The Problem with Everything

by Meghan Daum

  Though I found Ford’s statements against Kavanaugh moving, compelling, and entirely credible, I was less moved by the sloganeering that rose up around them. Something about it felt hollow and perfunctory, as if Ford had become a meme before she even left the stand. Within hours of Ford’s appearance at the Senate hearing, the mantra and meme #BelieveWomen was appearing on T-shirts and projected onto the sides of buildings. Democratic senators like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker were grandstanding to win points with their liberal voters. Harris called Ford a “true patriot.” Booker, who’d made a show of bringing Ford a cup of coffee when she requested some caffeine, said, “How we deal with survivors who come forward right now is unacceptable. And the way we deal with this, unfortunately, allows for the continued darkness of this culture to exist.”

  Booker was correct in saying that the way we deal with survivors who come forward is unacceptable. That is because many of them, including Ford, didn’t intend to come forward publicly. They were pushed into the spotlight by forces that, at least in this case, remain nebulous. I have no idea what sequence of events or what sort of political maneuvering led to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein holding on to Ford’s allegations for months after Ford brought them to her. Nor do I know exactly how other accusers, like Julie Swetnick and Debbie Ramirez, came into the mix shortly after word got out that Ford was set to come forward. I do know that the timing did Blasey Ford and the Democrats no favors. It did little more than muddy the already turbid waters. And that is unacceptable given the hell that so many people, Ford and Kavanaugh most of all, were put through.

  Swetnick’s story was a weak goulash of memories of drunken parties wherein high school boys who may or may not have included Brett Kavanaugh deliberately incapacitated girls with drugs and alcohol in order to gang rape them. It was also, notably, brought to public attention by lawyer Michael Avenatti, who represented adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the case involving President Trump and who, of course, would later be arrested on federal embezzling and extortion charges, which he denied. Ramirez’s story, first reported in the New Yorker by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, was stronger, but at times left me with the impression that she was struggling to put a puzzle together more neatly than it could realistically be assembled.

  “She was at first hesitant to speak publicly,” Farrow and Mayer wrote in the New Yorker, “partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with the New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”

  Let’s go back to Primary Colors for a minute, specifically the scene where James Carville—I mean Richard Jemmons—exposes his penis to the press muffin at the copy machine. In the era in which this was supposed to have taken place, the early 1990s, this type of incident would have occupied a space somewhere between gross gag, stupid prank, and genuine violation. Now rewind to some ten years before that, in the early 1980s. Imagine a bunch of very drunk students at a prestigious Ivy League university horsing around at a party. Imagine that a male student exposed his penis to a female student in a very similar manner. Instead of this happening in front of an audience of spellbound colleagues working on a political campaign, imagine it happened among people likely too drunk to really register it at the time, let alone remember it later. Does this sound like a big deal?

  I believe Ramirez’s account of what happened at the party. Or at least I have no reason not to believe her. Again, this is not the same as knowing that it happened; as with Ford’s description of her encounter with Kavanaugh, which I also believe, there is no way that anyone who wasn’t there can know. The thing is, I have a hard time placing it into the category of “big deal.” And until Kavanaugh was a Supreme Court nominee, I wonder how Ramirez herself was categorizing it. “It was kind of a joke,” Ramirez said in the New Yorker. “And now it’s clear to me that it wasn’t a joke.” That is not to say she wasn’t adversely affected by the incident. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she told the New Yorker. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.”

  But who, or what, exactly, made that clear? Ramirez’s former classmates from Yale? Farrow and Mayer? The #MeToo movement itself? According to reports about the article, including a Today interview with Jane Mayer, e-mails about the incident had begun circulating between Ramirez and her Yale classmates in July. “Eventually, word of it spread,” Mayer told Today’s Savannah Guthrie. “It spread to the Senate. It spread to the media. And we at the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow, my partner and coauthor on the story, reached out to her and she decided, after giving it really careful consideration for six days, she decided to talk to us about it.”

  Less than a week later, Ford took the stand and described, with far greater assurance, Kavanaugh holding her down on a bed and grinding against her while his buddy looked on. She said she was afraid he was accidentally going to kill her. She also mentioned the two boys laughing at her.

  “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said. “The uproarious laughter between the two and having fun at my expense. . . . I was underneath one of them while the two laughed. Two friends having a really good time with one another.”

  Sometimes I think it was this detail—the laughter—that hit so many people in their souls. Unlike Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas twenty-seven years earlier, Ford managed to elicit the sympathy, even the empathy, of many men as well as women. Even if they couldn’t bring themselves to believe it was Kavanaugh who assaulted her, they believed she was assaulted. They seemed to feel her pain. Maybe because if there’s anything men know about humiliation, it’s that it often comes in the form of ridicule by women. The famous Margaret Atwood quote that goes something along the lines of “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, while women are afraid men will kill them” is overused, reductive, and not quite anything that Atwood actually ever said (in fact it was made famous when it showed up, in slightly different wording, in Gavin de Becker’s best-selling book about female self-protection, The Gift of Fear), but it’s not untrue. To fear for your life while also being laughed at by your peers is a particular sort of trauma, one that combines the worst of middle school with the worst of actual warfare.

