There's No Integrity In The Box

But refusing it is a dangerous business

On the same day it was announced that Irish singer Sinead O’Connor had died, I went to see the Barbie movie. This was a more fitting juxtaposition than I expected. The movie is a hyper-pigmented daydream about the box women are put in in order to be accepted and loved, and O’Connor is a perfect example of the reality of what happens when a woman dares to publicly refuse the box entirely.

I’m sure I don’t have to explain who Barbie is to anyone reading this newsletter. She has been at the center of the culture for decades, long before the current onslaught of summer blockbuster movie promotion. But perhaps there are some of you who don’t know O’Connor. Though I am not the one to present a summation of the entirety of her life and impact, what I can say is that when she rocketed to the top of the pop charts with an orchestral, wild, and aching cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U I was just starting college— the perfect age to resonate with the dramatic heartache which fueled O’Connor’s unforgettable delivery.

The song was a romantic heartbreak song and all of us assumed that was what O’Connor was channeling, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was her trauma and tortured love for the mother who abused her that caused those famous tears to track down her face. And it was that abuse, justified by a Catholic Church that was later revealed to have enabled and hid the physical and sexual abuse of thousands of children over the years, that caused O’Connor to rip up a picture of Pope John Paul II defiantly on Saturday Night Live in 1992. The same picture of the pope that hung on her mother’s wall, which O’Connor had saved since her mother’s death when she was 18 years old.

The common cultural narrative was that O’Connor tanked her career with that defiant act, and at that crucial age that’s what I witnessed— a stunning, fierce, transcendentally-talented young woman who refused to be silent, appropriate, nice, simply pretty, or palatable by popular standards, and who was pilloried for it. The cost of her integrity was starkly clear, and underlined what had already been taught to me over a decade earlier when I witnessed the scold’s bridle used to hold down the tongues of Quaker women imprisoned for daring to speak for God in public. At seven years old, standing in a tiny museum in rural England, the message arrived like a stage whisper, pretending to be soft but actually loud enough to be heard at the back. At 20, watching the culture’s attempt to grind Sinead O’Connor into dust like every Cassandra before her, it was an air raid siren.

Woman, you will be punished.

I don’t know how old I was when my mother, after what felt like years of pleading, finally relented and bought me a Barbie doll— Ballerina Barbie, to be exact. What I do know is it took less than 24 hours after I pulled her out of the box for me to break her neck over my abusive brother’s head. I remember my incredible angst and regret so palpably. Not that I'd hit him hard enough to snap her neck (he deserved it), but that the reality of my life had so quickly intruded on my perfect Barbie dreams. Barbie, as much as I yearned for her saccharine simplicity, was never going to be able to survive in the real, complicated world of this girl.

Long after Barbie’s broken neck, the year before O’Connor ripped up the pope’s photo so defiantly, I arrived home from college for Thanksgiving. I’d spent the fall semester talking with people for the first time about the abuse I had experienced. I was emotionally exhausted and looking forward to collapsing to recuperate. Instead, my parents showed up hours late to pick me up from the house of the friend that had gotten me back to D.C., telling me bluntly that they’d been delayed because they were “dealing with” the fact that my brother had put his girlfriend in the hospital.

The last time I’d seen him before that, when I was 17, he’d pinned me on our parent’s bed and screamed how he’d kill me during a fight over the tv remote. And now he’d escalated to putting women in the hospital. Even though he was thousands of miles away, I was convinced that he would find out that I told and kill me. I curled in on myself and barely left my room for days, awash in flashbacks and fear.

O’Connor, meanwhile, was suffering accusations of censorship because she turned down the opportunity to appear on Saturday Night Live with proudly misogynistic comedian Andrew Dice Clay. She was attacked by fans and other performers (Frank Sinatra notable among them) for refusing to have the national anthem played at her concert in New Jersey. The week after she finally appeared on S.N.L. and ripped up the Pope’s picture, actor Joe Pesci threatened to “smack her” in his hosting monologue. Violence against, and hatred of, women who dared to step out of line surrounded our lives— defined the boundaries of what was safe and permissible, constricting and punishing us as necessary to keep us contained.

