Laurie Penny
The Horizon of Desire
“Man fucks woman. Man: subject. Woman: object.”
—The Fall, Episode 3, “Insolence and Wine”
The first thing you need to understand about consent is that consent is not, strictly speaking, a thing. Not in the same way that teleportation isn’t a thing. Consent is not a thing because it is not an item, nor a possession. Consent is not an object you can hold in your hand. It is not a gift that can be given and then rudely requisitioned. Consent is a state of being. Giving someone your consent—sexually, politically, socially—is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process. It’s an interaction between two human creatures. I believe that a great many men and boys don’t understand this. I believe that lack of understanding is causing unspeakable trauma for women, men, and everyone else who is sick of how much human sexuality still hurts.
We need to talk about what consent really means, and why it matters more, not less, at a time when women’s fundamental rights to bodily autonomy are under attack across the planet, and the Hog-Emperor of Rape Culture is squatting in the White House making your neighborhood pervert look placid. We still get consent all wrong, and we have to try to get it a bit less wrong, for all our sakes.
To explain all this, I’m going to have to tell you some stories. They’re true stories, and some of them are rude stories, and I’m telling you now because the rest of this ride might get uncomfortable and I want you to have something to look forward to.
So, I’ve got this friend with a shady past. He’s a clever and conscientious person who grew up in the patriarchy, and he knows that he’s done things which may not have been criminal but have hurt people, and by people he means women. My friend has hurt women, and he doesn’t know what to do about that now, and from time to time we talk about it. That’s how it happened that, a few weeks ago, halfway through an effervescent confession in a coffee shop, the following words came out of his mouth: “Technically, I don’t think I’ve raped anyone.”
Technically. Technically, my friend doesn’t think he is a rapist. That technically haunted me for days. Not because I don’t believe it, but because I do. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, or something like it, from otherwise well-meaning male friends who are frantically reassessing their sexual history in the light of the awkward fact that shame is no longer enough to stop women from naming abusers. It’s so far from the first time I’ve heard it, in fact, that I ought to add a caveat, for a few select readers: If you haven’t given me permission to share your story, this isn’t you I’m talking about.
“Technically, I haven’t raped anyone.” What did he mean, technically? My friend went on to describe how, over years of drinking and shagging around before he got sober, he considers it a matter of luck rather than pride that he has never, to his knowledge, committed serious sexual assault. The fact is that, like any number of men growing up in the last decade, his concept of consent could have been written in crayon. Sex was something you persuaded women to let you do to them, and if they weren’t passed out, saying no, or actively trying to throw you off, you were probably fine.
All the way home from the coffee shop, I thought about consent and why the very concept is so fearful to anyone invested in not looking under the carpet of modern morality. I thought about the number of situations I’ve encountered where no, technically, nobody committed a crime, and yes, technically, what happened was consensual. Maybe someone pushed a boundary to its breaking point. Maybe someone simply lay there and let something be done to them because they didn’t feel able, for whatever reason, to say no.
That technically, of course, is not just something one hears from men. You hear that same technically, in a different key, from girls and grown women who don’t want to think of the things that happened to them that way, even though the fact that those things happened to them, with or without their say-so, is the whole problem. We learn, just as men do, that our instincts about what we feel and experience are not to be trusted. We learn that our desire is dangerous and so we tamp it down until we no longer recognize the difference between wanting and being wanted. We learn that our sexuality is contemptible and so we crush it; we become alienated from our own bodies. I’ve told myself before that technically, this or that person committed no crime, so technically, I’ve got no reason to feel used like a human spittoon, and technically I did invite him back to my house, so technically, I should have expected nothing less, and technically, there’s no reason to be angry and upset, because really, what is female sexuality but a set of technicalities to be overcome?
The problem is that technically isn’t good enough. “At least I didn’t actively assault anyone” is not a gold standard for sexual morality, and it never was. Of course, we have to start somewhere, and “try not to rape anyone” is as good a place as any, but it can’t end there. Our standards for decent sexual and social behavior should not be defined purely by what is likely to get us publicly shamed or put in prison because we are not toddlers, and we can do better.
This is what consent culture means. It means expecting more—demanding more. It means treating one another as complex human beings with agency and desire, not just once, but continually. It means adjusting our ideas of dating and sexuality beyond the process of prying a grudging “yes” out of another human being. Ideally you want them to say it again, and again, and mean it every time. Not just because it’s hotter that way, although it absolutely is; consent doesn’t have to be sexy to be centrally important. But because when you get down to it, sexuality should not be about arguing over what you can get away with and still call consensual.
When you put it that way, it sounds simple. Easy to understand. But there are a great many simple ideas that we are taught not to understand and a great many more that we choose not to understand when our self-image as decent human beings is at stake, and that’s where a lot of men and boys I know are at right now. Bewildered. Uncomfortable. Wrestling with the specter of their own wrongdoing. Frightened, most of all, about how the ground rules for being a worthwhile person are changing so fast.
