i am an intellectual Girl
@aidenarata on Instagram, 2020
I. Smart as Hell
The first time anyone told me I was good at debate was the summer before my junior year.
I was at an intensive debate program, and it was right after the semifinals of the camp tournament. My partner Jazmyn and I were debating two boys from Hunter a year older than us. We had spent two years in the shadow of those boys on Hunter’s team, and everyone assumed we would lose the round. The round was in the basement of a building named after a woman at Bryn Mawr College, it was 11 o’clock at night, and I had just chugged a bottle of cold brew because I had spent the night before writing pages and pages of arguments instead of sleeping. Right before the round I sat in a bathroom stall with my head in my hands and I was excited that I had made it so far in the tournament but I also felt my forehead sweating under my palms. All I could feel was worry that I would stand up in the round and not be able to say a thing — that my opponent’s god-like argument would leave me speechless and everyone would realize that I was just as bad as they thought. Before I got out of the stall I noticed that I had just started my period and I didn’t have any products and then I also worried that I would stain my pants during the round and everyone would see.
The round started and the room was so crowded, as if we were the city’s hottest ticket — every seat was taken and people were sitting on the windowsills. After my opponent’s speech, I stood up to give my rebuttal and I felt like I was sitting in the audience and I was watching myself debate. But I wasn’t watching myself debate, I was actually watching one of the successful debaters I spent years idolizing. She was desirable, desirable because she was smart and people were listening to her and paying attention to her. She used the same intonation and aspirated ts as her opponent — her voice deep and smooth — but in a slightly more charming way because she was just a bit more emotionally expressive. She looked really good in a suit and managed to look flawless when she was walking across the room to show her opponent evidence. She ran a ridiculous argument on teachers’ unions but everyone believed it because she made it sound so good. In twenty years, I saw her as the type of female politician who people listen to and find likeable, but I knew she was aware of the fragility of likeability because she had an Elizabeth Warren sticker on her MacBook. She was so desirable because she was so smart and good at debate and everyone knew it but her.
It was a performance, and a damn good one at that.
We lost the round but that didn’t matter, because after the round I overheard my opponent tell his coach he was terrified of me. And later that night we were with my coach and her friends, walking back to the dorm in the sticky Pennsylvania heat at one in the morning. We were walking back from the lecture hall named after a woman to our dorm named after a woman and everyone was praising us. These people who were so much older and better than me were telling me that I should have won and they couldn’t wait to see me at Nationals and that I was such a good debater. The praise felt so much better than caffeine, it felt like serotonin and adrenaline and dopamine and the first day of a new antidepressant dose all at once and probably cocaine as well. I knew that that feeling was why I was doing debate in the first place and I knew that I would do anything to feel it again.
That night in bed, I was still high from the praise but I was thinking about how my older male teammates never stopped calling Jazmyn and me “Junior Varsity” debaters even though we had been competing in — and doing well in — Varsity tournaments for over a year. I wondered if my performance that night would change that. All I wanted was to be seen as an equal and I knew I needed to work for it but I thought that maybe I had finally won the prize of equality. Once I fell asleep, I dreamt about debating the most well-known debater in the country — this white boy from Stuy who everybody idolized. I dreamt that I was in front of an audience and I stood up to respond to his speech and everything went wrong and no words came out of my mouth and he looked at me and laughed. I woke up in a cold sweat and had to remind myself that I was in my little dorm room, not the lecture hall I was debating in earlier that night. I swallowed three melatonin gummies from the bottle I hid in my desk and fell back asleep.
The next week, Jazmyn and I debated a boy who had previously mansplained the country of Latvia to me. During cross examination he got very aggressive and we started arguing a tiny point about the 2018 EU Parliamentary elections. We were yelling and our voices were echoing in the giant Bryn Mawr atrium and everybody was staring at us. But I knew that I was right — that it didn’t matter if Marine LePen’s party was strong in 2016, because it underperformed in the 2018 elections. I knew that I was right because I didn’t sleep the night before and instead spent all night researching EU Euro-sceptic parties. And after the round, our 18-year-old judge told us that it was the best cross-examination he had ever seen. I told your coaches you two are smart as hell, he told Jazmyn and me, and the compliment felt better because I watched him debate a year before and idolized him for a period of time. And for the next week or so I was attracted to my opponent even though he has a post captioned #ReaganBush84 on Instagram and he stopped talking to me after I beat him.
II. Sweetheart
A year later I am sitting in my room and I am reading an article by Sally Rooney. She’s writing about her experience with debate and I knew the article would be an emotional read but I’m surprised by how deeply I resonate with her words. It’s midnight and I’m in my bed and I have no one to scream or cry to so I just send Jazmyn quotes.
“I had low self-esteem and a predilection for hero-worship, and I was extremely determined. This was probably the perfect cocktail of tendencies for the novice debater.”
I copy and paste this quote over and over in my Notes app because I don’t think Sally Rooney is writing about herself, I think she is writing about me. I think she saw a picture of sixteen year old Josephine in a Goodwill pantsuit and her mom’s high heels debating condescending boys two years her senior and decided to model a character after her. Because in these words, I see the young girl who saw academics as a way to perform invulnerability but still be desirable while doing it. I see how I convinced myself I loved debate despite the culture of paternalism on my team and the nights I spent not sleeping and drinking too much coffee and just working. I see the all-boys Catholic school coach who would rub my shoulder and call me sweetheart in front of all his students. I see his students, who always talked over me in round but who I always found myself attracted to. I see the girl who thought she would win the older boys’ acceptance by performing well at the camp tournament, but who they treated just the same as before when summer turned into fall and the debate season began.
And I feel a little bit sick to my stomach because I realize now that I never actually cared about any of this treatment. I just accepted it as my place in debate. I dealt with so much shit from older debate boys but I still gave them the time of day. I thought that it was okay that I needed to work twice as hard to be seen as their equal, and that if they never treated me well it was because I wasn’t an equal after all. I accepted that I was a source of emotional labor and a source of prep and a source of team administration to these boys, but never a successful debater. I was working the Second Shift and the Third Shift and the Fourth Shift but I was seventeen and I didn’t know I didn’t deserve it. Maybe I welcomed it, because it was preparing me for the “real world.” Maybe it was the first time in a while that I felt connected to femininity and maybe that made the treatment worth it. Maybe I thought that was how the world was supposed to work, and maybe I desired that treatment.
And I realize that debate became a socially acceptable way for me to hurt myself.
III. “Read The Robber Bride!”
A few days later I see that one of the older boys from my debate team had seen my review of the Rooney article on Goodreads and read the piece himself. He gave it five stars and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Realistically, I know he has every right to read the article. But I feel as though he read my diary or my psychiatrist’s notes. And for some reason I want to yell, to make up for the years I sat next to him at debate tournaments, meek and quiet and feminine. I want to yell at him and say that he represented everything about the debate world that I wanted so badly but could never have — the white male ethos and the god-complex and the success. I want to yell at him to read Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride and then hold up a mirror and ask him who the fuck he thinks I was performing for. And while I yell at him I’ll also yell at that Catholic school coach and every opponent who ever interrupted me and the older male teammates who took advantage of my emotional labor. I want to yell at him but then the other part of me tells me that my victim complex is acting up and that if I did yell at him we would probably start debating and he would probably win because he was better at debate than I was. So I decide to go to bed but I can’t sleep because I had too much coffee and I can’t stop thinking about Sally Rooney’s article.