Look Mom I'm a Hegelian E-girl

On Lost Lambs, Flat Earth, and misogyny

Why is the Right so appealing to young women novelists? The protagonists of Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth and Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs are enamored by incels and Info Wars, soldiers and QAnon. They also care about God, or at least they enjoy the spectacle of ritual and purity. These two books by the co-founders of Forever Mag offer an opportunity to consider the e-girl novelist whose reactionary Dimes Square world masquerades as princesses with personality disorders. Their attempt to outline the contours of modern womanhood often becomes its own trap. The Right and Left vie for erotic triumph with emoji-filled irony.

Anika Jade Levy is a very funny writer, even if her book occasionally fails to connect the dots into a coherent political framework. Dimes Square is a hell many enjoy taking down, even those on the inside. In Levy’s novel Flat Earth, two young women navigate college and the twenty-something dating world, one takes the ethical route and one takes the aesthetic. It’s been marketed as Renata Adler’s “Speedboat for the Adderall generation,” but it’s more like Elif Batuman’s Either/Or for the girl who loves Brandy Melville and preferred Lolita to philosophy class. Down the drain they go, twirling around flat earth conventions, purity balls, and right-wing dating apps while chasing clout. Her narrator Avery continually scrapes her finger on her cracked phone screen while she and her best friend/creative rival Frances travel through “postindustrial towns ravaged by QAnon and synthetic opioids and dead factories” to create a bizarre avant-garde documentary. Avery enjoys the company of fascists and would “would rather kill [herself] than give up dating taxicabs or having [her] hair professionally washed.” Frances, on the other hand, becomes an art world sensation. Jealousy, of course, ensues.

Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, features its own bonkers zombie right-wing ideas through a more surreal, magical realist tint. It also features—what else?— a Jeffrey Epstein stand-in, a cult, and three disaffected sisters chasing a twisted American dream while their parents try out an open marriage. “The Flynns’ marital ‘arrangement’ seemed neither exploratory in the swinging-sixties sense nor justified in the new age liberal poly-whathaveyou sense but rather a creative avenue through which each spouse could inflict pain upon the other and their three daughters,” she writes bleakly. It’s a “nonconsensual nonmonogamous spell.” Imagine if Jonathan Franzen’s America crossed paths with “Mean Girls” by Charli XCX. Coquette, casual, Catholic. It’s The Bee Sting by Paul Murray for the vaping crowd, those who have retreated from neo-conservatism to a sort of middle ground now that Zohran and pronouns are back in. Lost Lambs shifts focus between three sisters, each displaying their own boutique spin on masochistic femininity, their mother, and father both of whom are pursuing their own romantic leads---all while disaster looms, shrouded in Pynchon-esque puns.

In “Hostage #4,” an earlier short story by Madeline Cash, all politics and events are flattened into one deadpan send-up of girlhood: “I’m twenty- four and everyone on Instagram has been sexually assaulted and I’m allowed to roll my skirt up as short as I want now because of #metoo and because there is no God and Trump’s railing Adderall and Lauren Myracle died of cervical cancer and Dante went to jail for vehicular manslaughter and Lacey McKelvy is on OnlyFans and Mr. Gayworth adopted a beautiful baby girl and the dry cleaner man was deported.” Cash’s prose levels both the personal and the political into one nihilistic whirlpool, almost as if to suggest each event is as bad as the other. Instead of dramatizing the difference, she collapses it.

Cash and her contemporaries attempt to marry sign to symbol inside an empty belief system. So far, e-girl novels have not exactly broken into the mainstream, not outside the online literary bubble at least, but can they rehabilitate themselves for a mainstream audience outside the bubble of a certain cultural milieu? The success of Lost Lambs seems to suggest so. Many even think it’s an industry plant of coordinated press, though the truth is far more quotidian. Some books have a publicity team and get a bigger push. Some books, especially those by cis white women, get more coverage. It’s also not Cash’s first book, she previously published a book of short stories with CLASH. There’s no conspiracy in the combination of privilege and hard work and it’s clear these authors do work hard. They write often and make connections. Isn’t that what we all want to do? Certainly, the reaction online is also backed in misogyny and jealousy—the fact that Cash was so successful, that she isn’t a man, that her press team is clearly on point.

