#in retrospect I think some of my elementary school teachers thought I was being abused by my parents

[cookinguptales]

I could probably write a thousand posts about how terrible American cops are wrt disability, and how cops are trained to read disabled behavior as “erratic behavior” that should be addressed with lethal force.

BUT INSTEAD I’M GONNA WRITE ABOUT SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETERS.

I mentioned this briefly a little while ago, but I grew up in a pretty abusive household. My younger sister was a little monster, and for a long time, no one would believe me when I tried to tell them she was hurting me. Because she was younger than me. Smaller than me. Deaf. My sister, like many other members of my family, has a hearing disability. (To my knowledge, none of them choose to identify as Deaf and some specifically don’t, so I’m just gonna stick with deaf.) And growing up with a sibling who left me bloody and bruised all the time taught me something important: our society has very few resources for violent PWD.

Now, my sister probably did have a lot of anger in her because of her disability (though that part is probably her story to tell rather than mine) and she did eventually get diagnosed with some sort of mental illness. But deafness doesn’t make a person violent, and mental illness isn’t an excuse for it. Like hell, I’m disabled and mentally ill and I never hit my sister with a metal baseball bat.

What is true, though, is when you have a deaf family member who is violent, there just aren’t as many treatment resources. Therapists who can sign are few on the ground, and therapists who will cooperate with interpreters (and interpreting requests) aren’t as common as they should be. (Plus, therapy with an interpreter really is more difficult for the patient; you never really get to be alone with the doctor.) Many of the treatment centers who help families deal with “troubled children” don’t take deaf patients. Honestly, most treatment options (and believe me, my parents looked and looked and looked) just aren’t available to children with special needs. The ones that are are often too expensive for families to seriously consider.

And cops, as I later learned, don’t bring interpreters.

My sister got worse over time, you see. The baseball bat wasn’t the worst thing she did to me. And when we were young, she mostly focused on me -- but as she got older, I learned how to get out of her path of destruction and she started hurting other people. My parents started calling the police on her to deal with domestic disturbances fairly often. There was a period there where the police were coming to our house every week or two. (Generally because my sister had straight-up tried to kill one of us or something. You know, mild stuff.) It was a pretty small police department. The same damn guys came to our house every time. They knew exactly who we were and what the situation was in our house.

And they never. Brought. An interpreter.

Now here’s what you need to know about sign language interpreters. Legally speaking, they’re supposed to be supplied by the business/service, not the consumer. Often, interpreters will refuse to be hired by an individual consumer because they want to protect the standard set by the ADA that the business/service must supply the interpreter. The school provides the interpreter. The doctor provides the interpreter. The lawyer provides the interpreter. The cops provide the interpreter. Or they’re supposed to!

These cops never did. They never did much to help us, either, but I guess that’s a separate issue. (Or maybe it’s not. Maybe they didn’t want to deal with a deaf kid in the system and that’s why they never took her into custody and wouldn’t let us press charges. She got Baker Acted a few times, like when the cops had to physically restrain her, but that’s about the extent of it.) And here’s the thing. Here’s the big problem with them refusing to bring a goddamn interpreter literally ever. It meant that they ended up asking us to interpret.

Think about that for a second. These cops regularly asked the victims of violent assault (and the people who reported that violent assault) to interpret for the person who assaulted them. It wasn’t fair to us to put us in a room with someone who’d hurt us and was usually still screaming about how she still wanted to. (idk if the cops could always understand her when she talked; I could, but I mean, I grew up with her. They learned to recognize the profanity tho, lmao.) And you know what? As much as I hate her, it wasn’t fair to her, either. We could have lied. We could have framed her. We could have misrepresented her statements as a result of our own trauma. Who’s to know? We certainly weren’t impartial. It’s hard to be after someone puts their hands around your throat. And we were usually crying and stuff. The whole situation was emotionally exhausting. My sister has always been terrifying when she’s angry, and no one likes calling the cops on their own family. Like we were not good interpreters at that point. lol

