Author Emmeline Clein on hysterical women, dissecting tone, and that one Taylor Swift rumour
Plus, feeling uncomfy at Uniqlo.
VANCOUVER – I’m standing shirtless inside a Uniqlo fitting room and I don’t like what I see.
It’s Saturday afternoon and though I came here looking for socks and underwear, the search for essentials has expanded to include shirts, pants, and sweaters. While I don’t come here often, this fitting room feels like familiar terrain. I have stood here before, half-naked, in the room closest to the folding station, surveying parts of myself I didn’t previously consider defective.
I’m not always like this. At home, I stand naked in front of mirrors two or three times a day. I study my corporeal form. I try to embrace my body for what is, and not what I want it to be. And most of the time I succeed.
But standing here in this clothing store confessional, that sense of self-assurance has dissipated. Instead, all I feel is a slight sense of dysmorphia; as if I’m staring at something foreign and not the skin I’ve inhabited for three decades.
I assume this is normal; to be slightly disgusted by your own sagging stomach and hairy shoulders. To suddenly consider marathons and meal plans and Equinox memberships. To long for absolution from your imperfections.
But what if it wasn’t?
A few days ago, I spoke with Emmeline Clein about her book, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. The conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, found the writer and cultural critic dissecting Western beauty standards, and the harms they cause, while also waxing poetic on “Barbenheimer,” The Oscars, Sofia Coppola, and the “Gaylor” Swift phenomenon. It was a welcome reminder that care can come from within.
While the topics we discussed are sensitive, I think our chat is suitable for just about everyone.
I stare at myself in the fitting room mirror a while longer.
It’s not a perfect body, but it’s what I’ve got. That should be enough.
I pull out my phone and snap a picture. I am straight-faced, stoic, and, crucially, still shirtless.
I want to remember this feeling. I want to unlearn it.
ES: Are you in New York right now?
EC: I am, I’m in Brooklyn.
ES: But you aren’t from there originally, are you?
EC: I was born here but when I was two my family moved to California for my dad’s job. Then we moved to D.C. I moved back here for college and have been here ever since.
ES: Do you have roommates?
EC: I have one roommate, who is a teacher. It’s fabulous for my work because she’s never here.
ES: You have one person waking up early to educate young minds and another sleeping until 11 A.M. and smoking cigs all day.
EC: Exactly.
ES: I want to get to the book, but I love your cultural criticism, and I wonder what you think of the current discourse surrounding The Academy Awards and Barbie.
EC: Well, the interesting thing about me–my toxic feminist trait, I guess–is that I didn’t see Barbie or Tár but I did see Oppenheimer twice.
ES: Laughs.
EC: I think it’s fascinating that anyone expected Barbie to do anything genuinely feminist. Anything beyond the idea that women should be allowed to have jobs and not be raped and murdered. I just wasn’t that interested in it because it seemed depressing, and a movie for children, which I ultimately think it kind of was.
I wish I had seen it so could say more. My impulse not to see it is interesting, I think. We have so few happy expressions of feminism that seem optimistic, and it seems like Barbie was doing that for a lot of people. I didn’t want to see it and go in cynical and hate it and then pointlessly yuck other people’s yum.
People freak out over the Oscars every year and I don’t know why. It’s not a real metric of quality.
ES: Weirdly, people expect the biggest box office movies of the year to also be the actual best pieces of cinema of the year. Top Gun: Maverick can make a trillion dollars, but that doesn’t make it Kuberick.
EC: Totally. People seem to understand that when it comes to franchises, but less so with these one-off big-budget spectacles. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. Like, if this is the culture we live in, and what we have access to, then we can delude ourselves into thinking it’s fabulous and not depressing.
ES: What’s your feminist read on Oppenheimer then?
