Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Rules Do Not Apply
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/17/1974
WEBSITE: http://www.ariellevy.net/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.ariellevy.net/about.php?press=y * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/cover-to-cover-the-rules-do-not-apply-a-memoir/513866/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2005034429
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2005034429
HEADING: Levy, Ariel, 1974-
000 00604cz a2200145n 450
001 6535638
005 20141218082712.0
008 050510n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2005034429
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC
046 __ |f 1974
100 1_ |a Levy, Ariel, |d 1974-
670 __ |a Levy, Ariel. Female chauvinist pigs, 2005: |b CIP t.p. (Ariel Levy) data sheet (b. Oct. 17, 1974) author info. p. (contributing editor, New York magazine; this is her first book)
670 __ |a Information from 678 converted Dec. 18, 2014 |b (Apparently not same as Ariel S. Levy of Buenos Aires, b. Oct. 13, 1974.)
953 __ |a sc15
PERSONAL
Born October 17, 1974; married (divorced).
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, graduated, 1996.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. New York magazine, New York, NY, contributing editor; New Yorker, New York, staff writer, 2008—. Previously, worked at Planned Parenthood.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the Washington Post, Vogue, New York Times, and to the Slate website. Contributor to anthologies, including The Best American Essays of 2008, Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, and New York Stories.
SIDELIGHTS
Ariel Levy is a journalist based in New York, NY. She holds a degree from Wesleyan University and has worked as a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2008. Prior to joining the New Yorker, Levy was a writer for New York Magazine.
Female Chauvinist Pigs
Levy’s first book is Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Rauch Culture. The volume expands upon an article Levy wrote about the Girls Gone Wild franchise. She also discusses other pop culture phenomena, including the Sex and the City series, Pamela Anderson’s celebrity, and the influence of Playboy.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews called Female Chauvinist Pigs “an assertive blast, filled with punchy language and vivid images.” Rebecca Miller, contributor to Library Journal, described it as a “fascinating and furious critique.” “Levy’s engrossing book should be required reading for young women,” asserted Kristine Huntley in Booklist. Library Journal reviewer, Elizabeth Kennedy, remarked: “Levy’s witty style entertains even as the facts disturb.” Sarah Petrescu, critic in Herizons, suggested: “Female Chauvinist Pigs may lay out what most of us already know: that this sexed-up Paris Hilton dummy culture is no good for women. But the details and wit in which Levy lays this fact out are what makes the book such a provocative and engrossing read.” “Levy’s insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what’s hot,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. A writer in Psychology Today stated: “The book is culturally astute and not at all preachy.”
The Rules Do Not Apply
In The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir, Levy discusses the trauma she experienced when her pregnancy abruptly ended while she was on a reporting assignment in Mongolia. Her son did not survive. In addition to this loss, Levy’s marriage also crumbled. She weaves in stories about her childhood, her parents, her romantic relationships, and her career. In an interview with Amelia Abraham, contributor to the Refinery 29 website, Levy explained why she wrote the book. She stated: “Every woman is not going to decide to have children, every woman is certainly not going to lose a child, but at some point in her life almost every woman will have some kind of epic drama around menstruation, fertility, infertility, birth, menopause…something to do with this business of being a human female animal. It’s part of life and it’s not something that gets written about much. I felt like it was important to do that.”
Charlotte Shane, critic on the New Republic website, suggested: “Levy presumes her perspective is universal and her experiences are uncommon when it’s the other way around. She doesn’t speak from inside one-size-fits-all feminine ambition but rather garden-variety white entitlement. She’s ambitious because she’s been set up to satisfy that ambition; she climbs the metaphorical mountain not because the mountain is there but because the sherpas, the tools, and the cheering crowd are there as well. To pretend that what results is wisdom—’life is uncooperative, impartial’—feels a bit like being expected to (literally) buy into a paper towel manufacturer’s abrupt passion for women’s rights.” Other assessments of the volume were more favorable. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the volume as “unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking.” “Levy’s generous portrait of modern feminism … speaks strongly and directly to readers,” commented Annie Bostrom in Booklist. Leslie Jamison, critic on the New York Times website, remarked: “This need to specify the terms of grief—to make it legible—is deeply human and deeply moving. It’s not a bid for sympathy but an attempt to honor what happened. Levy has done that here, mapped the force of what happened—written an imperfect account of the imperfect art of surviving loss.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Arena, December, 2005, Alice Coster, review of Female Chauvinist Pig: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, p. 19.
Atlantic, March, 2017, Ann Hulbert, review of The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir, p. 46.
Booklist, August, 2005, Kristine Huntley, review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 1974; February 1, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of The Rules Do Not Apply, p. 5.
Herizons, winter, 2007, Sarah Petrescu, review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 40.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2005, review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 720.January 15, 2017, review of The Rules Do Not Apply.
Library Journal, September 1, 2005, Rebecca Miller, “What Desire Is,” p. 41; October 1, 2005, Elizabeth Kennedy, review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 98.
National Review, October 10, 2005, Myrna Blyth, “O Femina! O Mores!,” review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 44.
Psychology Today, September-October, 2005, review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 38.
Publishers Weekly, August 1, 2005, review of Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 59.
ONLINE
Ariel Levy Website, http://www.ariellevy.net (November 16, 2017).
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 11, 2017), Hadley Freeman, author interview.
New Republic Online, https://newrepublic.com/ (March 10, 2017), Charlotte Shane, review of The Rules Do Not Apply.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 25, 2017), Penelope Green, author interview; (April 3, 2017), Leslie Jamison, review of The Rules Do Not Apply.
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (November 16, 2017), author profile.
Refinery 29, http://www.refinery29.com/ (March 23, 2017), Amelia Abraham, author interview.
Vogue Online, https://www.vogue.com/ (January 19, 2017), essay by author.
booksarticlesaboutnews After graduating from Wesleyan University, I worked for Planned Parenthood, but they fired me after just one week because I am an extremely poor typist. Almost immediately thereafter, I was hired at New York magazine. As a typist. I kept typing there for twelve years. In 2008, I became a staff writer at The New Yorker.
You can send me an email here.
For media requests, please contact London King at Random House
loking@penguinrandomhouse.com
click below to visit the press section
photos, interviews and reviews
If everyone reading this gave $3, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come.
Donate now
MAYBE LATER
Ariel Levy (journalist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Chilean actor, see Ariel Levy (actor).
Ariel Levy
Writer Ariel Levy.jpg
Ariel Levy in 2016
Born October 17, 1974 (age 43)
Nationality American
Notable works Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Website
www.ariellevy.net
We ask you, humbly, to help.
Hi reader in the U.S., it seems you use Wikipedia a lot; I think that's great and hope you find it useful. It's a little awkward to ask, but today we need your help. We depend on donations averaging $15, but fewer than 1% of readers choose to give. If you donate just $3, you would help keep Wikipedia thriving for years. That's right, the price of a cup of coffee is all that I ask. Please take a minute to keep Wikipedia growing. Thank you. — Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder
Credit Card
MAYBE LATER CLOSE
Ariel Levy (born October 17, 1974)[1] is an American staff writer at The New Yorker magazine[2] and the author of the books The Rules do Not Apply and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.[3] Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vogue, Slate, and The New York Times. Levy was named one of the "Forty Under 40" most influential out individuals in the June/July 2009 issue of The Advocate.[4]
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life and education
1.2 Writings
2 Bibliography
2.1 Books
2.2 Essays and reporting
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
Biography[edit]
Early life and education[edit]
Levy was raised in a Jewish family[5] in Larchmont, New York, and attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, graduating in 1996. She says that her experiences at Wesleyan, which had "coed showers, on principle,"[6] strongly influenced her views regarding modern sexuality.[citation needed] After graduating from Wesleyan, she was briefly employed by Planned Parenthood, but claims that she was fired because she is "an extremely poor typist."[7] She was hired by New York magazine shortly thereafter.
Writings[edit]
At The New Yorker magazine, where Levy has been a staff writer since 2008, she has written profiles of Cindy McCain, Silvio Berlusconi, Edith Windsor, Caster Semenya, Lamar Van Dyke, Mike Huckabee and Callista Gingrich. At New York magazine, where Levy was a contributing editor for 12 years, she wrote about John Waters, Stanley Bosworth, Donatella Versace, the writer George W. S. Trow, the feminist Andrea Dworkin, and the artists Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow. Levy has explored issues regarding American drug use, gender roles, lesbian history and culture, and the popularity of U.S. pop culture staples such as Sex and the City. Some of these articles allude to Levy's personal thoughts on the status of modern feminism.
“I always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. I’ve kept a journal since at least the third grade—writing has always been my method for making sense of the world and my experience. Also, my dad is a writer so it seemed sort of natural.”
—Levy, on how she decided to become a writer[8]
Levy criticized the pornographic video series Girls Gone Wild after she followed its camera crew for three days, interviewed both the makers of the series and the women who appeared on the videos, and commented on the series' concept and the debauchery she was witnessing. Many of the young women Levy spoke with believed that bawdy and liberated were synonymous.
Levy's experiences amid Girls Gone Wild appear again in Female Chauvinist Pigs, in which she attempts to explain "why young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit." In today's culture, Levy writes, the idea of a woman participating in a wet T-shirt contest or being comfortable watching explicit pornography has become a symbol of strength; she says that she was surprised at how many people, both men and women, working for programs such as Girls Gone Wild told her that this new "raunch" culture marked not the downfall of feminism but its triumph, but Levy was unconvinced.
Levy's work is anthologized in The Best American Essays of 2008, New York Stories, and 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary.
In 2013 The New Yorker published her essay, "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" about the loss of her unborn son at 19 weeks while traveling alone in Mongolia.[9] In March 2017, Random House published Levy's book, The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir, about her miscarriage, an affair, her spouse's alcoholism, and their eventual divorce.
Bibliography[edit]
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Books[edit]
Levy, Ariel (2005). Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press.
—, ed. (2015). The best American essays 2015. Mariner Books.
Essays and reporting[edit]
Levy, Ariel (March 2, 2009). "Lesbian nation : when gay women took to the road". American Chronicles. The New Yorker.
— (2011). "Female chauvinist pigs". In Karen E. Rosenblum and Toni-Michelle C. Travis (eds). The meaning of difference : American constructions of race, sex and gender, social class, sexual orientation, and disability : a text/reader (6th ed.). Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill.
— (March 4, 2013). "Gaonnuri". Goings on About Town. Tables for Two. The New Yorker. 89 (3): 10.
— (March 18, 2013). "Bagman". The Talk of the Town. Dept. of Coveting. The New Yorker. 89 (5): 25.
— (May 6, 2013). "Living-room leopards : a new group of breeders want to undomesticate the cat". Department of Husbandry. The New Yorker. 89 (12): 28–32.
— (May 13, 2013). "Pearl & Ash". Goings on About Town. Tables for Two. The New Yorker. 89 (13): 17.
— (August 5, 2013). "Trial by Twitter : after high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served. Was it?". A Reporter at Large. The New Yorker. 89 (23): 38–49.
— (September 30, 2013). "The perfect wife : how Edith Windsor fell in love, got married, and won a landmark case for gay marriage". Profiles. The New Yorker. 89 (30): 54–63.
— (April 13, 2015). "The price of a life : what's the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?". Annals of Justice. The New Yorker. 91 (8): 54–63. Retrieved 2015-06-21.
— (May 1, 2017). "A long homecoming : the novelist Elizabeth Strout left Maine, but it didn't leave her". Life and Letters. The New Yorker. 93 (11): 22–26.[10]
See also[edit]
Third-wave feminism
Pornographication
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Ariel Levy Facebook profile. Accessed Sept. 25, 2013.
Jump up ^ Levy bio, New Yorker website. Accessed Sept. 25, 2013.
Jump up ^ Safire, William (October 2, 2005). "Language: 'Raunch' and the mysteries of back-formation". The New York Times. Retrieved January 25, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Forty Under 40: Media". The Advocate. May 5, 2009. Retrieved January 10, 2013.
Jump up ^ The Jewish Daily Forward: "Beyond Grief, Ariel Levy Faces The Future" by Talya Zax April 5, 2017|“There’s two identity markers I’m sure of, and one is, I’m Jewish. And the other is, I’m a writer,” Levy told me. “There’s just no arguing with either thing. I’m just Jewish.”
Jump up ^ Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, p. 76.
Jump up ^ Levy, Ariel. "About". ariellevy.net. Ariel Levy. Retrieved 25 September 2013.
Jump up ^ http://literalaffairs.com/2012/11/17/female-chauvinist-pigs-ariel-levy-2/
Jump up ^ Levy, Ariel (2013-11-18). "Thanksgiving in Mongolia". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2013-12-04.
Jump up ^ Online version is titled "Elizabeth Strout's long homecoming".
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ariel Levy (writer).
Official website
New Yorker Archive
New York magazine – Ariel Levy Archive
"Dispatches from Girls Gone Wild," Slate.com
Alican Çakmak Kozoğlu (2012). "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Ariel Levy by Alican Çakmak Kozoğlu". Literal Affairs (Interview). Literal Affairs.
Authority control
WorldCat Identities VIAF: 19088178 LCCN: n2005034429 ISNI: 0000 0000 4831 5408
Categories: Living peopleJewish feministsAmerican women journalistsAmerican magazine editorsAmerican women writersAmerican feminist writersLGBT journalists from the United StatesLGBT writers from the United StatesLGBT JewsPeople from Larchmont, New YorkThe New Yorker staff writersWesleyan University alumniAnti-pornography feministsLesbian feministsLesbian writersJewish American journalists1974 births
Navigation menu
Not logged inTalkContributionsCreate accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView historySearch
Search Wikipedia
Go
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page
Print/export
Create a book
Download as PDF
Printable version
In other projects
Wikimedia Commons
Languages
Español
Français
Nederlands
Edit links
This page was last edited on 23 September 2017, at 23:18.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersContact WikipediaDevelopersCookie statementMobile viewEnable previews
Wikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki
ShopSign in|Link your subscription
News
Culture
Books
Business & Tech
Humor
Cartoons
Magazine
Video
Podcasts
Archive
Goings On
Contributors
Ariel Levy
@avlskies
Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. Her subjects for the magazine have included the South African runner Caster Semenya, the artist Catherine Opie, the swimmer Diana Nyad, and Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act. Levy won a National Magazine Award in 2013 for the essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.”
She is the author of the New York Times best-seller “The Rules Do Not Apply,” and her first book was “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” Before joining The New Yorker, she was a contributing editor at New York for twelve years.
Reading List: Ariel Levy recommends Rebecca Mead's “Precarious Beauty,” about Daphne Guinness.
[audio url="https://soundcloud.com/newyorker/142010-outloud-levy"]
All Work
News Desk
Postscript: Edith Windsor, 1929-2017
The glamorous grande dame of gay rights was not your average old Jewish lady. But then she hadn’t been an average young lady, either.
By Ariel LevySeptember 14, 2017
Life and LettersMay 1, 2017 Issue
Elizabeth Strout’s Long Homecoming
The author of “Olive Kitteridge” left Maine, but it didn’t leave her.
By Ariel Levy
ProfilesMarch 13, 2017 Issue
Catherine Opie, All-American Subversive
Her photographs range from the marginal to the mainstream, capturing things that are invisible to the rest of us.
By Ariel Levy
When In Rome Dept.November 28, 2016 Issue
Can Women Bring Down Trump?
Italian women have some advice for American women based on their experience with Berlusconi.
