Martha and Barbra

In praise of pleasure over approval.

The other night, I watched The Many Lives of Martha Stewart (Max), directed by Kinga Janik. Most of the time I was thinking, What great hair you have, Martha. The thick, blond slabs of it look pretty good, even when she's in jail.

I like the Martha we see in the doc because she laughs at herself, and she can't control it. She is almost always on the verge of laughing at the weird, stiff, yearning, and crazed churn of herself as host of her own shows, as a talk show guest, and in zillions of interviews. Certain shy people are on camera all the time, looking inward as we watch them.

What is Martha laughing about? In part, the way her spiel about food, and chickens, and compost, and glue guns is a cruise ship or perhaps a battle ship chugging backward against the tide of feminism that gives women a pass to leave the house. Sure, leave, says Martha, leave the way I did to create my media empire, but when you get home, here’s how to make the best martini you will ever have. You don’t even have to mix it, but I’ll give you the recipe.

At one point in the 4-part series, Barbara Walters asks her in that poisonous whisper of hers, “Martha, why do so many people hate you?” And you think, Barbara Walters, what a running dog lackey you were of the media establishment that has as its highest value crushing any woman who shows the world: Everything you think about women is a lie.

I have been writing lately about how women line up—or are lined up by others as cattle in a live stock competition—how women line up for the approval or disapproval of others, male others and female others and gender nonconforming others, how women find themselves placed in the glare of you, I don’t like you because you’re not admirable enough, or you, let me hang this ribbon around your neck because you pass the good-girl test, or the smell test, or the clean underwear test.

You want to see some crazy-assed shit along these lines? I just rewatched the 1991 Mike Wallace interview with Barbra Streisand on Sixty Minutes. She agrees to sit with him on camera because she’s publicity whoring for her upcoming movie The Prince of Tides, the second film she’s directed. The first words out of Wallace’s mouth are, “I didn’t like you. I couldn’t stand how self-obsessed you were.” He’s referring to times, early in her career, she went on a show he had. Her face falls because it can’t not. It’s an ambush, and no matter how practiced she’s become at handling this arrow or that dart shot at her, no one is ever practiced enough to hear such sentences without registering the hurt.

That’s what he’s after. He wants to put her in her place because she’s become a thousand times more successful than he has since they were starting out. The astonishing thing about the sequence is his sense he’s speaking for all the men on the planet who also hate Barbra’s staggering originality. He’s doing the world a favor. At another point in the interview, he asks her if she knew what she would become thirty years ago. She says, “I knew when I was seven. I was going to make this life for myself. There was no other way.” He hates her for this knowledge. It’s written all over his astonished smirk. He’s thinking about himself at seven. What did he think about his future? Did he even have to think about the course his life would take the way an undefeated girl would have to think about hers?

While they sit together in the studio, he keeps making her cry. He raises the issue of her father’s death when she was fifteen months old and that she still cares she didn’t have a father who might have loved her. Wallace reports he spoke to her mother who says on camera that her daughter, “Doesn’t have time to be close to anyone.” Wallace calls Streisand “controlling.” Meanwhile, the 60 Minutes crew shows her working with people on her movie, all of whom obviously love her because she looks at them and takes them in.

In the cases of both Barbra and Martha, if a woman is perceived as strong, that’s her weakness. She must be compensating. She must have a psychological defect. If she’s weak and confirms the stereotype, then she proves she belongs in second place. Who would accuse a male director of not being close to his mother . . . or a male letter carrier, for that matter?

When Barbara Walters asks Martha, “Why do so many people hate you?” Martha looks sad and says she doesn't know. But she accepts the verdict. If Barbara Walters says she’s hated, then it must be true. It's always a solemn and worthy job to consider why we are hated, although sometimes we are not actually hated. All women think they are hated if people tell us we are hated. And people like telling women they are hated. Boy, do they like saying this to us.

Every fucking person who speaks to Martha, male or female, asks her, “Don't you feel something is missing in your life?” Or, “When are you going to find a mate? Aren't you lonely?” One time she snaps, “I'll find a mate when I want one.”

