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What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo
Amid the chorus of stories that define the #MeToo phenomenon, there remain other, unattended stories. These others do not displace the chorus. They do not say, You are wrong, shut up. They do not exist in the world of Keep quiet or Be good. They do not deny the reality of power, of men’s long dominance over women or of conformity as a silencing force. They say power is cunning, power is a hydra; it has more heads than any story or group of stories can describe. They say history does too. They invite us to inspect the hydra.
What follows is my invitation.
We both were young, twenties, but I was older. We worked for the same outfit, but I was paid. We kissed while walking home from a party, and then at the back of a bus, and then in his stairwell. He had made the first move, but only I could say, in the midst of our distraction, “Of course this means I can’t hire you.” He was an intern, I a department chief. The declaration astonished him—whether because he sensed I underestimated him I cannot say. Ultimately, he so surpassed the qualifying test’s requirements that not hiring him would have been absurd. Years later a catty friend would say ambition alone drove the boy’s kisses: “After all, he was gorgeous, and you …” I was his boss and lover, he my assistant and lover, each of us on the seesaw of power and weakness that those dual roles implied until, over time, the temperature changed.
That is a true story, true to me, and the telling, I suppose, encourages you to believe it. But what do you know? Say I were a man and the intern a woman. Say I called her a girl and someone said that her desire for a job figured in the encounter. Say you knew nothing of her side of the story, as you know nothing of his—as, actually, you know only the barest details of mine. Say, finally, that she knew the value of her kind of beauty in seduction and social competition—how could she not?—but also its curse. Does that imaginative exercise open what for me is a sweet, if complicated, memory to sinister interpretation? Is the intern now a victim? Am I a predator? And yet the information is unchanged, as revealing and partial as it was at first telling.
The story, like any told from a single point of view, raises an unnerving question about certainty: how can we determine the truth from what we cannot know? In his Histories, Herodotus tells readers that x is what he heard but could not confirm, that y is what his informants say they believe, that z is something he highly doubts but is, in all events, a cultural consensus. Readers might not have verifiable truth, but they are invited to interpret what those views might say about the people who hold them (or the writer who chose to record them). At the detective’s desk, a story of crime is pieced together from multiple sources; even then a charging document is not the truth, it is subject to challenge. In literature, truth is an investigation not an endpoint, so the story is an instrument for revealing the complexity of being alive, and wisdom, rather than certainty, is the hope.
In politics, truth tends to be whatever those holding the bullhorn say it is. During the spectacle of the Golden Globes ceremony, television viewers would have seen this graphic commercial:
He said. She said.
He said. She said.
He said. She said.
He said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said.
She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said.
The truth has power.
The truth will not be threatened.
The truth has a voice.
The New York Times.
Afterward the ad flickered from New York subway platforms. As cultural messaging, it resolves the problem of uncertainty by saying, first, that truth lies in the teller and, second, that social truth—the reality of sexual violence—may obliterate the particulars of any individual life by the sheer number of tellers saying “Me too.”
Given the timing of its debut at the start of Hollywood’s award season, the “She said” cascade could be read narrowly to represent producer Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and the Times’ role in his fall. It is now accepted as fact that Weinstein is a violent criminal. He may be, but in actual fact we don’t know. Saying that should not be controversial: review enough cases brought on the basis of multiplying accusations in periods of high emotion, and you resist trial-by-media. That it is controversial indicates just how much people are willing to trade for certainty—also, how sheltered some are from the idea that they could ever find themselves on the wrong side of a police investigation. Weinstein basked in the bully role, but his descent would be more satisfying if it did not rely simultaneously on conviction by say-so and a generalized agreement that he dis-empowered every man and woman who wasn’t on his security detail, from assistants to actors to journalists.
Affirmations of powerlessness are more telling than sordid details. Not because the latter might be untrue but because the former reduce a many-layered story of sexism, violation and human weakness to a bleached tale of monstrosity and cowering. If some of the most privileged people on the planet were paralyzed by fear, this story implies, what defense do the rest of us have against the Bad Man?
As Natalie Portman explained, we are helpless: “It’s only some men who do the harassing, but it’s all women who fear the violence and aggression. It has an effect like terror … everyone is afraid to walk down the street alone at night.”1
Desperate situations demand desperate measures. After the terror of 9/11: war, torture, mass surveillance, the gulag. After the terror of Weinstein, to what ends must we go to feel safe?
That is not a glib question, nor is the terror reference insignificant. It points to a broader politics of fear structuring our time. Rage, revenge, the frisson of command as the list of accused men grew—these emotions reigned as #MeToo burst into the air-conditioning system of the culture.
Rose McGowan joined the cry for jettisoning laws and legal distinctions (“These rape and child molestation statutes of limitations—what the fuck? That’s murder. That’s killing somebody”). Jenna Wortham imagined “the possibility of a new world order,” perhaps unaware of the term’s association with boasts of US leadership in global violence. After the appearance of the Shitty Men in Media List, the pell-mell anonymous J’accuse on the internet, Wortham expressed initial unease in The New York Times Magazine, only to conclude:
A friend compared the feeling [after seeing the list] to the final scenes of “V for Vendetta.” She liked seeing women as digital vigilantes, knowing that men were scared. I did, too. I wanted every single man put on notice, to know that they, too, were vulnerable because we were talking.
Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin tweeted of the list: “Sorry. If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay”—a curious way of putting it, since Lindin would absolutely not be the one to pay. Dylan Farrow, whose stated memories of molestation by Woody Allen are anything but simple—one brother (Ronan) launched a career off them while another brother (Moses) says they are false memories, implanted—blasts “our collective choice to see simple situations as complicated and obvious conclusions as a matter of ‘who can say?’”
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