By Ariel Levy
Onward and Upward with the ArtsOctober 3, 2016 Issue
Ali Wong’s Radical Raunch
A comic and writer addresses the last taboo of female sexuality.
By Ariel Levy
Dept. of PsychopharmacologySeptember 12, 2016 Issue
The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale
How ayahuasca, an ancient Amazonian hallucinogenic brew, became the latest trend in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley.
By Ariel Levy
Letter from ItalyApril 18, 2016 Issue
The Psychedelic Garden of Tuscany
Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculpture park, dreamed up in an asylum, was the capstone of a tempestuous life in art.
By Ariel Levy
Onward and Upward with the ArtsDecember 14, 2015 Issue
The Radical Mind Behind “Transparent”
With her post-patriarchal TV show, Jill Soloway is determined to change how we think about gender.
By Ariel Levy
News Desk
A Party for Edith Windsor
Windsor, the plaintiff in the case that brought down DOMA, is “absolutely thrilled” at the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that marriage is a fundamental right.
By Ariel LevyJune 26, 2015
Annals of JusticeApril 13, 2015 Issue
The Cost of a Stolen Life
John Restivo was wrongfully convicted. Can he be compensated for decades of lost freedom?
By Ariel Levy
12345...7
Older entries
Listen to the New Yorker Radio HourBuy the CoverPlay the Jigsaw Puzzle
News & Politics
Daily Comment
John Cassidy
Amy Davidson
Ryan Lizza
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Culture
Cultural Comment
Culture Desk
Goings On About Town
The Critics
Jia Tolentino
Persons of Interest
Business, Science & Tech
Currency
Elements
Maria Konnikova
Humor
Daily Shouts
Shouts & Murmurs
The Borowitz Report
Cartoons
Daily Cartoon
Cartoon Caption Contest
Cartoon Bank
Books & Fiction
Page-Turner
Books
Literary Lives
Poems
Fiction
Magazine
This Week's Issue
Archive
Subscribe
Photography
Photo Booth
Portfolio
Video
Culture
Humor
Politics
Business
Science & Tech
Books
Sports
Podcasts
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Political Scene
The Writer's Voice
Fiction
Poetry
Out Loud
More
Customer Care
Buy the Cover
Apps
Jigsaw Puzzle
SecureDrop
Store
RSS
Site Map
Newsletters
The Daily
Culture Review
Podcasts
Cartoons
John Cassidy
The Borowitz Report
Fiction
Goings On About Town
About Us
About
Careers
Contact
FAQ
Media Kit
Press
Accessibility Help
Follow Us
© 2017 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our user agreement (effective 1/2/2016) and privacy policy (effective 1/2/2016). Your California privacy rights. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers.
HomeSKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO NAVIGATIONVIEW MOBILE VERSION The New York Times FASHION & STYLE
Share
Cover PhotoAriel Levy at home in Manhattan, a one-bedroom walk up that she bought when she was married. Credit Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
Ariel Levy Has Written a
Thoroughly Modern Memoir
In “The Rules Do Not Apply,” a writer for The
New Yorker interrogates the hoary conceit of “having
it all” after a harrowing miscarriage and divorce.
By PENELOPE GREENMARCH 25, 2017
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Just before Thanksgiving 2012, Ariel Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, flew to Mongolia to report on that country’s mining boom. She was 38 years old and five months pregnant, and on her second night there, she miscarried in her hotel room, delivering her son in a torrent of blood that nearly killed her. Her son would not survive, but Ms. Levy detailed in a heartbreaking essay a year later that would win her a National Magazine Award that after she yanked the placenta from her body, crawled to the phone and called a local doctor, she took the boy’s photo.
“I worried that if I didn’t,” she wrote, “I would never believe he had existed.”
The essay, titled “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” was a brutal read. Ms. Levy wrote of the feeling of her son’s skin, “like a silky frog’s on my mouth,” and of the image of a white bath mat someone had thrown over a bloodstain next to her bed that would slowly darken as her blood seeped through it during the five days that she spent holed up in her hotel room. Back home, she wrote, she sobbed, bled and lactated in an awful storm of hormones and grief.
Before the miscarriage, she had considered herself lucky: buoyed by the gains of third-wave feminism, successful at her chosen career, legally married to a woman and carrying a baby made by a friend’s donated sperm. Afterward, as she wrote, she felt buffeted by a different kind of fate, something more Shakespearean or biblical, “the 10 or 20 minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic; there is no adventure I would have traded them for.”
And yet. Not only did she lose her child, but her marriage also fell apart. This felt like a karmic smackdown, and Ms. Levy wanted to interrogate her own responsibility for such a sequence of grim events. That is the intellectual backbone, anyway, of “The Rules Do Not Apply”: her memoir, out March 14, that lays the groundwork for what happened in Mongolia and picks up where the essay left off, raising, once again, that hoary conceit, the one about women and “having it all.”
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
“I felt like this very fortunate beneficiary of the women’s movement,” she said during a recent interview in her bright, one-bedroom walk up in Chelsea. “I got to have all these choices, and the rules” — biological, historical — “did not apply. So it was a very shocking experience to find myself, childless and alone at 38. I felt like a complete failure, on the deepest level.
Photo
Ms. Levy’s memoir, which was released this month.
“Some of it was like someone in a Jane Austen novel, getting her comeuppance, but some of it, most of it, was feeling like a mother, but where’s the baby? There is no child. Then you’ve got a little identity crisis on your hands.”
Ms. Levy bought the apartment during her marriage, when she and her former spouse, now a recovering alcoholic, separated for a time. She lives there alone, attended by two amiable, rotund cats. On a Friday afternoon, she was preparing for an appearance at the 92nd Street Y, where she would be interviewed by her friend Lena Dunham.
“This thinking that you can have every single thing you want in life is not the thinking of a feminist,” Ms. Levy told the audience that night. “It’s the thinking of a toddler.”
“T-shirts!” Ms. Dunham said, “T-shirts for all! Hashtag toddler.”
A thoroughly modern memoir, the elements of “The Rules Do Not Apply” seem plucked not from the script of “Girls,” which has also been exploring reproductive issues of late, but “Transparent” — even “Portlandia.”
When Ms. Levy, at 30, marries her girlfriend, her left-leaning parents are put out not because she is a lesbian, but because they are against the square traditions of marriage. “Are you impressed with how cool I am about all this?” her father said when she brought home her first girlfriend. She has a gothic affair with a brutish and unhinged transgender man who hacks Ms. Levy’s computer. When Ms. Levy conceives a child with the sperm of a dear friend who is rich enough to pay the child’s college tuition but wants a hands-off relationship to parenthood, you imagine a sort of Michael Cunningham utopia for Ms. Levy and her wife in their house on Shelter Island. Or perhaps a reality show. Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler, colorful exemplars not just of same-sex marriage but also of Manhattan’s creative class, are their neighbors.
Of her generation, Ms. Levy writes: “Sometimes our parents were dazzled by the sense of possibility they’d bestowed on us. Other times, they were aghast to recognize their own entitlement, staring back at them magnified in the mirror of their offspring.”
Ms. Levy, who in person speaks in the vernacular of her era — “dude” and “girl” are her preferred terms of address — presents a memoir often festooned with self-mocking irony. It’s her second book. “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” out in 2005, wondered just how liberated the heroines of “raunch” culture actually were. She knows she is a different sort of cultural cliché, a bisexual Wesleyan graduate who never quite learned to mind her pronouns. She wears her Jewish-urbane sensibility lightly. Before her wedding, Ms. Levy writes of trying to woo her wife’s Minnesotan mother, whose strongest expression of emotion was the phrase, “Oh, honestly.” In conversation one day, Ms. Levy lets loose an “Oy vey,” startling her soon-to-be mother-in-law. As she writes, Ms. Levy had to explain, “That’s what my people say when we mean, ‘Oh, honestly.’”
She grew up, in Larchmont, N.Y., as an outlier. She was the only child of 1960s-inflected parents who didn’t fit in with the suburban ethos of her neighborhood: her father wrote copy for Planned Parenthood, Naral and NOW, among other organizations; her mother worked with Down syndrome children and opened an after-school day care. And there was a family secret hiding in plain sight: Her mother was engaged in a long-term affair with a grad-school classmate who would appear periodically, camping on blankets in the living room.
By her account, Ms. Levy was a brash, overly-verbal, unpopular child who took to her diary for companionship, using a notebook to puzzle her way through a hostile social environment at school and the weirdness at home. “That was my lifeline,” she said. “People didn’t like me, I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you’re a little kid, and people are like, ‘You’re loud and awful,’ you think, ‘I guess I am awful,’ so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.”
Photo
Lena Dunham, left, and Ms. Levy backstage in 2014 after a discussion as part of The New Yorker Festival. Credit Thos Robinson/Getty Images for The New Yorker
Not long after college, she got a job at New York magazine, where she was mentored by the editor John Homans. David Remnick, editor in chief of The New Yorker, hired her away after a lunchtime courtship during which Ms. Levy suffered a bad case of flop sweat. When she tells her father about her new job, he says, “Well, nowhere to go but down.”
Ms. Levy has spent much of her career profiling women who are, in her words, “too much,” like Caster Semenya, the African runner with elevated levels of testosterone who upended the way the Olympics thought about gender; Lamar Van Dyke, a founder of a band of lesbian separatists from the 1970s; and Edith Windsor, the octogenarian lesbian whose suit against the United States paved the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Last week, Ms. Levy profiled the photographer Catherine Opie, once an S&M aficionado and darling of the Whitney Biennial, circa 1995, unpacking her homey radicalism.
While a gay or bisexual woman like Ms. Levy would seem to be the ideal image for what is now called “intersectional” or multilayered feminism, Charlotte Shane, a writer for The New Republic, recently accused her of second-wave feminist sins — or the “dangerous failures of neoliberal feminism” — in a piece headlined “Ariel Levy’s Infuriating Memoir of Privilege and Entitlement.”
Open Thread Newsletter
A look from across the New York Times at the forces that shape the dress codes we share, with Vanessa Friedman as your personal shopper.
Sign Up
SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME
“It’s unlikely many black women or Arab women or undocumented women would presume a similar degree of permission and mobility,” Ms. Shane wrote, “regardless of their exposure to Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan.”
This line of argument amused more than rankled Ms. Levy.
“If one of my students at Wesleyan tried to take down a writer,” she said, “I’d say, ‘white and from Larchmont’ is a good start but you need more of a case.”
She added: “I think it would be difficult to argue that I’m a net-negative for womenkind. I’ve tried pretty hard to bring in unusual female voices and perspectives. Not just young women and not just white women, either. I don’t know that I’m the best target for improvement. I don’t know that I’m the problem.”
Her friend Mr. Doonan would label Ms. Levy a first-wave feminist, like his own mother, who served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. “She’s like those fearless viragos,” Mr. Doonan said of Ms. Levy. “She’s uniquely intrepid. Tremendously grateful for opportunities and never complaining. That isn’t in a way a contemporary thing. People tend to see things through the lens of victimhood, but Ari takes full responsibility and carries on.”
Ms. Levy is deferential to her ex-spouse, whose alcoholism arguably tanked the relationship, though Ms. Levy said, “We made a fine mess together.” She gave her a pseudonym, Lucy, and she also gave her the manuscript to read before she showed it to anyone else. Lucy suggested no changes. “She said, ‘It’s your story, I’m not going to censor you,’” Ms. Levy said. (The identity of the baby’s father is even more veiled, in keeping with his wishes, she said.)
“I don’t come from addicts,” she said. “My parents never drank. What I did know about was something being amiss in the house, there being a secret, and knowing — knowing — something’s off.” When she attends an Al-Anon meeting, reluctantly (because its jargon irritates her), she learns a “profound concept,” she said. “The idea that you’re off the job, that it doesn’t matter if you figure it out, you can try and persuade the person at the center of it that there’s a problem but you’re never going to get anywhere, so just punch your punch card out. You’re done.”
Photo
Ms. Levy is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Credit Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
She added: “It’s not that I have no regrets, but I no longer think, for example, I shouldn’t have gone to Mongolia. It wouldn’t have mattered. People say, ‘Oh, it would have been better to have miscarried in New York.’ I’m not sure about that. There’s no way your baby is going to die in your hands and you’re going to be, like, ‘Well, that worked out well!’”
When “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” landed on his desk, Mr. Remnick said he read it right away, against his habit. “I couldn’t get out of my chair,” he said. “It’s not as if I hadn’t known what had happened; we had been talking even when she was still there. The world is full of personal essays. My illness. My divorce. My delight. They are everywhere. Arguably there are too many. Among the average ones, there’s a kind of grasping aspect to them. When they connect, as Ari’s did, there’s really nothing like it.”
She is a joyful person, and a joyful writer, he added. “No question she has an absolutely magnetic personality,” he said. “One imagines Joan Didion hanging around the Doors and Haight-Ashbury was a recessive presence. Ari ain’t recessive.”
As it happens, Ms. Levy’s adventures fit into an older tradition than the memoir/exposes, “the autopathographies,” as James Atlas wrote, introducing the wave of literary memoirs from the early 1990s — Mary Karr, Susanna Kaysen, et al — that have dominated the form for decades. When her marriage finally ends, Ms. Levy strikes up a correspondence with the handsome South African doctor John Gasson, who had treated her in Mongolia.
The memoir ends ambiguously, with Ms. Levy pondering a flight to South Africa. But in real life, she and Dr. J., as she calls him, conducted an epistolary romance through email that continued to blossom. There would be setbacks, as Ms. Levy tried — “400,000 times,” she said — to get pregnant through IVF treatments, until “my heart was broken and I had no money and I was like: ‘Girl, it’s done. Let it go.’”
“Not everybody gets everything, but you get some stuff,” she continued. “You get other stuff.”
She and Dr. Gasson, a rotational doctor whose work schedule at a clinic in Nigeria is five weeks on, five weeks off and who also writes, are engaged. If either one of them can get it together to file the paperwork, she said, they will marry. As to where they will live, she added, “We’re going to be mobile. The fact that I cannot bear a child works rather well with that. Given that I have no choice in the matter, that’s the upside.”
And so, despite all the postmillennial complications of Ms. Levy’s coming-of-age tale and her sexual fluidity, in the end she gets the guy. Who says modernity killed the marriage plot?
Or as Ms. Dunham put it, Ms. Levy “fully is like hitting it with the hot doctor in the book.”
Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.
A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2017, on Page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Have and Have Not. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Continue reading the main story
FROM OUR ADVERTISERS
TRENDING
Live Briefing: Jeff Sessions Displays Unsteady Recall on Trump-Russia Matters
News Analysis: Trump Shatters Longstanding Norms by Pressing for Clinton Investigation
Feature: Spurned by ESPN, Barstool Sports Is Staying on Offense
Op-Ed Columnist: I Believe Juanita
Justice Dept. to Weigh Inquiry Into Clinton Foundation
A Statue Stirs to Life in Washington Square Park
First Digital Pill Approved to Worries About Biomedical ‘Big Brother’
Op-Ed Columnist: The Siege Mentality Problem
Under New Guidelines, Millions More Americans Will Need to Lower Blood Pressure
Op-Ed Columnist: Republican Class Warfare: The Next Generation
View More Trending Stories »
What's Next
Loading...
Go to Home Page »
SITE INDEX THE NEW YORK TIMES
Site Index Navigation
NEWS
World
U.S.
Politics
N.Y.