So let’s talk about getting away with it. Let’s talk about what happens in a society where women’s bodies are contested commodities for men to fight over. Let’s talk about rape culture.
The naming and shaming of rape culture has been one of the most important feminist interventions of recent years and one of the most controversial and misunderstood. “Rape culture” does not imply a society in which rape is routine, although it remains unconscionably common. Rape culture describes the process whereby rape and sexual assault are normalized and excused, the process whereby women’s sexual agency is continuously denied and women and girls are expected to be afraid of rape and to guard against it, the process whereby men are assumed to have the erotic self-control of a gibbon with a sweetie jar of Viagra, creatures who ought to be applauded for not flinging turds everywhere rather than encouraged to apply critical thinking.
(I have never understood why more men aren’t offended by this assumption, why more of them aren’t arguing that possession of a penis does not automatically cripple a person’s moral capacity, but then again, that might mean that behaving with basic decency wouldn’t get you a gold star every time. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where all it takes to be considered an upstanding guy is lack of actively violent misogyny? Oh, that’s right—women.)
You do not have to be a victim of rape to be affected by rape culture. You do not have to be a convicted rapist to perpetuate rape culture. You don’t have to be an active, committed misogynist to benefit from rape culture. I sincerely believe that a staggering proportion of straight and bisexual men are working with some ingrained assumptions about sex and sexuality that they have not fully analyzed. Assumptions about the way women are, what they do, and what they have the capacity to want. Assumptions like: men want sex, and women are sex. Men take, and women need to be persuaded to give. Men fuck women; women allow themselves to be fucked. Women are responsible for drawing up those boundaries, and if men overstep them, that’s not their fault: boys will be boys.
What is confusing to a great many men, including otherwise accomplished, successful, and sensitive men, is that women can and should be trusted to make their own choice at all. Right now, one of the fundamental operating principles of rape culture, rarely articulated but routinely defended, is this: men’s right to sexual intercourse is as important or more important than women’s basic bodily autonomy. Therefore, while it’s women’s job to police the boundaries of sexuality, to control themselves where men are not required to, they cannot and should not be trusted with any choice that might affect men’s ability to stick it wherever they like and still think of themselves as decent people, even retrospectively. Women’s agency, choices, and desires may matter, but they matter much less, and they always will.
The thing is, if you accept the idea a woman has the absolute right to sexual choice, you must also wrestle with the prospect that she might not make the choice you want. If she’s really free to say no, even if she’s said yes before, even if she’s naked in your bed, even if you’ve been married for twenty years, well then—you might not get to fuck her. And that’s the hill that far too many dudes mistake for the moral high ground as they prepare to die on it.
Quite a few people, most of them men, are truly confused as to why the ladies are so upset that they keep getting hit on by potential investors and having to chase creeps out of their apartments when they thought they were having a business meeting. After all, few of the allegations in question involve violent penetration by a stranger. That’s what rape looks like in films, where the villain may be identified by his suspicious facial hair and the creepy theme music that follows him around and is nothing like you or your friends because you’re all the heroes of your own story, and heroes don’t rape.
In the real world, as the sex-pest scandals roll over America’s earthquake zones, almost nobody is being directly threatened with jail for sex crimes. The complaints are about the everyday sleaze and scumbaggery that have been tolerated for decades in male-dominated industries: grabbing, lewd comments, bosses hassling you for sex, the ubiquitous, unspoken understanding that women are first and foremost objects of desire, not individuals with desires—sexual, professional—of their own.
We are surrounded by so many images of sexuality that it’s easy to think of ourselves as liberated. But liberation, by definition, involves everyone. Instead, the messages that bombard us from marketing and pop culture to mainstream pornography insist that acceptable desire goes only in one direction: from men to women. It’s a homogenous, dehumanizing vision of straight sex, a simple story where only men have agency, and women are passive points on a spectrum of fuckability. This is sexual license, not liberation. Today’s sexual freedom is rather like today’s market freedom, in that what it practically entails is freedom for people with power to dictate terms and freedom for everyone else to shut up and smile. We have come to accept, as in so many areas of life, a vision of freedom whereby the illusion of choice is a modesty slip for unspeakable everyday violence.
Consent culture, first named by activist and sex-critical feminist Kitty Stryker, is the alternative to all this. Resisting a culture of rape and abuse must involve more than insisting on the individual right to say no—although that’s both a decent starting place and a difficult concept for some people to wrap their RedTube-rotted brains around. There’s a reason for that. The reason that the notion of real, continuous, enthusiastic sexual consent is so outrageous is that the concept of female sexual agency—let alone active desire—is still a fearful one. Our culture still has very little room for the idea that women and queer people, given the chance, want and enjoy sex just as much as men do.
