So it turns out we may have all been wrong about Blake Lively.  I use “we” in the loosest of terms – I hadn’t been particularly following her career, at least not until the actress’s “cancellation” was predicted during last August’s release of It Ends With Us. 

As I wrote at the time, it wasn’t entirely obvious what Lively had done that was so terrible. Indeed, it was depressing to see the publicity surrounding a film about domestic abuse dominated by discussions of Lively’s supposed flaws while Justin Baldoni, her male co-star, was showered with praise for his “sensitivity”. Now — following a New York Times’ piece on Lively’s decision to sue Baldoni for launching a smear campaign against her, as retaliation for her accusing him of sexual harassment — the situation seems a little clearer (although Baldoni has decided to counter-sue). 

Even so, this doesn’t quite capture why, as one of the PR executives employed by Baldoni wondered, it proved so easy to vilify Lively in the first place. “It’s actually sad,” wrote Melissa Nathan in one message, “because it just shows you people really want to hate on women.” But would that be women in general, or women like Lively in particular?

In a Guardian piece titled “Why did so many people jump to criticise Blake Lively? The answer isn’t complicated”, Sarah Manavis puts the situation down to old-fashioned double standards. “A man,” she writes, “can do almost anything, but as long as a woman has done an inch of wrong, she will be the one that people — eagerly, gleefully — want to watch burn.” I think there’s a lot of truth in this (witness, for instance, the difference in “crimes” that male and female artists had to commit in order to be considered problematic enough for inclusion in Claire Dederer’s Monsters). I don’t think it’s the whole story, though. 

It wasn’t just misogyny that Lively was confronted with, but a particular type, one which men who wish to retain their “feminist ally” credentials — men such as Baldoni — are especially well-placed to use to their advantage. The issue isn’t simply that such men pay lip service to feminism without meaning it. It’s that there are particular women they can undermine and shame while claiming to do so in the name of a better, purer, less exclusive feminism, and there are plenty of self-identified feminists who will cheer them on. 

… it was easier for “nice” men and “progressive” women to attack Lively without being called sexist because she was coded as privileged

Baldoni’s PR team had very little work to do because there was a ready-made misogynist caricature into which to slot Lively. It took only the tiniest bit of pushing to turn Lively into the spoilt girlboss, the “lean in” feminist out for herself, the posh lady elevating herself by standing on the necks of countless other women (whose pain only those such as Baldoni could truly understand). The Guardian’s Laura Snapes hints at this when she quotes a friend claiming what occurred was “the weaponisation of the ‘weaponisation of feminism’”. But isn’t the fact that “weaponising feminism” is so often attributed to a particular type of woman something that requires more acknowledgement? Put simply, it was easier for “nice” men and “progressive” women to attack Lively without being called sexist because she was coded as privileged. 

Misrepresenting women with a little too much power, independence or authority as spoilt ladies who misuse feminism to get one over on others is hardly a new phenomenon. In “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood”, her 1976 article for Ms magazine, Jo Freeman described how women who fell out of favour with the sisterhood were often “the achiever and/or the assertive woman, the one to whom the epithet ‘male-identified’ is commonly applied”:

This kind of woman has always been put down by our society with epithets ranging from ‘unladylike’ to ‘castrating bitch’.

This is convenient if you are a male ally who enjoys some harassment on the side and don’t want to be inconvenienced by the kind of woman who has the financial and cultural clout to challenge you. Just point out that she’s “one of those women” — those who’ve already got too many advantages to need feminism at all — and other women (particularly those who are anxious about their own privilege) will be on your side. 

In recent years, other targets of this form of “progressive” misogyny have included Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham. One doesn’t need to be fans of their work to notice how even the tiniest potential infraction is picked up on and presented as evidence, not of any actual evil, but that these women don’t understand real suffering and need to take the word “feminist” out of their mouths. I’ve only ever watched the first two episodes of Girls, but it seemed obvious to me that when Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath uttered the lines “I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation”, this was to highlight her own ridiculousness. Nonetheless, this did nothing to prevent countless “who does Lena Dunham think she is?” think pieces, engaging in the same deliberate misunderstanding that occurred when Lively told survivors of domestic abuse “no one else can define you”. When the video for Swift’s song “Anti-hero” was edited to remove a reference to Swift’s own eating disorder — on the basis that Swift’s “thin privilege” made it fatphobic — it seemed to me that there really is a certain woman from whom empathy can be actively, publicly withheld in the name of “virtue”.

In her 2017 book The Perils of ‘Privilege’, Phoebe Malz Bovy points out that “the privilege approach asks women to hold back from engaging in unapologetic self-promotion, and to consider – aloud – every aspect of their accomplishments that could be attributed to some systemic injustice”. Many women joining in with attacks on Lively were privileged themselves, but certainly not on the same scale. Focusing on this one woman’s supposed “tone deafness” to injustice offered them a way of laundering their own privilege and demonstrating that, unlike her, they were not too elevated to remember what really matters. 

It’s certainly true that privilege shields a minority of women from the worst forms of exploitation and abuse. It also offers them the option — of which Lively is making use — of retaliation in situations where other women lack resources and cannot afford to take risks. But if privilege gives women choices, here is one that matters — she can please the men around her and take out rivals by launching “feminist” attacks on others, or she can put herself in the firing line. When women choose to do the former, they send a message to all women: the moment you no longer know your place, we will come for you. As Freeman noted in 1976, underpinning much of the shaming of “the assertive women” are “some very traditional ideas about women’s proper roles”. 

It remains to be seen how Lively’s and Baldoni’s lawsuits play out. Perhaps it is true that Baldoni wasn’t trying very hard to do so much damage. Perhaps it shocked him how quickly the knives came out. The story never made sense, but thanks to the “privileged girlboss” framing, it wrote itself all the same.