Business
Tech
Science
Health
Sports
Education
Obituaries
Today's Paper
Corrections
OPINION
Today's Opinion
Op-Ed Columnists
Editorials
Op-Ed Contributors
Letters
Sunday Review
Video: Opinion
ARTS
Today's Arts
Art & Design
Books
Dance
Movies
Music
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Television
Theater
Video: Arts
LIVING
Automobiles
Crossword
Food
Education
Fashion & Style
Health
Jobs
Magazine
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Real Estate
T Magazine
Travel
Weddings & Celebrations
LISTINGS & MORE
Reader Center
Classifieds
Tools & Services
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Multimedia
Photography
Video
NYT Store
Times Journeys
Subscribe
Manage My Account
NYTCo
SUBSCRIBE
Home Delivery
Digital Subscriptions
Crossword
Email Newsletters
Alerts
Gift Subscriptions
Group Subscriptions
Education Rate
Mobile Applications
Replica Edition
Site Information Navigation
© 2017 The New York Times Company HomeSearchAccessibility concerns? Email us at accessibility@nytimes.com. We would love to hear from you.Contact UsWork With UsAdvertiseYour Ad ChoicesPrivacyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite Information Navigation
Site MapHelpSite FeedbackSubscriptions
2
ARTICLES REMAINING
Get The Times for one month free.
SEE MY OPTIONS Subscriber login
Objective reporting. No matter what the subject.
Politics. Business. Science. Driven by facts.
One month free.
2 articles remaining this month
See where The Times will take you.
SEE MY OPTIONS Already a subscriber? Login
FASHIONBEAUTYCULTURELIVINGRUNWAYVIDEOSHOPHOUSE OF Z
MOST SHARED
1
Rihanna Is Asking You Not to Laugh at Her DIY Make-Up Tutorial
2
Angelina Jolie Already Has Next Season’s It Bag on Her Shoulder
3
Slick Woods Updated the Exposed Thong Trend for the Red Carpet
MAGAZINE
Writer Ariel Levy on Meeting the Woman Who Changed Her Life
JANUARY 19, 2017 3:00 AM
by ARIEL LEVY
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on Pinterest
ShareShare on Google+Share on Email
Ariel Levy
The author in a Derek Lam top and David Yurman earrings.
Photographed by Tom Johnson, Vogue, February 2017
FacebookPinterest
We met in the middle of a blackout.
It was searing hot and there wasn’t any running water and New York City had lost its mind. People were sweaty and edgy, thronging the streets, leaking heat and anxiety. Traffic lights dangled dead over the intersections; taxis lurched through the dark. The ATMs didn’t work and bodegas were charging insane amounts for bottled water and I was thirsty, hungover, and almost out of cash. I felt defenseless every time I walked up the ten flights to my apartment carrying a lit candle in the ghostly stairwell.
I was nearing panic when a friend called and told me he had the water back on in his building down by City Hall, and a grill out on the balcony. As I walked there, on the cobblestone streets just north of Washington Square Park, past an intersection where a woman in a sundress was directing traffic, down into the lighting district—window after window teeming with powerless, shimmering chandeliers, the people in the apartments above drinking beer on the fire escapes—the city seemed less like a nightmare and more like a carnival.
My friend had said he had a houseguest in town, visiting from California: Lucy. She was golden-skinned and green-eyed in her white shirt, and she smiled with all the openness in the world when I walked in the door. She had the radiant decency of a sunflower.
It felt as if I had conjured her out of the dark. Not just the bewitched darkness of the blackout, but all the nights that had come before then, when I went to bars and parties, searching for someone who wasn’t there.
The sky was soft and humid, up above the steaming sidewalk. Our friend grilled all the meat that had thawed since his freezer lost power, and Lucy told me about San Francisco, where she had lived for two decades, where I was going soon, by chance, to report a story. I was immediately struck by her wholesomeness—her clean, easy competence. I liked that she was a decade older than I was, that she was an athlete, that she had a real job as the director of development for an environmental nonprofit, and that she owned her own home. All the girls—and the boys before them—whom I’d dated lived in rentals furnished with dusty junk. I could feel her ambition buzzing away like mine, just under her joie de vivre. I’d never thought it possible to have such a crush on someone so obviously suitable for me in every way. My fantasies about Lucy were extravagantly domestic, almost immediately.
I was in my late 20s. I had spent my childhood desperate to flee the dark, leafy confines of the suburbs, the lonely quiet of my parents’ house. I’d decided then to be a writer—someday I would travel the world like Pippi Longstocking and tell its stories. The years since I’d graduated from college were spent in ferocious pursuit of that objective. I was accustomed to yearning for escape, accomplishment, excitement. I was new to craving commitment.
It would have been easy to sleep over that first night. I could have said I didn’t want to go back to my hot, dark apartment. I could have stayed on the couch and Lucy and I could have found a way to kiss, at least. But I walked home, swooning in the summer night. I didn’t want an encounter. I wanted a partner.
Only she lived with another woman—Lucy was wearing a ring when we met. They had a house in Oakland, with a slate patio and leggy nasturtiums in the backyard. Lucy told me about terracing the garden in one of the first emails she wrote to me, about how she’d studied the slope and carefully planned the drainage before she planted Meyer lemons and lavender. I was dazzled: Could there really be someone so wise as to understand drainage?
We started writing each other incessantly. I would rush home from things to check my computer (there were no iPhones yet; I didn’t even have a cell). She told me about the summer she helped build her brother’s log cabin on Orcas Island, in Washington State: “There were only three of us living in tents on the property. We flossed, we hammered, we went swimming in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.” Everything she did sounded upbeat and virtuous.
Lucy grew up in a little town outside Portland, where you could smell wood pulp from the paper mills when the wind blew. Her father, a tall, competent man who had served in MacArthur’s honor guard in the Pacific theater during World War II, was the town doctor for half a century. When Lucy was little, they used to go to a cabin on the Toutle River during the summertime, and her father lifted giant rocks and rearranged them to make her a paddling pool. He would introduce her to people by saying, “My daughter is six years old”—or seven, or thirteen—“and she’s never done a single thing wrong.”
When she was a child, Lucy asked her parents to call her Joe—which they did, blissfully (or willfully) unaware that it was a harbinger of her homosexuality. She would borrow her brother’s summer-camp uniform to survey the neighborhood, and patrol the perimeter of Lake Sacajawea wearing his coonskin cap. In the fourth grade, she came very close to convincing a new girl in school that she was a boy named Joe, and that they should go steady. Lucy got in trouble when their teacher found out about it, but she hadn’t meant to be duplicitous. To her, it was the truth.
When I went to San Francisco for my story a month after the blackout, I stayed at a guesthouse near Dolores Park. Lucy picked me up in a convertible she had rented for the day and took me to see Muir Woods. I dressed carefully for the occasion, in a pair of tiny red shorts and hiking boots I’d bought to go trekking in the Himalayas years before. I told Lucy about that trip as we tramped through the cool shade of the redwoods, the clean smell of forest rot rising around us.
I had traveled across Asia for six months with a backpack when I was 22. My mood on those exotic days in Kathmandu and Danang alternated between euphoria and lonely terror. I had traveler’s checks that I kept with my passport in a little sack that I wore under my T-shirt at all times, afraid that someone would snatch it and then I would be completely fucked. American Express let you receive mail at their offices then, and the first thing I did whenever I got to a city after a long bus ride was rush to collect a small stack of envelopes and postcards—reports from my friends in New York who were managing to keep our corner of the East Village running without me. Then I would read my mail and cry in my tea.
I had planned to stay for two weeks at a monastery in southern Thailand that hosted a silent meditation retreat for novices. The night I arrived, it was too late to go to the huts with the other foreigners; the monk who met me at the gate brought me to what had once been a stable. Lying on my sleeping bag on the straw floor, I could see the moon in the dark shining sky out the open window. I heard animals, small and busy, moving up in the rafters. I did not feel frightened or alone.
The next morning the monk came back and took me in his truck up the road to a place where strange young white people with dreadlocks went about their chores, stone-faced. In addition to being silent, we were not supposed to read or write while we were there. I lasted three days.
That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life. Lucy said she had gone backpacking once in Kanchenjunga. “At the end of the trek, the Sherpas told me they had given me a nickname,” she said. “Boy Scout Lady.”
A wild flock of green parrots had migrated to Telegraph Hill at the turn of the millennium, and I could hear them, flutelike, in the sky when we drove back to the city in Lucy’s rented convertible. She took me to the Zuni Café, where there was a long copper bar and the air smelled like wood fire and rosemary, and a dazzlingly butch woman made us tequila gimlets. It was clear that I needed to move to San Francisco, immediately. Once we lived together, I figured, Lucy and I would go for drinks at that bar at least once a week—it would be one of our things. (During the decade we were married, we did return there consistently, but it was more like once a year.)
When it started getting dark outside, she had to go. She kissed me goodbye on the corner of Gough Street and Market, and I drifted off down the hill feeling molten and golden and saved.
She came to New York often for work in the months that followed. I had just moved into a cacophonous apartment on Fourteenth Street—when ambulances went screeching past every fifteen minutes on their way to Beth Israel, it felt like they were plowing directly through the living room. I scheduled a housewarming party when I knew Lucy would be in town, but pretended it was an accident. The night before, she stayed up late with me making deviled eggs. Lucy told me about wandering her small town with her brothers as a child, plucking apples and plums from the neighbors’ trees: “the fruit tour,” she called it.
During my own insomniac childhood, when I was the only person awake to battle the armies of the darkness at four in the morning, I would put the Free to Be . . . You and Me album on my record player to buoy morale. A fleeting feeling of safety and relief came over me as I heard the opening sequence—Marlo Thomas offering the warbling promise: The world is not all bad! Persevere. Lucy’s presence had a similar effect on me. With this person, I could be normal, content, blessed. Cleaned by her goodness.
A more-or-less married 41-year-old who is secretly renting convertibles and flying to New York City to see her 28-year-old mistress might not sound like someone with a contagious case of virtuousness. But Lucy’s relationship was over. After a very short time, it seemed more like she was cheating on me when she went home to her girlfriend than the other way around. Not that the thought of them together made me jealous or angry: It made me sad. It pained me to think of Lucy feeling lonely, out of place, in her own house.
I didn’t want her girlfriend to suffer. But I didn’t feel particularly guilty, either. They seemed so far from love, I even thought (stupidly) that the girlfriend might be happy to have Lucy taken off her hands.
They had become strangers. Maybe they always had been. And we were magic.
From The Rules Do Not Apply, by Ariel Levy. Copyright © 2017 by Ariel Levy. To be published by Random House on March 14, 2017.
Sittings Editor: Lindsey Frugier
Hair: Lucas Wilson; Makeup: Junko Kioka
In This Story:AUTHOR, SEX & RELATIONSHIPS
Facebook
Twitter
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU
Kristen Stewart, Todd Haynes, Elizabeth Banks Celebrate Julianne Moore at MoMA Film Benefit Presented by Chanel
LIVING
Wonderstruck: Stars and Cinephiles turn out to celebrate the career of Julianne Moore
LIVING
SPONSORED STORIES
Women everywhere are trading in heels for these.
Women everywhere are trading in heels for these.
NATURALIZER
[Gallery Story] Marie Osmond's Daughter Finally Confirms The Rumors
[Gallery Story] Marie Osmond's Daughter Finally Confirms The…
TECHOWIZ
The Pillow That is Taking The Internet By Storm...
The Pillow That is Taking The Internet By Storm...
SLEEPGRAM
21 Abandoned Ships Discovered, What They Found Inside Was Breathtaking
21 Abandoned Ships Discovered, What They Found Inside Was…
STANDARD NEWS
Outbrain
FASHION
BEAUTY
CULTURE
LIVING
RUNWAY
MAGAZINE
CITY GUIDES
VIDEOS
VOGUE APP
VOGUE SHOP
VOGUE FORCES OF FASHION
HOUSE OF Z
PROMOTIONS
VOGUE ARCHIVE
VOGUE PODCAST
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER
CONTACT
PRESS
ACCESSIBILITY HELP
SUBSCRIPTIONS
DIGITAL EDITIONS
VOGUE WORLDWIDE
REPRINTS/PERMISSIONS
MEDIA KITS
CAREERS
CONDÉ NAST DIGITAL
MAGAZINE CUSTOMER SERVICE
SITEMAP
© 2017 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/2/2014) andPrivacy Policy (Effective 1/2/2014).
Your California Privacy Rights
The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
Skip to main content
Advertisement
Come on
Advertisement
sign in
become a supporter subscribe search find a job US edition
The Guardian - Back to home
home › lifestyle › health & fitness
love & sex
family
women
home & garden
food
recipes
home
US
politics
world
opinion
sports
soccer
tech
arts
lifestyle selected
fashion
business
travel
environment
browse all sections
Life and style
‘All my friends had some nightmare experience trying to get pregnant. My story took the cake’
At five months pregnant, Ariel Levy lost her baby. After another four years of IVF, had she left motherhood too late?
Writer Ariel Levy at home in New York
Ariel Levy: ‘I heard myself say out loud, “This can’t be good.”’ Photograph: Annabel Clark for the Guardian
View more sharing options
Shares
4,025
Comments
550
Hadley Freeman
Hadley Freeman
@HadleyFreeman
Saturday 11 March 2017 05.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.38 EDT
I first met Ariel Levy in 2009, soon after moving from London to New York, but I had been a fan for more than a decade. Her frank articles about pop culture and sex, which she wrote in her first job at New York magazine from the late 1990s, provided the template of what I wanted to write one day. Her 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, a blistering look at how young women were being sold the lie that emulating pole dancers and Paris Hilton was empowering, became one of the defining feminist statements of that decade. At the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008, she breaks up the magazine’s occasional aridity with vivid articles about sexuality and gender. (She got her job when she told editor David Remnick that, “If aliens had only the New Yorker to go by, they would conclude that human beings didn’t care that much about sex, which they actually do.”)
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy review – a memoir of wanting too much
The New Yorker writer had a life that balanced domesticity with intellectual and sexual adventure. Then it fell apart
Read more
Heroes rarely live up to your fantasies, but Levy exceeded them. Usually we’d go out for drinks – cocktails that knocked me sideways, but barely seemed to touch her sides – and from the start she struck me as being just like her writing: laid-back, wise, curious, kind. Sometimes Levy’s wife, Lucy, would join us. “Isn’t she hilarious?” Levy would say after Lucy had said something that wasn’t, actually, all that funny, but I envied them their mutual devotion after almost a decade together. I, by contrast, was lonely and, like generations of single women in their mid-30s before me, starting to panic. But like a lot of women of my particular generation, I felt ashamed of this. Panicking about not having a baby? How retrograde. So I never admitted any of it to Levy, who seemed more likely to eat her own hair than indulge in such uncool, unfeminist thoughts.
I left New York in 2012 and, despite my doomy fears, had twins when I was 37. Levy and I stayed in touch by email, and although her messages became shorter and more distant, I assumed everything was fine, because she was Ari. But in 2013, I opened the New Yorker and learned that it was not.
***
When we meet for brunch on a cold Saturday in February, it has been five years since we last saw each other. It’s a typical New York scene: weary and winter-pale parents eating scrambled eggs in a trendy restaurant while their sugar-rushed toddlers play on iPads. Levy, by contrast, looks calm, happy and healthy, and not just because she has a tan from a recent five-week stay in South Africa.
“If we had this conversation five months ago, I would have been in a bad way,” she says, in a lilting voice that often puts an unspoken “Oh my God!” and “Can you believe it?” behind her words. “But I’m so much less miserable – I’m not even miserable at all. So what the frack are we going to eat?”
