Recognition

 

I remember the first time I saw this picture, I didn't know who its subjects were. Already the image really struck me: the great difference in the age of the two subjects, the strong energy between the two, the suggestion of an intimacy and a distance at the same time, as though they didn't know each other well, but were somehow connected. Then I saw the caption, and I finally recognized Duke as the young girl, and the thing sort of exploded in my mind because I hadn't known that Keller was still alive when The Miracle Worker first appeared on stage. They are not just holding hands, if my memory serves, this image also captures, without being able to truly show it, a moment of silent, private connection, despite its being recorded on film, as they communicate--through a method invented by Annie Sullivan that only a very few people on the planet know how to use--a word that held the most powerful, foundational place in Keller's lexicon, in her very understanding and experience of the world, as Patty Duke finger-signs T-E-A-C-H-E-R into Helen Keller's hand.

she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room

April 13, 2018 | A major donor with close ties to the White House resigned on Friday as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after the revelation that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during an affair. The deal was arranged in the final months of 2017 by President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen. Under the terms of the deal, the Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, would pay the woman in installments over the course of two years, and she would agree to stay silent about their relationship, two people with knowledge of the arrangement told The New York Times. The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. From The New York Times.

I look at this man--everything that seems visible about him: the insistent PEPPERDINE photo-op backdrop; the poor physical and social health evident in the skin color, the mirthless pools of black that are his eyes, the grimace which at some point forgot to disguise itself as the signal of a pleasure in the world, which is to say, as a smile, rather than the wincing expression of a forbearance of, a steeling against, the world; I look at that "haircut"--I look at this man and I feel sorry for the "Playboy model," who, with those two words, is surgically caricatured into nothingness, into dismissal, as the barely described but overly present sine-qua-non--the that-without-which--pretext for the humiliation, the failure, the weakness, the desire of another, the barely described pretext for the humiliation of a man, who, as we well know, is the only another, the only other, that matters.

I look at this man, and I see the women not on his arm, in this frame or in any other frame: no surplus of disappointed wives or expensive mistresses or disappointed, expensive mothers will ever be enough to make him believe that he is a success, that he is a man, that he is alive, that he is real, that he is a real boy, alive, and not someone else's fantasy of a man, not some father's fantasy of a boy, not some father's fantasy of himself, made of painted wood and string, a fantasy whose lies are forever revealing, forever announcing, the degree to which they arouse him by his shameful erection, which is as clear as the nose on his face. 

It is, of course, the height to which he has risen; the richness of his investment and achievement; the scope and number of his responsibilities; the reputation and the dignity of--the admiration for--his family, both up (parental, ancestral) and down (spousal, childrel: inherital), which is to say, his very name, its currency and value, its reference and intelligibility; his ability, his dependability and responsibility, his ability to influence others, which is to say his word; his respect, his solidity, his fearsomeness, his strength, his resolution, his intensity, his fecundity, his power, which is to say, his maleness, his manhood, his sex, itself, all coming into question; it is the threatened or actual loss--even just the news of the threat of the loss--of these things that makes the story tragic, that gives it any value at all, that makes the story worth knowing or repeating, because the story's very iterability isn't affected at all by it's depressing and clichéed reiteration that it is news if/that/when a man falls from grace by partaking of his association with a [insert any two words here that describe a woman, but in this case:] Playboy Model. Every time, the loss, the tragic fall, the story occurs to, the story is about, an individual, a subject, a person of interest, or notoriety, of value, a person in whom I should be interested if only by dint of the fact that someone has decided to repeat the story of his loss of value to me. In the story, in his story, the (actual/potential) loss of his status--his value or usefulness in politics, industry, finance, faith, or law; his value as a leader or thinker or role-model; his value as a husband, father, son, and man--is presented as though it hadn't just happened to this other asshole yesterday, it is presented as though it were happening for the first time, when, depending on the timing it is only just happening for the first time today. And the lady--all the women, of course, for the most part--but the lady in question is just the stock character of Fallen Woman, just a two-word dismissal as a description, because it doesn't matter who she is, she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, she is not important, except in one way and one way only: as the pretext for the (threatened, perhaps actual) loss of a man's status, family, fortune, word, name. Her presence in his story--because she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, and no one cares about her story, except that there must be some suggestion, some hint, some suggestion to the suggestible, that she's just the least bit tawdry, or a shopgirl, or a divorcee, or an actress, or working class, or a coed, or a latina, or a european, or a prostitute, or a woman--signals his loss and is the cause of his loss. She exists--she serves--merely as a function in his story. She exists to serve. 