Near the end of the last segment, someone asks her, “Martha, do you wish you could start your life all over again?” Translation: Now that you’re old, how can you enjoy one second of your existence? I thought, how absurd to imagine that being old you would want to erase everything you have felt and learned that gives you joy to carry around with you.

It's not wisdom we gain as we move through time, it's a sense of humor. The kind of sense of humor Martha had early on. I can imagine a moment when you might want to leave the clothes of your life on the beach and swim away to a different life, but not to a different, unformed version of who you are.

The amount of insult casually tossed at Martha is the amount of contempt the world has for all women who make mistakes and are expected to disappear. Or at least have bad hair. But they don't disappear.

How I wish both women had yanked off their mikes and walked away from the insults. Basta, no more, muthafuckers, you can’t talk to me that way. I want them to say, “I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t need your approval.” In the 1970’s, when the sex researcher and author Shere Hite walked off sets where she was ambushed and insulted, it destroyed her publishing career, and neither Martha nor Barbra is willing to take that risk. Plus, in a state of sadness about being called the names you most fear being called, you’re a bit stunned and can’t move.  

A few days ago, I posted some early reactions to the Martha doc on social media and in five minutes some fingers were wagging, reminding me of Martha's less than admirable qualities. If you think you need to school me about the right people to laugh at and wonder about, if you think you need to disapprove of my amusement and worship of a person's hair, you are of course telling me off as well, and what I say to you is what I would say to Barbara Walters if she were here in my bedroom: bugger off. (Not that there's anything wrong with buggery.)

You don't want to know the number of people whose values I admire and I can't stand them. They give me no pleasure. They never wanted to give pleasure. They're not in the business of producing pleasure. I'm not looking to find people admirable. I'm looking to feel pleasure when I'm around them. It's incalculable. It's weird. That's what makes life fun. And by the way, I am aging exactly the way I have lived every other period of my life: disgracefully.

Tom, a flash fiction

One day, in Riverside Park, my friend Tom said, “Stop it.” I said, “What?” He said, “You’re spying on that man.” I said, “I’m not.” He said, “How can you get involved with every stranger you pass? What, you have zero attention span?” I said, “I want to see what he’s reading.”

I walked behind the bench where the man was sitting and looked over his shoulder. He didn’t turn. He had thick, dark hair and the beautiful mouth of a Greek statue. He was reading Jude the Obscure, my mother’s favorite book. Jude the Obscure has to be one of the most painful novels ever written, the clattering machinery of social power and money grinding the characters down.

When I got back to Tom, he was hanging over the railing, looking at the river. I told him about Jude, and he said, “Who cares?” I said, “Don’t you think it’s odd? It’s the most unhappy book on the planet.” He said, “No, it’s not.” I said, “What is?” He said, “They’re all unhappy in different ways.”

I said, “Do you think there are only two conditions in life: love in the absence of knowledge and knowledge that kills love?” He said, “That’s been my experience, except with my daughter, and that’s parent love, and I don’t know if we know each other, either.”

I said, “What do people want when they don’t have to struggle to stay alive? In a glorious future where, let’s say, there’s no poverty and political coercion, what will people want?” He said, “A life of ordinary anguish and selfishness.” He smiled. I said, “People want what they think they’re not supposed to have.” He said, “No, Laurie, that’s what you want.”

Zoom conversation tomorrow for paid subscribers! Saturday March 23 from 3 to 4pm EST. To RSVP, please email me: lauriestone@substack.com.

One of the topics for Saturday: Writing from life. Also, everyone attending is invited to send ahead a specific question about your own writing projects and reading interests.

Writing from life has the advantage of I really care about this moment because it happened to me and I like feeling the things I feel when I think about things that have happened to me. That rush of I care is also the thing that will produce a dead piece of lox on the page.

There is a weird and often not conscious wish that other people will care about a thing that has happened because it has really happened to a person or a character. Alas, no subject is intrinsically interesting or uninteresting. It’s what the narrator makes of “what happened.”

On Saturday, we'll explore concrete ways to transfer the needs of the individual to feel a thing that has happened to the needs of the reader, who wants to experience the story as if the story is about them. How does this magic occur? How does the narrator stay out of the way of the reader's enjoyment, so the reader is not asked to feel anything for the narrator? To attend, please upgrade your subscription here.

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