For #MeToo to Work, We Must Draw the Line Between Sexual Assault and Being a Jerk
Accusations against author Junot Diaz are pouring in, but not all allegations are equal.
Jesse Singal | July 9, 2018
At its best, the #MeToo movement has smashed open what had been a closed, whispered conversation, mostly occurring between women, about the prevalence of male sexual harassment and assault. It has exposed serial violent predators like Harvey Weinstein and serial abusive creeps like Louis C.K., and it has apparently led at least some men to rethink their own actions and the boundaries of acceptable behavior. "The #MeToo era has changed my work," the psychotherapist Avi Klein wrote in a New York Times column. "If therapy has a reputation for navel gazing, this powerful moment has joined men in the room, forcing them to engage with topics that they would have earlier avoided."
But with any movement, there's a point where the initial excitement and sense of shared purpose fades a bit. It's time to discuss exactly what the movement is for—what it's trying to accomplish and which goals it should seek. No set of #MeToo allegations better highlights the importance of answering these questions clearly than the story of Junot DÃaz.
An article by Mark Shanahan and Stephanie Ebbert, published last week in The Boston Globe, offers a useful summary of the DÃaz case. For those unfamiliar with the saga, here's where we are: Since May, the Dominican-born, mostly-American-raised DÃaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her, the Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and a host of other celebrated novels and short stories and essays, has been accused by four women, all fellow writers or former writers, of several misdeeds. The problem is that these alleged misdeeds run such a wide gamut, from genuinely abusive behavior to what is little more than alleged being-a-jerk, that it should worry us that they are all being lumped under the #MeToo rubric.
Two allegations involve acts that would certainly qualify as assaults. The novelist Zinzi Clemmons kicked off the allegations against Diaz when she confronted him at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival over a previous incident, but she didn't go into specifics. Later, she claimed on Twitter that six years earlier, when she was a graduate student, he had cornered her and "forcibly" kissed her, and that he had acted similarly toward other women. The other allegation comes from Alisa Rivera, described by the Globe as "a Los Angeles woman who wrote about an encounter with DÃaz that left her in tears," who claimed that after an uncomfortable conversation in which he told her her skin was too white, DÃaz "grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me onto his lap."
In the immediate wake of the Australia incident, DÃaz issued a somewhat vague statement that some interpreted as a mea culpa. But in his Globe interview, flanked by an attorney, DÃaz flatly denied Clemmons' and Rivera's accusations. "I did not kiss anyone. I did not forcibly kiss Zinzi Clemmons. I did not kiss Zinzi Clemmons," DÃaz told the Globe. "It didn't happen." ("He also provided a cordial email he received from Clemmons the day after the workshop that made no mention of a kiss," notes the Globe. "A Columbia professor also recalled encountering Clemmons after DÃaz left the event and described her as delighted, not shaken.") DÃaz denied Rivera's account with a similar vehemence, saying it simply never happened; that leaves the incident as a he-said-she-said, since neither side has any corroborating evidence.
Whatever one thinks of the Rivera and Clemmons' accusations, they involve exactly the sort of behavior that #MeToo should be about. Just because the accusations in question don't center around penetrative rape or the years of horrific abuse of power described by, say, Weinstein's victims, doesn't mean they aren't serious and don't warrant investigation. (For what it's worth, the Globe notes that DÃaz "is keeping his teaching job at MIT and his editing position at Boston Review after separate investigations found the accusations lacked 'the kind of severity that animated the #MeToo movement,' as Boston Review's top editors put it.")
It's the other two allegations against DÃaz where things get extremely fuzzy, especially given the extent to which these charges have been embraced by so many journalists and onlookers as bona fide instances of #MeToo-relevant abuse. These allegations severely blur the line between actual assault or harassment and simple disagreement between adults taking part in consensual conversational exchanges. Blurring that line further would be deleterious to the #MeToo movement.
"During his tour for THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, Junot DÃaz did a Q&A at the grad program I'd just graduated from," Carmen Maria Machado, an award-winning writer in her own right, tweeted in May, in a tweetstorm that began as a quote-retweet of Clemmons' allegation of a forcible kiss. "When I made the mistake of asking him a question about his protagonist's unhealthy, pathological relationship with women, he went off for me for twenty minutes." In her subsequent tweets, she described him as "enraged" during the exchange, and accused him of having engaged in "bullying and misogyny." The experience, she wrote, was "a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation." Naturally, these accusations, coming as they were in the wake of Clemmons', garnered a great deal of attention and intensified the spotlight on DÃaz.
