AbsurdBeats

Cont.

36. When #MeToo hit I thought, Oh, this is good, that people are talking about this. But I didn’t think #MeToo.

37. I’ve never been raped. I’ve never sexually harassed at work, grabbed on the train, hassled on the sidewalk. Not really.

38. Not really. I mean, yes, I’ve dealt with some shit, but, y’know, not like what other women have gone through. Sure, there some words, some grabbiness, some threats, but that didn’t count, did it? It’s just. . . what happens, sometimes.

39. And I mostly haven’t thought about it: it’s been nothing, not like what other women have gone through.

40. Do I just want to fit in? I’ve never really fit in with women, with women’s experiences. Sure, I feel like a women and other women recognize me as such, but I’ve always felt just off to the side.

41. Maybe I was nudged here or shoved here, maybe I drifted here, but I’ve mostly been fine being off to the side. Mostly. Mostly because I don’t know what it would be to be in the midst.

42. Anyway, I wondered, was I trying to make #MeToo about me when it really wasn’t? Was I trying to horn in on something that, really, wasn’t mine?

43. Or maybe I just stopped paying attention to things that other women, many younger women, have rightly said Bullshit! to. Maybe it’s not (just) about the worst thing happening, but that that petty shit even happens at all.

44. And that that worst thing is always there, the omnipresent threat: watch out and take care and don’t walk there and is it dark and did I latch that window and where are the people and where are the exits.

45. It’s background. It’s normal. Keep your eyes open and ears open and those times you drank too much and made it home safe, you were lucky, you were lucky.

46. I’ve been lucky.

47. Anyway, I don’t know if #MeToo, but I’m paying attention, now.

48. And I’m paying attention to how this is working its way through our culture(s), how the conversations are policed.

49. Some, older women, older feminists, are disdainful, dismissive. I think they’re wrong, but given my own uncertainties about my own place in this conversation, I can’t just dismiss them in turn.

50. This is what they’re used to, this is what they’ve managed, this is how they’ve lived.

51. They may be charged with a lack of empathic imagination, they may have forgotten all of the women who were with them when they were young, who fell away because they couldn’t get used to it, couldn’t manage it, couldn’t live with it, but they are not enemies.

52. Are they to be pitied for what they lack? Oh, no, certainly not: I mean, would you pity Catherine Deneuve?

53. But this moment has a history, and this history has currents, and not all of us are wading in the same river.

54. And, anyway, beyond noting that they’ve said this, what else is to be done with them? They took what power they could, but they were not the ones who shaped power, not the ones who could grant it in turn. Their attitudes may be problematic, but these women are not the problem.

55. So what is to be done with the problem—and, again, the problem is one of a system, of many systems, of men mistreating women? I don’t know, and because I don’t know, I’m willing to say Try everything.

56. Really: try everything. Try the mild and the radical, trying smashing against and working within, try lawsuits and black clothes and pins and hashtags and calling out and standing up and sitting down and everything, everything.

57. Everything, I have to remind myself, includes gentleness and patience and empathy for those who are kicking with everything they have, even—especially—when I think their aim is a bit off.

58. After all, I don’t know what will work, and maybe their aim isn’t off at all.

To be continued.