By the time Devin found me, I’d been at the office for fourteen hours and was lying on a lavender velvet chaise, fortifying myself with room-temperature-staff-kitchen chardonnay that I’d poured into a “MALE TEARS” mug, scrolling through my various feeds, using multiple search terms, absorbing every abusive thing people were saying about me, @MarenGelb, M**en G**b, libtard, feminazi, stupid fucking cunt.
I wasn’t crying. I felt pleasantly numb. With an insatiable hunger for knowing, I kept compulsively refreshing, in search of the worst. The infinite scroll prevented me from ever hitting bottom.
The elevator ding signaled her arrival. “Babe?”
I raised my mug in the air.
“You’re here! People are worried about you. Your phone is off.”
“I turned it on Do Not Disturb so I could OD on the internet in peace.”
Devin tossed her coat over an ergonomic exercise ball chair. Her blond hair was still damp from showering after her exercise class, so I knew she wasn’t too concerned about me, not so concerned that she’d miss an opportunity to burn six hundred calories. She was wearing her “Namaslay” T-shirt.
After a bottle of wine, I’d ditched my sweater and was down to my BreastNest, a garment I’d ordered online. It’s a spongy beige sack you can wear for support if even the idea of clasping a bra is too much.
“Sit next to me,” I said. “You smell good.”
“What are you drinking?”
“Kombucha,” I said.
I’d been working late, revising the competitive advantage slide for our pitch deck. Everyone else had gone home. The song of my inbox played at a slower tempo after dark—it was the only time of day I could get anything done. I took a break to check Twitter, and without asking anyone’s permission or doing a SWOT analysis, I made a joke. Or I thought it was a joke. Definitely an anger-based joke, I can admit that now. It seemed more obviously funny at the time.
“What if you just deleted the tweet?” she said.
“Too late. They already showed it on Anderson Cooper.”
I played the clip for her on my phone. Leading feminist Maren Gelb is causing waves tonight with what some on the right are calling a dog whistle to other activists about the president’s daughter and her—I had to turn it off. I couldn’t watch it again.
“Don’t worry,” Devin said. “No one watches Anderson Cooper.”
“I watch Anderson Cooper.”
“Well, you’re my elder.” Devin smiled and the highlighter around her eyes shimmered with optimism. “Give me the phone, Maren.”
“Why, what are you going to do with it?”
“I’m just going to babysit it while you clean up.”
“Wait,” I snapped. My left hand was a claw that had evolved to grip this little screen until I died. “Can I show you just one?” We both knew I was stalling. “Look at this douche in Palo Alto with half a million followers, saying, ‘@MarenGelb is an example of the leadership principal when they go low, we go lower. Did I get that right? Hashtag AllLivesMatter.’ He doesn’t even know how to spell principle! ‘All Lives Matter’? Seriously? Do you see this?”
Devin put my phone in her back pocket without even looking at the screen. I needed another drink.
“Well,” I said, “the good news is I figured out what our competitive advantage is.”
“Let me guess. Our badass cofounders?” She pointed at me and made her hands into a heart.
“No.”
“Wait, don’t tell me. Our seamless integration of sponsored content and organically sourced influencers?”
“No,” I said. “The worse it gets—I mean the more women who are outraged and terrified and suffering—the more our user base grows. The more the network scales.”
It was happening right now. A hundred new members a minute. The more I was attacked by right-wing trolls, the more women on the left rallied to support me. I was smart enough to retweet all the rape threats (mostly in the “too ugly to rape” genre) I was getting and ask women to create accounts at Richual, the social network Devin and I had built as a world without men—where women could actually take care of themselves.
Richual asked: when’s the last time you put yourself first? Our app pressed a pause button on all the bullshit in daily life. You could track your meditation minutes and ounces of water consumed and REM sleep and macros and upcoming Mercury retrogrades and see who among your friends was best at prioritizing #metime, based on how many hours a day they spent on the app. It was a virtual space where @SmokyMountainHeartOpener posted videos of herself doing forearm stands in a thong leotard and @PussyGrabsBack shared photos of her feet soaking in Epsom salt after a march.
It was the digital sanctuary where you went to unload your pain.
We earned revenue from the brands who offered solutions to that pain: serums and creams, juices and dusts, clays and scrubs, drugs and masks, oils and enemas, scraping and purging, vaping and waxing, lifting and lengthening, straightening and defining, detox and retox, the cycle of life.
Devin was the face of Richual. She was also the body. She was literally the “after” photo in a piece of branded content promoting a thirty-day cleanse. T-shirt slogans popped on her flat chest. Her collarbone was usually exposed and opalescent. She was small enough that she appeared appropriately human-size in photographs taken at red carpet launches, while I stood to one side like her zaftig cousin visiting from another country—the country of Wisconsin.
Devin hid the work it took to make that body. I wore my work like a second, visible skin. Over the course of eighteen months, I’d gone from a size 8 to a 14 and upped my Zoloft prescription twice. My thighs rubbed together when I walked in a dress. The internet told me this was normal. The internet showed me ads for nontoxic anti-chafing gel.
No one ever called us by the other’s name.
Devin went to the beauty closet and came back with a tube of Missha Super Aqua Cell Renew Snail Sleeping Mask with 15 percent snail slime extract “from healthy snails born within five to six months” for “strengthening the skin barrier in a natural way.”
“Try this and we’ll take a selfie and I’ll post it to my account so everyone knows you’re okay,” Devin said. She picked my wrinkled sweater off the floor and I held my arms up like a toddler, so she could dress me.
“The tweet is gonna be good for us, you’ll see,” I said. “Don’t worry about the tweet.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 24, 2017
RICHUAL CEO DEVIN AVERY WISHES COO MAREN GELB “GOOD VIBES” FOR HER RECOVERY