Now, I’m not gonna say that my sister wouldn’t have grown up to be the violent asshole she was if she’d been able to get proper treatment as a kid. I don’t know that. It’s possible, I guess. I hear she’s doing better now, though now that we’re both adults, I try to limit our interactions. I do know that I would have been hurt a lot less often as a kid if we’d had more treatment options. I would have spent less of my life living in fear, and I’d probably have fewer symptoms of trauma now. If she couldn’t have been cured, maybe she at least could have been contained. (That sounds horrible to say, but you try living with someone trying to kill you for fifteen years. You won’t care where they go as long as it’s away from you.) And honestly, my experience with my sister speaks to a lot of problems we have with our justice system, too. Our justice system just isn’t designed to accommodate people with disabilities and special needs. Cops shoot autistic people and show up to household disputes with no goddamn interpreter. They aren’t trained and they aren’t held accountable, and that puts PWD like us in danger. I can look at this situation as someone who felt disenfranchised as a victim, but also as a person with a disability who might find myself on the other end of police disinterest one day.

Like, look. I have a physical disability and a mental illness. I hate the stereotype of the violent disabled person as much as anyone. But sometimes PWD really are violent, and for all the horror stories we have about ~scary disabled people~, we actually have very few institutional protections in place for when something like that happens. We don’t train cops or hold them to acceptable standards. We don’t have interpreters on staff or fully accessible facilities. We don’t have treatment programs for PWD that might stop the problems before they become too bad. We don’t always have ways for PWD to be heard if they’re being abused -- or if they’re worrying that they might be the abuser. And we have a lot of cultural stereotypes about disability that we need to unpack. God knows I had trouble convincing people that I had a sister who was deaf and violent, and that the two were unrelated.

I don’t talk to my sister anymore, not unless I have to. Most days I kind of try to pretend I’m an only child. I’m not sure I have a single good memory of her from our childhood. Even the peaceful moments were tense; her mood could turn on a dime and I was always scared of a potential blow up. I still kind of am. These days, I wish her all the best in her recovery -- as long as it happens far away from me. My childhood was already ruined. So was hers. I hope we move forward and increase both accessibility and specialty treatment options so other children don’t have the same fate.

[lettersfromstrangers-blog1]

By the time I realized what it was it was all I knew

To no one in particular, 

Everything seems to make so much sense in retrospect. But when you’re there, it seems like wave after wave with no concept of the ocean. 

In a way, I think I’m lucky. I’ve been struggling since I can remember; I’ve gotten really good at dealing with it. But on the other hand, I can’t help but think about all of the things I’ve missed out on. 

I guess I should start at the beginning. Looking at my parents, one could tell that I was going to be pretty messed up. My mother endured the abusive nature of her own parents. She never learned what love meant and she is always paranoid. My father was raised in a strict household but ended up a train jumper. My mother “adopted” him while she was in college and thus the chaotic relationship began. Drugs, avoiding the police, emotional manipulation, and romance. Surprisingly, my parents were married and owned a house, albeit in the middle of nowhere, before I was born. They passed down some good traits, some mediocre ones, and a high chance at problems with addiction and a predisposition for poor mental health. 

I moved to the city right around when I turned 2. I don’t have many memories, before then, and I think living in the same city most of my life has done me some good. When we first arrived, we stayed with my parents' friends before securing an apartment of our own. I was an older sister now so I always had someone to play with and protect. But I guess our little nuclear family wasn’t perfect. My mother thought that she was in a loving relationship, but when she started seeing my brother and me reenacting their fights she realized that this wasn’t right. She found God and stopped drinking, using drugs, smoking, and drinking coffee all at once. But my father didn’t have the same change of heart. So we left. 

I remember when my mother told me we were going to leave. I went into my room and packed up all my clothes and was ready to go. I was not even 5 years old. When my father told me that my mother was taking my brother and I away, his tears on my face, I just sat there.

And so we left and I never saw my father again. We moved a lot after that. I went to the same school and had my mother and brother but it was still a lot of change for a little girl. I was very quiet and probably quite anxious even back then.

Things were alright for a while. I only have a couple of bad moments from elementary school. On a trip to visit my grandpa when I was about 9, I had a very interesting experience. He lives off a lake in a nice house. One night, my mother brother and I were all asleep in the same bed. I woke up screaming and crying. It felt like I was on the ceiling looking down at myself and I couldn’t do anything. I woke up the next morning with a crippling fear of fish and anything else that lives in the water. Awful inconvenient when you’re visiting a lake. That was about 10 years ago and I still get an anxiety spike even looking at a picture of a little fish. 