Certain kinds of psychoanalysis have a word for this state, which is often translated into English as a state of "abjection": she is abjected--in truth, before the story is told, she is already in an abjected state, always already--humbled and rejected, ejected outside of accepted, acceptable, informed, available, permissible or possible discourse. He is not. He has many more than two words to apply to his highest level of attainment, or any attainment, in the social spheres. He has many more than one sphere, he has many more than one title, many more than one role, and more than one name by which to call him, but his names, titles, roles, and spheres and his ability to move among them, capitalize upon them, and use them to his advantage and others' is damaged by his association with the storyless, abjected lady in question. Her story is unavailable and unimportant because she is abjected, and she is abjected because of some now-unimportant but singular detail of her now-unimportant and abjected story: she has no story, and it is as though his story, he, himself, takes on some contamination, partakes of some contaminating quanta of her abjection, and thus becomes, in some sense, abjected himself. So, gents, beware of Fallen Women.

But if we're really honest with ourselves, it is not difficult to see that the abjection of which Fallen Woman takes is not due to her fallen state, but due to her state as woman, as her hypothesized-but-the-hypothesis-is-enough fallenness is hypothesized on her hypothesized unreliable, unstable, untrustworthy, weak, flighty, fickle, faithless, unteachable, ignorant, dissembling, dangerous, dark, mysterious, unknowable womaness. The hint of falleness is the addition that is not an addition because it serves to call out what we all know women already to be, or be capable of, which is tacitly the same. The Fallen Woman is all women. She doesn't have the same value as a man, and her as-few-details-as-possible story only exists as a non-story to affect the story of a man. Woman is the property of someone else's story. She is property. That is why she is paid less on the dollar than a man for the same job; that is why she doesn't have her own name but has the name of her father or her husband; that is why she is defined most powerfully by her relationship to men, as daughter, wife, mother, mistress, widow; that is why when she is raped it is because of the way she was dressed or because she has had more than one sexual partner or any sexual partner, or because she is a lesbian, or a woman; that is why our vice president does not allow himself to be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife; that is why when she is beaten by her husband it is because she must have done something to cause it; that is why we have difficulty encouraging or imagining women in physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, law, law enforcement, the military, sports, music composition or in leadership roles in these fields, or any field; that is why she cannot be elected president because she seems cold, seems untrustworthy, seems ambitious, and doesn't smile enough; that is why, in Virginia Woolf's memorable formulation in A Room of One's Own, she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room. 

For her to be acceptable, she must be the paragon of fidelity, fealty, faith, compromise, kindness, supportiveness, selflessness, nonexistent opinions, disregarded thoughts, and uncomplaining labor: In the terms of King Lear, she must only be Cordelia, whose back is a bridge for men, for men and children, for male children, a bridge for men; otherwise she is those monstrous other sisters, Goneril or Regen, it seems, by default. It would be best for everyone if she died in childbirth. For there will always be another woman to marry--as they are interchangeable--who will teach the daughter her place, or beat her into it, because she can be counted on not to love her as her own. Because we must always force women into competition with other women, for everything, but especially for the attention of the Man, who is the hero of the story, the narrator, the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the critic, and the reader. And he has made the notion of Fallen Woman--precisely because there is no real distinction from Woman, precisely because Woman is, at every moment, in danger of submitting to her nature, like a scorpion--to distinguish interchangeable women from one another. If you believe that the purpose of sex is not pleasure, a dimension accorded only to men, but solely for the reproduction of men, sons to carry the name only they may keep and to safeguard the property only they may inherit, upon your body, which is the purpose of your body, by the man you were given to by a man, through the painful labor of your body, which is the only labor you are to be allowed; if you are Cordelia and make an incubator of your body, a bridge of your back, and suffer beautifully with your muted voice and your cramped agency, a jealously restricted purview that is mostly the execution, reinforcement, and extension, as their agent, of someone else's interests, desires, prejudices, and will; if you defer to, maintain, celebrate, supplement, and anticipate those interests without question, because they are, and must be, your own; if your every action and expression is toward keeping things the way they are, then you will be called "respectable"--a precarious high-wire act of a designation--and your origins, your class, your poverty, your ethnicity, your foreignness, your sins, your past, your woman-ness will not be held against you. You will not be fallen.