That’s not my gripe with these books. My frustration is their tendency to masquerade as something they’re not. These women pretend to satirize the conservative world they inhabit when in reality their belief system is a dog whistle for conservative far-right values. They use internet aesthetics (emojis, Epstein satire, Dimes Square Catholicism) as linguistic currency to obscure the emptiness of their beliefs. In interviews they say they’re writing about flat, archetypical women as a way to skewer male perceptions. But merely depicting misogyny, sex work, conservatism, the shallowness of internet culture, and eating disorders is not inherently radical or progressive. Their novels are about “flat” women who only want men and sex and to be skinny. (Anika Lade Levy went so far as to say she purposefully attempts to write two dimensional female characters.) Each novel follows a Catholic young woman who wants to be loved---often told in fragments and sketchy asides that don’t add up to much. While they’re seeking erotic fulfillment, their values don’t allow them to enjoy sex. Conservatism is always anti-body. If you can’t enjoy your body, how can you enjoy sex?

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Perhaps these women writers are trying to excavate misogyny by perpetuating it. But even as they try to distance themselves from their right-wing sisters, their work often ends up enshrining the same conservative values. Their politics are incoherent because their work is about referencing politics, not wrestling with ethics. These writers seem to think they are writing about the Right and misogyny from the outside. They’re not.

There was an uproar after UnHerd, a typically conservative outlet, published a pan of Flat Earth. (Though, admittedly, I would not want the full-on MAGA Red Scare girls coming to my support in such a tumult.) The author of that review then went viral for fatphobic bullying of Vogue writer Emma Specter. But that seems like a convenient smoke-screen to ignore the fact that there are already people calling out the misogyny these writers perpetuate in their work by crying wolf. Instead of focusing on the content of the review, or later a pan in Bookforum that merely called the novel boring, readers could ignore the content of the negative article. The problem is sometimes multiple truths can exist at the same time.

Regurgitating what you hear your Downtown friends say is not inherently skewering them. Just look at Brock Colyar’s piece on the Downtown Republican scene. While profiles (and novels) are not endorsements of the politics they depict, they certainly lend credibility to the reactionary party scene. Matthew Donovan has written a fascinating piece in this vein about the platforming of Clavicular by fashion designers like Elena Velez. The tricky thing for writers is to understand the difference between endorsements, satires, and reporting. Media literacy is down, of course, and the political responsibility of a writer is a tricky thing. Ivy Wolk recently posted a few Instagram stories wondering why men are allowed to platform or profile Clavicular without backlash while women were often punished for the same activities. Where do we draw the line? If we argue we’re just following the trend and writing about the same controversial figures as everyone else, aren’t we, at some point, just as culpable? This isn’t just woke for the sake of wokeness. At some point it’s complicity. Is it possible to have it both ways? Can we hang out with our problematic favs while keeping our leftist values in tact?

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Authors like Madeline Cash and Anika Jade Levy offer a shallow attempt at positioning themselves outside the conservative mediasphere even while these books enshrine the normative values of cis white womanhood: power, beauty, men, family. The narrators in Dimes Square-adjacent books like Flat Earth, My First Book, Paradise Logic, and Lost Lambs are skinny, white women with eating disorders addicted to using their beauty for social cache while looking down on other women. There’s no output for their misery, instead they internalize it, wishing and hoping for men to pay attention to them and give their lives the guardrail of meaning. “Why was I always seeking permanence in places where women are disposable?” Levy’s narrator Avery wonders.

There are plenty of tradwives, erotica writers, online magazines, and it girls with the same kind of political gambit. The downtown scene is full of those enacting a glamorized, sexualized it-girl routine. Levy and Cash’s Forever Mag regularly publishes these kinds of stories. Cassidy Grady’s “hi i’m holly” features a woman who wishes to be kidnapped and sold into white slavery. It’s a bizarre, striking example of an inflammatory attempt to court right-wing readers.

If Honor Levy came out guns blazing for neoconservative anti-MeToo talking points, Cash and Anika Jade Levy offer a reformed version of the Hegelian e-girl. (Though even Honor Levy has seemed to soften her reactionary edges in more recent interviews.) There’s a daisy chain for this kind of cultural byproduct. The Red Scare girls are often at the top of the waterfall, directing the politics that flow downstream. This is not to say some of these writers aren’t shifting their focus, intent on joining the pronoun Mecca, perhaps even by canvassing for Zohran. But it’s difficult to do an accountability tour when one isn’t actually repenting. These writers want it both ways. They don’t just hate patriarchy, they hate women too.

There’s a kind of depressing heteropessimism here as Arielle Isack has previously referenced in a review of Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. Isack found the work “outright hostile to female readers like myself, if not womankind writ large. I guess it doesn’t matter though—anything goes. Existence is meaningless and random, the market for contemporary fiction even more so. YOLO.”