But they're false. In June, someone posted a recording of the talk in question on SoundCloud. It reveals that at no point did DÃaz become enraged or engage in anything that a fair observer would define as "bullying," misogynistic or otherwise. He responds to Machado's question with a lot of explaining about his writing, some of it, to be sure, a bit defensive-sounding, but none of it aggressive or abusive. Despite this audio, Machado subsequently stood by her accusations in a series of tweet, accusing doubters of "gaslighting": "You are entitled to quibble about tone," she tweeted. "But to say that what I said happened didn't happen is straight-up not true. If you think so, you probably aren't the best at reading subtext." So before the recording surfaced, DÃaz's response was "a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation"; after, it required "reading subtext" to understand why it was so bad it warranted a tweetstorm positioned as a followup to Clemmons' claims of a forced kiss.
Then there's the accusation leveled by the writer Monica Byrne. In another tweetstorm that began as a quote-retweeted response to Clemmons' claims, she wrote that during a 2014 dinner party she and DÃaz both attended, she had suffered a "verbal sexual assault." The Globe describes the exchange thusly:
Byrne considered the comment "completely bizarre, disproportionate, and violent."
DÃaz recalled it merely as a "messy conversation."
Both parties appear to agree on this version of events, though Byrne claims DÃaz screamed the term rape during the exchange. If this is what happened, then DÃaz, during a conversation between adults at a dinner party, used a sharp but accurate example to explain why it didn't make sense for Byrne to suggest that her story's rejection was, on its own, evidence of gender bias at The New Yorker. There may well be gender bias there, of course, though if so the situation seems to be improving—as of 2010, only about a quarter of the bylines appearing in the magazine belonged to women, but that number approached 40 percent in 2017. But DÃaz is correct that a single person saying that X didn't happen to them has little bearing on how often X happens.
Accusations against author Junot Diaz are pouring in, but not all allegations are equal.
Jesse Singal | July 9, 2018
At its best, the #MeToo movement has smashed open what had been a closed, whispered conversation, mostly occurring between women, about the prevalence of male sexual harassment and assault. It has exposed serial violent predators like Harvey Weinstein and serial abusive creeps like Louis C.K., and it has apparently led at least some men to rethink their own actions and the boundaries of acceptable behavior. "The #MeToo era has changed my work," the psychotherapist Avi Klein wrote in a New York Times column. "If therapy has a reputation for navel gazing, this powerful moment has joined men in the room, forcing them to engage with topics that they would have earlier avoided."
But with any movement, there's a point where the initial excitement and sense of shared purpose fades a bit. It's time to discuss exactly what the movement is for—what it's trying to accomplish and which goals it should seek. No set of #MeToo allegations better highlights the importance of answering these questions clearly than the story of Junot DÃaz.
An article by Mark Shanahan and Stephanie Ebbert, published last week in The Boston Globe, offers a useful summary of the DÃaz case. For those unfamiliar with the saga, here's where we are: Since May, the Dominican-born, mostly-American-raised DÃaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her, the Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and a host of other celebrated novels and short stories and essays, has been accused by four women, all fellow writers or former writers, of several misdeeds. The problem is that these alleged misdeeds run such a wide gamut, from genuinely abusive behavior to what is little more than alleged being-a-jerk, that it should worry us that they are all being lumped under the #MeToo rubric.
Two allegations involve acts that would certainly qualify as assaults. The novelist Zinzi Clemmons kicked off the allegations against Diaz when she confronted him at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival over a previous incident, but she didn't go into specifics. Later, she claimed on Twitter that six years earlier, when she was a graduate student, he had cornered her and "forcibly" kissed her, and that he had acted similarly toward other women. The other allegation comes from Alisa Rivera, described by the Globe as "a Los Angeles woman who wrote about an encounter with DÃaz that left her in tears," who claimed that after an uncomfortable conversation in which he told her her skin was too white, DÃaz "grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me onto his lap."
In the immediate wake of the Australia incident, DÃaz issued a somewhat vague statement that some interpreted as a mea culpa. But in his Globe interview, flanked by an attorney, DÃaz flatly denied Clemmons' and Rivera's accusations. "I did not kiss anyone. I did not forcibly kiss Zinzi Clemmons. I did not kiss Zinzi Clemmons," DÃaz told the Globe. "It didn't happen." ("He also provided a cordial email he received from Clemmons the day after the workshop that made no mention of a kiss," notes the Globe. "A Columbia professor also recalled encountering Clemmons after DÃaz left the event and described her as delighted, not shaken.") DÃaz denied Rivera's account with a similar vehemence, saying it simply never happened; that leaves the incident as a he-said-she-said, since neither side has any corroborating evidence.