EC: It had some problems with feminism. That Florence Pugh character was not fleshed out. She was basically a trope; the female-hysteria, he-broke-up-with-me-so-I-have-to-slit-my-wrists plotline. But I thought the acting was amazing, the way they addressed the history and the character that is Oppenheimer. His realization that he’d been a pawn of the state was done well and offered an interesting comment on white masculinity. That he could have had the politics he had and still had this dude-like-delusion that he wasn’t a total pawn in a project he didn’t believe in. Or, if he knew on a tiny level, he had the hubris to think he could manipulate it.
The Barbie movie makes it seem like everything a woman does is feminist. That’s not feminist to me. It’s more feminist to be able to critique a woman in the same way you would critique a man.
I was trying to be a ventriloquist and channel the pain of so many other women, whether they were on internet forums, or fictional characters, or people I know in real life.
ES: What do you think of Reneé Rapp?
EC: I think she’s pretty fabulous. I haven’t seen Mean Girls yet. I’m really coming out of the closet as being behind the times. But I like her music, I like her vibe. I’m just not qualified and I apologize.
ES: Who are you paying attention to, then, if not Miss Rapp?
EC: I was just reading Rachel Syme’s profile of Sofia Coppola, and there’s a part where she sends Rachel an email about something that she’s been irritated about for years, and she says “I don't understand why people think that just because you're interested in superficiality, you’re superficial.” I think that question is fascinating and at the crux of a lot of our internecine, girl-on-girl cultural crimes at the moment. Sofia’s films interrogate the way girls are taught that their superficial circumstances can determine their life’s circumstances; that you can reject that, or that you can re-claim it by embracing it to this almost campy-extreme, or point of excess. At the same time, while I think it’s interesting to document that excessive impulse, you have to take it a step further to push your thinking forward…
That said, I think Eliza McLamb is also really smart and interesting. She’s a Substacker and musician. She’s playing with the manic pixie dream girl paradigm in a very fascinating way. She documents that yearning to embody the ideal girl, or woman, in a way that’s funny but also vulnerable. Like, she seems to understand that this ideal was designed to hurt us, but we can’t tear it down, so why not embrace it?
ES: It feels like we’re living in a period where the common response to anything is “It’s not that serious” but also everything is so deadly serious. I think it’s true for everyone but especially women. Like, you can’t grab a coffee and go shopping without someone telling you to put your feminist badge on the desk and get out. Even if your little coffee is the only thing that sparks joy!
EC: Exactly. That goes back to why I didn’t want to see Barbie. I didn’t want to ruin it for other people. But then there’s the peppy girl-boss, girl-dinner thing which I think is easy to critique as if we’re backsliding. I think that’s unnecessarily cruel. Like, we’re not allowed to go on a walk and enjoy ourselves.
There’s been a shift in the past decade towards this extremely nihilistic tone that is more plaintive than it first appears. People my age were raised on this idea that feminism totally slayed and there was one plus-sized girl in Vogue and everything was awesome. But we slowly realized those things didn’t work as well as we thought. Like, issues around body image still exist, the same extremely emaciated beauty standard that shows a version of a girl, who might not make it to womanhood, remains ascendant. You think: What if I make a joke about it? What if I try to embody that standard while admitting it’s wrong? But, to me, that approach runs the risk of being just as harmful.
I always want to come at these things from a place of compassion and attention, though. I don’t think condemning that stance is helpful to anyone. Condemnation just obfuscates the larger structures that make it so these feel like our only options. Like when I talk about my book, most women will say something to the effect of “What girl doesn’t have an eating disorder?” Which is sort of my whole point. Like, how have we gotten to such a nihilistic place on this issue? How do we get back to one that is kinder?
ES: On the book, I was sort of interrogating my feelings as I prepared for our chat, and I realized I had a real sense of queasiness, but in the sense of sympathy pangs. I imagine this would have been a difficult book to write, but maybe not.