The worst of it came in middle school though. I had attended the same school since kindergarten and I was petrified of change. But at the same time, the school I was in was really hard and I didn’t think I could keep up with it. I visited the local public middle school but it was so big and I knew no one their and I think that’s when I had my first panic attack. 

I continued going to the school I knew and it wasn’t as awful as I had imagined. At least not work wise. I started feeling tired most of the time. I felt physically ill and it felt like the bones in my forearms were numb and freezing cold. In the 7th grade, I had a really tough literature class that did not work well with my mother being in college again and us getting home late every night. I would set an alarm for 3 in the morning, do my homework, and if I was lucky I could go back to sleep for a little while. That alarm caused me so much panic, I wouldn’t even dare to listen to it again. 

In the 8th grade, things went from tough to worse. My brother started having some serious issues of his own and that coupled with the constant social exsertion really hit me. I was the strong one but I was barely holding on. I thought I was just weak. I missed so many Fridays from school because the week had completely destroyed me again and again. I got my first C on a math test. I slept too much or not at all. And then the year was over and I had made it.

But then the thought of high school was crippling. I had gone to the same school for 9 years and I was comfortable even if I hated it. But a new school that was so big was terrifying. But I selected classes, toured the school, and bought supplies. I even went to school the first day. I had decent teachers and reunited with an old friend. I sat with nice kids for lunch. It was the best I could hope for.

I couldn’t do it. My brother had already decided on attending an online school the year I started high school, and after attending for a couple of days, I asked my mother if I could do the online school instead. That school ended up being a really bad match for our family and my brother and I ended up being “homeschooled” for a year. With my mother gone all day every day we didn’t do much learning. I didn’t talk to anyone other than my mother and I very rarely left the house. My appetite was all over the place and I spent hours doing practically nothing. I slept a lot. That’s all I really remember.

I missed a year of my life. 

The next year, we enrolled in a new online school and that actually went really well. I had earned 3 high school credits in middle school, so I was really only half a year behind. I still barely left the house, but I would go to meet my teacher a couple times a month. I started talking to a couple of the kids in my neighborhood and started going outside. It was during this time too that I learned about mental health. Looking through site after site I was so shocked to see how many things I thought were my own defects were parts of actual illnesses. Even now, I’m learning about symptoms that I was experiencing. 

I started creating a routine and the depression started to fade. I got comfortable and I was happy for almost year. 

Around the end of my first year at the new online school, my teacher advised that I should apply for their early college program. I was just settling into the school and I really liked it, but I applied and made it in. I attended some meetings and went to the community college a few towns over to take placement tests. I learned the 2-hour bus route and registered for classes. It wasn’t really in my mind. But the summer started to pass and I got scared again. The Friday before I was supposed to start classes I completely broke down. Another panic attack, this time in front of my mother. I quickly dropped my classes and signed up for the ones online. I wasn’t ready.  I wasn’t sure if I would ever be. 

As this was going on, my 16th birthday was approaching. My neighbor and friend was a couple of months older than me and had gotten her first job. She really wanted to work with her friends and one day, she called me out of my house, took my ipod touch and filled out the better half of a job application for me. I called my mother and was almost in tears when I said: “I think I just applied for a job.” I think this is when the anxiety really came in full force. I interviewed, called, got lost on the bus and ended up with a job. I was so scared but part of my fear is that I won’t be perfect. So even though I was scared I was a really good worker. And it’s amazing how quickly desensitization can set in. At work, I became close to more people my age, as well as some folks who were older, and I wasn’t as scared. The norms of teenagehood were fascinating to me but not things I wanted keen on partaking in. I lived through my friends. I thought I was better. 

I continued with the online school and graduated on time. Part of me wishes I would have attended this school my freshman year so I could graduate early but part of me is just proud that I didn’t let that dead year stunt me too much. 

The thought of college came up again. I was scared to try again, but I was more scared of not. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life. I’m not sure if I do yet. But I thought college would be a good place to figure it out. This time I would be within walking distance of home, and I had a friend to take a class with. I geared up, registered for classes, and actually showed up the first day. And then the second day. I actually really liked school. I made friends. I made good grades. And I was still working a lot. But the anxiety was always there. It still is. I get all riled up so frequently. I’m happier now though, I know a lot more about myself. I know that when I’m anxious, I’m anxious. I’ve learned healthy coping mechanisms. I allow myself 2 times a year to truly break down. 

