You Were So High
Some thoughts on Tavi Gevinson's latest.
“When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” —Joan Didion
When I was in high school, I began my writing career with Project Consent, a now-folded online publication that would go on to blossom into an initiative meant to promote the importance of consent across all platforms. From insightful articles that dissected headlines about the latest man with power being accused of rape, to cheeky graphics where cartoon genitalia explained the importance of affirmative consent, Project Consent was created by young people for young people. As a teenager who thought she was wise beyond her years and knew more about the world than some seasoned adults did, I was excited to write about things I was passionate about.
I was confident that in time, I would move to New York, write a column where I got to spray my opinions like a garden hose over the city, and live in a beautiful Brownstone that had a closet filled with Rodarte and Marc Jacobs — which I would wear to exclusive events where I would sip on fruity cocktails and bump elbows with my favorite celebrities. I wanted a life that looked like the posts on my favorite website, Tumblr.
If there was anyone among us Zillennials who was living that dream, it was Tavi Gevinson. At the time, Gevinson was the wunderkind behind Rookie, an online magazine Gevinson founded at 14 following the success of the fashion blog she had maintained since she was 11. Plucked from a suburb in Chicago, she had been invited to New York and Paris fashion week and wrote guest articles in Harper’s Bazaar. Rookie would go on to earn praise in the blogosphere for being “enthusiastic, embarrassing, [and] funny.” One of the magazine’s featured columns, “Ask a Grown,” featured interviews with celebrities where Rookie’s teenage readership submitted poking questions about adolescence (“How do I tell my best friend I like them?”). These were with celebrities 16-year old me fantasized about going on shopping sprees with. Gevinson and I are the same age — we would be in the same graduating class had we gone to school together. She was gifted designer clothes and wrote thoughtful, creative opinion pieces for the masses. She had celebrities leaving heart emojis in the comments on her Instagram posts. Tavi Gevinson was cutting edge teenage culture of the early 2010s. If there was anyone among us who was living that cotton candy dream so many of us tried to reblog into manifestation, it was her.
Rookie folded in 2018, but Gevinson continues to write — and with a pen (or Macbook keyboard, I suppose) that remains searing and true, just like how she did when we were teenagers. Earlier this week, The Cut published “Britney Spears Was Never in Control,” an article in which Gevinson assesses The New York Times’s documentary, Framing Britney Spears. I encourage you to stop now and read Gevinson’s article, as it’s some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. In her dissection, Gevinson critiques the documentary’s assertion that Britney Spears’ sexuality was a projection of her confidence and power as a young woman. She calls the documentary a “spell,” noting that it puts its viewer in a difficult spot: choose to rally behind the exploited female pop star who had her sexuality snuffed out because society fears confident women, or question why someone that young was marketed behind a schoolgirl uniform and pigtails in the first place. No matter your choice, you’re wrong.
Gevinson goes on to write: “In the flurry of recent Britney Spears commentary, I thought of a few men who would be relieved to learn that it is considered anti-feminist and sex-negative to suggest that there is anything dubious about sexualizing teenagers.” She then lays plain the details of questionable relationships she herself has been involved in, noting the once “gray area” she’s now able to see for what it is. In her quest to assure herself that yes, teenage girls can do anything they put their mind to, Gevinson found herself taken advantage of by men who saw her maturity and old soul as a free pass. Gevinson writes:
If teen girls — or young women — are encountering adult men socially, they are navigating norms and expectations that were built to rationalize men’s behavior. They are not inured to power imbalances or how power may complicate consent. They are not historically taught to leave a sexual encounter the moment that it becomes violent or to subordinate men’s desires in favor of their own pleasure or safety. They are taught to be responsible for the actions of sexual predators, who receive a vast margin of plausible deniability. When I’ve met 18-year-olds in the last couple years, I have been struck by the fact that even if someone is precocious, it is their youth that makes them precocious. If you can still be considered “mature for your age,” you are not an older person’s equal. This observation can easily go from an act of respect to license for harm.
