Chapter 19 #2
“It’s naive, unforgivably so. The table exists whether you acknowledge it or not—it impacts you, and others, regardless. So honestly, it’s a betrayal,” said Alex. “Plain and simple.”
“I see,” said Sloane, with potentially too much excitement. Because it was exciting! That kind of black-and-white stance was invigorating. It gave her something: a hypothesis. A question.
Essentially, what was power? Was it the woman who used her desirability and the conventions set for her by the institutional penises-that-be to exist in the room, or was it the woman who said “Fuck this room, I don’t even want it”?
Was the Good Woman the one who molded herself on the accepted path?
But, of course, then every woman who couldn’t achieve acceptability was …
what, rejected from the holy church of Whatever It Takes?
Alex could promise to leave the ladder down behind her all she wanted, but how many Alexes were actually required in order to dominate the room?
If modeling “appropriate” conventions was the necessary bar for all women to clear, what behavior did Alex expect from the queer woman, the BIPOC woman, the disabled woman, the trans woman…
? Which was not even to speak of the unattractive woman, god forbid!
“What’s going on in there?” asked Alex, playfully squinting at Sloane’s face. “You look deep in thought.”
“I am, a little,” Sloane admitted, and took a sip of her coffee before gambling with, “What do you think about me using this experience to write something?”
“Which experience?” Alex asked. “Our inevitable demise or the descent into geriatrics?”
“Oh, I meant The House,” Sloane said, as Alex froze with her cup partway to her mouth. “I’m not going to exploit the girls, I promise,” she said quickly. “I’m more … curious about the uncanny volume of high-achieving women The House produces.”
“Uncanny? Next you’ll be calling us witches.” Alex’s brow was pointedly arched, her eyes elsewhere.
“Unusual, then. Remarkable. Not occult.” Sloane forced a laugh. “And anyway, I meant more like its philosophies and values, and why that culture works or doesn’t work.”
“I see,” said Alex, her brows now stitched neatly together.
“Not doesn’t work, just—I don’t know, I’m fleshing it out,” Sloane amended quickly, realizing this was not the time to bring up The Country Wife or Alex’s disappointment in her ostensible failure.
“Basically,” Sloane summarized, “I want to look into the values of feminine institutions, and structures of power in feminine spaces. You know, what is female power?” she riffed, realizing that Alex had begun to nod slowly, then with increasing fervor, despite this not at all being the thing Sloane wanted to research.
Well, not that it wasn’t, but there was definitely something more micro at work, something best paraphrased as “What the fuck is up with this sorority cult?” Which Sloane was at least smart enough to know wasn’t going to be taken well by Alex.
“So, you know, in addition to The House, there’d be some discussion about wellness influencers, or momfluencers, for example.
The way women themselves give shape and definition to traditionally patriarchally understood power and agency. ”
“That’s incredible,” said Alex, who was still chewing something, unclear what. “But that’s still way too pop-psychology for the University, though, isn’t it? Given what you said about the dean.”
“I was thinking about maybe chatting with Priscilla about it,” said Sloane, hoping Alex wouldn’t find that too inappropriately buddy-buddy, given that Alex was their common ground.
“Maybe there’s some nonfiction imprint she knows about that would find it interesting?
Something non-academic?” Distantly, Sloane felt her deadline disintegrating blithely into space. Progress:??
(No really, was it progress??)
“Oh, good idea. I can ask her for you.” Alex seemed to be gradually coming around, shifting her ideological weight from foot to foot.
“I’d have to ask you to be cognizant of The Girls and their privacy, though.
No real names, nothing like that. Might be better if you focus on alumnae rather than current members. ”
“Oh yeah, completely doable,” said Sloane. She would have to be in touch with more than just The Country Wife, anyway, to find out where things really diverged.
“I can help connect you, if you want,” Alex said. “A lot of our best and brightest have gatekeepers, but I can make sure you get through. All of our alums have great connections, too—the breadth of interviews here could be really interesting.”
Oh, this would definitely be a book, Sloane realized.
The list of high-profile women who might be willing to be interviewed …
it was pop-sociology, but why should that have to be a bad thing?
If Burns still couldn’t be convinced, then to hell with the tenure track.
She could really build something with this.
“That would be amazing, thank you so much—”
“Absolutely. You’re an honorary sister now.” Alex beamed at her, and Sloane felt an irritation, a tiny patch of friction, at the knowledge that she was misleading what currently seemed to be her only real friend.
She mulled it over later, in her office, watching Arya’s head bounce soundlessly along to the Enya he listened to while plugging in grades.
She pondered, staring into space, too distracted to attend to her correspondences (mainly students requesting extra credit).
Then she suddenly stood and tapped Arya’s shoulder to get his attention.
He jumped. “Whoa, hi,” he exhaled, grinning up at her as he removed his headphones. “Got a little too in the zone there. What’s up?”
This close his eyes were a velvety brown, Parisian ganache.
His lower lip was bitten red from concentration.
The impetus had been innocent, purely academic, but the choreography of how this all played out was somehow suspect.
From where Sloane stood and Arya leaned in his office chair, his mouth was very close to the apex of her thighs.
“The, um. The influencer I told you about,” Sloane said. “The Country Wife.”
“Oh yeah, the homesteading trad wife.” Arya nodded.
“I want to write about her,” Sloane said, and trailed off, because she wasn’t sure how to use words for I want to write about her but my friend might be mad.
Was she a professional or wasn’t she? She couldn’t reasonably leave out such a notable outlier.
And wasn’t that part of the undressing of feminine power?
Was it power for Caroline Collins to have a significant, financially viable platform of acolytes even if the values her brand espoused were harmful— or even, as Alex had put it, a betrayal to her kind?
Was there ever real power in the subversion of power?
Was it simply committing to the bit when it came to exploitation, or was it in some way exactly the same as Alex’s approach—parlaying desirability into money, influence, and the increasingly relevant social capital of ultra-niche microfame?
Was Alex’s success by traditionally masculine markers less significant than Caroline’s success by traditionally feminine ones?
Was gendering power even a thing that could be done, or was it already a failure because it was inherently buying into a system ruled by heteronormative cisgender men?
“Cool, cool,” said Arya, as if he were now vibing to the low-fi bass of Sloane’s private thoughts. “I think it’s interesting, but more importantly, you think it’s interesting. So, you know. What would you say to anyone who told you they were inspired?”
“I’d say chase it,” Sloane admitted aloud. “I’d say to follow it down the rabbit hole, because only in madness lies genius. But then again—” She laughed. “I’m full of shit.”
“No, you’re not.” She’d been lost in thought, albeit not so lost that she didn’t feel it like a fever flush when Arya leaned closer. “It’s true, and you know it. So who better to take advice from than you?” he pointed out, the curl of his wry smile landing somewhere in her stomach.
Sex with Max that night was unusually good, apropos of nothing.
“Twice in one week,” Max panted, “I must have been a very, very good boy,” but Sloane’s thoughts were once again elsewhere, so she had replied with little more than a distracted laugh.
Though she was all too cognizant later when her screen lit up with an email confirming her meeting with Priscilla.
Too buzzed to sleep, she slid out of bed to sit at her computer, typing up what would become the proposal for her book while Frankie the dog seized casually with halting snores.
I have to figure it out for my daughter. I have to become the right kind of woman so that she will have a model and a path. That urgency, it keeps me up at night. I thought I had stakes before but I had no idea. It’s a new form of seeking perfection—knowing with abject certainty that I will fail.
(Deadline: already slipping through her fingers. Circumstances: exigent. Progress: irreversible. A long, long way.)