I’m not better. I’ve just learned to deal with it. It tells me that I won’t be me without it. That feeling can get really suffocating. But looking at how far I’ve come in the last few years gives me hope that I can go further. It’s a lot easier to try when you don’t want to be dead. Whenever it gets bad I remember that I’ve been through worse and made it out. I don’t partake in bad habits that would be a toxic band-aid over my life. I’m quite frankly proud. 

It sucks. It makes you physically ill. But every breath you take is a fight against it. When you push yourself an inch, you’re telling it that it can’t control you. And that is so powerful. It might be a fight in your head but it’s really a matter of life and death. Don’t let it win. You’re here for a reason. You are so strong

[industriousmind]

In the Maze

Must history have losers?

By: Dayna Tortorici

One of the purposes of this section is to provide a testimony of a moment — to recognize and record, as C. L. R. James said — the questions and debates that preoccupy us. But sometimes life furnishes situations that cannot be approached intellectually. None of the usual keys fits the lock. An intellectual situation grades into an emotional situation and becomes untouchable. How do you write a history of the present, then? Sublimate, sublimate — until that stops getting you anywhere.

Two years ago, in January 2016, I wrote to my coeditors with a proposal for an Intellectual Situation about what I felt was an impending male backlash. One colleague asked, “What backlash?” Another worried it was too close to the bone. In the end I abandoned the essay because I couldn’t find a way in. I couldn’t figure it out.

What was happening was that the men I knew were beginning to feel persecuted as a class. They remarked on it obliquely, with jokes that didn’t quite sound like jokes, in emails or in offhand remarks at parties. Irritation and annoyance were souring into something worse. Men said they felt like they were living in Soviet Russia. The culture was being hijacked by college students, humorless young people who knew nothing of real life, its paradoxes and disappointments. Soon intellectuals would not be able to sneeze without being sent to the gulag.

Women, too, felt the pressure. “Your generation is so moral,” a celebrated novelist said to an editor my age. Another friend, a journalist in her fifties, described the heat she got from online feminists for expressing skepticism toward safe spaces. “I’m conservative now,” she said, meaning to the kids. But the most persistent and least logical complaint came from men — men I knew and men in the media. They could not speak. And yet they were speaking. Near the end of 2014, I remember, the right to free speech under the First Amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.

The examples in the press could be innocent and sinister. A Princeton undergraduate, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, could not argue he was not privileged in Time magazine without facing ridicule on Twitter. A tech executive could hardly make a joke without being fired, a young tech executive told me. “Take Mahbod Moghadam,” he said. Moghadam was one of the founders of Genius, and had been dismissed for his annotations of the shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. (“This is an artful sentence, beautifully written” he wrote. Of Rodger’s sister, he added, “Maddy will go on to attend USC and turn into a spoiled hottie.”) Once, on my way to work, I heard a story on NPR about a Pennsylvania man named Anthony Elonis who was taking a First Amendment case to the Supreme Court. He was defending his right to make jokes about murdering his ex-wife on Facebook, in the form of non-rhyming, rhythmless rap lyrics. “I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, / soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts,” he posted. When she filed a restraining order, Elonis posted again. “I’ve got enough explosives / to take care of the state police and the sheriff’s department.” Posts about shooting up an elementary school and slitting the throat of a female FBI agent followed. When he was convicted for transmitting intent to injure another person across state lines, via the internet, he argued he was just doing what Eminem did on his albums: joking. Venting, creatively. Under the First Amendment, the government had to prove he had “subjective intent.” His initial forty-four month prison sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court but was ultimately reinstated by an appeals court. I learned later that he had been fired from his job for multiple sexual harassment complaints, just after his wife left him.

How did I feel about all this? Too many ways to say. The aggregate effect of white male resentment across culture disturbed me, as did the confusion of freedom of speech with freedom to ridicule, threaten, harass, and abuse. When it came to the more benign expressions of resentment, in the academy and in the fiefdoms of high culture, I was less sure. On the one hand, I was a person of my generation and generally thought the students to be right. Show me a teenager who isn’t a fundamentalist, I thought; what matters is they’re pushing for progress. The theorist Sara Ahmed’s diagnosis of teachers’ reactions to sensitive students as “a moral panic about moral panics” struck me as right. (Her defense of trigger warnings and safe spaces in “Against Students” remains one of the best I know: trigger warnings are “a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that ‘difficult issues’ can be discussed” and safe spaces, a “technique for dealing with the consequences of histories that are not over. . . . We have safe spaces so we can talk about racism not so we can avoid talking about racism!”) I also agreed with my colleague Elizabeth Gumport when she observed, speaking to a man in mind but also to me, “It’s not that you can’t speak. It’s that other people can hear you. And they’re telling you what you’re saying is crazy.”