In 2016, Gevinson made an entry on Rookie called “The Infinity Diaries,” where her journal entries were published for her readership to peruse. In an entry shared from spring of 2015, Gevinson shared an account from that awkward stage of “talking to someone” that we all know so well, where sex may be on the table but intimacy isn’t. When dates are defined by “hanging out” and nothing of real substance is said, but the connection (or feeling of connection) is enough of a high to continue seeing where this goes. Gevinson’s story, which is troubling to read now as an adult woman, reminds me of the stories my friends and I carry from our college years like armor. Stories of gray area and fog clouding the difference between a “stop” and a “haha, you’re so weird” and regret in retrospect. I should have said something. But I was drunk. So was he. And no one ever said the word no.
When Gevinson first published that article, chatter began swirling online as to who the “Man” was that she had written about might be. Sleuthing fingers began pointing towards Ezra Koenig, frontman of indie band Vampire Weekend. The band, which had a vice grip on the same demographic that Rookie’s readership did — young women and teenage girls who lived on the fringe (or at least as much of the fringe as their suburban lives would allow) — was fresh off a Grammy win for their third album, Modern Vampires of the City. Their songs populated many a Tumblr dashboard and Koenig, the band’s lead singer and guitarist, was armed with dark, swoopy hair and a closet full of skinny jeans, both crucial pieces to being labeled a teen heartthrob in the early 2010s. Koenig maintained a presence on Twitter, where he was known for being funny and interacting with the score of teenage girls who tweeted at him in attempts to get him to notice them.
I remember reading that article and discussing it with my friends, fellow fans of Vampire Weekend. I thought that the story was kind of sad, but wasn’t that just the way men were? As young women, we were warned of the predatory lech, the strange man allegedly waiting for us in the bushes by the bus stop, but was there anything truly predatory about the man who admires us for our confidence and maturity? He may be a bit older, but what was wrong with the men who could keep up with our interest in pop culture five years too old for the average girl our age? Who remained gentlemen up until that moment where the match strikes the box — and even then, on better behavior than the boys our age?
I have never encountered a strange man at the bus stop or by my car, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I hope I never do. I have, however, met many men who hid behind the cloak of a nice, funny, “not like the others” guy only to show their teeth when it was just the two of us alone.
Gevinson’s entry, while powerful, didn’t change my mind about someone who I had placed on a pedestal as a teenager. I thought that Gevinson was lucky; she was dating a musician I had been harboring a crush on for years. I also specifically remember thinking that because she had never mentioned her abuser by name, it gave me a pass to continue listening to Vampire Weekend, to continue supporting them financially by buying their merch and tickets to their shows. I was absolved of the guilt that came with listening to someone who had truly been “canceled” à la R. Kelly or Kanye West. Two close friends and I traveled to Los Angeles to see Vampire Weekend in 2019 and stood at the barricade, singing along and screaming at the feet of someone who we all knew had these potential allegations pinned to them. I can promise you that I never once thought about that Rookie Mag article while dancing at the Hollywood Bowl that night. It would color my experience from time to time, but never informed my level of engagement. My complacency was more comfortable. After all, wasn’t that just what men were like?
When Gevinson’s article in The Cut was published Tuesday, Twitter slowly erupted with those who had read Rookie Mag and were familiar with previous events prepared to point fingers yet again, this time for accusations that were far more serious and damming. The unnamed predator, who Gevinson refuses to name, is assumed to be Koenig. Too many details of their arrangement and the trajectory of his career and personal life since 2016 line up. Upon finishing the article, I immediately sent it to my friends, the same ones who went to L.A. with me two years ago, all of us older and wiser and studied in the — stealing from Gevinson — “slow-motion aftershock[s]” that come with relitigating our own trauma or the trauma that others have shared with us. In the midst of us sharing screenshots of passages that stuck out and reckoning a favorite musician being called out like this (again), one of my friends said something that stuck with me:
“What is the role of a fan when their idol isn’t fully named, but you suspect it’s them? How do you engage when ‘waiting’ for proof that may never come?”