EC: It was difficult to write but it was also cathartic. I’m interested in tone and I wanted to give eating disorders the structural, intellectual, and political-economic treatment that other mental illnesses, which have the same level of demographic prevalence but which don’t primarily affect women, regularly receive. These are illnesses that primarily affect women. People understand that this is an issue that has to do with beauty standards, but it’s thought of in a very straightforward way when it’s also about how capitalism, patriarchy, and racism conspire to make the act of consuming food incredibly freighted… I wanted to write an intelligent and analytical book, but I didn't want it to be dry. I was trying to be a ventriloquist and channel the pain of so many other women, whether they were on internet forums, or fictional characters, or people I know in real life. I didn’t want to censor the ways they express themselves because I feel like a lot of my favorite media–Elizabeth Wurtzel, Jennifer’s Body, Bachelorette starring Kristen Dunst– have been criticized and misunderstood due to their tone. They’re accused of being acerbic or pulpy or gross in some way, and so I tried throughout the book to present medical studies and analysis, even when I’m writing about having a sore throat from throwing up and having a cigarette.
ES: At the same time, eating disorders can involve an element of control, which is interesting given what we’ve been talking about in terms of societal pressures. Some people might see it as a release valve.
EC: Completely, I think the impulse for control in a very chaotic world is a massive part of many people’s eating disorders. It is fascinating to trace that impulse back through the centuries, to look at what was commonly known as female hysteria until not that long ago. Women were understood to have these imbalanced humours and to be incapable of being rational and of being in society the way that men were. They were supposed to be quiet at home. Some modern feminist scholars interpret those hysterical outbursts as the woman’s way of taking back control of her life. They were protesting, but in the language that men gave them.
There’s this incredible Barbara Ehrenreich book called Witches, Midwives, and Healers that argues hysterical women were performing a sort of guerilla warfare. These “hysterical women” weren’t united in a bigger fight against the patriarchy, they were each fighting their own battle. I think eating disorders function in a parallel way; you are attempting to take control, by inflicting something onto yourself that you feel the world will do eventually. It feels like control, but it isn’t.
Right now these issues are very isolating, but they don’t have to be. The way eating disorders are currently treated focuses almost entirely on the individual. They try to help you understand that you are overvaluing thinness and that it’s not the only thing that matters about you. That’s true, but it’s also a bit gaslight-y because many people have seen the difference in attention that they get when they are thin versus when they are bigger. These treatments also tend to happen in silos. Patients can’t talk to each other about their experiences because it could be triggering for someone else. I think it would be better for us to communicate these experiences more openly.
ES: How are you feeling heading into this current press run? Are you worried at all about this being a challenge for your recovery journey?
EC: I feel cautiously optimistic. It’s always scary because there isn’t an endpoint with eating disorders. It’s awesome that this doesn’t control my day-to-day life and that I’m not having a high volume of intrusive thoughts. I’m worried that the book could be triggering in many ways for people who want to read it. Eating disorders are often written about in memoirs or self-help books, and the authors often include an abundance of details, to the point that these cautionary tales almost read like manuals for how to manage a disorder. People will give these insanely and unnecessarily detailed rundowns of what they were eating to prove that they were anorexic, in part because our diagnostic paradigms are so exclusionary and require people to be so sick before they can be diagnosed. I tried to avoid anything that might be instructional or triggering. It’s not about what I ate or threw up or didn’t eat, or what anyone I interviewed did, it’s about what could make someone think this is a good idea, and the emotional truths behind it.
ES: What’s your strategy for promoting this on something like #BookTok? I imagine it might be hard given that the book would likely involve trigger warnings for people, and I wonder if you and the team have discussed a strategy.
EC: I have a letter that I wrote to accompany the book whenever we send it to people. I try to explain my intentions and what the reader should expect so they aren’t caught off guard. Honestly, I think the #BookTok girlies are stronger than anyone at a major publishing house is giving them credit for. Gen-Z, in general, is less trigger averse than even the youngest millennials were, I think. We weren’t as snowflake-y as the media made us out to be, but Gen-Z especially doesn’t want to be babied. I don’t want to trigger anyone, but I would say I’m equally as worried that the book will not be read holistically. There are parts you could take out of context, but I hope my intentions are clear.
ES: Are you having a book release party? My friend Kate has one coming up and she asked me to M.C. it. I’m wondering what I should expect.