We are just around the corner from Levy’s flat, where she has spent the past year writing a memoir. This in itself is something of a surprise, because she is not normally a first-person writer. But Levy, after negotiating her order with the waiter (“Ooh, the cheddar scramble – is that good? But do we have to have the creme fraiche with it? I mean, let’s not”), shrugs off any concerns about self-exposure: “I’m pretty open book-y, you know? I never understood what the big deal is about privacy. The hardest part was realising that I’d better mean what I say. The whole schtick of the book is acceptance and surrender. So after I finished writing it, I thought, ‘Wow, I guess I’d better follow my own advice now.’”
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
In 2012, Levy conceived a baby with sperm from a friend, having overcome the reservations she’d long had about parenthood. She was about to turn 38: “It felt like making it on to a plane the moment before the gate closes – you can’t help but thrill,” she wrote in her 2013 New Yorker article, Thanksgiving In Mongolia.
When she was five months pregnant, she flew to Ulaanbaatar for work. Her friends were concerned but, she wrote, “I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi desert pregnant.” After two days of abdominal discomfort, she ran into the hotel bathroom, crouched on the floor and blacked out from the pain. When she came to, her baby was on the floor next to her. “I heard myself say out loud, ‘This can’t be good.’ But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell,” she wrote. She stared in awe at his mouth, “opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world”.
She had suffered a severe placental abruption, a rare complication in which the placenta detaches from the uterus. In shock, Levy held the 19-week foetus while blood spread across the tiles. She eventually called for help, taking a photograph of her son before the ambulance turned up. She was taken to a clinic where a kind South African doctor tended to her while she bled and sobbed. “And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me,” she wrote.
I don’t hear less privileged women thinking they’re entitled to everything, whenever they want it. The body doesn’t play by those rules
Levy flew back to New York and, within two weeks, her relationship with Lucy came to an end. For months afterwards, Levy continued to bleed and lactate: “It seemed to me grief was leaking out of me through every orifice.” She looked obsessively at the photograph of her baby, and tried to make others look, too, so they could see what she saw and they did not: that she was a mother who had lost her child.
Her article, which won a National Magazine Award in 2014, ends at that point, and I assumed that the end of Lucy and Levy’s marriage was tied to the loss of their child. In fact, that was “a whole other shitshow”, Levy says now. When she returned from Mongolia, she realised through her fog of grief that Lucy, who had struggled with alcoholism before, needed to go to rehab, badly. The women, still in love but too broken to support one another, separated. Today, they are in touch, but, Levy says, “There are times when one of us says, ‘I gotta stop talking to you for a while because this is too painful.’ Just because you get divorced, you don’t magically stop caring about each other.”
The breakup is one of only several shitshows recounted in Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, which looks, in self-lacerating detail, at events in her life before she went to Mongolia, and hints at some that came after. It is not the book that many expected would follow Female Chauvinist Pigs, not least because it could be spun as a warning to women about the perils of waiting too long to have a baby. Placental abruption, Levy writes, “usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it just happens because you’re old.” She doesn’t go into this in the book, but Levy, who is now 42, has not been able to conceive again, despite having undergone “a ridiculous amount of IVF” over the past four years.
The alternative way of looking at Levy’s memoir is that she is dealing with a subject that feminism has never been able to resolve: the immovable rock of fertility, butting up against female progress. Levy says she had always wanted to be a writer, “so I built my life with that as my priority”; by the time she realised she also wanted to be a mother, she was in her late 30s. She writes that she and her generation “were given the lavish gift of agency by feminism”, coupled with a middle-class, western sense of entitlement that led them to believe that “anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules.”
“Of course, this is partly about class,” she says now. “I don’t hear women who are less privileged thinking they’re entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That’s a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon. It makes me laugh when people say, ‘Why don’t you “just” do surrogacy, or “just” adopt?’ Believe me, there is no ‘just’ about them.” Surrogacy costs $100,000-$150,000 in the US, while adoption costs are on average between $20,000 and $45,000 (costs in the UK are much lower). After the money Levy spent on IVF (“A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot”), those options are less possible than ever.
Doomy warnings that women need to stop shillyshallying and sprog up are published in the Daily Mail every day. They are far less common from prominent feminist writers, and Levy agrees there is no point in lecturing young women, “because it doesn’t do anything, and they know it already. They’re like, ‘Eff you: I’m busy trying to earn money and figure myself out.’ It’s just a design flaw that, at the exact moment so many of us finally feel mature enough to take care of someone beside ourselves, the body’s like: ‘I’m out.’”
Writer Ariel Levy at home in New York
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
At home in New York: ‘I was a mess for a long time.’ Read an extract from her new memoir below. Photograph: Annabel Clark for the Guardian
In the UK and US, the average age of first-time mothers has climbed consistently for the past 40 years, partly because of the decline in teen pregnancies, but also because feminism has given women options beyond marriage and motherhood in their 20s. This, Levy says, “is a seismic rejiggering, and the cost can be epic”. While not all women want children, many do eventually, and it doesn’t matter how many articles you read about women who are childfree and fabulous – when the desire hits, it grabs by the root. That much has not changed, even if the age at which it comes has.
It feels almost treacherous to say this, I say, given how hard our mothers fought to give us more options than they had.
“I was never any good at keeping secrets,” Levy says. “I mean, we see the problem all around us. All of my friends had some nightmare experience trying to get pregnant. My story took the cake, but it wasn’t pretty for anyone.”
In the book, Levy suggests it was being a writer that encouraged her to think she could choose motherhood when she wanted: “[Writers] are accustomed to the power of authorship… you control how the story unfolds.” But I tell her I see the writer side of her more in her self-recrimination, the idea that she was to blame for the loss of her child because she waited too long to conceive. Although it is above the average age for first-time motherhood (in the US, this is 26; in the UK, 29), 37 is not crazily old to get pregnant. According to the NHS, 82% of women aged between 35 and 39 will conceive within a year if they are having regular unprotected sex. Levy was in a different situation, because she was relying on IVF. Is it easier to ascribe self-blame, or even societal blame, than say she simply suffered terrible luck in tricky circumstances?
“Well, it’s not just bad luck, because you are more likely to suffer from bad luck if you’re older,” she says. “But who knows? This might have happened to me if I’d got pregnant when I was younger. I just would have had more time afterwards to get pregnant again.”
***
Levy grew up believing the rules existed to be defied. As a child in pretty Larchmont, New York state, her mother’s “special friend”, a large African-American named Marcus, would frequently come to stay with Levy and her parents, a pair of “diminutive Jews”. Sometimes Levy’s mother would go to visit him. “Marcus had the power to change my mother from a stern regulator of all food containing sugar into a giggling nymph pouring giant glasses of 7Up, as carefree as if it were carrot juice. It was terrifying to see her so happy,” Levy writes. Eventually, her parents divorced.
“They came out of the 60s, where people were experimenting with all kinds of things,” she says. “And they were going to reinvent marriage, and everything that was established was bullshit. So my mom was like, ‘I’m going to have everything. I’ll have this thing and I’ll have my domestic life, and neither will affect the other.’ She feels really bad about it. You know, it destroyed my family. But it’s not like I think, ‘Therefore convention is great and traditional families are perfect.’”
Because neither the traditional nor the less conventional approach guarantees happiness?
“Exactly.”
Levy got in touch with an ex, only to find she was now a trans man. He wanted a baby, using his eggs and her uterus
As she grew up, Levy occasionally “experimented” with women, but it wasn’t until she was 26 and fell in love with her first girlfriend, Debs, that she realised this was, in her words, “a definite thing”. “The narrative around [coming out] is that everything that preceded it was a lie. But that’s not true for me – I really dug my boyfriends. But when I was with Debs, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m totally a lesbian.’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, wait. You don’t have to choose – no one’s going to make you sign anything.’”
She met Lucy when she was 28 and Lucy 41, at a friend’s party, and fell for her instantly. They had a wedding in 2006 and were legally married the following year in San Francisco. A few years after, Levy, then 35, embarked on an affair.
Even as affairs go, this one really broke the rules. Levy had got back in touch with an ex-girlfriend, Jen, only to find that she had since transitioned and was now a trans man named Jim. The sex was as good as Levy remembered, but on a personal level Jim infuriated her: he suggested the two of them have a baby together using his eggs and Levy’s uterus, a concept she found “repellent” in its blithe presumption: “It was his sense of entitlement – his belief that you could just keep choosing whatever you wanted in life, without ever sacrificing a single thing,” Levy writes.
But this was really a form of self-reproach: she wanted to be married, but also to have an affair; she had tried to forge her own path, but ended up replaying her childhood; she wanted to delay motherhood, but not reject it entirely.
Levy finally cut Jim off, and she and Lucy repaired their relationship. Soon after, Lucy’s alcoholism overwhelmed her, and she attempted suicide. But the two of them came through it; I met them soon after, when they couldn’t have seemed more together. They decided to have a baby. This, Levy thought, would be their happy story.
But happy stories come in unexpected shapes. Soon after Levy returned to New York from Mongolia, suddenly with neither a spouse nor a baby, she got an email from John Gasson, the South African doctor who had looked after her in Ulaanbaatar. He sent her her medical report, which stated unequivocally that flying to Mongolia had played no part in the loss of the baby, “just in case you have any lingering doubt or feelings of guilt”, which she did. The two began to correspond, “and that was a lifesaver, because he was the only one who saw me with the baby, and that was the only thing that felt real to me then,” Levy says. Emailing turned into visits. Visits turned into something more, and they are getting married next year. “This relationship feels less conventional than my relationship with Lucy: we don’t live in the same country, we have different lives. My straight relationship is a lot less straight than my gay one was,” she says.
Levy only hints at this relationship in her book, and I tell her I was amazed that she resisted concluding with this better-than-Hollywood happy ending. “Well, I didn’t want the book’s message to be, ‘Someday, my prince will come’, because it wasn’t like that. I was a mess for a long time. There’s no such thing as a happy ending. And this isn’t an ending – I mean, I’m not dead.”
The real lesson of Levy’s story isn’t that women are having children later and that this is a problem, but that women’s lives are now an entirely different shape, with happiness no longer dependent on the old markers. A woman can marry another woman in her 30s, and then a man in her 40s; a woman can run for president in her 60s. And even if they don’t get the original intended prize – the baby, the presidency – the forging of that new path still feels in itself like a triumph. But I suspect it will be some time before Levy will be able to tell that story.
She has always loved to garden; her roof terrace was always bordered by shrubbery, and these days she has vegetable and flower beds. “If I had my way, it’s the only thing I’d ever do,” she says. In South Africa, she has learned to horse ride along the beach: “I like how it feels like flying.” When we meet, she is just finishing up a New Yorker profile of the artist Catherine Opie, whom Levy describes as “a feminist and visual poet on gender”.
As for herself, Levy remains first and foremost a feminist, but one who has moved on from Female Chauvinist Pigs: “I still agree with myself that reducing women to tits and ass isn’t this liberating thing. But I’m just not that interested in talking about porn and whatnot at this moment in time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older, or because the world has changed and we’re in a genuine crisis about women’s rights with Trump.”
Last summer, Levy decided, after four long years, to stop the fertility treatments. “I just need my life not to be about what I don’t have, or consistently failing to get it in the most painful way. And it’s great. I mean, you can’t spend the month of January in South Africa riding horses on a beach and be like, my life sucks. All choices mean not choosing something else, and if the kid thing doesn’t work out, John and I can travel when we like, and that has its charms.
“I feel like we’re not supposed to admit to regret about our lives, but I do have regrets, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean I can’t live with them, or that something’s wrong. And it’s pretty great when I can hand my friends’ kids back when they start having a tantrum. Just as you won’t lie to me and say there’s nothing fulfilling about motherhood.”
A decade ago, Levy profiled the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, and asked her if she regretted not having had children. “Everybody doesn’t get everything,” Dowd replied.
“That sounded so depressing to me at the time,” Levy says. “Now it just seems like a relief to know I don’t have control over everything. It’s a part of growing up.”
Another part is learning that the rules are mutable: you can be divorced and still love your former spouse; sadness is part of a happy life; and feminism doesn’t mean getting everything. It means giving women choices and that’s a good thing – even if sometimes those choices are taken away.
‘Dr John asks how I am feeling. I tell him that I am in hell’: an exclusive extract from Ariel Levy’s new book
An email arrives from Dr John Gasson, medical director, SOS International Clinic, Ulaanbaatar. As promised, he has sent my medical report, which I need to submit to my insurance company. He has also attached a study on preterm birth that he mentioned when we were in the clinic.
I ask him if it is normal that I’m lactating. He explains that the oxytocin that brings on contractions also signals the body to lactate. He adds that the “milk letdown reflex after a miscarriage is one of nature’s less kind tricks”, which I think is an elegant and apt way of putting it.
Dr John asks how I am feeling. I tell him that I am in hell. But the very fact of him asking, of being in communication with the person who was there that night, is a balm beyond any other.
I thank him for being so kind to me at the clinic. I ask if it’s gotten even colder in UB. He says that it has, but that the real problem is the pollution: the colder it gets, the more garbage and coal people burn in the streets for warmth, and the harder it becomes to breathe.
He explains that for six months of the year, he lives on the other side of the world, in South Africa, in a cottage he built himself. There is a stable there that he put up for his horses, and next door, his two teenagers live with their mother and her second husband. “I do miss my kids and horses when I am away, and that can be difficult,” he writes. “The kids will be leaving school soon and off to university. Then I will just have the horses to miss.”
I tell him about the time I spent in Cape Town. I describe my meeting with the track team out in the wind in Limpopo, my encounter in Pretoria with Caster Semenya.
Actually, he knows that story: he has been reading some of my articles online. He says he likes the way I write.
I like the way he writes, too: “One of my father’s better stories involved being woken up in the early hours of the morning and leaving in some haste as the house was burning. He remembers himself and his younger brother peering through the back window of the motorcar, still in their Victorian nightdresses, as the night sky lit up over the rapidly receding town of Barberton. The veracity of his account is suspect, but what is fact is that some very incriminating documents conveniently disappeared in the fire.” His sentences are so jaunty! And so foreign. They sound like they were written in not just another place, but another time. His stories transport me.
Dr John tells me about his childhood in Zambia and Zimbabwe – Rhodesia, to him, at the time. Growing up, he didn’t question why, if they were Englishmen, as the people they socialised with considered themselves to be, they lived in a country where everyone else spoke Shona and Ndebele. He did not really contemplate what it meant that his father – also a doctor – and his grandfather before him were colonialists, until many years later when he began to question everything he’d been taught about blackness, whiteness and where he belonged.
His brother, Greg, was his best friend; they were only two years apart in age. Their mother died when they were toddlers. Greg died, too, in a motorcycle accident when he was 21. I can feel how haunted Dr John Gasson was – is – by that loss from 6,000 miles away. His mother, his brother, his father, his country no longer exist, are part of the past.
I wonder sometimes if my grief is disproportionate, inappropriate
When we converse in writing, everything feels complete, discrete. I don’t have to explain what just happened; he was there. Within the confines of our epistolary friendship, I am not missing pieces of my life – except the one that came from my own body, the one that Dr John alone has seen. Not a picture of the piece, the person.
I wonder sometimes if my grief is disproportionate, inappropriate. “I saw my father fall apart after my brother got killed,” Dr John tells me. “But he had the consolation of knowing the adult that my brother briefly became. You don’t even know what your son would have been like as a little boy. I feel desperately sorry for you.”
