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Stormy Daniels’ Full Disclosure has hit bookstores.
It describes a hardscrabble childhood. It tells about life as a stripper, porn star, and adult film writer and director. And it alleges a momentous encounter with Donald Trump.
No, Daniels doesn’t say he raped her. In fact, they had “the least impressive sex” she’d ever had. But it set in motion events that culminated in a flash of terror. After people from In Touch magazine contacted Trump to confirm Daniels’ reluctant admission to them that he and she had once had sex, a thug approached her. Motioning toward her newborn, he said, “Beautiful little girl you got there.” And, “It’d really be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
Did our president hire a goon to silence Daniels with a threat to her life?
As Daniels’ memoir debuted last week, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified at the Kavanaugh hearing. Later that day I heard her repeatedly called a “shero.” To my ear, the praise was well deserved.
Perhaps the world heard from two “sheroes” last week. Still, as much equivalence as I find in the Ford and Daniels tales, I do realize that, when compared to the ultra-educated Ford and her Senate testimony, stripper Daniels and her tawdry tale will suffer.
Why? Well, slut shaming for starters. But first let me tell you some brain science history.
As is true of many stories about brain science, this one begins with observations about insanity. Sixty years ago, German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad noted that many psychotic patients spontaneously identify patterns in unrelated sensory input. Conrad called this quirk “apophenia.” An apophany is pretty much the opposite of an epiphany. Rather than amplify singular ideas, apophanies suck the singularity out of them. They reduce everything unique to bland parts of an imagined, larger whole.
Eventually, researchers realized that a type of apophenia is common among non-psychotic people, as well. That may be because, as the human species evolved, thoroughly examining every new input would have tied up mental resources to the point that humans would have been unaware of the predators around them.
As humans learn to walk upright and create civilizations, they developed the trick psychiatrists now call “confirmation bias.” Unconsciously, we humans pigeonhole new ideas into patterns (or, if you prefer, “groups”). When a new idea confirms an old one that has served us well, we add it to the group. If not, we either consider it “unreliable” or fail to notice it altogether.
In other words, we create apophanies. Rather than amplify singular ideas, we suck the singularity out of them and fit them into a imagined, larger wholes.
Sigmund Freud’s idea of the Madonna-Whore complex reflects two common apophanies about women. Madonnas are practically perfect in every way. (Apologies and thanks to Mary Poppins.) But Madonnas are also sometimes wounded as a direct result of their saintly acts. They’re pretty close to what many liberals probably imagined about Christine Blasey Ford.
Whores, on the other hand, are selfish and debauched, like many people imagine a stripper is. Or a porn star. Or a slut. Or Stormy Daniels.
While confirmation biases like “Madonnas are good, and so is Ford” and “Whores are debauched, and so is Daniels” help us process information efficiently, they shut our eyes and ears to insight. Confirmation bias is why Republicans listen to Fox and avoid NPR. For them, hearing and watching evidence that they’ve been right all along feels great. Ditto for Democrats who prefer Rachel Maddow and mock Sean Hannity.
Confirmation bias is dangerous. If it were a commercial product, its WARNING sticker, might say: “Unsupervised use of this product can result in unchecked prejudice and in highly polarized communities.”
At this point I have to cop to some of my own confirmation biases, ones I think I inherited from my mother.
My apologies for sounding like an old Johnny Cash song, but my mother was a lady. Specifically, she was a white one who voted liberal and wanted all of her children to have advanced degrees. Mom would automatically have thrilled at Ford’s testimony—and at her PhD.
And she would never have read Daniels’ book.
But if she had read Full Disclosure, Daniels tale of our president’s entitlements might have made her sit up straight in her wheelchair and shout. Daniels’ story is so well told that I can even imagine it making Mom growl—not at Daniels but at Trump.
Whether they want to be or not, at this political moment Daniels and Ford are two warriors in an epic struggle between women of all stripes and dangerous, powerful men. The struggle is not only about reproductive rights or sexual assault at parties or #MeToo harassment at work. It’s about death threats. It’s about deaths. It’s about mothers separated from terrified children. It’s about an administration that didn’t always bother to keep track of which child belonged to which mother, and so now the separation is forever. It’s about control of every aspect of women’s lives.
We have to salute our sheroes where we can find them. And, last week, both Ford and Daniels took risks that most of us have not taken (yet).
