2. There is no right move
The person at the center of a story about sexual extortion is entirely lacking in agency. And that's unappealing. It's also terrifying.
I showed the first installment of my story here to a couple of female friends. Jane, an artist in Boston, found the end abrupt and wanted to know why “No one wants to be the person in that story.” Also, she said, she didn’t know what I meant about these stories being “untellable.”
“Unrelatable,” I tweaked.
I told Jane I meant that in two senses. “They’re just impossible stories to tell,” I said. “And this whole newsletter thing is going to be me explaining all the different ways in which that’s true.”
“But you’re telling one here,” she objected.
“I don’t know that I am,” I said. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to.”
I said that these stories are “unrelatable” also in that newer sense of the word. “There’s literally no one to relate to in a story like this, no one you want to identify with.”
The person at the center of a story about sexual blackmail or extortion is entirely lacking in agency, an entity purely acted upon. And that’s unappealing. It’s also terrifying.
I said that was why the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of the governor of California and a mother of four—a woman, in other words, not lacking in authority, power, or prestige—had gone to pieces on the stand testifying against Harvey Weinstein. I said it was why the actor Brendan Fraser dropped out of the movie business for a while after being fondled by a producer at an industry event. I said it was why generations of mashers have gotten away with what they do—because you don’t want to describe the humiliating thing that happened, and what’s humiliating isn’t whatever body part got touched but the fact that something was done to you while you just stood there, disbelieving and bewildered.
“Can’t the person at the center of a sexual harassment story take action?” Jane asked.
“If they do, then it will be the wrong action. It will turn out to be ineffectual or counter-productive.”
I said that was the point. “There is no right move. If there were, then it would be a story about something else.”
Meredith, who works in media, understood what I meant by “unrelatable.” She said that was why sometimes women who have experienced some variety of harassment or abuse don’t credit other women’s stories. “To identify is to see yourself in that situation, and that’s threatening.” Meredith said. “It’s easier to become someone who doesn’t believe the story.”
I didn’t mind Jane not knowing exactly what I meant to begin with. My thought is to start out by keeping these entries brief, no more than 1,000 or 1,500 words, always including something that can be explained or expanded on in the next installment or further down the road.
To go back to Mr. New Yorker Writer’s confession, for instance: I was surprised to find that although I couldn’t remember when it had taken place—before or after that issue’s publication—I could remember everything about the way I’d felt when he made it.
“You were supposed to feel flattered,” Meredith pointed out.
“Well I didn’t,” I said.
I’d known I was supposed to feel flattered. Also, that I was supposed to say, “That’s all right. It doesn’t matter.” But I didn’t think it was all right. What Mr. New Yorker Writer was saying he’d done wasn’t just a violation of me and my relationship with the magazine. It was also a shocking violation of a long-standing compact between the press and the theater community whereby reviews are always made available to everybody at the same time. I remembered, through much of the conversation, trying to seem as cold and distant as I could for as long as I could, until finally I’d had to relent and stop being overtly hostile. After all, he was a colleague. And he had a certain amount of plausibility and clout. Also, he was a very good writer.
A couple of other things about that confession. First: it was unnecessary. Mr. New Yorker Writer could have read my not-yet-published work to half a dozen people and left me completely unaware. The whole point of the exercise had been to tell me about it.
The other thing: I had no way of knowing whether what Mr. New Yorker Writer said was true. I still don’t. He may have actually done what he was confessing to; or he may have invented the whole thing. I’m not in a position to know.
There’s a lot that someone caught up in a sexual harassment scenario isn’t in a position to know, a lot of information you don’t have access to. One of the most important things is a conversation that you weren’t present for in which someone talked about you in a way that went on to affect your life, saying things about you that weren’t true.
Since you weren’t there, you can’t even really be sure that conversation took place. You can infer that it did, because it seems that it must have.
Because you were first warehoused and then, one day out of the blue, you got a call from one of the guys in the messenger room telling you to come in and clean out your office.
From that you can infer that something happened out of your hearing.
Or you can make that assumption because you were one of two women fired when Mr. New Yorker Writer became briefly powerful and both of you had rejected him, and you were still at the magazine when the other woman got fired, in fact it was Mr. New Yorker Writer who told you she had been fired—he followed you into the break room to tell you, and if he talked about you to others the way he talked about her to you, then no wonder you both got fired. He asked if you’d heard, and then he said What a shame it was! And how brilliant she was! And how gifted and talented and maybe he even called her a genius before going on to allow—ruefully—that she was difficult. And the way he said the word “difficult” made it sound like a great big huge vast understatement, like a euphemism for stark staring bughouse crazy.
Do I sound crazy now? You bet I do. And that’s another reason these stories can’t be told: because thinking about them makes you go out of your ever-loving mind, even though you weren’t crazy to begin with.