This is a hollow value system that refuses to move toward something, merely contracting instead. These writers try to take on bigger ideas like the church, sex, beauty but instead merely replicate beauty norms, the nuclear family, and sneering at sex work. But the value that’s really apparent in these novels is self-punishment, not a feminist critique of it. The attempt at farce seems to say more about their autofictional morals. Flat Earth follows a woman’s struggle to be interesting and compete her “best friend” and Lost Lambs follows a family collapsing after they open their marriage and their kids lose all sense of their values. Womanhood, these books argue, requires total self-abnegation. The yonic is empty. No wonder they run with the boys.

Ann Manov also critiqued Flat Earth in The Baffler for its anti-feminist limitations, citing both the narrator Avery’s obsession with sexual value and her inability to become a successful writer: “When I did manage to write, there was no plot, just prose.” The book’s mix of first-person narration and oblique omniscient Twitter-esque dialogue never rises above its obsession with fertility (“Gynocracy has failed, and everyone agrees that we are moving toward a masculine vision of America”). Manov asks the essential question: “does Flat Earth actually exist outside the ecosystem of female identity it critiques?”

“The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards,” one Interview Magazine headline jokes. Cash and Levy are more interested in QAnon and Pizzagate as fictional fodder than political phenomena. The ambition of these novels is profundity through referencing politics in passing, never engaging. This is not how critique works. As bell hooks wrote, cynicism is not progressive. The worst thing these protagonists fear is aging, their breasts sagging. They fret over their competitive female friends more than their patriarchal foes.

“All my exchanges with men felt like prostitution,” Levy writes in Flat Earth. “It’s true that I have a technically perfect body, but I’m hopeless at sex and secretly conservative,” she states elsewhere. Cash’s book is no less full of such diatribes. “Perhaps sex was the secret to religious adherence,” her characters half-jokingly confess. They know that “any huge conglomerate was probably a little evil,” but they rarely care. The girls of Lost Lambs date soldiers and pay lip service to liberal democracy before they say the quiet part loud.

Satire isn’t protection from scrutiny. Portraying the suffering of women through eating disorders and sex work is an attempt at wallpapering character motivation instead of developing interiority. Cash is certainly aware of the way such narratives are mobilized. The religious cult in Lost Lambs encourages young girls to tell their stories to earn luxuries, “tales of neglect, disordered eating, sexual assault.” But rarely is their “sincere vulnerability” rewarded, instead it’s ammunition. The same can be said of these authors’ dramatization of suffering. I think writers owe readers something by the end of the book. If the message is just “being a woman sucks lol” followed by a lot of emojis or writing-as-trolling, it’s justifiable---important even---to critique that. It’s important to consider the way we consume and contemplate these “uwu it-girl” kinds of literature, it’s not just playful but can be harmful and relies on stereotypes while acting as if it’s subversive. Their nihilism comes from the limited roles they allow women to take on, how much they punish their narrators for their desire. Arielle Isack critiqued Honor Levy’s short story “Love Story” for a similar reason: “the digital world serves up an unlimited vocabulary of alienation and self-hatred.” Instead of offering us community, the internet serves as a cauldron of vicious comparison and feral feminine competition.

Of course authors are not their characters, but I think merely pushing aside their ideology as a pure aesthetic gives them too much of a pass. “All complex female characters need conflict and adversity,” Cash writes in Lost Lambs. Their novels portray the self-degradation of women with little redeeming qualities in their narrators. What is the point of that? I’m not trying to cry woke scold, not entirely, I’m pointing out that this satirical bend is a foggy fictional tool that these women can hide behind. I don’t think fictional narrators have to be unimpeachable, but don’t their authors have to stand for some sort of value system beyond mere cynicism? Do authors get away with poor politics and cold prose in defense of cool girl, I’m-just-quoting-someone-else posturing? Authors don’t control how their books are marketed, but they do have to defend the aesthetic and political values their books purport to explore. Even if we can’t say an author’s characters are espousing morality (and certainly no novel should be read for moral qualities alone) the authorial intent and vision of a book must still stand for something. The narrative distance of a book is always telling.

Renata Adler was able to tap deep wells of political weather and crystalline, biting prose—reading her fiction you’d be forgiven for thinking she was anti-politics altogether. A stylish nihilist. Not so with the e-girls, they wear their flimsy beliefs on their sleeves: make money, stay beautiful, hate the body into submission. More than a Catholic revival, they believe in self-hatred. Men offer canvases for masochism, trophies they don’t even want, and women offer competition for empty prizes. If the prose wasn’t so brutally barren, it might just offer a distraction from their cruel politics.

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Image above is a painting by Lee Krasner