Only Dr John saw him, and only Dr John saw me with him. Only Dr John saw what feels so violently true to me, I can’t stand that it is invisible to everybody else on Earth: here is a mother with her baby who has died.
And so, in one way, our friendship is a kind of fiction.
We are two people on opposite ends of the Earth, who do not know each other, who write each other emails as if we are familiars. (At first, we just exchange a few, here and there. But soon we are writing regularly. And the first thing I do when I wake up after I stop crying is check to see if he has sent me an email full of stories about places I have never seen, in a voice that is swashbuckling but somehow intimate.) In another way, these emails – and that picture – are the only things that are real to me.
• This is an edited extract from The Rules Do Not Apply, by Ariel Levy, published on 16 March by Little, Brown at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Topics
Life and style
Health & wellbeing
Feminism
Women
Parents and parenting
Family
extracts
Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Google+
Reuse this content
Advertisement
Most popular in US
Richest 1% own half the world's wealth, study finds
Has Blade Runner 2049's failure killed off the smart sci-fi blockbuster?
Trump skips East Asia Summit on final day of 12-day tour
Amazon announces Lord of the Rings TV adaptation
Stories of loss, love and hope: six firsthand accounts from some of America's worst mass shootings
comments (550)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion.
Guardian Pick
A very hard read but skilfully crafted to resist mawkishness. Womens biology can be so visceral, violent and all consuming and our scars are so often the root of our strength and wisdom.
Jump to comment
Catherine Hawkins
11 Mar 2017
14
15
Guardian Pick
I think it's nice that the switch was flipped. Shows you are in touch with your 'softer' side. Men don't have to be emotionally cold, cool and tough as nails. That's not really appealing to women or only in the very short term!
In practical terms, rather than thinking 'I want children', for a happy life, don't settle for anything but a very compatible partner who you can talk to easily and who can understand where you are coming from. Family life…
Jump to comment
maricaangela
11 Mar 2017
17
18
View more comments
most viewed
The Guardian back to top
home
US
politics
world
opinion
sports
soccer
tech
arts
lifestyle selected
fashion
business
travel
environment
all sections
lifestyle
› pregnancy
jobs
become a supporter
make a contribution
guardian labs
about us
work for us
contact us
advertise with us
ask for help
terms & conditions
privacy policy
cookie policy
securedrop
complaints & corrections
all topics
all contributors
facebook
twitter
subscribe
digital newspaper archive
© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
QUOTED: "Every woman is not going to decide to have children, every woman is certainly not going to lose a child, but at some point in her life almost every woman will have some kind of epic drama around menstruation, fertility, infertility, birth, menopause...something to do with this business of being a human female animal. It’s part of life and it’s not something that gets written about much. I felt like it was important to do that."
VIDEO
STYLE
BEAUTY
WORK & MONEY
HEALTH
ENTERTAINMENT
FOOD
NEWS
Refinery29
US
DAILY INSPIRATION FROM R29 IN YOUR INBOX
EMAIL ADDRESS
SIGN UP
Refinery29NOW READING
Why "Having It All" Is An Illusion
Ariel Levy On The Illusion Of "Having It All"
AMELIA ABRAHAM
LAST UPDATED MARCH 23, 2017, 10:05 AM
PHOTO: DAVID KLAGSBRUN
Ariel Levy is a journalist’s journalist. Which is to say, she’s idolized by young women writers everywhere. Rising through the ranks of New York Magazine to land a job at The New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer for nine years, she’s made her name penning generous profiles of unconventional women and sharp essays on American contemporary culture. Some might know her better for her famous 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, which was a look at how a sex-positive brand of female empowerment can become a slippery slope to misogyny.
Something of a cut-through voice in the noise that is contemporary feminism, put a stock question like “Can women have it all?” to Ariel Levy and you’ll get anything but a simple answer. That answer comes in the form of her new memoir, aptly titled The Rules Do Not Apply. It is, as she would put it, a “coming of age story” and by skewering her privilege demonstrates that — in Levy’s words — “thinking we should get everything we want in life isn’t the thinking of a feminist, it’s the thinking of a toddler.” The book reminds us that the thing about having it all is that you’ve got so much more to lose.
ADVERTISEMENT
When I speak to Levy over the phone from her home in New York, she tells me she’s spent the morning drinking a ton of coffee and doing yoga, and we laugh about how she’s suddenly found herself the subject of interview profiles where mundane facts like that are used to give some indication of her personality. Still, “it’s not like I’m walking down the street and people are yelling my name,” she jokes, sounding like she’s genuinely quite pleased about that — perhaps because, after reading The Rules Do Not Apply, it’s hard to predict what people would be yelling.
The book is a dangerously honest account of her life from childhood through to adulthood (she’s now 42). Growing up in Westchester, New York, to Jewish parents, she is raised in a household so liberal she can virtually do no wrong. Levy moves to the city to become a writer — “that, I thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses” — and writes her first big story for New York Magazine about nightclubs for plus-size women in Queens. It’s the first of a bunch of reporting jobs we hear about in the book — like a trip to South Africa to meet Olympic athlete Caster Semenya, or a profile of Republican politician Mike Huckabee.
Soon after the Queens story, during a citywide blackout, Levy meets the older, West Coast lesbian Lucy (a pseudonym), and falls deeply in love. As the pair get married, concern starts to creep in. “I didn’t really care about marriage being too straight, at least not in the sense of heterosexual,” she writes in the book, “I cared about marriage being too normal, too American, too confining for my fantasy of a life.” This, for me, was the moment where I fell headfirst into The Rules Do Not Apply, and the moment where you realize that, for Levy — as for most of us — “having it all” can just mean being greedy.
ADVERTISEMENT
When Levy has an affair with an old flame who has newly transitioned from female to male, her marriage with Lucy starts to fall apart, and ultimately, admitting her infidelity doesn’t solve anything; it causes Lucy to spiral further into a drinking problem. The painstaking detail in which the collapse of the marriage is then described makes for awkward reading — it really pulls the rug out from under our basic belief that we can trust one another. And yet, Levy writes about her dishonesty so honestly, you struggle to hate her for it.
“Maybe it’s because as a journalist I’ve spent 20 years doing the kind of writing where the whole agenda is being as accurate as possible,” offers Levy, when I ask her whether she ever stopped to weigh up how much she shared. “It’s the only way I know how to write.” She explains the affair now as her deepest regret, but also as symptomatic of where she was at in life: “I was in this frantic state where I felt this duty to myself to get as many experiences as I could. But losing everything has made me relax now. I’ve lost the illusion of control.”
Losing it all
In 2013, Levy published a story in The New Yorker that would become the impetus to write her memoir. It was called "Thanksgiving in Mongolia," and detailed a trip she made to the country to report on its economy. At the time of the trip, Levy was 38 and five months pregnant with Lucy’s baby but decided to travel, because at the time, having it all through her eyes didn’t mean sacrificing a work trip for a pregnancy. On the second day of her trip, in her hotel bathroom, she went into labor, and gave birth on the tiles. When the paramedics arrived, they warned Levy that her baby wouldn’t live — and he didn’t.
ADVERTISEMENT
After the story was published, it became clear to Levy that she wasn’t done with it yet. “I got so many responses to women that had lost children, or had miscarriages or still births, I felt like it was a matter of feminism to write about it,” she explains in her no-nonsense manner. “Every woman is not going to decide to have children, every woman is certainly not going to lose a child, but at some point in her life almost every woman will have some kind of epic drama around menstruation, fertility, infertility, birth, menopause...something to do with this business of being a human female animal. It’s part of life and it’s not something that gets written about much. I felt like it was important to do that.”
If you haven’t read "Thanksgiving in Mongolia," it’s hard to see the disaster coming. I had read it, and I still cried with shock and horror when I got to the scene in the book. What happens afterwards remains just as upsetting for a while, as Levy returns to America and attempts to rebuild her life with grief at its centre. “Initially, grief is something you live in and then later, if you’re lucky, it’s something that lives in you,” Levy tells me over the phone, when we discuss how she’s feeling now. “I’m not in a tunnel of pain anymore but there’ll always be a spark in my heart for that baby.”
Talking about the baby, for the first time in our call, Levy understandably loses her wording. Until now, she has been quick to respond, almost cutting off my sentences, but when I suggest that grief might be separate from trauma, she is uncertain: “I bet you’re right. You sound right. I guess my experience was one of trauma. But it’s so much about that baby, I can’t really think of it in any other way.” She sighs: “I’m not being articulate. It’s just, that’s such a big deal to me, having been someone’s mother for 10 minutes... I never think about it as traumatic.”
ADVERTISEMENT
When Levy wrote the story, back in 2013, one thing she was sure of was that she wanted to include the blood and guts of what happened; to call the picture she paints ‘visceral’ would be an understatement. “I wanted to write about that because I think the fact that women are animals is sort of the last taboo. You can talk about sex now and no one cares, but we are supposed to be clean and shiny and not admit that blood comes out of our bodies again and again and again..."
Saying what you’re not supposed to say
I realize about 15 minutes into my call with Levy that her honesty probably isn’t the product of 20 years in journalism, as she suggests, but is the reason she’s a journalist. When I ask her what she thinks of a particularly damning review by Charlotte Shane in The Australian, entitled “Ariel Levy’s Memoir is A Monument To White Female Privilege” she immediately quips back: “News just in...Ariel Levy is privileged, no shit, baby.” Shane’s piece suggests The Rules Do Not Apply is narrow in focus; “What, in the middle of when my baby was dying, I should have gone on a side trip about how, you know, there’s a lot of economic inequity in the world? That’s ridiculous.”
Levy tells me that on the night prior to our phone call, she took the stage with Lena Dunham in New York City for a discussion on The Rules Do Not Apply and Dunham posed a similar argument to Shane’s, albeit hypothetical: “What are you going to say to the inevitable 22-year-old who says you’re not politically correct enough in the age of Trump?” Dunham asked her. Rather impatiently, Levy responded: “What young feminists should be focused on in the age of Trump is Trump.”
ADVERTISEMENT
She elucidates: “If you have a choice as a young feminist between critiquing the most powerful man in the free world who is an avowed misogynist, or a 42-year-old writer called Ariel Levy who has spent years writing profiles of courageous women like Edith Windsor, the 84-year-old plaintiff who used the Supreme Court to bring down the Defense of Marriage Act and legalize gay marriage in this country, Diana Nyad, who was the first person in the world to swim from Cuba to Florida when she was 64, or Claressa Shields, the 18-year-old African American Olympic boxer who won a gold medal” — she pauses for breath — “then, who is a more productive target?”
As our call nears an end, I ask Levy if there’s anything she didn’t include in The Rules Do Not Apply, any self-censorship. She tells me that the main thing she chose not to include was a happy ending. I thought about the last pages of the book, where Levy strikes up a strange email correspondence with a Dr. John Gasson — the doctor who treated her in Mongolia. It makes for enjoyable reading, but you wonder what the relevance is. When Ariel explains that she’s about to marry Dr. John I tell her I’m “shocked to shit” — not just at the serendipity of a love story coming out of her pain, but because the book gave little indication they were now together.
“I’m really happy to hear you say that,” she responds. “I didn’t put that in the book because I didn’t want it to seem like Prince Charming came and saved me from my grief and my messed-up life and my lesbianism. It wouldn’t have been accurate...” — again, that word. “First of all, I fell in love with him over a long period of time and secondly, it didn’t solve anything. It opened up a new life for me eventually, but initially it didn’t take away my grief over the ending of my last marriage or over losing my son, and it certainly didn’t cure me of the desire to have children, which it’s turned out I could not have.”
Does the prospect of not becoming a mother upset her? “I could get in a dark place, but I roll with it,” she muses, “I don’t know how much of that is being in my 40s and how much of that is about having the center of my life drop out when I was 38, but I’m not in a frantic state anymore. When I first got back from Mongolia, I found the pain intolerable... I couldn’t stand the reality. But it became clear to me that I had no choice. It’s like walking up an escalator — you’re never going to get anywhere — but the sooner you surrender, the less you can be in physical pain.”
I tell Levy these words are what I take to be the crux of The Rules Do Not Apply. Fuck having — or not having — it all. The message is: while we might think our choices make us who we are, actually, it’s the things we have no choice over that truly make us. And with that, we hang up the phone.
ADVERTISEMENT
by Taboola Sponsored Links You May Like
6 Reasons Why This Subscription Box Is Everyone’s Favorite
MAKER.ME | FABFITFUN
Every Modern Wardrobe Needs These Modern Loafers
EVERLANE
Why Contact Lens Wearers Are Loving This New Startup
HUBBLE CONTACTS
Amazing Girls Bedroom Styles in Richardson
ROOMS TO GO
TV Star's Stomach Problem Has Surprising Cause
ACTIVATEDYOU
This App Applies Every Coupon on the Internet to Your Cart
HONEY
ARIEL LEVY INTERVIEW THE RULES DO NOT APPLY
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 23, 2017, 1:50 AM
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS • ENTERTAINMENT • ENTERTAINMENT NEWS • NEWS
WRITTEN BY
AMELIA ABRAHAM
PHOTO: DAVID KLAGSBRUN
EDITORS' PICKS
The 29 Lipsticks We Want To Wear All Fall & Winter
BEAUTYANNA GRAYNOV 6, 2017
Zara Has A Lot Of Really Good Leggings Right Now
FASHIONCHANNING HARGROVENOV 1, 2017
Evan Rachel Wood Highlights How Reading Sexual Misconduct Allegations Affects Survivors
SPIRITSHANNON CARLINNOV 11, 2017
My Apartment Costs $4,800 A Month — & Here's What It Looks Like
In Refinery29's Sweet Digs, we take a look inside the sometimes small, sometimes spacious homes of millennial city dwellers. Today, Refinery29 staffer
HOMEJESSICA CHOUNOV 12, 2017
MORE FROM BOOKS & ART
The Best YA Books To Get Excited About
BOOKS & ARTREFINERY29 EDITORS21 HOURS AGO
Inspiring Books That Are NOT Chicken Soup For The Soul
BOOKS & ARTELIZABETH KIEFER21 HOURS AGO
These Books Make Us Literally Laugh Out Loud
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONSUSNOV 10, 2017
We Played 29 Questions With Tess Holliday—& Here's What We Learned
Your newest must-read has arrived, thanks to supermodel and fearless body positivity advocate, Tess Holliday. We caught up with the 32 year-old
ENTERTAINMENTRACHEL SELVINOCT 2, 2017
These Are The Books Money Diarists Recommend You Read
BOOKS & ARTELENA NICOLAOUNOV 10, 2017
The Best Books To Give As Gifts This Holiday Season
BOOKS & ARTELENA NICOLAOUNOV 7, 2017
If You Liked Gone Girl, You'll Love These Suspense Thrillers
BOOKS & ARTUSNOV 6, 2017
Rose McGowan Shares Empowered Cover For Her Memoir, Brave
BOOKS & ARTMEGHAN DE MARIANOV 6, 2017
500 Women Artists Have Signed An Open Letter Condemning Sexual Misconduct In Their...
BOOKS & ARTKATHRYN LINDSAYOCT 30, 2017
The Compelling Memoirs You Have To Read
BOOKS & ARTERIN DONNELLYOCT 27, 2017
© 2017 REFINERY29TERMSPRIVACYABOUTPRESSADVERTISINGJOBSFEEDBACKR29 NEWSSITE MAPRSS
BY USING OUR SERVICE, YOU AGREE TO OUR TERMS (EFFECTIVE 2/07/2017) AND PRIVACY (EFFECTIVE 2/07/2017).
