virginia, they sit at opposite ends of the plane. In the fleet of cars the Roys use, she chooses to ride with her father. When the Waystar communications boss, Hugo (Fisher Stevens), updates the family on murmurs from the Department of Justice regarding its investigations into the company, he tells them that “no one big is likely to do jail time … with the notable exception of Tom, obviously. Sorry, Tom.” In my review of HBO’s The White Lotus earlier this year, I wrote that that show has a distinct thesis about privilege: People who have it would rather be miserable than sacrifice even a fraction of their status. Tom is caught in the same trap. If his marriage survives, it will be because he has decided that the money is worth the pain.

Across decades of Silence of the Lambs sequels and spin-offs, Hannibal Lecter has become a pop-cultural juggernaut. Starling, not so much.

If metaphor is art, then consider Thomas Harris an old master: His finest work, 1988’s The Silence of the Lambs, is a Gothic carnival of symbolism and allusion. The substance of the novel is how society ritualistically depersonalizes, objectifies, and consumes women. Jame Gumb, the serial killer being pursued by the novice FBI agent Clarice Starling, takes this mission literally, stalking and skinning women in a macabre quest to turn them into “material.” The police, the media, and the FBI reduce victims to exploitative clichés or nameless bodies. Throughout the novel, Starling is dissected as a physical object and a psychological one, offered up as bait and leeringly scrutinized. When an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane throws his semen at her, the gesture is a cruder, more animalistic version of the asylum director’s propositioning of Starling only minutes earlier.

Harris’s novel was a striking examination of institutionalized misogyny, but Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation, released in 1991, went further. From the beginning, the movie shows its audience how exposed Starling (played by Jodie Foster) is to the world’s predations. Before the opening credits have wrapped, an older man in an FBI cap is shown staring after her as she jogs away from him. Moments later, Starling—the lone woman in an elevator with eight much larger men—gazes nervously up at the ceiling. Repeatedly, Demme has the men Starling interacts with look directly at the camera, forcing the audience into the role of object. In a canny act of inversion, we, the ones watching, are winked at and ogled alongside her.

I love Clarice Starling, and I especially love the way Foster plays her, swallowing the anger Harris makes explicit in the novel and refusing to be rocked. Gothic art has always played with doubling, and in the movie Starling is the elusive, empathetic, uncultured antithesis to Hannibal Lecter’s extravagant psychopath. Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) is in The Silence of the Lambs for only 26 minutes, beginning with a scene in which Starling consults the serial killer, forensic psychiatrist, and notorious cannibal for help on the Gumb case; he proceeds to assess her so brutally, it’s almost like watching a dissection. And yet he’s the one imprinted on the pop-cultural psyche, a charismatic obscenity of a character who turns his atrocities into perky rhyming couplets. After Silence came out, Hannibal received a sequel, a prequel (both adapted into movies), and a television show. Starling got an ending in Harris’s novels that bewildered and outraged her fans, and now, decades later, she has earned the gloomiest of all fates: her own network procedural.

* * *

In the seven years that pass for Starling between The Silence of the Lambs and its 1999 sequel, Hannibal, something bleak and unanticipated happens to her: She molders. “Her failure to advance in the FBI after a brilliant start was a new and awful experience for her,” Harris writes. “She batted against the glass ceiling like a flea in a bottle.” Her triumphant capture of Gumb and rescue of a senator’s daughter have led her nowhere, because the FBI is still an organization run by men, and, Harris suggests, those men at some primal level dislike and distrust women. Paul Krendler, an assistant attorney general who drunkenly hit on Starling one night and was rebuffed by her, has dripped just enough “poison into her personnel file” to keep her from getting promoted. Starling is stuck: too honorable to play games and ascend, too brilliant to be relegated to the basement.

The new CBS drama Clarice is set in the period when things went wrong—between the two novels and shortly after the collaring of Gumb. The title itself is telling: In the books, Harris refers to his character as “Starling,” an act of professional respect that’s countered by Lecter’s deliberately intimate deployment of her first name, Clarice. (Surely you can hear it—Hopkin’s singsongy, high-pitched drawl and his over-sibilant second syllable, as if a rattlesnake has suddenly started speaking.) Starling is an agent; Clarice is a target. This is a show less concerned with the actions of a promising agent than with the tediously over-trod subject of a woman’s trauma.

The concept, by itself, represents a change of direction for CBS, whose recent reputation has been defined by sexual-harassment allegations and rote crime dramas—sometimes both at the same time. Clarice is billed as a psychological procedural and horror thriller. The word feminist hovers uneasily around it, not cited explicitly enough to deter male viewers, but implied by its subject’s investigation of crimes against women. The show was created by the screenwriter and director Alex Kurtzman (CBS’s Star Trek: Discovery) and the actor and screenwriter Jenny Lumet, who has a serendipitous connection to Demme—she wrote the screenplay for his luminous 2008 film, Rachel Getting Married.