Sinead’s treatment was a testament to that and I, for one, was listening. I couldn’t afford not to. No real woman can.

Ferrara as Gloria in the Barbie movie, Photo via Twitter

There’s a monologue in the Barbie movie, delivered by actress America Ferrera. In it, she succinctly articulates the incredible contradictions of modern womanhood— how we are always supposed to be just enough, but never too much, how we are in charge of practically nothing of consequence, and yet everything is our fault. Lots of women’s takes on the movie that I’ve read suggest they cried or cheered during this scene, but I will confess it left me cold. Not because the monologue wasn’t accurate or well-written. It was both. And well-timed in the narrative, to turn the tide in a Barbieland that has been overrun by the most obvious and bizarrely comedic patriarchy. But I couldn’t help as I was listening to it thinking, Is this seriously revelatory for you people? This is not new news! It’s been the message of feminism since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

The movie suggests that simply hearing this message will snap the Barbies out of their fog of dedication to the patriarchy and get them right back to valuing themselves and ruling the world. Easy-peasy!

With all due respect to the movie makers, who created a fantastical, hilarious, acid-trip of a movie, if liberating women were that simple then Sinead O’Connor would have dragged us all into consciousness thirty years ago. News flash! She tried, and was punished by men, other women, and all the powers that be for it. Because that’s what actually happens when women refuse the box that the world has prepared for them. They don’t just leap out and run into the arms of their sisters like a Barbie movie, triumphing over all those dumb boys while still looking gorgeous. They get sidelined, attacked, silenced, punished, and die too soon. Assuming they aren’t simply killed outright.

O’Connor never wanted to be a pop star, and despite the prevailing narrative, didn’t see the decimating of her pop stardom as a bad thing. Reflecting on the public’s response to her refusal to submit to the box offered to her, she said, “The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act. It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.” O’Connor wasn’t a good girl, a “stereotypical Barbie”, to quote the movie. She was a wild, embattled, imperfect, human woman who just wanted to be heard— about the reality of her life and the world she lived in. And she rarely, if ever, was.

Katherine May, over in her newsletter The Clearing, wrote a masterful take on O’Connor in the wake of her death.

For daws to peck at

The title of May’s missive references the Shakespeare quote about wearing your heart on your sleeve, though we leave out the second half: “for the daws to peck at.” This is hinted at in the movie. Barbie arrives in the real world to find that instead of being the gorgeous, adored ruler of the world she is leered at and subjected to the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) violence of male harassment. Peck, peck, peck.

This death by a thousand pecks was explicit with O’Connor, and as brutal as Hitchcock imagined. O’Connor offered herself up— honestly, vulnerably, unapologetically, a brilliant, beautiful, broken woman— and we treated her offering like a product instead of a holy thing. An unfortunate, mental health problem and not a prophesy. A nuisance and not a wake-up call.

Maybe things are slightly better now. For sure, there is no way a movie like Barbie, which is satirical, smart, skewers corporate culture, and the lives of the women it banks on, would have been a summer blockbuster when O’Connor burst onto the scene. Its insights may be basic, but they’re permeating the cultural conversation at the moment and that’s not nothing. It’s also true, as May notes, that we’ve slowly built a cultural space (on the backs of women like O’Connor) where vulnerability, authenticity, and truth-telling are valued and lauded. The trouble, of course, being that value is so easily coopted by capitalism. May writes:

It seems that we have taken the pain, the righteous anger, the raw transmission of feeling, and folded it neatly back into capitalism, another product to be consumed. Vulnerability sells, and it adds a bankable ring of authenticity to boot. We congratulate ourselves for this new understanding of mental health and diversity. But there is something missing. The circle is not being closed. We are not taking good care of the people who give us so much through their sharing.

We weren’t taking care of women, of truth-tellers at the height of O’Connor’s fame and we still aren’t. Integrity like hers still carries far too high a toll.

In the wake of O’Connor’s death, Irish singer Glenn Hansard stated, “Ireland has always preferred its heroes on the wall. Too scared and afraid to deal with them in the room. Now we can finally hang her picture on the wall and revere her for the giant she was.”

From the box to the wall, with no safety in between. Still, after all these years, blockbuster Barbie movies notwithstanding. And who will change it? Will you?