I was scammed once, during the single, broiling summer I ever lived in New York City. In urgent need of an apartment, I exchanged messages with a friend of a friend; soon I found myself exchanging money, although I suppose exchange is the wrong word. I got nothing in return for my timely wire: no keys, no half of a decent two-bedroom, no reply to my furious question marks. It was a great deal of money for me and I felt too ashamed to go to the police and more ashamed than that to go to my father.
To make up for it, I spent the rest of the summer dining for free, with men I pretended to find interesting. I tell this story to emphasize two points: first, that one falls for a scam because one wants to believe in it.
We are told, with increasing frequency, that we are living in a post-feminist age. As in, after feminism, chronologically. As in, over feminism, abandoning it, philosophically. Undeniably the gold-star celebrity feminists of the s are changing. Thank you to the witches in my coven. The chronic sufferer, shopping for detoxes. The she-shaman, ketamine-tripping from medieval hut to modern Tulum. The outright scammer, convinced she can turn the lemons of misogyny into lemonade for herself.
Seemingly unrelated, except for one unifying theme: they all consider themselves the victims, or survivors, of a vast feminist setup. Women have always had a special relationship with lies; often, we have relied on them for survival. But it was the aspirational feminism of the s—individualistic, empowering, breathless, especially after SoulCycle—which first introduced many of us to the art of lying to ourselves.
In those years, women followed a noble ethics—or a maladaptive one, depending on who you asked. We tried to live by the rules of how things should be, rather than how things are. Misogyny was a feedback loop that would keep running unless we intervened in it: systemic, embedded in all our expectations and validated each time we played along. Since our actions and speech could either reinforce misogyny or undermine it, feminists fought the patriarchy conceptually, with the right words and behavior.
