"I hated the word 'feminine.' It reminded me of a tampon or a panty liner."

Said Tonya Harding, whose "sin" — as the NYT puts it — "was not being the Disney princess Barbie doll that the Figure Skating Association demanded of its skaters."

The NYT article is "Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now/In the movie, 'I, Tonya,' the disgraced figure skater looks back on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal and her struggles to tell her side of the story" by — what a spectacular name! — Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

“You all disrespected me and it hurt. I’m a human being and it hurt my heart,” she said, her hand karate chopping the table lightly with every word for emphasis. “I was a liar to everybody but still, 23 years later, finally everybody can just eat crow. That’s what I have to say.”

Yes, but the world is different now, I tell her.... Look at Monica Lewinsky and how we treated her. Just yesterday I saw maybe the seventh essay comparing her with you, how rough the 90s were on women who needed support and ——

“Monica Lewinsky?” she asked, incredulous, using a modified version of the same obscene phrase involving male anatomy that she had just said she would never use.* “In the Oval Office! You don’t think that there’s something wrong with that? She disrespected the country.”

But you were both so young, I said. And the press was so hard on you before they’d heard the full ——

Stop it, she said. Don’t compare her to Monica Lewinsky. She is nothing like Monica Lewinsky, she said. Tonya wasn’t making mistakes like a privileged person who gets an internship at the White House....

I'm interested in Brodesser-Akner's use of the double em-dash. That would look crazy to me, but I recently read — in "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen " — that Charles Dickens had a penchant for the double em dash:

In Dickens I discovered something unexpected: an abundance of double dashes— two-em dashes, closed up. “Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way——” He uses the double dash in dialogue, to convey an interruption compounded by a threat. The double dash is strangely expressive, packing an extra dose of suspense, as if the speaker, rendered inarticulate by emotion, were resorting to his fists. And, when you think about it, suspense is what punctuation is all about: how is the author going to finish the sentence?

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* Earlier in the article, we're told that in the movie, there's a scene with Tonya confronting skating judges, showing that "she gets frustrated and gives them an obscene directive involving male anatomy. Never happened, she said. 'I would never say that.'" I guess I could look up the movie dialogue. The "obscene directive" must be "Blow me." Or is it "suck my dick"? Oh! I looked it up. It's "suck my dick." Here's Vulture, "A Fact-checked Guide to I, Tonya":

Did Tonya tell a judge to “suck my dick” after the judge criticized her outfit? No. [the actress playing Harding, Margot] Robbie said in a late-night interview that the line was made up, but that when Harding saw the movie, she apparently wished she had said it. Harding did, however, tell the judge who criticized her outfit that unless she could come up with $5,000 to buy Harding a new costume she could “stay out of my face.”