Still, I had sympathy for what I recognized in some peers as professional anxiety and fear. The way they had learned to live in the world — to write novels, to make art, to teach, to argue about ideas, to conduct themselves in sexual and romantic relationships — no longer fit the time in which they were living. Especially the men. Their novels, art, teaching methods, ideas, and relationship paradigms were all being condemned as unenlightened or violent. Many of these condemnations issued from social media, where they multiplied and took on the character of a mounting threat: a mob at the gate. But repudiations of the old ways were also turning up in outlets that mattered to them: in reviews, on teaching evaluations, on hiring committees. Authors and artists whose work was celebrated as “thoughtful” or “political” not eight years ago were now being singled out as chauvinists and bigots. One might expect this in old age, but to be cast out as a political dinosaur by 52, by 40, by 36? They hadn’t even peaked! And with the political right — the actual right — getting away with murder, theft, and exploitation worldwide . . . ? That, at least, was how I gathered they felt. Sometimes I thought they were right. Sometimes I thought they needed to grow up.

The outlet of choice for this cultural moment within my extended circle was Facebook. More and more adults were gathering there, particularly academics, and reactions to campus scandals ruled my feed. A mild vertigo attends my memory of this time, which I think of, now, as The Long 2016. It began at least two years prior. There were reactions to Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance, to Laura Kipnis’s essay in the Chronicle Review, to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Michael Brown poem, to Joe Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford character in the Whitney Biennial, to Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out as trans, to Rachel Dolezal’s getting outed as white, to the Yale Halloween letter, to Michael Derrick Hudson writing under the name Yi-Fen Chou to get into a Best American Poetry anthology, to the phenomenon of Hollywood whitewashing, to sexual abuse allegations against Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes. Meanwhile, in the background, headline after headline about police murders of black people and the upcoming presidential election. Many of these Facebook reactions were “bad” — meaning, in my personal shorthand, in bad faith (willful misunderstanding of the issue at hand), a bad look (unflattering to he or she who thought it brave to defend a dominant, conservative belief), or bad politics (reactionary). Yet even the bad takes augured something good. A shift was taking place in the elite institutions. The good that came of it didn’t have to trickle down further for me to find value in it. This was my corner of the world. I thought it ought to be better.

The question was at whose expense. It was easy enough to say, “white men,” harder to say which ones and how. Class — often the most important dimension — tended to be absent from the calculus. It may once have been a mark of a first-rate intelligence to hold two opposing ideas in mind, but it was now a political necessity to hold three, at least. And what of the difference between the cultural elite and the power elite, the Harold Blooms and the Koch Brothers of the world? While we debated who should be the first to move over, pipe down, or give back, we seemed to understand that the most obvious candidates were beyond our reach. What good would it do, for us, to say that Donald Trump had a bigger “problem” with black voters than Bernie Sanders did, or that Donald Trump would be kinder to Wall Street than Hillary Clinton would? To do so would be to allow a lesser man to set the standard for acceptable behavior. We would tend to our own precincts, hold our own to account.

This may have been bad strategy, in retrospect. Perhaps we lost track of the real enemy. Still, I understand why we pursued it. It’s easy to forget how few people anticipated what was coming, and had we not attempted to achieve some kind of equality within our ranks, the finger of blame would have pointed infinitely outward, cueing infinite paralysis. Shouldn’t that domino, further down the line, be the first to fall? Yes, but we’d played this game before. Women of color couldn’t be asked to wait for the white male capitalist class to fall before addressing the blight of racism or sexism on their lives — nor, for that matter, could men of color or white women. It was not solidarity to sweep internal issues under the rug until the real enemy’s defeat. Nor was achieving a state of purity before doing politics. But a middle ground was possible. Feminism and antiracism shouldn’t have to wait.