Whatever one thinks of the Rivera and Clemmons' accusations, they involve exactly the sort of behavior that #MeToo should be about. Just because the accusations in question don't center around penetrative rape or the years of horrific abuse of power described by, say, Weinstein's victims, doesn't mean they aren't serious and don't warrant investigation. (For what it's worth, the Globe notes that DÃaz "is keeping his teaching job at MIT and his editing position at Boston Review after separate investigations found the accusations lacked 'the kind of severity that animated the #MeToo movement,' as Boston Review's top editors put it.")
It's the other two allegations against DÃaz where things get extremely fuzzy, especially given the extent to which these charges have been embraced by so many journalists and onlookers as bona fide instances of #MeToo-relevant abuse. These allegations severely blur the line between actual assault or harassment and simple disagreement between adults taking part in consensual conversational exchanges. Blurring that line further would be deleterious to the #MeToo movement.
"During his tour for THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, Junot DÃaz did a Q&A at the grad program I'd just graduated from," Carmen Maria Machado, an award-winning writer in her own right, tweeted in May, in a tweetstorm that began as a quote-retweet of Clemmons' allegation of a forcible kiss. "When I made the mistake of asking him a question about his protagonist's unhealthy, pathological relationship with women, he went off for me for twenty minutes." In her subsequent tweets, she described him as "enraged" during the exchange, and accused him of having engaged in "bullying and misogyny." The experience, she wrote, was "a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation." Naturally, these accusations, coming as they were in the wake of Clemmons', garnered a great deal of attention and intensified the spotlight on DÃaz.
But they're false. In June, someone posted a recording of the talk in question on SoundCloud. It reveals that at no point did DÃaz become enraged or engage in anything that a fair observer would define as "bullying," misogynistic or otherwise. He responds to Machado's question with a lot of explaining about his writing, some of it, to be sure, a bit defensive-sounding, but none of it aggressive or abusive. Despite this audio, Machado subsequently stood by her accusations in a series of tweet, accusing doubters of "gaslighting": "You are entitled to quibble about tone," she tweeted. "But to say that what I said happened didn't happen is straight-up not true. If you think so, you probably aren't the best at reading subtext." So before the recording surfaced, DÃaz's response was "a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation"; after, it required "reading subtext" to understand why it was so bad it warranted a tweetstorm positioned as a followup to Clemmons' claims of a forced kiss.
Then there's the accusation leveled by the writer Monica Byrne. In another tweetstorm that began as a quote-retweeted response to Clemmons' claims, she wrote that during a 2014 dinner party she and DÃaz both attended, she had suffered a "verbal sexual assault." The Globe describes the exchange thusly:
In an interview, Byrne said the conversation concerned the statistical disparity between male and female authors who get published and reviewed. Byrne told DÃaz that The New Yorker had rejected an excerpt of her novel and she questioned whether that was evidence of gender bias. DÃaz, who appears regularly in The New Yorker, responded by saying something like: "I don't know if you know how statistics work, but that's like saying if you haven't been raped then nobody's been raped," Byrne said.
DÃaz recalled it merely as a "messy conversation."
Both parties appear to agree on this version of events, though Byrne claims DÃaz screamed the term rape during the exchange. If this is what happened, then DÃaz, during a conversation between adults at a dinner party, used a sharp but accurate example to explain why it didn't make sense for Byrne to suggest that her story's rejection was, on its own, evidence of gender bias at The New Yorker. There may well be gender bias there, of course, though if so the situation seems to be improving—as of 2010, only about a quarter of the bylines appearing in the magazine belonged to women, but that number approached 40 percent in 2017. But DÃaz is correct that a single person saying that X didn't happen to them has little bearing on how often X happens.
Women really do need to stop using the language of physical violence to describe their emotional reactions to words or non-violent events. This cheapens descriptions of real assaults and makes normal people tune them out.
Interpersonal relationships of any kind are loaded with real and wholly imaginary incidents that leave one party angry or sad and the other party confused and dismissive. Women do this to each other all the time. Men have plenty of horrifying stories about sexually/socially awkward women (which they laugh off).
Anybody who ever attended a Q&A has seen authors/presenters vigorously defend their position when questioned in a manner they deem disrespectful, stupid, or troll-like. This is normal. Heck, coders do this and you would not think a Q&A about Java tools would be exciting.
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Reason
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