Read Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why for Free Online Page A

attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion.”
    And bury her they did. The progressives who used to read her, such as John Stuart Mill, increasingly either avoided the topic of feminism or carefully eliminated all mention of Wollstonecraft when framing it. Novelists writing for lady audiences filled their plots with misguided, sex-crazed feminists who threw themselves at men—or off cliffs. The prediction that her work would be read with particular revulsion by “females” was correct; it was women, in fact, who increasingly drove the shaming of Wollstonecraft, in an effort to avoid being associated with her disgrace. In 1885, socialist Karl Pearson proposed naming his activist group after her. It was the women in the group who threatened to resign. Even if you believed in the brotherhood and equality of all mankind, you didn’t want to march into battle calling yourselves the Crazy Slut Fan Club.
    The only way for a woman to engage in feminism at all, it turned out, was to actively participate in the shaming: Harriet Martineau, one of the few to carry the torch, declared that “Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace,and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied.” Not only were real feminists entirely unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, allowing women like her into the movement set it back:“[Their] advocacy of Woman’s cause becomes mere detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness, unless they have fortitude enough […] to get their own troubles under their feet, and leave them out of the account in stating the state of their sex.”
    A whore, a madwoman, an idiot, a joke, and most of all, responsible for setting women’s rights back. It didn’t matter that she’d started the conversation about their rights in the first place. Feminism was for women who behaved correctly and had their shit together. As for Mary: Mary was over. She was wrecked.
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    The leap from Paris Hilton to Mary Wollstonecraft may seem like a long one. But in practice, it’s hardly even a bunny hop. The pattern of forcible exposure and public shaming that governs female sexuality is very old, and has changed very, very little. We simply find new personalities and new technologies with which to recreate the same drama.
    In the summer of 2014, Eron Gjoni published “thezoepost,” a 9,000-word blog post. It was perhaps the world’s most exhaustive and lamentable effort on the part of an ex-boyfriend to prove that his girlfriend—well-reviewedfeminist game developer Zoe Quinn—was a bad person. It was also, if you watched closely, an eerie play-by-play reenactment of the furor surrounding Wollstonecraft and the Memoirs .
    “This post exists to warn you to be cautious of Zoe,” Gjoni began.“It is here to paint a portrait of her actual personality.”
    That “actual personality,” in Gjoni’s view, was entirely comprised of the fact that, during their five-month relationship and/or the three months they’d been broken up, Quinn had slept with other people. Gjoni knew the language of left-wing and feminist outrage well enough to mimic it effectively (“I very much align with SJ [social justice],” he assured Vice ) by claiming that his post was “helping a very large number of abuse survivors” and taking care to “apologize to those […] who have been triggered.”
    Yet despite the highflown rhetoric, Gjoni’s definition of “abuse” was highly unorthodox—specifically: It failed to include his own behavior. Gjoni posted chatlogs in which he interrogated and browbeat Quinn into messy, borderline-suicidal breakdowns by calling her a liar and telling her that she was exactly like her violent mother and ex-husband. He counted as one of her sins the fact that