Only they would have to wait. By summer 2016, Trump, the echt white-male-resentment and “free-speech” candidate, had proven all kinds of discriminatory speech acceptable by voicing it and nevertheless winning the Republican nomination. A low bar, to be sure, but even his party was horrified when the Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before voting day. Trump’s remarks crossed a boundary his apologists didn’t expect: the GOP’s standing benevolent-patriarch attitude toward white women and sex. How depressing it would be, I remember thinking, to muster a win on so pathetic a norm as the purity of white femininity. But I was desperate. I’d take just about anything.

And then, despite the outrage, we didn’t win. Although it matters that Trump won the election unfairly, it shouldn’t have even been close. Perhaps I’d forgotten what country we lived in, what world. Sexual harassment was by and large accepted as an unfortunate consequence of male biology, and joking or bragging about sexual harassment was a comparably minor offense. Months later, I walked down the street in Manhattan and saw a row of the artist Marilyn Minter’s posters wheat-pasted to a wooden construction fence. Gold letters on black read DONALD J. TRUMP above a two-tone image of his smiling face, and across the bottom, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. In between was a prose poem of Trump’s words captured on the hot mic, iterated across the span of wall:

I did try and fuck her. She was married.

I moved on her like a bitch,

But I couldn’t get there.

And she was married.

You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful.

I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss.

I don’t even wait.

And when you’re a star they let you do it.

You can do anything . . .

Grab them by the pussy.

You can do anything.

You can do anything was the refrain of my childhood. I was a daughter of the Title-IX generation, a lucky girl in a decade when lucky girls of lucky parents were encouraged to play sports, be leaders, wear pants, believe themselves good at math, and aspire to become the first female President of the United States. The culture validated this norm. Politicians and advertisers loved girls. Girls, before they became women, could do anything. (Women were too old to save, an unspoken rule behind all kinds of policy. Need an abortion? Better to keep the kid, who has not yet been ground down by life.) But if girls were taught to be winners, boys were not taught to be losers. On the contrary, to lose was a man’s worst fate — especially if he was straight — because winning meant access to sex (a belief held most firmly by the involuntarily celibate). Even then I understood that someone’s gain was bound to be perceived as someone else’s loss, and over time, I learned not to be too brazen. I maintained a prudent fear of the falling class. Even when men weren’t dangerous, they weren’t defenseless. Some still had the resources to bring you down, should you be unlucky enough to be crossed by one.

Combine male fragility with white fragility and the perennial fear of falling and you end up with something lethal, potentially. Plenty of men make it through life just fine, but a wealthy white man with a stockpile of arms and a persecution complex is a truly terrifying figure. Elliot Rodger, Stephen Paddock: both these men had money. This is not to say that men punishing women for their pain is a rich thing or a white thing or even a gun thing. It occurs across cultures, eras, and classes, and the experience of being on the receiving end of it varies accordingly. As Houria Bouteldja writes in “We, Indigenous Women”:

In Europe, prisons are brimming with black people and Arabs. Racial profiling almost only concerns men, who are the police’s main target . It is in our eyes that they are diminished. And yet they try desperately to reconquer us, often through violence. In a society that is castrating, patriarchal, and racist (or subjected to imperialism), to live is to live with virility. “The cops are killing the men and the men are killing the women. I’m talking about rape. I’m talking about murder,” says Audre Lorde. A decolonial feminism must take into account this masculine, indigenous “gender trouble” because the oppression of men reflects directly on us. Yes, we are subjected with full force to the humiliation that is done to them. Male castration, a consequence of racism, is a humiliation for which men make us pay a steep price.

Women pay the price for other humiliations as well. The indignity of downward mobility, real or perceived, is a painful one to suffer, and a man takes it out where he can (Silvia Federici: “The more the man serves and is bossed around, the more he bosses around”). Whatever else it may be, sexual harassment in the “workplace context” is a check on a person’s autonomy, a threat to one’s means of self-support. It can feel like being put in place, chastised, challenged, or dared. Sure, you can do anything, it says. But don’t forget that I can still do this. The dare comes from winners and losers alike. Either you accept it and pay one price or you don’t and pay another. All of it always feels bad.

I imagine that some people feel good about bringing perpetrators to justice, such as it is under the system we have. But I imagine just as many do not want to be responsible for their offender’s punishment. They might say: Please don’t make it my decision whether you lose your job, are shunned by your peers, or get sent to prison. Prison, unemployment, and social exile are not what I want for men. I’m not here to be the police. I don’t want to be responsible for you.