Well before they are old enough to start thinking about having it, girls are still trained to imagine sex as something that will be done to them rather than something they might like to do for its own sake. We grow up with warnings that sexuality in general and heterosexuality in particular is a fearful, violent thing; sex is something we must avoid rather than something we have. If we’re able to recognize that we want it of our own accord, we learn that we are deviant, dirty, and wicked. The legion of one-handed-typers on misogynist subreddits, wondering why on earth it’s so hard for them to get laid, wondering why women don’t make approaches, why we use sex as a social bargaining strategy, would do well to remember that straight women didn’t come up with those rules. Most of us are proficient at suffocating our own desires because withholding sexuality is the only social power we are permitted—even if that permission is given grudgingly and unreliably by a culture that calls us sluts and bitches and whores when we don’t say no but can’t be relied on to believe us when we do. This, too, is rape culture. Rape culture is not about demonizing men. It is about controlling female sexuality. It is anti-sex and anti-pleasure. It teaches us to deny our own desire as an adaptive strategy for surviving a sexist world.
We’re All Mad Here: Weinstein, Women, and the Language of Lunacy
We’re through the looking glass now. As women all over the world come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual violence, all our old certainties about what was and was not normal are peeling away like dead skin.
It’s not just Hollywood, and it’s not just Silicon Valley. It’s not just the White House or Fox News.
It’s everywhere.
It’s happening in the art world and in mainstream political parties. It’s happening in the London radical left and in the Bay Area burner community. It’s happening in academia and in the media and in the legal profession. I recently heard that it was happening in the goddamn Lindy Hop dance scene, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Men with influence and status who have spent years or decades treating their community like an all-you-can-grope sexual-harassment buffet are suddenly being presented with the bill. Names are being named. A lot of women have realized that they were never crazy, that even if they were crazy they were also right all along, and—how shall I put this?—they (we) are pissed.
“It’s like finding out aliens exist,” said a friend of mine last night. He was two gins in and trying to process why he never spoke up, over a twenty-year period, about a mutual friend who is facing public allegations of sexual violence. “Back in the day we’d all heard stories about it, but … well, the people telling them were all a bit crazy. You know, messed up. So nobody believed them.”
I took a sip of tea to calm down, and suggested that perhaps the reason these people were messed up—if they were messed up—was because they had been, you know, sexually assaulted. I reminded him that some of us had always known. I knew. But then, what did I know? I’m just some crazy girl.
The process we are going through in our friendship group and in our culture as a whole is something akin to first contact. Abusers, like little green men in flying saucers, have a habit of revealing their true selves to people nobody’s going to find credible—to women who are vulnerable or women who are marginalized or who are just, you know, women. But abusers don’t come from any planet but this. We grew up with them. We’ve worked with them. Admired them. Loved them. Trusted them. And now we have to deal with the fact that our reality is not what it seemed.
So who’s the crazy one now? To be the victim of sexual assault is to fall down a rabbit hole into a reality shaped by collective delusion: specifically, the delusion that powerful or popular or ordinary-seeming men who do good work in the world cannot also be abusers or predators. To suggest otherwise is to appear insane. You question yourself. Even before anyone calls you a liar—which they will—you’re wondering if you’ve overreacted. Surely he couldn’t be like that. Not him. Anyway, it would be insanity to go against someone with so much clout. The girls who do that are sick in the head. At least, that was what we used to think.
Something important has changed. Suddenly women are speaking up and speaking out in numbers too big to shove aside. The public narrative around abuse and sexual entitlement and the common consensus around who is to be believed are changing so fast you can see the seams between one paradigm and the next, the hasty stitching where one version of reality becomes another. Now, instead of victims and survivors of rape and assault being written off as mentally ill, it’s the abusers who need help.
“I’m hanging on in there,” said Harvey Weinstein, in the wake of revelations about a pattern of abuse that has upended the entertainment industry, tipping all its secrets out. “I’m not doing OK, but I’m trying. I’ve got to get help. You know what—we all make mistakes.”
Days earlier, Weinstein e-mailed other Hollywood higher-ups frantic not to be fired, asking for their assistance convincing the Weinstein Company board to keep him, begging to be sent to therapy as an alternative. The same pleas for mercy on the grounds of mental illness have been issued on behalf of powerful predators in the tech industry. Here’s 500 Startups’ statement on the actions of its founder, Dave McClure: “He recognizes he has made mistakes and has been going through counseling to work on addressing changes in his previous unacceptable behavior.”
The social definition of sanity is the capacity to accept the consensus of how the world ought to work, including between men and women. Anyone who questions or challenges that consensus is by definition unhinged. It is only when the abuse becomes impossible to deny, when patterns emerge, when photographs and videos are available and are enough to lead to conviction—then we start hearing the pleas for mercy. It was just twenty minutes of action. He’s got such a bright future. Think of his mother. Think of his wife. He couldn’t help himself.