On David Brooks on Jane Addams

Hull House, Chicago

I have criticized him, sharply, over the years, and it has been fascinating to watch his Times pieces evolve through Bush II, the Republican Congress with Obama, and Trump. At base, through dilatory, piecemeal self-expressions--as "the conservative" voice at the Times, through his initial excuses for the Right, followed by his subsequent bewilderment at the madness and obvious venom of their agenda, which was an agenda of inaction-as-sabotage-and-brinksmanship, when it wasn't one of plutocratic self-interest at the expense of, well, anything, everything, else--Brooks has slowly revealed himself to be a classic, true conservative--who does not put party before country--and the kind we need many more of.

I'm not a liberal, I'm a radical, but I respect a real, conservative movement, that seeks to conserve, that doesn't need the appellation "compassionate" before it to find the spurious taste of being palatable. We have come to a place where "conservative" means something it was never meant to mean. It's an insult to conservatism, as such. Let's just call it the Far-Right, and be done with it. And don't forget, there are--or were--both Right and Left conservatives. Oh, how I miss texture, nuance, investment, and thought.

David Brooks! I might start liking you one day.

From the New York Times, in its entirety:

The Jane Addams Model

David Brooks

 

April 25, 2017

These days everything puts me in mind of Jane Addams. Many of the social problems we face today — the fraying social fabric, widening inequality, anxieties over immigration, concentrated poverty, the return of cartoonish hyper-masculinity — are the same problems she faced 130 years ago. And in many ways her responses were more sophisticated than ours.

Addams was born to an affluent family in Cedarville, Ill., in 1860. She was a morally ambitious young woman who dreamed of some epic life of service without much idea about how it might come about. In her teenage years, she earnestly set to reading — “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” — but in her twenties she was one of those young people who don’t get to themselves quickly. They spend years in study and in acquiring degrees with a vague sense they are preparing for something, without actually leaping into what it is they might want to do.

Addams took a Grand Tour of Europe and found herself in a vegetable market as the leftovers were being tossed to a crowd of paupers, who stood with their grasping hands upraised. The image had a powerful effect on her. Forever after, the sight of hands raised up, even in dance and calisthenics, caused her to feel the pain of poverty and want.

In London, she visited a place called Toynbee Hall, a settlement house where rich university men organized social gatherings with the poor in the same way they would organize them with one another. Addams returned to Chicago and set up Hull House, an American version of the settlement idea.

As today, it was a time when the social fabric was being torn by technological change. Addams moved her family possessions, including the paintings, books and heirloom silver, into a large mansion in a blighted district. The idea was to give the dispossessed the same sort of refined and cultivated home environment that she had known, and thus create a network of family and neighborly bonds. Before long, 2,000 a day were streaming through the place, taking and teaching courses, offering and receiving day care, doing the housekeeping, conducting sociological research.

This was not rich serving the poor (Addams hated paternalism). It was rich and poor, immigrant and old stock, living and working in reciprocity, and as a byproduct bridging social chasms and coming to understand one another. For example, Addams thought it was especially important to put immigrant adults into the role of teachers, because it affords “a pleasant change from the tutelage in which all Americans, including their own children, are so apt to hold them.”

There were classes in acting, weaving, carpentry, but especially in art history, philosophy, and music. Addams was convinced that everyone longs for beauty and knowledge. Everyone longs to serve some high ideal. She believed in character before intellect, that spiritual support is as important as material support. And yet “the soul of man in the commercial and industrial struggle is under siege.”

High culture was her way to elevate the desires and tastes of all who passed through. Residents were surrounded with copies of Rembrandts and presented with Greek tragedies and classical concerts. One new immigrant walked in and Addams handed him an Atlantic Monthly and recommended an essay he could barely understand. But it was a sign of respect and equality, and access to a different world. Even poor kids, she believed, should “share in the common inheritance of life’s best goods.”

Our antipoverty efforts tend to be systematized and bureaucratized, but Hull House was intensely personalistic. She sought to change the world by planting herself deeply in a particular neighborhood. She treated each person as a unique soul.

Addams had amazing capacity to work from the specific case to the general philosophy, and had the ability to apply an overall strategy to the particular incident. There are many philanthropists and caregivers today who dislike theory and just want to get practical. It is this sort of doer’s arrogance and intellectual laziness that explains why so many charities do no good or do positive harm. Addams, by contrast, was both theorist and practitioner.