There are many obstacles to honesty in conversations about sexual assault. Loyalty and pity, fear of judgment or retaliation, feelings of complicity or ambivalence — all are good enough reasons not to talk. Alleging sexual misconduct also tends to involve turning one’s life upside down and shaking out the contents for public scrutiny. It’s rarely done for fun.

When victims do want to talk, however, the litigiousness of men proves an obstacle to honesty. It is not unusual for women who speak too liberally about men to be threatened with legal action. Of all the striking things in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker articles about Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes, what struck me most were the allusions to Weinstein’s lawyers. “He drags your name through the mud, and he’ll come after you hard with his legal team,” said one woman who asked not to be named. Another chose to pull her allegation from the record. “I’m so sorry,” she told Farrow. “The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.”

In the weeks after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first reported the story in the New York Times, as colleagues and strangers on the internet moved to identify the Weinsteins within their own industries, I felt uneasy. Behind every brave outing I saw a legal liability. I suppose that’s what happens when you know enough men with money. Such men are minor kings among us, men with lawyer-soldiers at their employ who can curtail certain kinds of talk. While I do believe in false allegations, and I do believe that women can be bullies, it’s hard, sometimes, not to be cynical about the defense. Some men love free speech almost as much as they love libel lawyers.

“Smart or reckless or both??” I texted my friends when I first saw the Google spreadsheet, titled “Shitty Media Men,” that compiled the names, affiliations, and alleged misconduct of men in my field: writers and editors of books, magazines, newspapers, and websites. The document had been started anonymously, and though intended for circulation among women only, it was visible (and editable) to anyone with the link. I saw the names of men I knew and men I didn’t, stories I’d heard before and a few I hadn’t. “The List,” as it came to be called, didn’t upset me, but neither did it give me comfort. Mostly I worried about retaliation: the contributors getting sued or worse. “Reckless,” a friend texted back. “Not sure how but definitely reckless.”

By then I was once again preoccupied by backlash. The day the Weinstein story broke in the Times and five days before Farrow’s first article, an investigative piece on BuzzFeed had described the range of people who’d sustained an email correspondence with Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor who’d once been the face of the company. In addition to the usual alt-right characters, there were “accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries — entertainment, tech, academia, fashion, and media — who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy.” Named among them were two writers I knew, both men, who according to the article had tipped off Milo for stories. One of them was a Facebook friend. He vehemently denied the allegations and said he hadn’t written the emails provided by BuzzFeed as proof. The other, as far as I know, said nothing. He was the managing editor of Vice’s feminist vertical (he once profiled Ann Coulter) who emailed Yiannopoulos with the request, “Please mock this fat feminist,” linking to a story by Lindy West.

The article had made me feel naive. These were the people I’d given the benefit of the doubt, the professional acquaintances who adopted such strong anti-identitarian poses that I often couldn’t discern their true sympathies. I figured that like the liberal professionals in the throes of a moral panic about moral panics, they shared the goal of collective liberation but disagreed about how to reach it, and in their disagreement came off as more resistant to change than they were. But what if some of them were not just acting like reactionaries? What if they didn’t share the goal?

In the case of Milo’s pen pals, their connection to the right was far from abstract: they talked, griped, shared notes. The lesson was that if someone sounds like an enemy and acts like an enemy, he may in fact be an enemy. I wasn’t sure what this meant for the men on the List. These were men I’d known to say “woke” in a funny voice, to make intellectual arguments against the redistributive efforts within their control — who they published or how they assigned. They lamented the intrusion of politics on quality art and warned of the perils of hysteria, witch hunts, and sex panics. To prove myself worthy of their confidence I tried not to leap to conclusions. But the allegations against men like this were damning: rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, choking, punching, physical intimidation, and stalking; “verbal intimidation of female colleagues”; “sexual harassment, inappropriate comments and pranks (especially to young women).” Even if half of it was false, I knew at least some of it to be true. At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does. In the days following the BuzzFeed article, “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times — in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

And so I talked to men. Men on the List, men not on the List, men secretly half-disappointed that they’d been left off the List, mistaking it for some kind of virility ranking. In the past I’d argued that it shouldn’t be women’s job to educate men about sexism, and I sympathized with the women who said so now. But reality isn’t always how it should be.