These excuses are never just about the abuser and his reputation. They are desperate attempts to bargain with a rapidly changing reality. They are justifications for continuing, collectively, to deny systemic abuse. Suddenly, it’s Weinstein, not the women calling him a rapist and a pig, who gets to be the one with “demons.” He needs to see a therapist, not a judge. He’s a very unhappy and very sick man. And so is Bill Cosby. And so is Woody Allen. And so was Cyril Smith. And so is that guy in your industry everyone respects so much, the one with the big smile and all those crazy ex-girlfriends.
What’s the word for what happens when a lot of people are very sick all at the same time? It’s an epidemic. I’m not sure what started this one, but there’s a lot of bullshit in the water.
The language of mental illness is also a shorthand for the articulation of truths that are outside the realm of political consensus. Anyone who challenges that consensus is deemed mad by default, including women who dare to suggest that predators in positions of power might have to be accountable for their actions.
There’s a long, grim history behind the idea that women lie about systemic sexual abuse because they’re mentally unwell. Freud was one of the first to look for a psychiatric explanation for the number of women patients he saw who told him they had been molested or raped. To report that such things were going on in polite society would have outraged Freud’s well-heeled and intellectual social circles. So in the course of his later writings, the father of modern psychoanalysis found alternative explanations: perhaps some of these girls were unconsciously obsessed with the erotic idea of the father figure, as opposed to an actual father figure who might have committed actual abuse. Or perhaps they were just hysterical. Either way, no reason to ruffle whiskers in the gentlemen’s club by giving too much credence to unhappy young women.
A century later, in absolutely every situation like this that I have ever encountered, the same rhetoric applies. Women are overemotional. They cannot be trusted because they are crazy, which is a word patriarchy uses to describe a woman who doesn’t know when to shut her pretty mouth. They are not to be believed because they are unwell, which is a word patriarchy uses to describe women who are angry.
Well, of course they’re angry. Of course they are hurt. They have been traumatized, first by the abuse and then by their community’s response. They are not able to express righteous rage without consequence because they are not men. If you had been assaulted, forcibly penetrated, treated like so much human meat; if you had sought justice or even just comfort and found instead rank upon rank of friends and colleagues closing together to call you a liar and a hysteric, telling you you’d better shut up—how would you feel? You’d be angry, but you’d better not show it. Angry women are not to be trusted, which suits abusers and their enablers just fine.
This is what we’re talking about when we talk about rape culture—not just the actions of lone sociopaths but the social architecture that lets them get away with it, a routine of silencing, gaslighting, and selective ignorance that keeps the world at large from having to face realities they’d rather rationalize away. If everyone around you gets together to dismiss the inconvenient truth of your experience, it’s tempting to believe them, especially if you are very young.
Ten years ago, when I was raped and spoke out about it, I was told I was toxic, difficult, a compulsive liar. I was told that so consistently that eventually I came to accept it, and I moved away to heal in private while the man who had hurt me went on to hurt other people. In the intervening decade, every time women I know have spoken out about sexual abuse, they have been dismissed as mentally ill. And yes, some of them were mentally ill—at least one in four human beings will experience mental health problems in their lifetime, after all, and violence and trauma are contributing factors. More to the point, predators seek out victims who look vulnerable. Women and girls with raw sparking wires who nobody will believe because they’re already crazy.
The thing that is happening now is exactly the thing that the sanity and safety of unnamed thousands of women was once sacrificed to avoid: a giant flaming fuss. It is amazing what people will do to avoid a fuss. They will ostracize victims, gaslight survivors, and provide cover for predators; they will hire lawyers and hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars under the table and, if pressed, rearrange entire social paradigms to make it seem like anyone asking for basic justice is a screeching hysteric.
In decades gone by, women who made a scene, who made the mistake of confronting abusers or even just closing the door on them, were carted off to rot in the sort of hospitals that featured fewer rehabilitation spas and more hosing down with ice water to get you to stop screaming. Now it’s the abusers who are seeking asylum. Asking to be treated as sufferers of illness, rather than criminals.
The language of lunacy is the last resort when society at large cannot deny the evidence of structural violence. We hear the same thing in the wake of a mass shooting or a white-supremacist terror attack. He was always such a nice boy. Something broke. We couldn’t have seen him coming. He was depressed and frustrated. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, so instead we pretend that there’s no pattern here, just individual maladaption. A chemical imbalance in the brain, not a systemic injustice baked into our culture. Harvey Weinstein is not a rapist, he’s a “very sick guy”—at least according to Woody Allen (who may or may not have special insight, being famously interested in both psychoanalysis and recreational sexual harassment).
Woody Allen feels at least as sorry for Weinstein as he does for the forty-plus women and girls who, at the time of writing, have come forward to claim they were assaulted or raped by the movie mogul. We’re now supposed to feel pity for rapists because they’re messed up. Well, join the queue. All of us are messed up, and having low self-esteem and a dark obsession with sexually intimidating the women around you aren’t excuses for abuse. At best, they are explanations; at worst, they are attempts to derail the discussion just as we’ve started talking about women’s feelings as if they matter. In fact, according to researchers like Lundy Bancroft, who has spent decades working with abusive men, abusers are no more or less likely to be mentally ill than anyone else. “Abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with values and beliefs,” says Bancroft. “Abusers have a distorted sense of right and wrong. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.”