In her day, like our own, public life was dominated by manly men who saw politics as a competition between warriors and who sought change through partisan chest thumping and impersonal legislative action.

Addams was certainly political, but she defended the primacy of the “woman’s” sphere. People are really shaped by dense intimate connections. People thrive in “familied contexts.” As Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote in her biography, “The world of women was, for her, a dense concoction of imperatives, yearnings, reflections, actions, joys, tragedies, laughter, tears — a complex way of knowing and being in the world.”

Tough, Addams believed that we only make our way in the world through discipline and self-control. Tender, she created an institution that was a lived-out version of humanist philosophy. In today’s terms, she was a moral and religious traditionalist and an economic leftist, and an incredible role model for our time.

Fourteen Points about You, Me, and Everybody Else

I, actually, don't look anything like this.

So, I've been meditating on the last few days for the past three months.

And I have a couple things to say about it:

1.
If you wanted "CHANGE," Honey, you are about to get some REAL CHANGE, for real. 

I hope it's to your liking.

2.
I never thought the day after an in-inauguration would move me more than the day itself. The day after became a new kind of the-day-itself, and I thank each and every one of you for making that happen.

3.
The Law is something we subscribe to--and when it is often wrong--we resist it. The United Republican Democratic States of the continent of north America only exists because of resistance, dissent, and revolution. 

Never forget that while we agree to disagree, we disagree in order to agree. We build consensus out of dissent. But you have to know shit in order to disagree and then change your mind. 

Know shit. Be educated, nuanced, sophisticated, smart, and compassionate. 

Listen. Know more later than you know right now.

4.
We are all immigrants to this land..

No human life took hold in the western hemisphere, until immigrants, who crossed the Bering Strait/Sea, long ago, in our prehistory, settled it.

After that, the settlers were all people from across either of the oceans that nestle us in "the West," some of them, even in the earliest days before the Republic for which the American flag stands, brought here forcibly to labor without pay and to make more people, their children, who would also be forced to labor without pay, and to foster grandchildren, great, great-great, and great-great-great, great-great-great-great grandchildren, to be ensnared until the present day, and after, in American law and the "Justice" system, to be imprisoned, paid lower wages, to be denied the franchise, and to, on the average, die at a younger age, unless they were made to join the lowest ranks of the armed forces as cannon fodder or, often unarmed, shot dead by the police.

We are all immigrants to this land. This land, which is your land, this land, which is my land, from California to the New York Island(s), from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. This land, which, in point of actual fact, was not made for you and me, but which is a land upon which we are all living, so, we certainly had better start figuring out how to get along better, because none of us is going anywhere. Except for the very old, who tend to vote Republican.

We are all immigrants to this land.

5.
Respect people who came here because they had the temerity to believe in The American Dream. A Dream that still exists in those foolish enough to believe in it. Do not let them down! Respect immigrants. We are only a land only of immigrants.

6.
Jews are actually people.

Muslims are actually people.

Women are actually people.

Women's rights are human rights.

And black lives actually do matter, too.

Why is this so hard to get through your skull? Black lives mattering is not about all lives not mattering, it's about the fact that, heretofore, it didn't seem to matter to much of anyone not black that lives lived by black people matter, too. Not just your bullshit. This isn't that hard. Stop resisting it. It's called normalization, motherfucker. It's called Brown vs Board of Education, motherfucker. It's called Loving vs Virginia, motherfucker.

Could we, please, put a stake into that insidious vampire, in my lifetime? Please? It just makes you look like an ignorant asshole. And you're probably not that ignorant or that much of an asshole to completely disregard reason.

The point isn't that black lives matter more than all other lives when they're black, it is that lives actually matter when they're not white.

Honestly, this is so American basic. It's something even a racist could understand. In America, all men are created equal, even when they are black, even when they are women. And yet black men are disproportionately killed by the police and women are disproportionately underpaid, even when they are white, and even in Hollywood. The evidence is epidemic; the evidence is moribund.

Black lives matter, too.

I guess there's only one way to find out.

7.
Corporations are not people. People are people.

Any questions?

8.
Money is not free speech. 

If you have more money that does NOT give you more speech.

And THAT is the American way, okay?

Any questions?