  But what an opera this has all become. What a Greek tragedy masquerading as a news cycle. In the Autumn of the Patriarch, as the balmy remnants of an Indian summer petered out with the last weeks of October, I felt like I was wedged into a narrow theater seat, desperate to go home despite barely having made it through the first act of the play. By Thanksgiving, slogans like #BelieveWomen, #BelieveSurvivors, and #BelieveHer had become their own subjects of controversy, with many conservatives and even some liberal types pointing out that their message fundamentally flew in the face of “innocent until proven guilty.” Besides, the previous summer had seen two relatively high-profile examples of women being accused of sexual misconduct and even statutory rape, though both cases were so full of ironies and complications that they were almost too cumbersome to talk about. One was the case of Asia Argento, the Italian actress who was among the first to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault and emerged as a leader in the #MeToo movement. In August of 2018, reports emerged, all of which Argento denied, that she paid off a young man who had accused her of sexually assaulting him years earlier, when he was seventeen and she was thirty-seven. Another case involved Avital Ronell, an eccentric and mercurial professor of German and comparative literature at New York University who was the subject of a Title IX investigation when a former graduate student named Nimrod Reitman accused her of sexually harassing him in a way that, according to the
lawsuit, “asserted complete domination and control over his life.”

  In a display of irony that will be further underscored in the next chapter of this book, several feminist colleagues rushed to Ronell’s defense, decrying the lack of due process. “We deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her,” they wrote in a letter to the university. “We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare.”

  I sat back and watched—or rather read about—this whole saga as though it were a delicious prime-time soap opera, perhaps one entitled As the Schadenfreude Turns. Ronell, according to Reitman, had invited him to join her in Paris, where, he says, she pressed herself against him and kissed him repeatedly. And when Ronell lost electrical power during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, he said, she repeatedly showed up at his apartment and demanded to sleep there. Reitman alleged that Ronell’s behavior over the course of his academic career amounted to “sexual harassment, sexual assault, and stalking.”

  Ronell denied all the charges, characterizing some of her affectionate language in e-mails as merely playful and “gay coded.” This interpretation was backed up by an NYU colleague of Ronell’s named Lisa Duggan, who said in a blog post that she had been “collecting cases of queer faculty accused of sexual harassment” and believed that “queers are disproportionately charged, often by homophobic or sexually confused students, sometimes by queer students whose demands for ‘special’ treatment are disappointed.” The e-mails between Ronell and Reitman, Duggan said, were of a nature that “resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders.”

  The simple end to this story is that Ronell was suspended without pay for the 2018–19 academic year. The more accurate, and far more complex, set of conclusions to be drawn here may be less satisfying. That is to say that academia, especially the highly specialized and esoteric corners of the humanities in which this drama played out, is a labyrinth of egos, jealous gatekeeping, and the challenges of dealing with people whose outsize intellects are sometimes paired with quirky or possibly underdeveloped social skills. So confusing and specialized and “baffling to outsiders” is this labyrinth that when it comes to normal standards of human conduct, there is a sense that all bets are off. There is far more to the story, which isn’t really worth going into here but which Masha Gessen outlined in an excellent August 25, 2018, New Yorker article about the whole affair. The morass of confusion and finger-pointing, Gessen said, amounted to “academics doing their job: engaging with things in great complexity. Discussions of #MeToo cases in other areas haven’t been up to this task. We certainly can’t expect it from Hollywood, whose job is to make stories palatable and simple. Writers, who on the subject of #MeToo have often practiced either avoidance or positional warfare, have been able to advance the conversation only so far.”

  That was the understatement of the year, or at least the understatement of the Autumn of the Patriarch. As that season trundled along, the Kavanaugh debacle moved the term “toxic masculinity” out of the ethos of Woke Twitter and into the mainstream embrace of the corporate wokescenti.

  Like intersectionality, which I’ll talk about in more detail a bit later, toxic masculinity is one of those concepts that, on its surface, makes perfect sense. It concerns the ways in which boys are raised to suppress their emotions and, in some cases, associate physical violence with power. But as tends to happen when trendy words like “toxic” are thrown in front of other words (“toxic person,” “toxic relationship,” “toxic workplace”), the whole concept has been diluted into zero-calorie nothingness. Sure, there are stereotypically male behaviors that range anywhere from the merely unfortunate, like not being able to share feelings with male friends, to the truly terrible, like engaging in unnecessary physical violence (and surely 99 percent of physical violence is unnecessary).