Perhaps it was just time for my shift. People take turns in the effort to explain collective pain, and I’d tapped out plenty of times before, pleading exhaustion, depression, and rage. The fact that I had the emotional reserves to discuss harassment at all implied that it was my responsibility to do so. (“It is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1980 — “a constant drain of energy.”) This is not to say I was good at it: I overestimated the length of my fuse, listening, talking, reasoning, feeling more or less levelheaded — then abruptly shutting down or crying. It was nevertheless more than some friends could muster. From each according to her ability, et cetera.

If my approach was too much about men, my defense is that the situation was about men from the beginning. The shared experience of sexism is not the same thing as feminism, even if the recognition of shared experience is where some people’s feminism begins. It was to be expected that the discussion turned to men’s fates and feelings. How could guilty men be rehabilitated or justly punished? Under what circumstances could we continue to appreciate their art? As think pieces pondered these questions, other men leapt at the opportunity to make their political enemies’ sexual crimes an argument for the superiority of their side. It might have been funny if it weren’t so expected, so dark. When a friend and former colleague mentioned the “male-feminist” journalist who had choked her at the foot of his stairs, right-wing outlets rushed to “amplify” her voice. The pro-Trump website Gateway Pundit quoted her without permission; the Men’s Rights activist and alt-right personality Mike Cernovich retweeted the blog post to his 379,000 followers; Breitbart followed up with its own story. “My therapist said that I should sign every tweet with ‘also the alt right sucks’ so they can’t use my tweets in any more articles,” she joked.

Leftist men celebrated the fall of liberal male hypocrites, liberals the fall of conservative ones, conservatives and alt-rightists the fall of the liberals and leftists. Happiest were the antisemites, who applauded the feminist takedown of powerful Jewish men. It seemed not to occur to them — or maybe just not to matter? — that any person, any woman, had suffered. Outrage for the victims was just another weapon in an eternal battle between men. I remembered the emergency panel Trump assembled in response to the Access Hollywood tape with Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones — women who had accused Bill Clinton of harassment or rape. A fourth woman, Kathy Shelton, had been raped by a man Hillary Clinton defended in court as a young lawyer. As the adage goes: in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.

All this posturing made optimism difficult and clarity imperative. Patiently, my peers and I explained to men that we understood the difference between a touch and a grope, a bad time and rape, and mass online feminist retribution and a right-wing conspiracy (how credulous did they think we were?). Meanwhile, we wrung as much change as we could from this news peg. We called meetings, revised workplace policies, resumed difficult conversations we’d have preferred not to. As we learned during the Long 2016, the self-evident harm of sexual assault is not self-evident at all: no automatic mechanism delivers justice the moment “awareness” is “raised.” Donald Trump remains the President. Social media, the staging ground for much of this reckoning, remains easy to manipulate. Our enemies pose as allies, and our allies act like enemies, suspicious that our gain will be their loss.

Must history have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in order for others to be free? And how to figure it when those freedoms are not symmetrical? A little more power for you might mean a lot less power for me in practice, an exchange that will not feel fair in the short term even if it is in the long term. There is a reason, presumably, that we call it an ethical calculus and not an ethical algebra.

Some things are zero sum — perhaps more things than one cares to admit. To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren’t so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. Changing the rules of the game might begin with revising what it means to win. I once heard a story about a friend who’d said, offhand at a book group, that he’d throw women under the bus if it meant achieving social democracy in the United States. The story was meant to be chilling — this from a friend? — but it made me laugh. As if you could do it without us, I thought, we who do all the work on the group project. I wondered what his idea of social democracy was.

As for how men might think about their role in a habitable future — or how anyone might, from a position of having something to lose — a visual metaphor may be useful. Imagine walking through a maze, for years and years, to find that your path has dead-ended near the exit. There’s an illusion of proximity, of closeness to the goal: you can see the light through the brush, hear the traffic just outside. It’s difficult, in that moment, to accept that you’re not in fact close — that you can’t jump the hedge, and that to turn around would not be to regress but to proceed. You turn around not because it is morally superior or because it will get you into heaven, but because it is your best and only option. Perhaps redistribution is like that. To attempt it is not to guarantee that the future will be better than the past, only to admit that it can be.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/the-intellectual-situation/in-the-maze/