Before it even begins, Clarice gets tangled up in two cumbersome obligations: its need to explain who Starling is and what happened to her in The Silence of the Lambs, and its legal inability to say the name Hannibal Lecter. (The ownership rights to Harris’s characters are divided between MGM—which produced Clarice and Demme’s 1991 movie—and the late Dino de Laurentiis’s production company, which made four movies out of other Lecter titles.) It’s an awkward two-step. In the opening scene, Starling (played subtly by the Australian actor Rebecca Breeds) talks with her condescending male therapist. “I thought it was done,” she sighs, in a good approximation of Foster’s Appalachian accent. “Buffalo Bill. Seven women. Skinned six. Six of them. I saved one. The last one.” Her shrink, undeterred by the laborious exposition, points out that the previous doctor she saw was “an inmate at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. You know. Ate his patients.” You know.

Part of the brilliance of Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs is its ability to insinuate rather than spell things out, more gracefully even than the source material. “She don’t look half as good as she thinks she does,” a male colleague sneers about Starling in the novel. “I’d put her on like a Mark Five gas mask,” another replies. In the movie, you don’t hear this kind of denigration so much as feel it. When Starling arrives at a morgue to assist with the autopsy of one of Gumb’s victims, she walks into a room filled with male cops, all dressed identically, all staring her down. Clarice isn’t so subtle. It tells instead of shows, maybe because its visuals are consumed with the stylistic tics of network procedurals: a saturated color palette, recurring images slowed down to a nightmarish crawl, exterior shots so gloomy, they’re almost Stygian. This is storytelling that feels the need to constantly regain its audience’s attention after each commercial break.

More troubling, though, is the show’s tenuous conception of its central character. Starling is difficult to define, because so much of her is drawn in opposition to—and later, in parallel with—Lecter. In contrast with the casually evaluative glances thrown her way, Lecter’s gaze aims for a deeper reading. “Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes?” he tells her in the book. “You look like a rube. You’re a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Your eyes are like cheap birthstones—all surface shine when you stalk some little answer.” Later, Starling can’t tell whether he’s truly seen her or simply sketched her in a way that pleases him. The assessment is an act of invasion, almost an assault. “For a few seconds she had felt an alien consciousness loose in her head, slapping things off the shelves like a bear in a camper.”

As a character, Lecter leaves the more indelible mark. Which is maybe why he’s occupied more space in culture than Starling has, including a starring role in Hannibal, Bryan Fuller’s baroque, thrilling NBC series, a much more fully conceived show than Clarice. On her own, Starling is a challenge, shaped as she is in response to the men around her: their mentorship, their interest, their harassment, their eyes. With Lecter in particular, she’s sharpened as his antithesis. He brutalizes; she protects. He inflicts; she endures. He’s an aesthete and a hedonist; she’s a spartan and an empath. Demme, who once said that he found Starling more interesting than Lecter, saw the potential in a character whose essence is forces in conflict: vulnerability and strength, impotence and power.

Clarice, though, mostly defines its central character through the stickiness of her trauma. She has flashbacks to Gumb’s basement; she sees imaginary moths (creatures Gumb harvested and deposited in the throats of his victims) around her; she’s plagued by phone calls from Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), the woman she saved from Gumb. “Can you sleep?” Catherine asks her. “Or do moths wake you up? How are you out there in the world?” The show, like the novel, draws much of Starling’s texture from her childhood: her father’s violent death in a robbery gone wrong, her desperate mission as a kid to save lambs from slaughter. In the movie, these moments function as suspenseful breakthroughs that help the viewer understand Starling’s drive; as recurring images trotted out across episodes of Clarice, they lose all meaning. Apart from her backstory, the show gives Starling one main characteristic, which Lecter might describe insultingly as “gumption”: She’s tough enough to withstand the nonsensically hostile treatment of Krendler (played by Michael Cudlitz) and savvy when it comes to saving victims. But who is she, really?

As an adaptation, Clarice is full of half-measures. It touches on its ’90s setting with an episode that explores an FBI standoff at a ranch in rural Kentucky; characters repeatedly mention the Waco siege but nothing enlightening comes of the comparison. It lightly references contemporary ideas about abuse when Starling, at a press conference, urges reporters to say the victims’ names and honor their stories, but in the first three episodes does little of that itself. And it sketches out a character by way of what’s happened to her, instead of grappling with who she might be. Maybe Starling’s simmering anger and the burden of her diminishing career prospects will emerge in later episodes. But I doubt it. The network procedural demands catharsis, and tidy conclusions. Its formula is too rigid for a character whose origins lie in the murkiness of negative space.