  But what about all the stereotypically female behaviors that can be equally toxic? What about the way women get together and conduct withering assessments of other women behind their backs—and then turn around and continue to act like their best friends? What about the almost unfathomable level of cruelty that teenage girls can inflict upon one another as they enforce social boundaries by shunning outsiders, both online and in real life? What about data (from various sources, including the Centers for Disease Control) that suggests rates of intimate partner violence among lesbian couples is just as high if not higher than rates among heterosexual couples? Most women’s social and emotional manipulation skills are far more sophisticated than those of most men, at least in my unscientific but anecdotally unassailable opinion. So isn’t it a little unfair that men are getting all the credit for being toxic?

  And this is to say nothing of the manipulations and abuses women can commit against men. Honestly, sometimes I wish I could gather up all the women I’ve ever known, or encountered, and conduct this informal poll:

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever behaved badly and blamed it on your period.

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever acted helpless in the face of an unpleasant-if-not-physically-demanding task like dealing with a wild animal that’s gotten inside the house.

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever coerced a man into sex even though he didn’t seem to really want it.

  Raise your hand if you’ve thought you were at liberty to do this coercing because men “always want it” and should feel lucky any time they get it.

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever threatened to harm yourself if a man breaks up with you or doesn’t want to see you anymore.

  Raise your hand if you’ve been physically abusive with a male partner, knowing you’d be unlikely to face any legal consequences.

  Raise your hand if you’ve lied about being on birth control, or faked a pregnancy scare, to see how a man would respond.

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever manipulated a divorce or child custody dispute in your favor by falsely insinuating that a man has been abusive toward you or your child.

  In this hypothetical gathering of every woman I’ve ever known or encountered (I’m imagining a football stadium at decent capacity), I’m certain there is not a single one of these questions that, if answered honestly, wouldn’t send at least a few (in some cases many) hands into the air. Including my own. I’m guilty on the pest-control front. I also once tried to excuse an excessive display of irritability by saying I had PMS, which was a lie because it wasn’t anywhere near that time of month (the truth is I’m just irritable a lot of the time). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying lots of women do these things routinely. Most women, like most men, try to be decent people most of the time. What I am saying is that enough women do these things often enough that it’s hypocritical, not to mention sexist, to constantly be on patrol for toxic masculinity when toxic femininity exists as well.

  There are minor forms of feminine toxins, like blaming irrational temper tantrums on “being hormonal” or feigning helplessness to get what you want. And there are major toxins, many having to do with weaponizing your fragility so that those to whom you cause harm have a difficult time defending themselves, lest they look like the aggressors. Women, of course, can unleash these tactics on other women, be they romantic partners or not. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s say we are talking about women and men and sex. We’ve established that many men are socially conditioned to think that women owe them sex. But what about the women who assume that men should be grateful for any sex they get?

  Throughout my life, I’ve heard dozens of men tell stories about going ahead with sex even though they didn’t really want to. I wasn’t surprised to learn of a 2014 study, published in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, that found that 43 percent of males in high school and college “reported they had an unwanted sexual experience and, of those, 95 percent said a female acquaintance was
the aggressor.” As the men I’ve talked to have put it, sometimes they went ahead with sex because they didn’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings. Other times, it was because they feared being perceived as having a low sex drive or as not being sexually interested in women. (Not without reason; in my younger years, it was not uncommon for a woman to console her female friend with “He must be gay!” when the friend lamented a man’s lack of interest in her. It was almost a corollary to “You so do not look fat in those pants!”) A remarkable number of men have told me about times when women approached them and, often wordlessly, initiated sexual encounters without the slightest provocation or questions asked. I’ve heard, more than once, about unsolicited hand jobs on school buses when they were boys. Also, more than once, men have told me about school camping trips or overnight parties wherein girls they barely knew slipped into their sleeping bags or beds. In some cases, the men were happy to oblige the women’s desires. In other cases, though, they went through with the encounters because they didn’t want to make an awkward situation even more awkward.

  These stories have been relayed to me in a tone I can only describe as bafflement. The men are not complaining, but nor are they boasting. If anything, they seem to be struggling to find the words to describe a not entirely welcome encounter that they felt they had no right to regard with anything other than gratitude. Needless to say, if you imagined any of these situations with the genders reversed, you’d have the potential for very different framing.

  I realize that the physical size difference between most women and most men means that the comparison above isn’t entirely fair; a woman who’s sexually aggressive with a man is probably not putting him in insurmountable physical danger. And (obviously) for every bad behavior I mentioned in my list of questions there is an equal, opposite, and potentially more physically threatening form of bad behavior that men can, and do, visit upon women with just as much frequency. But that, right there, is precisely my point. In a free society, everyone, regardless of gender, or any other identification, is free to be a manipulative, narcissistic, emotionally destructive asshole.