At the end of the day, we’re now encouraged to ask, aren’t these men the real victims—victims of their own demons? Come off it. We’ve all got demons and baggage and all of the other euphemisms we use to talk about the existential omnishambles of modern life. The moment I meet someone who has arrived at something like adulthood psychologically unscathed by the nightmare fun-house of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, I assume they’re hiding something or on enough tranquilizers to fell a small elephant or both. We’ve all got broken hearts and complicated childhoods, and survivors have spent too long being quietly directed to seek therapy rather than justice.
The abusers who are now being excused as mentally ill are not monsters or aberrations. They were acting entirely within the unhealthy value system of a society which esteems the reputation and status of men above the safety of women. Many abusers, on some level, do not know that what they are doing is wrong. They believe that they are basically decent. Most men who prey on women have had that belief confirmed over the course of years or decades of abuse. They believe they’re basically decent, and a whole lot of other people believe they’re basically decent, too. They’re nice guys who just have a problem with women or booze or their mothers or all three.
Pleas for mercy on the grounds of emotional distress are surprisingly effective when it’s men doing the pleading. Right now, all around me, I see women working to support men, as well as each other, through this difficult time. It’s not just because we’re nice and it’s not just because we’re suckers, although it’s probably a little bit of both.
It’s because we know how much this is going to hurt.
We should. We’ve carried it all for so long in private. We know how deep the damage goes, how much there is still unsaid. Even as we come together to demand an end to sexual violence, we worry that men are too weak to cope with the consequences of what they’ve done and allowed to be done to us.
I have for the past three months been nursing intermittent jags of panic at the knowledge of what was about to be revealed (and has now been revealed) about a person I once cared for deeply and, because I am a soft-hearted fool, still care about very much. A person who, it turns out, has hurt more women than any of us guessed when we started joining the puncture wounds in our pasts to make a picture. Panic because none of us want him to hurt himself. Panic because we worry that he might. We want him to be safe, even though none of us have been. Isn’t that just delicious? As more stories of private pain come out, it is still the men we’re supposed to worry about.
The threat of extreme self-harm is a classic last-resort tactic for abusers who suspect that they’re losing control, that their partner is about to leave them or tell someone or both. It’s effective because it’s almost always plausible, and who wants to be the person who put their own freedom and safety ahead of another person’s life? Not a great many women, certainly, given the bone-deep knowledge drilled into us from birth that we were put on this earth to protect men from, among other things, the consequences of their actions. We’ve been raised to believe that men’s emotions are our responsibility. Even the men who hurt us.
As the list of names grows longer, the plea for mercy on the grounds of mental illness is being deployed in exactly the same way. These guys are suffering, too. If you carry on calling for them to come clean and change their behavior, well, that might just push them over the edge. And you wouldn’t want that, would you? You’re a nice girl, aren’t you?
I’ve been told several times by controlling partners that if I left them, they might break down or even kill themselves. Each time, I stayed longer than I should have because I loved them and wanted them alive, and every time, when it finally became unbearable, they were absolutely fine. Not one of them made an attempt to carry out their threat. That doesn’t mean they didn’t mean it at the time. But the demand that even as we attempt to free ourselves from structural or specific violence, women prioritize the well-being of men over and above our own is a tried-and-true way of keeping a rein on females who might just be about to stand up for ourselves. We are expected to show a level of concern for our abusers that it would never occur to them to show to us—if they’d been at all concerned about our well-being in the first place, we wouldn’t be where we are. And where we are is extremely dark and very difficult, and it’ll get darker and more difficult before we’re done.
I’m worried about a lot of people right now. I’m worried about the several men I know who have hurt women in the past and who are now facing the consequences. I’m worried about the men who are analyzing their own behavior in horror, who stood aside and let it happen, and who are suddenly realizing their own complicity—and struggling to cope with the guilt, the shame of that knowledge. That’s allowed. Empathy is not being rationed here, and we can worry about whoever we like—as long as we worry about the survivors first. We were not liars or hysterical. We were telling the truth. And if the men are a mess today because they finally have to reckon with that truth, we must not let that stop us from building a world where love and sexuality and gender hurt less, a world where this does not have to happen again as it has happened, in silence, for so many generations.
Reframing serial abuse as a mental-health disorder stashes it conveniently on the high shelf marked “not a political issue.” The trouble is that sickness does not obviate social responsibility. It never has. Sickness might give a person the overwhelming urge to act in repulsive ways but sickness does not cover for them during business meetings or pay off their lawyers or make sure they get women dropped from films: it takes a village to protect a rapist.
