Anatomy of a Cut
In the swirling ocean of 2010s Girlboss Feminism, we had an archipelago of websites: Jezebel, an offshoot of Gawker, may have been the most well known, as was the messy, personal, Carrie-Bradshaw-by-way-of-Hannah-Horvath XO Jane. Out on the fringe, closer to the shoals, were my favorites: the hairpin, The Toast. All were varieties of the online magazine format; blogs, humor, reviews, think pieces, lifestyle, and personal essays. All of them are gone now — well, Jezebel is back, part of the Paste network, but she’s a shell of her former self — but through those years and into the 2020s, The Cut survived, as a fashion site, a feminist magazine, and now as a catchall cultural site that mostly covers female celebrities, fashion, and — occasionally — women’s rights.
This might be the bread and butter of The Cut, but in the last year or so their signature dishes have been a smattering of personal essays that swing down like a pendulum every couple months to capture some corner of the discourse.
A personal essay on the internet, as a published piece of media, is often designed to do two things for an audience: either it recounts a mundane or common existence in a way that is profound, thereby showing the audience that they, too, can experience something profound in their everyday life, or it tells an extraordinary story in a way that is accessible, a peek behind the curtain, inviting empathy along with engagement. There is delicacy to this; after all, a person telling their life story is doing so because they believe they have a story worth telling and that they are the one to tell it, so it’d better be a good one, right?
For brevity, I’ll be focusing on three of these essays, though I think that they match most of what The Cut (and much of its predecessors XO Jane and the hairpin, if I’m being honest) publishes for its personal essays, especially those written by white women. If you haven’t read them before — well, here is your chance to opt out, but otherwise, strap in:
The Case for Marrying an Older Man
As stated, the women who write these essays are white. They are middle-class or better off. Should they tell stories of their own finances, often it begins in an East Village Apartment with chipped white paint and ends in a Westhampton rental where the eggshell walls are freshly retouched. They are straight, I assume, because they only speak of their husbands and the men who failed to become their husbands (or the men they cheat on their husbands with). These husbands are also white, and they are not very fleshed-out characters, if I may be a critic: they either exist as nothing-husbands or they are supportive men with a few supportive lines and they father the children of the women who are writing the essays (unless they are not yet having children, a choice their husband supports).
The women are able-bodied, and seemingly, at least if they dare to mention it, beautiful. The woman who married an older man takes time to describe having “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out,” a sentence that, were it not written by a woman, seems ripped from a parody of how men write women. They are college-educated, close to their families, both qualities taken for granted.
Being of such an un-marginalized experience, one wonders what these women have to share with the audience. Certainly a good section of that audience will be women like them, amazingly, the writers will still find ways to be alienating in one way or another.
For Grazie Sophia Christie, the age-gap relationship writer, it’s her florid, self-impressed prose for describing the unimpressive: to wit, she was a beautiful, wealthy 24 year old woman who married a beautiful, wealthy 34 year old man. She claims this is a daunting age gap, that her friends who date men their age are wasting their time with foolish boys, when the only code she seems to have cracked is that she has… met a man older than, say, 29, shall we throw a party? Should we invite Bella Hadid? She opens the essay with an anecdote of walking through the dusty summer air in the south of France to buy lottery tickets only to never check the numbers or cash them because her husband is the real prize; ladies, are you meant to aspire to be her, high breasts and all? Do you regret wasting your 20s, your eggs, having other standards for partners, staying in school, turning 30 alone?
The sense of “good for you, I guess” permeates these essays in The Cut, encourages the rubbernecking. We watch as these women make decisions we have not, that nobody we know would make much less admit to making in a public forum (the phrase “you couldn’t torture this out of me” is commonly bandied when these stories hit the social networks), and realize that it is not the audacity of the choice made, but the audacity of the storytelling itself. Take, famously, The Cut’s own financial advisor writing an essay about losing $50,000 of her own money to a scam in a single day; a story that is indeed tragic and serves as a cautionary tale but also — good God! What was she thinking? Why did they publish this?
Or Emily Gould, whose essay on not divorcing her husband lived rent free in my head (and will now live rent free on this page, as I do not monetize). Formerly infamous as the Gawker Stalker (which she also wrote about in The Cut, which we will not get into here). Gould writes of the slow descent into self-sabotage brought on by a mental breakdown that is brought back by both the patience of her family and psychiatric treatment, and yet it’s more, or worse; selfish-sabotage, even. She detests her husband for being kind, she cheats, makes a mess of the marriage, does everything to push him away, and he stays, cares for her and the children, and she takes him back, end of story, thank you for subscribing to The Cut.
In the end that is the great unifier for all these pieces, that sense of this story needs to be told, and I am the one to tell it that is misplaced in, generally, both parts. Yes, it is good to know how to avoid scams, to understand what makes a happy marriage, or when to leave an unhappy one. But… her scam? Her marriage? Her not-divorce? In those voices, in those ways? With all those comforts and luxuries, with no outside worries to disrupt her or displace her, no inherited trauma, no cracks in the foundation?
Several years ago, I came across one of those pages that shows the daily activities of famous intellectuals and artists. Many of them have solid routines, they include when they eat, exercise, socialize, go for a walk, nap, cook, spend time with family, and, of course, write or work on their art. What they do not take time for are what we would call jobs: everyday work, ways to earn a living. They also don’t allot time for family care or caregiving or the upkeep of one’s home, in short, the daily tasks and labor that it takes to be a person, which can change significantly based on your class, ability, family, race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, etc.
Yes, these Cut essay writers are women, and often these essays are about the holy trinity of having-it-all womanhood that’s been marching outside our doors since the 80s: having children, having a career, having a husband. The Cut mostly publishes essays by women who traverse that path — yes, even the anonymous woman who wrote about her cat. There is some schadenfreude to reading these pieces every month or so, a bit of are you fucking kidding me buzz. It’s encouraging to feel that you, whether you’re nothing like these writers or also happen to be a straight/white/cisgender/middle class/educated woman, do not want to make the choices they did to upend your life. But I do wish — and please excuse my pun — that they would publish work that was a cut above this standard, to find more stories worth telling, even without the flush ponytails.