It brought me back to something I’ve thought about a lot in the wake of the #MeToo movement, where we began having discussions about sexual assault that went beyond people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, dangerous predators who committed heinous crimes and dug into the nuance of someone like Aziz Ansari, accused of sexual assault because of the ambiguity we are socialized to expect during sexual encounters and a lack of affirmative consent. I can vividly remember sitting in the car with my dad, who was trying to make sense of the Ansari situation and explaining to him the importance of affirmative consent; why not saying “no” doesn’t mean yes. He said something to me along the lines of “if a woman goes back to a guy’s house with him and has a drink after a date, what does she expect?” I remember the acute feeling of hurt not stemming from what was said, but who said it. How could my own father, someone who raised two daughters to not take any shit from a man, believe this? More importantly, what would make him believe something like this?
Gevinson points to a potential culprit:
My abuser was not free. I think the beliefs he held about men, women, and power hurt him, too. That is why he needed an outlet for abuse and came alive in our arrangement. This is not to suggest that you can only commit violence that is proportionate to your suffering but that it is possible to commit violence based on conditioning by the dominant culture alone. And because the conditions are there for you — not for everyone — to do what you want without accountability.
For as many conversations as we choose to have about sexual harassment and assault, or sexual coercion, or when we very briefly and publically choose to decry the phrase “boys will be boys,” we will never be free of the ghosts these horrors produce until we tackle the larger problem at hand — the white patriarchy that our nation was built upon and needs to keep afloat in order to keep things status quo. Therefore, the question my friend asked is impossible to answer, because it would apply to everyone we choose to admire and love, rock stars or not.
I am in no way accusing all men of being guilty of sexual assault. I am blessed to know men who value women and see them as more than sexual objects to be disposed of. (My dad, I might add, is one of these people.) Still, it is painful to think about this. It hurts to spend time thinking about the men in your life who have benefitted from this system work its magic. Fathers, brothers, uncles, mentors. But solely blaming men for this seedy part of the human condition wouldn’t be right. Rather, all of us, regardless of gender or sex, continue to perpetuate these systems of oppression. Most of us do so unwillingly. The college girl who was socialized to believe that “boys will be boys” will do as much damage as the phrase itself when she refuses to believe a survivor simply because the accused is a friend of hers. The wife or girlfriend who chooses to “stand by her man” will only sprinkle salt in an already festering wound. We do this damage not only to others, but to ourselves. I think the self-inflicted gunshot is always more devastating. I’ll offer a Fiona Apple lyric, since it proves to be Gevinson’s weapon of choice (and I can’t blame her) — “evil is a relay sport when the one who’s burnt turns to pass the torch.”
What keeps me from defending Koenig (or whoever Gevinson’s abuser may be; Koenig is never explicitly named) under the guise of “it’s just toxic masculinity, give him time to listen and learn,” is Gevinson detailing how in the end, optics were valued over autonomy. She writes:
We also did not talk about age or our power imbalance until he was suddenly worried about looking like a predator to the outside world. Appearing bad, it turned out, was a more urgent issue to him than causing harm. Looking like he was taking advantage of me was worse than raping me when I was too drunk to consent or coercing me into sex that I said, over and over, that I didn’t want to have… I witnessed one way in which obsession with identity blinds people to their own harmful actions, as though any man with a flattering self-image can’t possibly be a rapist.
Should Gevinson’s abuser in fact be Koenig, there’s something rather insidious about reading this passage, knowing that he’s currently in a relationship with a high-profile celebrity who is nine years his senior and an outspoken feminist. She’s even worked with Gevinson in the past. How much of that relationship is meant to rehabilitate a potentially damaged image? I’m not one to speculate on the ins and outs of celebrity relationships (I leave that up to the people who submit to deuxmoi on Instagram), but it’s something worth thinking about in the scope of this conversation. Koenig is now a father, which isn’t just further evidence pointing towards his guilt in all of this, but an opportunity for Gevinson to invoke Fiona Apple: “I don’t care if men accused of assault have good relationships with their wives or daughters or women they deem valuable. How do you treat women you have no stake in protecting? This is also the genius of the Fiona Apple lyric, ‘Good morning! Good morning! You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in!’”
