Christie Brinkley Shares Her Chump Story in New Book

I get the mordant humor and uncontrollable laughter in the middle of trauma, especially when it’s not your first rodeo and you’re in an arena that’s wall to wall pervs like the fashion industry.

To quote a feminist commentator, “Models age in dog years.” You just see so much sh*t going on from a young age that it’s either laugh or die. And there’s a tendency for women who work in similarly rapey industries to stick together because few people outside those worlds can even conceive how common the bs is nor the gallows humor survival reaction.

In fact, if the “uninitiated” even see you laughing about various awful scenarios, they’ll think you’re making it up or are sick and jaded or even “covert bragging” about being “so desirable” because there’s a very rigid social expectation of how “good victims” are supposed to behave, which is sort of blushingly hangdog and Christlike in your lack of spite while you demurely contemplate your “part” in the unfortunate event– not cackling like a banshee over comic revenge scenarios and brimming with schadenfreude.

I’ve been in so many of those cackling “war councils” with other women in those industries that I tend to take Christie Brinkley’s account of her friend group laughing at face value. Maybe later when alone everyone falls to pieces for a bit. But, in my experience, the group convergence for veteran serial survivors is all about using gallows humor like a tourniquet and fueling up the fighting spirit.

Like the Victoria’s Secret model who brought out a shoe box filled with obsessive letters from a violent psycho who was then on trial for stalking her. We read them aloud and campily acted them out over margaritas in her kitchen until we pissed ourselves.

Or the time my casting director friend came with me to a criminal sentencing hearing of the psycho coworker who’d stalked and assaulted me and she ventriloquized song parodies about prison rape under her breath until tears streamed down my face from the effort not to laugh in court (“When you love a Bubba, it’s no good unless he’s up there ALL THE WAY!”).

Or the time another model friend described the Looney Tunes scene when she sneaked up on her now-ex monster FW husband as he was jacking off over former Soviet Bloc cam girls with a cum-covered credit card in his hand.

I remember we were laughing so hard we couldn’t breath. But by then it was kind of a gallows humor ritual that started years before this when we spent one Christmas together in LA cutting and painting a few dozen Christmas ornaments out of tin depicting an array of paunchy, balding Harvey Weinstein-esque media industry pervs riding in Bentleys and a series of glittery “casting couches.” This was right after both of us had survived traumatic “near misses.”

Later I learned it’s not just women in certain industries who have reactions like this and that even men are expected to act like “good victims” if they survive sexual assault. I was at a small house party overseas when a group of childhood guy friends started laughing themselves sick as they described all the violent or terrifying near-rape experiences they’d had starting in their tweens while living under a violent military dictatorship. I remember how some of the politically uninitiated bystanders turned pale and gawped in disbelief or disapproval but not me.

In that situation I didn’t think it was my place to outright laugh along but I remember being overcome with a million deep thoughts. For one, I realized that, because, as kids, these men had experienced repeat assaults by adults (quite often military police officials) who weren’t even closeted homosexuals but simply opportunists, that rapists are their own sexual identity category completely separate from gay or straight and that rape is so dehumanizing and soul-killing even to perpetrators themselves that it negates even innate sexual preference.

It also dawned on me like a bolt of lightning that the whole underlying point of authoritarianism seems to be the right to commit rape and get away with it. I wondered if any studies existed reporting massively elevated rates of every kind of rape and domestic abuse under authoritarian regimes. I wondered if this could in turn explain why some men from classes that typically economically suffer under dictatorships will still rabidly support authoritarianism: because the latter offers every would-be rapist the chance to let their freak flags fly at last and that, to would-be rapists, this is even more important than basic civil freedom and economic survival. It also dawned on me that rape is political because every rape is an incremental incursion on democracy itself and democracy will never be stable or secure until progressives make sexual justice and gender parity a leading priority.

And of course I also realized that gallows humor is a pretty universal survival response to types of traumas that are repetitious and endemic and for which there is not yet real justice. Furthermore, it seemed pretty clear that even male survivors of sexual aggression are under judgy social pressure to act like “good victims.”

I think that only when serial survivors finally feel genuinely safe and validated regarding certain threats would they be able to stop topping off the “fight tank” with gallows humor fuel. But that may be exactly what bothers uninitiated or denialist bystanders so much: that the “group gallows humor” convergent reaction is something that belies that something is not only a “war” with mass casualties but an “ongoing” one while most people would prefer to think sexual abuse and exploitation is a rare anomaly.