I am perfectly willing to accept that toxic masculinity leaves a lot of broken men in its maw. That culture conspires to prevent men and boys from being able to handle their sexuality, their aggression, and their fear of rejection and loss of status in any adult way; that it is unbearable at times to exist inside a male body without constant validation. But very few men—very few people, period—grow up with wholly healthy attitudes towards their own gender. Not everyone with fucked-up ideas about women goes on to do fucked-up things to women. Toxic masculinity, as Bancroft observes, is a social illness before it is a psychological one.
So what about the rest of us? People say that they are shocked, and perhaps they are. But shock is very different from surprise. When was the last time you were really, truly surprised to hear a story like this? The truth is that a great many of those surrounding Weinstein did know. Just as the friends and associates of most sexual predators probably know—not everything, but enough to guess, if they cared to. The reason they didn’t say or do anything is simple and painful. The reason is that nobody had enough of a problem with what was going on to make a fuss. They thought that what was going on was morally acceptable. Polite society or whatever passed for it in their industry told them that this was all normal and par for the course, even if your heart told you otherwise. Polite society hates a fuss. Polite society can be a very dangerous place for a young girl to walk alone, and on this issue, most of us have been. Until now.
It is easier to cope with the idea of sick men than it is to face the reality of a sick society; we’ve waited far too long to deal with our symptoms because we didn’t want to hear the diagnosis. The prognosis is good, but the treatment is brutal. The people finally facing the consequences of having treated women and girls like faceless pieces of property may well be extremely unhappy about it. That’s understandable. I’m sure it’s not a lot of fun to be Harvey Weinstein right now, but sadly for the producer and those like him, the world is changing, and for once, cosseting the feelings of powerful men is not and cannot be our number-one priority. For once, the safety and sanity of survivors is not about to be sacrificed so that a few more unreconstructed bastards can sleep at night.
The Unforgiving Minute
I’m sick of being asked to suffer so a man can grow.
—Alexandra Petri
Everyone. Fucking. Knew.
—Scott Rosenberg
This is actually happening.
The so-called revelations about endemic male sexual aggression in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, in the tech world, and in communities large and small have not stopped, despite every conceivable effort to dismiss, discredit, shame, and belittle the survivors coming forward to demand a different world. The most uncomfortable revelation is the fact that none of this, really, was that revelatory.
A great many people knew. Maybe they didn’t know all of it, but they knew enough to feel tainted by a complicity that hobbled their compassion.
It turns out that this isn’t about individual monsters. It never was. This is about structural violence, about a culture that decided long ago that women’s agency and dignity were worth sacrificing to protect the reputation of powerful men and the institutions that enabled their entitlement. Everyone, including the “good guys,” knew it was happening. We just didn’t think it was all that wrong. At least, not wrong enough to make a fuss about, because the people groping their callous, violent way through life knew they’d get away with it, and most of the men around them were permitted the luxury of ignorance.
Except that now that seems to be changing. Now, Old Dinosaurs are wondering how to negotiate with an oncoming asteroid. Current or former Stupid Young Men are in a state of panic about their imminent introduction to the concept of “consequences,” leading to the question: What, precisely, is the age when men are expected to take responsibility for their behavior?
The answer, with any luck, is “The Digital One.”
Very few men seem sure what to do in this situation. I have been asked, repeatedly, what men and boys ought to be doing now. How should we behave differently? How guilty should we be feeling? What do women actually want?
Good. You’re finally asking. I suspect that if more of you had asked that question earlier, if you’d asked it often, and if you’d paid attention to the answers, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation—which nobody wants to be having—right now. It’s a shame, honestly, that it had to come to this. But here we are, and here we’re going to stay while powerful scumbags all over the world take a break from public life to spend more time with the police and while people who’ve nursed private hurts for years start putting the puzzle pieces together until they recognize the shape of injustice.
I’m sorry; you’re new here. The notion that women’s agency and dignity might be more important than men’s right to act like grabby children whenever they want may feel like uncharted territory, but some of us have lived here all along. You don’t know your way around, and the whole place seems full of hidden terrors, and you’re tired and scared, and being here makes you feel ignorant and powerless. You haven’t learned the language—they didn’t offer it at your school—and you wish you knew how to ask basic questions, like where is the nearest station, and how much is that sandwich, and do you know the name of a good defense lawyer? You wish you knew how to translate simple ideas, like: I’m hungry, and I’m lonely, and my entire life I’ve let my fear of women’s rejection control my behavior and that fear seemed so overwhelming that it didn’t matter who got hurt as long as I didn’t have to feel it and everyone else seemed to agree and now I don’t know who to be or how to act, or I think there’s a train leaving soon and I might need to be on it.
Lately I’ve been spending a good deal of time at the help desk, pointing men in the direction of possible answers. I mind this sort of work less than most because it actually happens to be my job. I write about this for a living. I listen and I take notes. The messages wink on my phone in freakish chromagreen, like Gatsby’s lights across the harbor: men reaching out to a world of women they have never really known, across a gulf they don’t know if they’re brave enough to bridge.