EC: Wait what does being an M.C. entail?
ES: I’m not entirely sure. I think I’m mostly introducing people. There’s going to be a DJ. But it had me wondering about your experience with this sort of event. Is M.C.’ing common?
EC: I’m not the most well-versed in this. I’ve only been to one book party for someone my age. They didn’t have an M.C. but it was really lovely. After the reading, we went to a bar which I am doing for this release. But I’m also going to throw myself a real party. I haven’t decided if I’m going to read at that one.
ES: I don’t think Kate is even reading at this party. I think she’s sort of approaching it like you, inviting the nearest and dearest, and they’ll have books and stuff you can buy.
EC: Yeah, I think bookstore launches tend to feel really professional. There’s strangers there, and business colleagues. Or at least you hope there are. Did you read that Nylon article about “The Makings of a Literary It Girl,” and some writers who threw their own parties as promotional vehicles? I thought it was totally sweet and innocuous but then it became this weird Twitter thing where a bunch of men were criticizing them. Like, I think it’s fab if you want to use a party to sell more books. Putting a book out is scary and the publishing side of the business can be confusing.
ES: Before we wrap, I want to ask you about The New York Times recent “Gaylor” op-ed, which speculated about Taylor Swift’s sexuality, and which was thoroughly rebuked by her team. You wrote a different article for the Times a few months before that talking about “Gaylor” and how fantasizing about Taylor being gay could be empowering for a young queer woman. It was one of the best things I’ve ever read about the whole conspiracy, and I wonder how you feel about this more recent controversy.
EC: I could not have more to say on this. My piece explored what I find most beautiful about the “Gaylor” phenomenon is the way it has become a touchstone for certain queer girls, and has offered them a sense of community. They have sort of banded together to write this thing. Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s fan fiction, maybe it’s Maybelline. Either way, there’s this universe centered around the idea that the most famous woman in the world is just like me. Not only in the sense that she shares my sexuality but maybe she has also felt ashamed of herself in this specific way and has shared this pain. I wanted to write about the ingenuity of the girls online, and the intensity of yearning that is fostered by queer shame that would make someone want to believe the conspiracy is true. I personally find the theory convincing but I don’t think that matters, and it in and of itself is not newsworthy.
I was deeply confused by that article. Since when is it appropriate to officially and explicitly out someone in the Times? It’s odd. That’s not how I thought we do the news, but I guess you learn something every day. I also wondered what was going on behind the scenes because, in my experience, the fact-checking process was rigorous. They changed a lot, they added parentheticals… Things that I knew would make Gaylors on the internet feel I was being homophobic. I wanted the tone to be “Maybe, maybe, maybe” because that is the ethos, but the fact-checkers wanted it to be clearly stated that Taylor is straight. So I’m just curious about how we got from that place to full-scale 5,000 words declaring “She’s gay!”
The article also should have cited some of the genius teenagers who helped bring this theory to life, because I’ve seen those threads. It felt like the community of Gaylors was erased from the article in a way that made it lose an emotional tenor that could have made it something more than an attempt to out a celebrity. At the same time, I don’t want to condemn the writer. She was coming at it from a similar impulse to mine, where you want to believe so badly that this person is like you. And if you go deep enough into the theory, you end up feeling bad for Taylor Swift, if it’s true.
I dunno. It just felt like the piece approached queer issues like closeting, and the shame it can bring a person, clinically. Part of that probably stems from the fact that queer writers, like women writers, can have their objective and analytical, and intellectual points undermined or missed because their tone is construed as overly emotional or too invested. I can understand why she’d want her piece to seem coldly reported, so that isn’t being called a crazy yearning teenage girl. I respect that decision, but I think what I’ve been trying to do is embrace that I might be called over-emotional or over-invested in my subject. I want to convey that being too invested in something can help you see it more clearly than someone who is trying to keep their emotions at bay.
Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. She lives in Brooklyn.
“Anything beyond the idea that women should be allowed to have jobs and not be raped and murdered.” 😮💨