A brief note on the whole “canceling” of it all: I don’t know how, if at all, my behavior will change in the wake of this news. I do, to a certain extent, believe in separating the art from the artist. I understand that phrase is loaded to the point where it’s become a parody of itself; a crutch for scorned fans to use when someone they’ve spent a good amount of time and money adoring is caught with their hands in the cookie jar. But I cannot pretend that I will, with ease, toss the art I’ve held dear into a dumpster and walk away, Zippo lighter thrown over my shoulder. I never stopped listening to Ryan Adams. I never stopped listening to David Bowie. I will probably continue listening to Vampire Weekend. I don’t share this as a point of pride but as an honest confession. I often wonder what the purpose is of someone announcing to their social media bubble that they’re “done” with a freshly scorned artist, only to join an online mob of those who seem to only have assembled to make this very proclamation. Gevinson states herself that “the notion of monitoring a mob I didn’t ask for sounds exhausting, whether this mob is coming for his head or mine.” She continues, “the awareness that my experience would be transmuted into a fascination with his moral character makes me want to get offline forever. It is easy to imagine a world where audiences’ infatuation with fame takes priority over a survivor’s needs.”
I have zero desire to join an online mob of keyboard warriors eager to “cancel” someone who has never been mentioned by name and who has no corroborating accounts to confirm their identity. While the situation demands something more comprehensive than “innocent until proven guilty,” I cannot in good faith publicly deride someone who has not been explicitly named for something as serious as sexual assault. However, naming your abuser is not a prerequisite to being believed. What I say with my friends and in the privacy of my group chats is my own business.
In this case, perhaps the punishment will fit the crime. The assault that lives in the limbo of sexual coercion will forever color the way I engage with the music of one of my favorite artists. Lyrics take on new meaning. Daydreams I had as a 17-year-old of Koenig noticing me at a concert and becoming my boyfriend no longer seem innocuous and instead, chillingly plausible. I come back to my friend’s question and the men I know in my life who, partially through fault of the system they were raised in, have been taught that these are low-level harms that are simply a part of being a woman. What did she expect?
I have no problem with these assumptions informing how I interact with art I still love and care about. Should my inclination to no longer be a fanatic affect the finances of an abuser, well. I guess that would just be too bad.
What did they expect?
I believe survivors. I hope you do, too.
I feel like I say it at the end of all of my newsletters, but thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting me as I write through it all. I love writing about culture and current goings-on, and this really checked a lot of boxes for me personally. I’ll keep recommendations brief this week, since this was such a deep dive.
Watch this: I started watching Riverdale after finishing my Twin Peaks rewatch, thinking it was the next logical choice after leaving behind the surreal world of David Lynch. I was only slightly wrong. It is just as chaotic as I had been told it would be, and I love getting to watch utter nonsense before bed each night. I just finished season two, so if you wanna chat about it…
Read this: Seriously, please read Tavi Gevinson’s article in The Cut this week. She writes like how I imagine a surgeon operates: with precision and immense care and dedication to the craft. I have always wanted to write in the way she does. Her voice is unmatched and beautifully honest. She is without a doubt one of the best writing today.
Listen to this: Fiona Apple will always have my heart, but it’s nearly Fetch the Bolt Cutters season, as noted by my friend Anna on Twitter yesterday. The best album to come out of 2020. Probably the best album of the decade. Yes, I know that 2020 is the first year of the decade. Give it a listen and you’ll see why.
This Must Be the Place is published at least once every other week (give or take) and is about whatever I feel like writing about. If you’ve liked anything you’ve read, you can always subscribe to this newsletter (and tell your friends, too!).
I happened upon this newsletter because I enjoy following Simone on twitter and this article was the first I read and incredible. Thanks for writing awesome stuff, can't wait to dig through the archives when there's a good time. BUt the tip of this iceberg is really promising. Thank you Simone.