My friend’s husband wants to know if he did the right thing in standing up to a superior at work who said he was going to stop hiring “hot women” because he’d only want to assault them.
My photographer friend wants to know why he didn’t listen properly to the rumors about predators in his industry and if he can make up for that now.
My environmental activist friend is worried that the stupid things he did as a teenager will obviate the work he’s doing today.
Nobody wants to be having this conversation, but we need to have it. Avoidance of this conversation has shaped our culture; cultures are defined not only by the stories they tell but also by the ones they don’t. It’s the negative space that gives definition to the picture we have of how men and women ought to live together—and that picture, of course, is the work of a series of old masters.
We have built entire lives, families, and communities around the absence of this conversation. And yet here we are, having it anyway. So let’s deal with some common queries, the very first of which is: how do we handle what we know now about how women have been treated for so long?
This is a question in two parts. It’s a question about how men should now relate to women in particular and to their own sexuality in general. It is also a question about how we all cope with the consequences. How do we deal with suspecting what we suspect, with knowing what we know about our own past behavior? The very first thing we must do is to continue to know it—to actively know it, rather than filing it away in the spam folder of our collective consciousness. We must stay here, in this difficult place. We must look at what we have done and allowed to be done to others, without flinching or making excuses.
Last week, as a fresh set of allegations threatened to topple the British government, a radio host asked me if flirting is now banned. No. It isn’t. To the mainly female people who are on the receiving end, the difference between flirting and harassment—between sex and rape—are extremely clear. To some of the mainly male people who do these things, there appears to be no difference, and when you start to explain the difference they run, in short succession, out of excuses and out of the room.
The fact that a great many men I have spoken to genuinely seem to think that the main issue here is how and whether they’re going to be able to get laid in the future is … I’m going to swallow a scream, and say that it’s “interesting.” Shockingly, this conversation is not about you and your boner. But since the difference between sex and sexual violence apparently needs explaining, put both hands on the table for a second and listen.
(Nobody here thinks that the entire arena of sexuality is necessarily dangerous and violent for women. Actually, no, that’s not true: plenty of people think that. Mostly male people who have spent generations imagining sex and violent conquest as one and the same, fetishizing the two together until the popular erotic imagination left little clear air between passion and assault. Some of us have been on the wrong end of that trajectory for so damn long that we’ve given up trying to find a way to be intimate with men that doesn’t cause us pain or risk our lives, and I imagine that those people, the vast majority of whom are women, do think of the male sex itself as inherently treacherous, unsalvageable, and irredeemably violent.)
Sex, however, is not the problem. Sexism is the problem, as is the fact that a great many men seem unable to tell the difference. It is maddening, the way those of us who complain about abuse are accused of trying to shut down sex and sexuality, as if we’d ever been allowed to be active sexual participants, as if abuse and the fear of abuse hadn’t made pleasurable sex all but impossible for so many of us.
Sex is not the problem, but for some people sexism itself has become eroticized, and that, yes, is a problem. “It’s not flirtation that any of us take issue with,” said my best friend, late one night after another round of exhausting emotional work trying to shore up the shuddering self-image of the men we know so they don’t collapse on top of us. “It’s entitlement. Projection. Objectification. We know when we’re being dehumanized. Good flirting is the kind where they see us. They won’t know how to flirt the right way until they start unlearning how to look at us.”
John Berger famously said that “men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at.” I’m sick of being looked at. I want to be seen. There are none so emotionally blind as those who look at a person standing right in front of them and see a mirror, not a window.
Many of the men I have talked to about this have begun of their own volition to speak about “no longer objectifying women.” To wonder whether they should just stop looking at pretty women at all, if the act of desiring another person is itself violent. It’s very sad that that confusion has arisen; it should be possible to want someone without dehumanizing them. But we have apparently created a world where it is incredibly difficult for a man to desire a woman and treat her as a human being at the same time.
So no, we are not trying to outlaw sexuality. We are trying to liberate it. You ask how the species is going to survive if we have to constantly check for consent before we get to the means of reproduction, but I promise you that the species has more pressing problems than that.
The biggest missing piece of this picture is women’s desire. If femme and female citizens were allowed to actually articulate our own desires then we could skip a few lessons and move straight to the advanced level of learning-to-treat-women-as-people, the one where we talk about managing our feelings like grown-ups.
Some men I speak to are worried, now, that “having to ask” will mean more rejection. I would draw attention to the fact that even as women everywhere are confessing to crimes others have committed against them, describing lifetimes of humiliation and hurt, still the second or third thought on some men’s minds is anxiety about whether this will affect their chances of getting laid.
I understand that you are terrified of rejection. Join the club. Rejection is the worst. So awful that an entire architecture of quiet violence, shame, and blame has been built up to help men avoid it. If women’s desire is absent from this conversation—if women are not thought of as desiring beings, if female desire is so terrifying we can barely speak of it without nervous laughter—then yes, we are going to remain confused about the difference between seduction and assault. That confusion is not human nature. Human nature is a lazy excuse for not doing the work of change here, and I’m sick of hearing it.