REFINERY29 NAME & LOGO AND R29 LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF REFINERY 29 INC.
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 1/15
Print Marked Items
The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir
Ann Hulbert
The Atlantic.
319.2 (Mar. 2017): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Atlantic Media, Ltd.
http://www.theatlantic.com
Full Text:
COVER TO COVER
The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir
ARIEL LEVY
RANDOM HOUSE
DON'T BE FOOLED by this book's neon cover, or by what could be taken as the Trumpian tone of its title. Ariel
Levy's subject is sudden, all-encompassing loss--of a son, a spouse, a house, and, along with them, "my ideas about the
kind of life I'd imagined I was due." When her world was upended, she had not yet turned 40.
Levy, who began her career at New York magazine before joining The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, knew early
on "the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses." A bold and bookish girl
growing up in Westchester, New York, in a pre-9/11 world, she thrived throughout her 20s and into her 30s on "a
compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure." She had male and female lovers. She traveled to far-flung places. Her
journalistic specialty was "stories about women who are too much."
Levy counted herself among that undaunted company. She still qualifies, even after being buffeted by deep grief in
marriage and pregnancy, and chastened to learn how much in life eludes control. Levy has the rare gift of seeing herself
with fierce, unforgiving clarity. And she deploys prose to match, raw and agile. She plumbs the commotion deep within
and takes the measure of her have-it-all generation.
Without giving away her story, I don't think you can beat this as a trailer for the turmoil unleashed in her one-of-a-kind
memoir: "And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I
would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hulbert, Ann. "The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir." The Atlantic, Mar. 2017, p. 46. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482392462&it=r&asid=4bbd7548f77f47a4a7b64d8033c011b6.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 2/15
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482392462
QUOTED: "unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 3/15
Levy, Ariel: THE RULES DO NOT APPLY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Levy, Ariel THE RULES DO NOT APPLY Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9693-7
An award-winning journalist tells the story of how her formerly charmed life in which "lost things could always be
replaced" came to a brutally abrupt end.In the late 1990s, Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of
Raunch Culture, 2005) was a young assistant at New York magazine trying to make it as a writer. "Greedy...like a
hungry cat" for success, she aggressively sought out the connections that led to more high-profile assignments and
eventually, in 2008, a coveted position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. By this time, she was living the promise of
second-wave feminism that women "could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us." Not
only did she have a thriving writing career that took her around the world and made her the toast of New York literary
circles. She had also defied convention: at a time when gay marriage was not yet legal, she married a woman. Lucy was
the love of her life and the person to whom she had sworn her first, but not only, allegiance. As though to prove her
sexual freedom, Levy then had an affair with a trans man and confessed it to Lucy, who began drinking heavily. "I lived
in a state of bewilderment punctuated by fury and aching guilt," she writes. As their broken relationship began to mend,
a male friend looking to become a parent "but...at a distance" agreed to donate his sperm to Levy, who successfully
became pregnant. Yet the shadow of Lucy's alcoholism hung over her life. While on assignment in Mongolia, the author
lost her baby, and her marriage to Lucy imploded not long afterward. The honesty with which Levy confronts her
youthful hubris and its consequences makes powerfully compelling reading. With dignity and grace, this former golden
girl eloquently acknowledges how the fact that "everybody doesn't get everything" in life is "as natural and unavoidable
as mortality." Unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Levy, Ariel: THE RULES DO NOT APPLY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242360&it=r&asid=a7e766c6a4789a6730e666df7a0beefe.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242360
QUOTED: "an assertive blast, filled with punchy language and vivid images."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 4/15
Levy, Ariel: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and
the Rise of Raunch Culture
Kirkus Reviews.
73.13 (July 1, 2005): p720.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Levy, Ariel FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture Free Press (224 pp.) $25.00 Sep.
13, 2005 ISBN: 0-7432-4989-5
An attack on "female chauvinist pigs," women who make sex objects of themselves and of other women. Levy, a
contributing editor for New York Magazine, has expanded two of her articles in that magazine and a piece for slate.com
into this biting critique of the phenomenon of raunch culture (think Paris Hilton) in which women choose to present
themselves as bimbos. Noting that "raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonymous, she questions the assertion by some
women that dressing and acting overtly sexual is empowering. She argues that they are deluded, that raunch culture is
not essentially progressive but rather focuses on one particular commercial view of sexiness. For the roots of this, Levy
turns to the schism between the women's liberation movement and the sexual revolution, with anti-porn feminists on
one side and women who argued that freedom for women meant being free to look at or appear in pornography on the
other. If grown women have adopted raunch as rebellion against the constraints of feminism, she asserts, teenage girls,
growing up in a postfeminist era, are unaware of feminism's history and thus have nothing to rebel against. To learn
why munch culture is so pervasive among the young, she interviewed teenage girls. Her finding, in a chapter titled
"Pigs in Training," easily the most disturbing part of her book, is that they are being blitzed with cultural pressure to
seem sexy, to dress provocatively, to look as lewd as possible if they want to win social acclaim. Ironically, she notes
that most teenage girls are being taught to just say no to sex before marriage rather than being educated about sexuality
as a fundamental part of being human. It is, she asserts, a lack of understanding about the complexity and power of
sexuality, an anxiety about real sexual freedom, that has produced the current unfortunate obsession with raunchy
exhibitionism.
An assertive blast, filled with punchy language and vivid images. (Agent: Lane Zachary/Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
Agency)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Levy, Ariel: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2005, p. 720.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA134169613&it=r&asid=60ac1814ac6f958ee0127e41540529bf.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A134169613
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 5/15
O Femina! O Mores!
Myrna Blyth
National Review.
57.18 (Oct. 10, 2005): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2005 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy (Free Press, 240 pp., $25)
I USED hot-pink post-it notes to mark the pages of this book; it seemed appropriate, since they matched so perfectly
the book's hot-pink cover. The cover, in turn, is highly appropriate for the book's contents. Its author, New York
magazine contributing editor Ariel Levy, has spent several years looking at today's young women--how they dress and
behave, what they watch and whom they admire--and she is very, very perplexed.
It's not just that when she turns on the TV, she finds strippers in pasties giving advice on " how best to lap dance a man
to orgasm"; or that when she walks down the street, she sees young women in jeans that expose their "butt-cleavage"
topped with minuscule T-shirts emblazoned with Playboy-bunny logos. Of even more concern to Levy was her
discovery that "people I know (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they
explained. It was liberating and rebellious. My best friend at college, who used to go to Take Back the Night marches
on campus, had become captivated by porn stars."
Yikes! Yes, the daughters of mothers who burned their bras and picketed Playboy and staged a sit-in at Ladies' Home
Journal to force the magazine to promote feminism have decided that they are now empowered enough to get Brazilian
bikini waxes, adopt Pamela Anderson's dress sense, and indulge--wholeheartedly--in the frat party of popular culture.
Understandably, Levy has trouble making this all add up. What happened to second-wave pornography-hating
feminism, in this post-feminist pornography-proliferating world? To find out, she explores the many byways of "raunch
culture," including the making of Girls' Gone Wild videos, in which young women on spring break appear eager to
flash for the camera. These particular videos are now a huge business, allegedly worth $100 million dollars to Joe
Francis, its creator. She also attends an evening organized by CAKE, "a hyper-sexed sorority" that deftly mixes political
action--they arranged for a bus to take women to Washington for the April 2004 pro-abortion march--with sex-toy
parties.
Part of Levy's thesis is that young women today basically want to act about sex the way young men always have. Some
of the women want to take this idea to its literal extreme. Levy spends a very long, distasteful chapter--which, like a
number of other chapters, began its life as a New York magazine article-describing lesbians who are trying to turn
themselves, through testosterone shots and double mastectomies, into young men.
The author does a very good takedown job on the women who are profiting from raunch culture. Notable among them
are Christie Hefner, who has spent years defending her father's dozy Playboy, and trying to revive it; and the muchlauded
Sheila Nevins, head of documentaries at HBO, known for her risky, cutting-edge taste. Levy describes how
Nevins, who has won numerous honors, rips apart a woman who dares to question why she is producing G-String
Divas, a late night soft-core docu-soap. "Everyone has to bump and grind for what they want," Nevins, the Jewish
Woman of Inspiration award-winner, replies with a snarl; she goes on to defend the strippers who star in her program by
saying, "Their bodies are their instruments, and if I had a body like that I would play it like a Stradivarius." Nevins is
using here a typical Female Chauvinist Pig strategy: Make anyone who questions or disagrees with you seem prudish
and uncool.
Levy's heroines remain the feminists of the 1960s: women like Susan Brownmiller, Erica Jong, and Andrea Dworkin
(indeed, Levy wrote very sympathetically about Dworkin after her recent death). She believes that the raunch trend has
arisen because conflicts between the women's movement and the sexual revolution were left unresolved 30 years ago.
She also thinks it's a way young women can thumb their noses at the grimly intense fervor of old-style feminists. "After
all," she writes, "nobody wants to turn into their mothers."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 6/15
Yet Levy touches only lightly on how the media and the marketing industry have also combined to turn feminism into a
type of Sex and the City narcissism in which women feel most empowered when they are shopping. And she dwells too
briefly on the effect of the media's fascination with the outrageous behavior of celebrities. (Think Paris Hilton.)
Most important of all, she leaves unexplored the idea that young women might benefit greatly from a societal
endorsement of a sense of morality--and that acting as crudely as a very crude guy not only diminishes a woman's
potential for real "feminist power," but also wreaks havoc on her self-respect. In her chapter on teenagers (titled "Pigs
in Training"), Levy reports on the shocking behavior of a number of girls--including an eighth-grader at Horace Mann,
an elite New York private school, who made a digital recording of herself masturbating and simulating fellatio on a
Swifter mop. Soon everyone at school had seen her performance. But did it shame her? Not at all. Allegedly, she was
walking around the school, giving out autographs. Levy also points out that today's young girls often compete to dress
the "skankiest"; one girl says that "since seventh grade [when she was twelve], the skankier, the smaller, the most
cleavage, the better ... I wanted guys to want me, to want to hook up with me ... I always wanted guys to think l was the
hottest one."
Reading this, I wondered: Since twelve-year-olds are not able to purchase skanky Abercrombie & Fitch skirts, no wider
than a belt, without the family credit card, what was her mother thinking? Why did she allow a twelve-year-old even to
try to look "hot"? But Levy never even comments on--never mind criticizes--such a lack of involved parenting. She
decides instead, in this very chapter, to let loose on the Bush administration's increase in funding for abstinence
education. She ignores the fact that such education has, in recent years, seemed effective in reducing the rate of teenage
pregnancy, and takes refuge in snide mockery. She recounts that she spent a day at a meeting of the New Jersey
Coalition for Abstinence Education: "That night, I dreamed I got a rare form of lethal mouth cancer from a particularly
passionate French kiss. I woke up anxious and aroused." This is exactly the kind of Female Chauvinist Pig sneer she
complains about when other women engage in it: a cheap way of dismissing attitudes with which one disagrees.
Levy's book offers very limited answers, but it asks some very interesting questions. And we can all be comforted to
know that just as most women were not the angry rip-snorting feminists of the 1960s, most young women today--no
matter how hard the media try to sell them on the notion--are not post-feminist bimbos. That's because for many young
women today, sex and moral beliefs remain intertwined, a proposition Ariel Levy, unfortunately, does not seem to want
to consider.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies Home Journal and founding editor of More, is the author of Spin Sisters: How the
Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness--and Liberalism--to the Women of America.
Blyth, Myrna
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Blyth, Myrna. "O Femina! O Mores!" National Review, 10 Oct. 2005, p. 44+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA145224078&it=r&asid=b17dc447647df397b1f68a601529b5c6.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A145224078
QUOTED: "Levy's engrossing book should be required reading for young women.
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 7/15
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and
the Rise of Raunch Culture
Kristine Huntley
Booklist.
101.22 (Aug. 2005): p1974.
COPYRIGHT 2005 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Sept. 2005. 224p. index. Free Press,
$25 (0-7432-4989-5). 305.42
With the rise of such magazines as Maxim and FHM and the popular video series Girls Gone Wild, raunch culture has
never been more mainstream. The reason, Levy posits, is because women are getting in on the act and participating in
their own exploitation. Levy takes a hard look at this new pop-culture phenomenon to see how smart, intelligent women
buy into sexual stereotypes. She tags along for a night of Girls Gone Wild filming during which college girls strip
down, fool around with each other, and regret it all in the morning. Talented female athletes, actresses, and musicians
feel the need to strip down to almost nothing and pose provocatively for men's magazines. Levy notes how the antiwoman
attitude has even invaded lesbian culture as sexually adventurous lesbians refer to themselves as 'bois' and resist
the attempts of "femmes" to get them to settle down. Even the very traits associated with women are considered inferior
as many women attempt to "just be one of the guys." A piercing look at how women are sabotaging their own attempts
to be seen as equals by going about the quest the wrong way, Levy's engrossing book should be required reading for
young women.--Kristine Huntley
YA/M: Essential reading for older teen girls. KH.
Huntley, Kristine
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." Booklist, Aug. 2005,
p. 1974. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA137503633&it=r&asid=7774af9d7d597b20b1d8ae452a6c4a5e.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137503633
QUOTED: "Levy's witty style entertains even as the facts disturb."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 8/15
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and
the Rise of Raunch Culture
Elizabeth Kennedy
Library Journal.
130.16 (Oct. 1, 2005): p98.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Free Pr: S. & S. 2005. c.224p, index.
ISBN 0-7432-4989-5. $25. SOC SCI
Female Chauvinist Pigs (FCPs), according to New York magazine columnist Levy, come in two species: the woman
"open to a certain sort of attention" and her foulmouthed female fan, willing and able to objectify "like a man. "Though
the reductive thesis imposes obvious limits, Levy nonetheless fortifies this original work with the boggling evidence of
raunch culture's ubiquity. Defending their work variously as liberating, ironic, and humorous, influential triumvirate
Christie Hefner (Playboy), Sheila Nevins (HBO), and Jennifer Heftier (former producer of Comedy Central's The Man
Show) appear unreflective as they call the (compromising) hot shots. Community anecdotes also abound as lesbians
(butch and boi) disparage their femme girlfriends or the straight dupes of the "Girls Gone Wild" juggernaut flash for a
branded hat. Levy suggests that the motivation behind all this pole dancing and pose striking is fear of an uptight
planet; she blames antiporn feminists like the late Andrea Dworkin and Elizabeth MacKinnon for this development.
Her insights into preteens' confusion between feeling sexual attraction and simply desiring attention reinforce her
argument for rehabilitation of comprehensive sex-ed programs. Levy's witty style entertains even as the facts disturb.
Recommended for all public libraries. [See "Fall Editors' Picks," LJ 9/1/05.-Ed.]--Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
Kennedy, Elizabeth
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kennedy, Elizabeth. "Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." Library Journal, 1
Oct. 2005, p. 98. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA137918316&it=r&asid=1ff28f50afefa733dba1eab773f4d2e3.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137918316
QUOTED: "Levy's generous portrait of modern feminism ... speaks strongly and directly to readers."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 9/15
The Rules Do Not Apply
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p5.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Rules Do Not Apply.
By Ariel Levy.
Mar. 2017. 224p. Random, $27 (9780812996937). 305.30973.
Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs, 2005) won a National Magazine Award in 2014 for her essay "Thanksgiving in
Mongolia," published in the New Yorker (where she's a staff writer), and this memoir is a sweeping, life-spanning
extension of that piece. In her late thirties, Levy suffered a traumatic end to a much-wanted pregnancy. Her marriage,
with a woman she adored, was simultaneously falling apart at the seams, stretched thin by addiction and past infidelity.
Levy tells many stories here: of her upbringing in suburban New York; of her ferocious, dovetailing pursuits of a career
in journalism and a life of adventure; of her parents, friends, and lovers. Levy writes of the sudden panic over her
fertility ("One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time"), the golden solution found
in a male friend who wanted to father and also provide for Levy and her wife's child, and the bottomless depths of the
resulting loss. Levy's generous portrait of modern feminism--at turns bleak, heartrending, inspired, and hopeful--speaks
strongly and directly to readers.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Rules Do Not Apply." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 5. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244687&it=r&asid=a046985ff21dea74b4071f2be7fe8d43.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244687
QUOTED: "Female Chauvinist Pigs may lay out what most of us already know: that this sexed-up Paris Hilton dummy culture is no good for women. But the details and wit in which Levy lays this fact out are what makes the book such a provocative and engrossing read."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 10/15
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of
Raunch Culture
Sarah Petrescu
Herizons.
20.3 (Winter 2007): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Herizons Magazine, Inc.
Full Text:
FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS: WOMEN AND THE RISE OF RAUNCH CULTURE Ariel Levy Simon & Schuster,
2005
It's inevitable that at any public feminist event, at least one heckler takes it upon himself to get vulgar. So I wasn't the
least bit surprised when, at a reading by Ariel Levy from her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of
Raunch Culture in New York, a guy at the back of the room piped up with the question: "So why do so many girls these
days want anal sex so bad?"
To those of us who had yet to read the book, the question seemed a sharp taunt to the fiery 30-year-old writer and editor
for New York magazine. But Levy surprised her audience by agreeing with his claim and seizing the moment to explain
why a new generation of so-called liberated women find power and humour in treating themselves and each other as
disposable sex objects.
Levy defines a female chauvinist pig as a woman who has taken to appropriating the worst of male behavior rather than
identifying with an evolved female attitude:
"She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn't mind cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality and she
doesn't mind a cartoonishly macho response to them. The FCP asks: Why throw your boyfriend's Playboy in a freedom
trash can when you could be partying at the Mansion? Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be
giving--or getting--a lap dance yourself? Why try to beat them when you can join them?"
Levy's inspiration came from a curiosity about half-clothed celebrities on magazine covers, with women wearing
Playboy pendants and porn star T-shirts, and with her own friends' move from Take Back the Night marches to lap
dances at strip clubs. She wanted to figure out how she went from a campus culture at Wesleyan University, "where you
could pretty much get expelled for saying 'girl' instead of 'woman,'" to somewhere along the line saying "chick." She
writes: "And, like most chicks I knew, I'd taken to wearing thongs."
Levy delves into the heart of raunch culture by tagging along with a Girls Gone Wild gaggle and examining selfprofessed
feminist figureheads who display piggish anti-woman behaviour. She takes us from the anti-PC backlash of
the 1980s to a current state of muddled non-feminist bravado that threatens to undermine the work of generations
before us. Her critique does not stop at the mainstream and the privileged, but gives a fascinating look at the rise of the
FCP in the lesbian, trans and teenage realms.
Female Chauvinist Pigs may lay out what most of us already know: that this sexed-up Paris Hilton dummy culture is no
good for women. But the details and wit in which Levy lays this fact out are what makes the book such a provocative
and engrossing read. In a sea of overly academic and derivative books on feminism, it is refreshing to find a book
written by a young feminist with the talent and understanding to speak to women frankly and with enough flair that she
knows will keep us reading.
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 11/15
This review was published in McClungs, the feminist magazine published bi-annually by the Ryerson School of
Journalism.
Petrescu, Sarah
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Petrescu, Sarah. "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." Herizons, Winter 2007, p. 40+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA155294659&it=r&asid=e23bf4edf9c21c0279dcec5d2e64c4cd.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A155294659
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 12/15
Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pig: Women and
the Rise of Raunch Culture (Schwartz Publishing,
October 2005)
Alice Coster
Arena Magazine.
.80 (Dec. 2005): p19.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Arena Printing and Publications Pty. Ltd.
Full Text:
Female chauvinist pig: a woman who defies all traditional stereotypes of prescribed femininity. She does so by pursuing
casual sex, genuflecting to the Playboy bunny talisman and generally advancing herself by self-proclaimed
sexualisation. Female Chauvinist Pig explores the rise of what is called female or feminist raunch. In this book Levy
examines the current culture, which appears to endorse sex, pornography and cosmetic surgery as the norm. She meets
the high-powered women who create raunch culture: the new thinking woman warriors of the corporate and
entertainment worlds. Levy traces this trend back to unresolved conflicts between the women's movement and the
sexual revolution.
Coster, Alice
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Coster, Alice. "Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pig: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Schwartz Publishing,
October 2005)." Arena Magazine, Dec. 2005, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA140707249&it=r&asid=52b6b57d367fb0568e5dc1d719562dc3.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A140707249
QUOTED: "Levy's insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what's hot."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 13/15
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of
Raunch Culture
Publishers Weekly.
252.30 (Aug. 1, 2005): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture ARIEL LEVY. Free Press, $25 (224p) ISBN 0-
7432-4989-5
What does "sexy" mean today? Levy, smartly expanding on reporting for an article in New York magazine, argues that
the term is defined by a pervasive "raunch culture" wherein women "make sex objects of other women and of
ourselves." The voracious search for what's sexy, she writes, has reincarnated a day when Playboy Bunnies (and
airbrushed and surgically altered nudity) epitomized female beauty. It has elevated porn above sexual pleasure. Most
insidiously, it has usurped the keywords of the women's movement ("liberation," "empowerment") to serve as
"buzzwords" for a female sexuality that denies passion (in all its forms) and embraces consumerism. To understand
how this happened, Levy examines the women's movement, identifying the "residue" of divisive, unresolved issues
about women's relationship to men and sex. The resulting raunch feminism, she writes, is "a garbled attempt at
continuing the work of the women's movement" and asks, "how is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that
feminism endeavored to banish good for women? Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?" Levy's
insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what's hot. It will create many "aha!" moments for readers who have
been wondering how porn got to be pop and why "feminism" is such a dirty word. (Sept. 13)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2005, p. 59+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA134832624&it=r&asid=c26daceeb7ba4addc70a1c78a8325d89.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A134832624
QUOTED: "fascinating and furious critique."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 14/15
What desire is
Rebecca Miller
Library Journal.
130.14 (Sept. 1, 2005): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture By Ariel Levy. Free Pr. Sept. ISBN 0-7432-4989-5.
$25.
"Sex is one of the most interesting things we as human beings have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester
underpants and implants," Ariel Levy writes in her fascinating and furious critique of "raunch culture," Female
Chauvinist Pigs. She describes a world where the concept of a sexually liberated woman is corseted into the very
narrow cliches of what's hot--Playboy bunnies, strippers, and porn stars--and promoted (and bought and sold) by the
very people it suffocates. With a magazine writer's energy and accessibility, Levy, who first wrote on the subject for
New York magazine, considers the roots of the problem--which she sees in an incomplete Women's Movement--and
talks to a wide variety of women about sex, finding a pervasive chauvinism at work in what they say and do. For the
teenagers, lesbian bois, and other partygoers she interviews, sex is about scoring, social status, and getting attention--
not desire, pleasure, companionship, or the myriad benefits of full, and diverse, sexual expression. "We have a very
sexualized culture that is actually very narrow-minded about sexuality," Levy tells LJ, and confusion, especially for
teens, follows when the political message is all abstinence. What can we do about it? "Talk about what desire is, what
sex is," recommends Levy, "there is more to it than just saying no."
Miller, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Miller, Rebecca. "What desire is." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2005, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA136261026&it=r&asid=2b188543e61158c17cc3758874b2d2e2.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A136261026
QUOTED: "The book is culturally astute and not at all preachy."
11/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1510679027134 15/15
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of
Raunch Culture
Psychology Today.
38.5 (September-October 2005): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/
Full Text:
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture By Ariel Levy (Free Press)
JOURNALIST LEVY introduces us to the female chauvinist pig, the girl who has tossed aside the egalitarian goals of
feminism to become raunchier and shallower than any Hefner-esque lothario. Mining pop culture to build her case,
Levy corners female producers from the Girls Gone Wild franchise, discovers a new breed of lesbian that engages in
sport sex and dissects the shtupping-and-shopping ethos of Sex and the City. The book is culturally astute and not at all
preachy. Her section on smut culture among the baby boomlet testifies that the phenomenon is only on the rise.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." Psychology Today, Sept.-Oct. 2005, p. 38. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA144351941&it=r&asid=8c0a10897223934075f240e96ac1e27d.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A144351941
QUOTED: "Levy presumes her perspective is universal and her experiences are uncommon when it’s the other way around. She doesn’t speak from inside one-size-fits-all feminine ambition but rather garden-variety white entitlement. She’s ambitious because she’s been set up to satisfy that ambition; she climbs the metaphorical mountain not because the mountain is there but because the sherpas, the tools, and the cheering crowd are there as well. To pretend that what results is wisdom—'life is uncooperative, impartial'—feels a bit like being expected to (literally) buy into a paper towel manufacturer’s abrupt passion for women’s rights."
Close
Search...
LATEST
MINUTES
POLITICS
CULTURE
MAGAZINE
CLIMATE
BOOKS
PHOTOGRAPHY
PODCASTS
SUBSCRIBE
About
Advertise
Contact
FAQ
Press
Jobs
RSS
Masthead
Privacy
Subscriber Services
Menu
MAGAZINESUBSCRIBE
Thos Robinson / Getty Images
Ariel Levy’s Infuriating Memoir of Privilege and Entitlement
'The Rules Do Not Apply' buys into the myth that feminism promises each woman that she can have whatever she wants.
BY CHARLOTTE SHANE
March 10, 2017
Yesterday I wasted some energy being mad about Brawny. Yes, that Brawny: the paper towel brand. They’ve exchanged their extra-manly man mascot for a plaid-clad woman as part of a new campaign called #strengthhasnogender. (It’s very important to include the hashtag.) This, I guess, is an effort to convince consumers that their company was spontaneously inspired to Do The Right Thing and Celebrate Women during Women’s History Month.
THE RULES DO NOT APPLY: A MEMOIR by Ariel LevyRandom House, 224 pp., $27.00
MOST POPULAR
How a Socialist Beat One of Virginia’s Most Powerful Republicans
Why Evangelicals Can’t Quit Roy Moore
Liberals Are Becoming Knee-Jerk Anti-Trumpists
The Costs of Being a Millennial
The Cause and Consequences of the Retail Apocalypse
This type of cynical marketing is far from innovative, which is part of why it’s so exhausting. Companies have a long, shameless history of pulling a John McCain: deploying one woman or several women as bait for the allegiance of us all. Another self-consciously “powerful” gimmick recently deployed was the placement of a statue of a girl standing with hands on hips and legs akimbo, facing the Wall Street bull. The work, titled “Fearless Girl” in case you couldn’t figure it out from her body language, was installed by the branch of a financial services corporation that, several years ago, paid over $64 million to resolve charges that they’d defrauded customers. Vote for me, buy our napkins, empower women by working for our rapacious investment firm—it’s all pandering, and transparently so. The nakedness is part of the insult; it presumes women are so stupid and vain we won’t notice what we’re actually being sold. It reduces social justice to a performance, and an unconvincing one at that.
Token women in these scenarios (Sarah Palin, the Brawny babe, the Child Who Would Be Hedge Fund Queen) are often white, which further speaks to the gestures’ superficiality. A company’s or candidate’s instinct to put a white girl on it, then sit back and reap the rewards, is not an impulse that could arise among those committed to the feminism of Audre Lorde or Winona LaDuke or Emma Goldman. But it’s very much an idea that would occur among people willing to exploit the flavor of feminism that already leaves most women behind, one that begins and ends with middle to upper class careerists like Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Within that blinkered worldview, feminism is synonymous with enhanced elevation of mostly white women, meaning greater visibility, higher compensation, and increasingly prestigious jobs for those already positioned for such success.
I suspect—I hope—you are a little bored by this summation, because I suspect (and hope) it’s familiar to you. By now, even the original offenders have learned better, or at least pay lip service to the possibility that they might; Sheryl Sandberg eventually tempered aspects of the (much criticized) Lean In, just as Anne-Marie Slaughter, years later, disavowed the framing of her infamous 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The vast majority of the women in my life—who range in age from early twenties to early forties—know that mainstream culture’s obsession with empowerment and “having it all” is hopelessly corrupted and lobotomized, antithetical to a truly progressive vision of the future. Of course we can’t have it all. Most of us can barely “have” a living wage; to simply obtain decent health insurance is a coup.
Which is why I’m so baffled by the premise of Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply, a memoir devoted to affirming the familiar truth that a person doesn’t always get everything they want—namely: a happy, lasting marriage, a nice house, and a baby at any age. Levy is an intelligent, well-traveled woman, a staff writer for The New Yorker who made a name for herself with 2005’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, a critique of women’s willing participation in ostensibly sexist and demeaning cultural rituals. Feminism is not unfamiliar to her, nor is human pain. (At the beginning of The Rules, she travels to South Africa in pursuit of Caster Semenya, the young Olympian runner subjected to constant, degrading speculation about her gender.)
Yet if Levy-as-narrator is to be believed, she spent the vast majority of her adult life feeling impervious to loss, deprivation, or insurmountable obstacles—and it’s feminism’s fault. “Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism,” she writes, “a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.” The conviction she’s describing actually belongs as much, if not more, to whiteness than to mainstream feminism—which is also called “white feminism” for this very reason. It’s unlikely many Black women or Arab women or undocumented women would presume a similar degree of permission and mobility, regardless of their exposure to Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan.
This matters because, inexcusably, The Rules buys into and therefore reinforces the corrosive lie that feminism was, is, or should be a promise made to each woman that whatever she wants, she can have; that feminism is first and foremost about a “you” rather than about an “us” because its power (and importance) is conscribed to the individual instead of the collective.
As far as Levy is concerned, the fruits feminism owed her were a vibrant career, a marriage, and the ability to bear a child. The fact that one week she thought she had these things but the next week, she didn’t, is the book’s central action, the reality treated as both exemplary and instructive for readers who apparently would otherwise not believe that “we can’t have it all.” “It’s all so over-the-top,” she writes, referring to her divorce, the sale of her house, and the end of her pregnancy. “Am I in an Italian opera? A Greek tragedy?” While surely she suffered, nothing about the vehicles of that suffering is rare or unexpected. Millions of Americans have divorced; millions more than once. As many as ten million Americans lost their homes in the recession alone, and it’s estimated that up to a quarter of all pregnancies result in miscarriage. People in Greek tragedies kill their children, accidentally marry their mothers, and commit suicide; they don’t amicably separate from their partners before flying to South Africa on a self-devised writing assignment for their high-paying job.
There is pleasure to be had while reading The Rules, which runs on a propulsive conversational voice. Levy is capable of cleverness and clarity, as in her confession that “when I first learned about sex, I was excited because it seemed like something that could prove useful for quantifying betrayal” and “[writing] made me feel good, like there was a reason for me.” But her unchecked entitlement and lack of perspective bury these moments until that same momentum-generating charm reveals itself to the result of superficiality. Though her material is by definition personal, it’s not rendered with any intimacy. As narrator, Levy is both assured and evasive. She sketches out plot points and reminds us of when and how a situation is not as she desired, but goes no further.
