In books like “Why Have Children?” and “The Purity Myth,” Jessica Valenti announced herself as a provocateur on the subjects of women, feminism and gender issues. But her new memoir, “Sex Object,” despite its suggestive title, feels far less raucous and adversarial.
This aching — and at times infuriating — account of attempting to live, date and work while female is a brave admission of vulnerability, an invitation to intimacy from a woman with no reason to trust that a great many readers won’t throw her disclosures back in her face. (The book’s epilogue consists of appalling Internet responses to her tweets, posts and articles: “You’re one heck of a disgusting ugly looking hag. … I hope some mack truck crashes head on into you.”)
Valenti, founder of the site Feministing and a columnist for the Guardian, resists playing the hero. Instead, she sets down something more private and surprising: a thoughtful lament, an elegy for the person she might have been in a less sexist world.
“Given all that women are expected to live with — the leers that start when we’ve barely begun puberty … the violence we survive or are constantly on guard for — I can’t help but wonder what it all has done to us. Not just to how women experience the world, but how we experience ourselves,” she writes. “Maybe we’re doing ourselves a disservice by working so hard to move past what sexism has done to us rather than observe it for a while.”
So we observe.
We see a motley crew of men who’ve impressed themselves upon Valenti’s life, from the subway lurker who ejaculates on the back pocket of her jeans when she’s in the eighth grade to the teacher who ogles her chest and barters top grades for hugs. We meet the boyfriend who has sex with her in a bathroom at a party just after she broke her finger and the one who has sex with her after she passed out from drinking too much. There’s also the passel of fraternity brothers who bedecked the door of Valenti’s dorm room with a condom and a slur, pushing her into a depression that led her to transfer schools. Later, she describes a blog post in Politico that turned a photograph of her meeting with former president Bill Clinton into an occasion to comment on her breasts and forwardness.
In aggregate, the relentless press of these stories is as exhausting as it is perversely mesmerizing, like some matriarchal religion’s Book of Job. Valenti argues that the multiple razor nicks add up to a psychologically potent wound, and the experience of reading her book is a demonstration of that fact, a crescent stroke from the blade of her collected violations.
Interestingly, she focuses not on the men but on the way their words and looks have warped her inner life. After a close male friend of Valenti’s propositions her, despite his bond with her husband, she flares not with anger but with shame. “He must have thought I was open to hearing it,” she explains. “Men see that I am the kind of person for whom doing the right thing does not come easily.” It’s strange — and bitter — to hear this self-doubt and self-blame flowing from someone who elsewhere seems so confident.
Of course, writing represents a kind of empowerment, and by narrating these stories Valenti is repositioning herself as subject rather than object. (The book’s title winks wryly at this transformation.) Evaluating her memoir leaves the reviewer in an awkward position — as another voice adding to a sea of voices interpreting her.
Still, it must be said that “Sex Object,” which registers a life spent under the gaze of others, doesn’t always hold up under aesthetic scrutiny. It feels like the work of a passionate but tired feminist, a fighter too worn down by struggle to alchemize it. There are moments of epiphany — and certainly enough shocking tales of sexual debasement — but they occasionally fail to come together in a narrative arc.
On the other hand, Valenti may not care about intellectualizing her experience or belaboring her prose. Certain episodes in the book stand alone perfectly as glimmers of someone else’s life — the what-for of memoir — while also gesturing toward a larger argument. Valenti appears to want to dose our era of giddy, optimistic feminism — “We laugh with Amy Schumer,” she writes, “listen to Beyonce tell us girls run the world” — with a shot of something sober. The result isn’t always intoxicating, but it is real.