Men who believe they cannot change are already being shown up every day by the growing number of their fellow male humans who have changed, who are changing. We can rewrite the sexual script of humanity. We’ve done it before.
Unfortunately, we are in one of those rare and curious moments where we have to do something unfair and hurtful in order to answer decades of pain and injustice. We didn’t want to have to make an example of anyone. We tried to ask nicely for our humanity and dignity. We tried to put it gently. Nobody gave a shit. Now that there are consequences, now that there is finally, for once, some sort of price to pay for treating women like interchangeable pieces of flesh and calling it romance, you’re paying attention.
This is what happens when women actively place their own needs first. The whole damn world freaks out. I don’t blame you for freaking out right now. I’m freaking out. I didn’t expect this to happen so fast.
You were led to believe that when it came to sex—and it somehow always came to sex—women weren’t people in quite the same way as you. You were taught that sex was a commodity you could acquire by bargaining, badgering, pestering, or force. You were never told that was wrong to do these things. Well, you were told, but not often, or not by anyone who mattered.
That all feels unfair to you, though it was far less fair—and a lot more dangerous—to us.
It also feels unfair that some men who have hurt women will be made examples of in their communities and workplaces while others who have done the same will escape, for now. It feels unfair that the cost of mistakes you made in your youth may well be professional respect, job security, money, and power. But it has been a lot less fair for a lot longer for people who were hurt and humiliated, disrespected and degraded, and who were expected to choose between shameful silence and blowing up their careers or communities by speaking out.
For so long, women have been confessing to crimes men have committed and being punished accordingly. That, I think you’ll agree, is truly unfair.
You are wondering if forgiveness is possible. If amnesty is on the horizon. If you fish your crimes out of the past and lay them dripping to dry in front of us will we accept you, forgive you, let you back into the loving female place you’ve been told is the only respite you’re allowed from the awfulness of the world?
The answer will eventually be yes. Well, my answer will eventually be yes. I can’t speak for everyone, ever, and particularly not in this case, as I’m pathologically forgiving and have often been told by people who care about my well-being that my life would be better if I didn’t let the men in it get away with quite so much bullshit because I expect no better. Still, my answer will always eventually be yes, yes, you are forgiven. But I’m just one person, and I’m not always a wise one, and even I can tell you that this is a bad fucking time to ask for forgiveness. Give it a while.
There will be time for apologies. We have the rest of our lives to do this differently. There will be time to reach out to those you may have wronged and say that you were a younger and different person, you are sorry, you didn’t know, you tried not to know, you know now. There will be time to make it right, but it will take precisely that. It will take time.
What women like me want in the long term is for you to stop this shit and treat us like people. We want you to accept that you have done bad things, so that in the future you can do better. We want a flavor of equality that none of us have tasted before. We want to share it with you. We want a world where love and violence are not so easily confused. We want a species of sexuality that isn’t a game where we’re the prey to be hung bleeding on your bedroom wall.
Right now, we also want to rage. We are not done describing all the ways this shit isn’t okay and hasn’t been okay for longer than you can believe. We want you to make space for our pain and anger before you start telling us how you’ve suffered, too, no, really you have. We are angry, and we are disappointed.
Because you made everything precious in our lives conditional on not making a fuss.
Because you behaved as if your right never to have to deal with anyone else’s emotions or learn the shape of your own was more important than our very humanity.
Because you made us carry the weight of all the hurt that had ever been done to you, and then you praised us for being so strong.
Because we tried for so long to believe the best of you, because it felt like we had no other option.
I promise you will survive our rage. We have lived in fear of yours for so long.
Stay here, in this difficult place. Stay here actively. Breathe through the discomfort and pay attention to what it’s telling you. Listen to women. Believe women. There will be a lot to learn, and a lot more to unlearn.
Sure, we can draw up a list of rules, and in the short term it might even help. Don’t make someone’s job conditional on allowing you to grab and hassle her when you’re drunk. Don’t fuck people who are unconscious. Don’t assume that any woman who’s made the barest effort with her hair and makeup has thereby given anyone within ass-patting distance an invitation. I can go on. I wish I didn’t have to.
You’ve just arrived in this strange new country where women are human beings whose lives and feelings matter and while you find your way around, yes, it’s useful to memorize a few key phrases. May I kiss you? Ok, that’s fine. Do you like this? Do you want me? Here’s what I want; what do you want? You can sound out the shapes of these sentences, but teaching you is a lot of effort, and frankly in the long run it’d be much less work for everyone involved if you’d just learn the language yourselves. Just think of the interesting conversations we could have in a rhetoric of mutual humanity.
Think on that, and be brave. Have the goddamn courage to admit that you got it wrong so that you can start getting it right. There’s a train leaving soon. It makes a few stops on the way to a less monstrous future, and I advise you to be on it.