Privilege doesn’t end with childhood; it’s something you usually grow deeper into, not farther out of.
Like Levy—and the Brawny woman, and Sarah Palin, those inspiring symbols of self-actualization against the odds—I’m white, and there’s much of The Rules Do Not Apply to which I relate. I too have “burned with the desire to rise” and congratulated myself for starting out on what seemed like “the beginning of a life perfected.” I also have reflected more than once on the miracle that “the world (has) left me unscathed” but thanks to exposure to others’ critical thinking, I came to learn this was a function of my various privileges as opposed to uncommonly good luck.
While Levy is vaguely aware she was born on third base, she doesn’t bother working through the implications of that fact. “Up until then, my regrets had been feathery things, the regrets of a privileged child,” she writes while ramping up suspense in advance of revealing a choice that she suggests ushered her down a path to ruin. (She emailed an ex-lover with whom she subsequently had an affair.) But privilege doesn’t end with childhood; it’s something you usually grow deeper into, not farther out of. It’s privilege in action to insist your privilege is irrelevant.
As a result of this blindness, The Rules Do Not Apply is a monument to obliviousness, an unwitting testament to the ability of whiteness and class to supersede other markers of social identity like sexuality and gender. When Levy marries a woman, her leftist parents are more bothered by the notion of her participating in marriage as an institution than they are by her partnering someone of the same sex. (Of course, her career in notoriously liberal New York media doesn’t suffer from the union.) She cheats on her wife with a trans man who, she mentions, “had no real job or career, but he lived in a dazzling apartment with three bedrooms and a view.” The man who provides the sperm for her pregnancy is “rich, but also self-made” and promises to cover child-related expenses, up through and including college.
“I had gotten to a point where I could pay for myself,” she writes of her late 30s, which is either a disingenuous way of saying she was pretty well off—she and her spouse are keeping up an apartment in Manhattan and a home in the Hamptons—or perhaps an allusion to a long period when she accepted financial help from her parents. I’m glad she hasn’t faced bigotry or violence or scarcity, because I’d like a world in which no one does, but just what did Levy think she needed feminism for in the first place? There is no point in The Rules when she experiences discrimination or cruelty because of her gender or queerness. After she tells Sarah Palin’s anti-gay ghost writer that she’s pregnant—she’s covering her for an assignment—the woman “looked like she was going to cry. ‘Oh, Ariel,’ she said. ‘How wonderful.’”
With circumstances like these, it’s no wonder what passes for hardship in Levy’s early life is awfully flimsy: a bad acid trip that she links to insomnia throughout her twenties, and once knocking an air conditioner out of a high window, where it could have conceivably murdered someone below (but in fact fell into an unoccupied alley.) Even her father’s cancer, which he survives against doctors’ expectations, is somehow both about her and yet leaves her unchanged: “nothing really bad could happen to me in my movie, because I was the protagonist” (emphasis added.) “Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary,” Levy claims. “It’s also a symptom of narcissism.” Yes, and hardly the only one.
Levy presumes her perspective is universal and her experiences are uncommon when it’s the other way around.
Opportunities arise when she verges on perspective, but she never quite tips over the edge. “I looked at the people—from Guatemala, from Mexico—working in the fields, the sun pounding down on them indifferently,” she writes, of driving from her Hamptons home to her New York apartment in a panic. “I wondered if everything that pained me would seem ridiculous to those women, or if some of our problems were the same.” Her alcoholic spouse has relapsed, or perhaps was never sober at all—a circumstance to which many women (and men) can relate. But instead of expanding this moment into a compassionate one or investigating her thought further, Levy stays contracted around herself. The women are little more than props, reminders of an outside world from which Levy wants to be immune. Throughout the book, she archly refers to herself as “the protagonist” and the implication is that she’s disabused of such egocentric thinking after her series of losses: The old Ariel thought that way, but the new one knows better. Yet I don’t see how anyone who’d truly given up intoxication with their own ego could write a book like this, with a message that never strays from “I didn’t get what I want so I guess no one does.”
Ultimately, what troubles me about The Rules Do Not Apply, which would otherwise be the capably told but unremarkable story of a young woman struggling through some of life’s most common trials, is that Levy presumes her perspective is universal and her experiences are uncommon when it’s the other way around. She doesn’t speak from inside one-size-fits-all feminine ambition but rather garden-variety white entitlement. She’s ambitious because she’s been set up to satisfy that ambition; she climbs the metaphorical mountain not because the mountain is there but because the sherpas, the tools, and the cheering crowd are there as well. To pretend that what results is wisdom—“life is uncooperative, impartial”—feels a bit like being expected to (literally) buy into a paper towel manufacturer’s abrupt passion for women’s rights.
Being swaddled in privilege doesn’t remove the possibility of writing a worthwhile memoir. Nor does it render someone unworthy of sympathy. But the White House is currently packed with rich white women while a staggering number of Muslim women, undocumented women, and poor women are rendered even more vulnerable and abused. If we can’t recognize the dangerous failures of exclusionary, neoliberal feminism by now, I worry we never will. Levy has a right to tell her story but others have a right—perhaps even a responsibility—to reject what she thinks that story means.
Charlotte Shane is the author of Prostitute Laundry and N.B. and cofounder of TigerBee Press. She lives in New York.
@charoshane
Read MoreBooks, Culture, Memoir, Ariel Levy, Privilege
Sign up for your daily dose of politics, culture, and big ideas.
email address
Sign Up
by Taboola Sponsored Links From The Web
Form meets function in SKAGEN's modern and minimalist designs
$195 - skagen.com
Authentic and classic(ish) taste never goes out of style.
$248 - fossil.com
Misfit Vapor Smartwatch - Stainless Steel with Black Sport Band
$199.99 - misfit.com
Explore Luxury Women’s Bath & Body Collection
$35 - moltonbrown.com
Classic Cashmere Crewneck Sweater
$125 - neimanmarcus.com
Relic Dylan Checkbook Checkbook Wallet
$36 - jcpenney.com
Dog Stares Out Window Every Day—When Owner Realizes Why He's Heartbroken, They Put This Up
Life Buzz
Amazing Boys Bedroom Styles in Richardson
Rooms to Go
Proof That Vintage Fashion Is Still Better Than Today's Fashion
Livingly
FacebookInstagramTwitterLinkedIn
Copyright 2017 © New Republic. All rights reserved.
QUOTED: "This need to specify the terms of grief—to make it legible—is deeply human and deeply moving. It’s not a bid for sympathy but an attempt to honor what happened. Levy has done that here, mapped the force of what happened—written an imperfect account of the imperfect art of surviving loss."
SECTIONS HOME SEARCHSKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO NAVIGATIONVIEW MOBILE VERSION
The New York Times
SUBSCRIBE NOW
LOG IN SETTINGS
FICTION
After ‘Mad Men,’ Matthew Weiner Turns to a Novel of Madmen
NONFICTION
Kevin Young’s Enthralling, Essential History of the Hoax
In ‘Raising Trump’ and ‘The Kardashians,’ Two Portraits of Modern American Matriarchy
Q&A
Joe Biden Talks About His New Memoir, ‘Promise Me, Dad’
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2017
BY THE BOOK
Krysten Ritter: By the Book
THE BOOK REVIEW PODCAST
Kurt Andersen on Channeling President Trump
EDITORS’ CHOICE
9 New Books We Recommend This Week
EGOS
Memoirs Take the Wheel
WAR STORIES
World War II Seen by a Classicist, and Other New Books About Conflict
FICTION
A Young Soldier’s Moral Compromise
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Love and Other Ties That Bind in This Fall’s Y.A. Novels
FICTION
Ghosts, Literal and Figurative, Haunt Magda Szabo’s Novel
PROFILE
Krysten Ritter Spins Her Own Mystery in Her Debut Novel, ‘Bonfire’
INSIDE THE LIST
Meet the Sword-Fighting, Home-Brewing, Airplane-Flying Heavy-Metal Singer
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
A Highlight Reel of Artists in Studio
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Bookshelf: Picture Books for Animal-Loving Children
THE SHORTLIST
How Movies Work
NONFICTION
Hunt for a Good Beginning. Then Write It.
FICTION
‘Ferocity’ Brings Florida Noir to Southern Italy
Loading...
Advertisement
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
A Memoir of Motherhood Lost
By LESLIE JAMISONAPRIL 3, 2017
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Credit Édith Carron
THE RULES DO NOT APPLY
A Memoir
By Ariel Levy
207 pp. Random House. $27.
In November 2013, Ariel Levy published an essay in The New Yorker that quickly went viral: “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” is a beautifully crafted, harrowing account of giving birth to a baby after 19 weeks of pregnancy, a baby who lived for only a few minutes. I had already admired Levy for years — as a journalist, and a chronicler of human life in its oddity and yearning — and the essay lodged inside me in the way that truly moving writing burrows into your sense of the world and takes up residence for good.
For all my admiration, though, I never once hoped her essay would become a book. It was such a perfect essay. Why would it need to become anything else?
Levy’s new memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” is much more than just an extension of that essay. It’s an account of a marriage and its dissolution, a female writer’s coming-of-age, a woman reckoning with the various cultural scripts that have been written for her gender. But the emotional core of this book is undeniably that loss, and its strongest writing still revolves around it, as if compelled by its unrelenting gravity. Of her son, she writes: “I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun.”
Turning from the essay to the book is an education in the messiness of grief. No story is as simple as its streamlined version in the pages of a magazine, and though there was little that felt traditionally slick or elided in Levy’s essay — it was skillfully and purposefully unvarnished — her memoir opens its camera aperture to show more of the complicated before-and-after around its epicenter: infidelity, alcoholism, ambivalence and estrangement. There’s a deep generosity in Levy’s willingness to acknowledge that trauma is rarely dignified or simple; her writing offers readers a salve against the loneliness of feeling that one’s own sorrow should feel more elegant or pure.
Photo
Whenever I teach Levy’s essay, and I teach it frequently, my students often praise it for being “unsentimental.” I know what they mean, that it doesn’t seem to be asking for sympathy, or resolving difficult experience into an easily digested moral, but what I admire about that essay, and what I admire about the strongest passages of this book, is Levy’s refusal to evade emotion. She risks the full tilt of feeling. “Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled,” she writes, and she gives us the song of that vulnerable land. She renders overwhelming sorrow with precise brush strokes and eerie constellations of details: a cellphone photo, a Snickers bar, the smoggy Mongolian sky.
One moral of “The Rules Do Not Apply” is that, mostly, they do. Levy discovers she is not exempted from certain hard truths: Fate is arbitrary and beyond our control. No one ever gets everything she wants. These are hardly revelations, and one would have to live under an incredible umbrella of luck and privilege to stay away from them for long, but they are certainly insights worth exploring from inside the particularity of a life — how the delusions of exceptionality and infinite possibility get punctured.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
One of the fundamental refrains of this book is the idea that our lives are not the same as the stories we want to tell about our lives, or the scripts we want our lives to follow. Over and over again, Levy acknowledges the hubris involved in thinking she could control the plotline of her life: “Nothing really bad could happen to me in my movie, because I was the protagonist,” she writes, describing youthful delusion. Years later, she finds herself at a friend’s birthday party in Westchester, where a stranger asks her: “Are you the Ariel who all the bad things happened to?”
Book Review
Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Sign Up
SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME
This book is haunting; it is smart and engaging. It was so engrossing that I read it in a day. But it’s also a deeply uneven book whose power in some moments only illuminates the absence of this force elsewhere. Its strongest sections illuminate the hollowness of passages that lean hard on cursory insights instead of probing beneath the surface of their easy summations to excavate more precisely articulated truths. I found sweeping summary (“somehow, things got better”) or the flattening displacement of the aphoristic second person (“You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one”) where I wanted rigorously specific introspection.
There is much to love about Levy’s writing when it’s operating on full throttle: She is unsparing with herself. She devotes real estate on the page to the perspectives of other people. She makes fascinating observations about the relationship between her reportage and her evolving sense of identity. She’s funny as hell; in a way that made me grateful for 200 pages of her company. But everything I loved about Levy’s voice — her intelligence, her candor, her sense of humor — also made me feel disappointed by the ways this book didn’t fully rise to meet the call of its strongest moments.
Some of the most wrenching parts of this book are Levy’s precise observations of her own desire to have her loss witnessed: correcting strangers who call her experience a miscarriage or a stillbirth, showing them the cellphone photo she took of her son during the moments before he died. This need to specify the terms of grief — to make it legible — is deeply human and deeply moving. It’s not a bid for sympathy but an attempt to honor what happened. Levy has done that here, mapped the force of what happened — written an imperfect account of the imperfect art of surviving loss.
Leslie Jamison is the author of “The Empathy Exams” and a Bookends columnist for the Book Review.
A version of this review appears in print on April 9, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Motherhood Lost. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Continue reading the main story
TRENDING
Live Briefing: Jeff Sessions Displays Unsteady Recall on Trump-Russia Matters
News Analysis: Trump Shatters Longstanding Norms by Pressing for Clinton Investigation
Feature: Spurned by ESPN, Barstool Sports Is Staying on Offense
Op-Ed Columnist: I Believe Juanita
Justice Dept. to Weigh Inquiry Into Clinton Foundation
First Digital Pill Approved to Worries About Biomedical ‘Big Brother’
A Statue Stirs to Life in Washington Square Park
Op-Ed Columnist: The Siege Mentality Problem
Under New Guidelines, Millions More Americans Will Need to Lower Blood Pressure
Op-Ed Columnist: Republican Class Warfare: The Next Generation
View More Trending Stories »
What's Next
Loading...
Go to Home Page »
SITE INDEX THE NEW YORK TIMES
Site Index Navigation
NEWS
World
U.S.
Politics
N.Y.
Business
Tech
Science
Health
Sports
Education
Obituaries
Today's Paper
Corrections
OPINION
Today's Opinion
Op-Ed Columnists
Editorials
Op-Ed Contributors
Letters
Sunday Review
Video: Opinion
ARTS
Today's Arts
Art & Design
Books
Dance
Movies
Music
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Television
Theater
Video: Arts
LIVING
Automobiles
Crossword
Food
Education
Fashion & Style
Health
Jobs
Magazine
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Real Estate
T Magazine
Travel
Weddings & Celebrations
LISTINGS & MORE
Reader Center
Classifieds
Tools & Services
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Multimedia
Photography
Video
NYT Store
Times Journeys
Subscribe
Manage My Account
NYTCo
SUBSCRIBE
Home Delivery
Digital Subscriptions
Crossword
Email Newsletters
Alerts
Gift Subscriptions
Corporate Subscriptions
Education Rate
Mobile Applications
Replica Edition
Site Information Navigation
© 2017 The New York Times Company HomeSearchAccessibility concerns? Email us at accessibility@nytimes.com. We would love to hear from you.Contact UsWork With UsAdvertiseYour Ad ChoicesPrivacyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite Information Navigation
Site MapHelpSite FeedbackSubscriptions Go to the next story
1
ARTICLE REMAINING
Get The Times for one month free.
SEE MY OPTIONS Subscriber login
Objective reporting. No matter what the subject.
Politics. Business. Science. Driven by facts.
One month free.
1 article remaining this month
See where The Times will take you.
SEE MY OPTIONS Already a subscriber? Login