9.
I'm sorry you grew up in coal country--or oil country. I'm sorry your fathers and mothers killed themselves to give you life, clothe you, feed you, and do everything they could to make your lives better than theirs. They were good people doing good things in this life. But the fossil fuels are fossils. 

We have to move on from fossil fuels. If your local, state, and national governments haven't done all they can--and I am certain most of them have done very little--to help your communities with jobs, most especially in the renewable energy sector, then blame THEM and vote them out of office. 

The canary in the coal mine isn't that big business found lower-wage workers to do the job you used to, the canary in the coal mine is that no one gives a fuck about funding a proper public education for you or your children, or figuring out a way to help you find a job.

You're not lazy. PS Black and brown people aren't lazy, either, Cracker. But we pay taxes to the government to make our lives better, not worse. I will happily pay all the tax dollars you let me to get your kids an education, get you healthcare, get you off drugs without incarcerating you, get you a job you like that will make you solvent enough to feed yourself and your kids, pay your rent, buy your home--if you want to--and live life for sunsets, dancing, laughter, friendship, love, music, reading, philosophy, pleasure, family, joy, education, civic duty, goodness, and NOT doing unto others as you have them NOT do unto you. 

We are our sisters' keeper. And our brothers', too.

10.
Rich people do not know more than we do and do not, as a function of their wealth, make your life, my life, their lives, or anyone's life better. Wealth only takes away some of the harm that life deals out to you, personally. Wealth doesn't make you happy or smart.

If anything, wealth just makes you better at taking advantage of other people.

And is that who you really want to be?

11.
The canary in the coal mine isn't a canary, it's the whole fucking environment telling you to stop burning fossil fuels. When the planet is dying from the fumes--instead of a tiny bird--I'm pretty sure it's time to pay attention.

12.
Educate yourself--because the Republican-led government doesn't care about your mind or body, male or female, white or black or brown. Speak truth to power. Volunteer; not just for religious groups--the world actually includes things beyond religion--and in this country, we're supposed to have a separation of church and state, which is a good thing. And here's why: it may not be your church. Are you really willing to take that chance? Stop trying to get your government to enforce your religious details and get them to embody the compassion that Allah, Adonai, Jesus, God, and the Buddha have been telling you to embody for the past ten centuries.

Vote. Run for office, locally. For Christ's sake, believe in something that doesn't only include you.

13.
I lived in the same city as Donald Trump for twenty-two years. If you voted for him, I feel sorry for you. But you probably didn't live in the same city with him for twenty-two years.

Because, if you had....

14.
The perfect is always the enemy of the good. 

Strive to be good. Strive to be happy. I bet no one told you it was very important to strive to be happy. Strive not to be angry. Strive not to be anxious. Strive to be compassionate. Do some yoga. Strive to be happy.

That's it. So, anyway.
Please, have a great day.

Have a nice day in the Patriarchy, everyone!

For a story so disturbing, I loved this wry account from one woman of the world we live in, which is, as many women know, a rape culture. You know you want to read this New Yorker piece by Mary Karr, because it's really funny and has a sort of happy ending.

Or the kind of happy ending we're allowed, these days.

Excerpted:

On a spring day in recent memory, I was strolling up Ninth Avenue alone, after leaving a bistro lunch with a gentleman caller and my soon-to-finish-N.Y.U. son. It was sunny but not yet steaming. Businessmen had their ties tugged loose or suit jackets slung over their shoulders. There were floral frocks and filmy blouses among the adorably pierced and punked-out goths of Hell’s Kitchen. I could almost feel the financial yoke of my son’s college tuition slipping off my neck. 

Then an approaching guy chatting equably with a tall friend dodged at me to grab my crotch. I don’t mean brushed by it maybe accidentally; I mean he grabbed between my legs with a meaty claw, big as a waffle iron. He also called me the C-word with breath that stank of beer. Then he passed on into a sandwich shop with his buddy.

He wore a royal-blue plaid short-sleeve shirt you might find in a J. Crew ad, nicely hemmed jean shorts, and pricey sneakers. He was half my age and twice my weight and had the wide, muscled form cultivated by Equinox aficionados. Translation: he wasn’t dope sick or a flat-out loon. 

In case you haven’t been on the receiving end of this sort of assault, you should know the primal physiological response it evokes—in this woman, anyway. The stomach drops, as if you’ve been shoved backward from a skyscraper and are flailing through space. Time dismantles. There are more frames per second, and people’s facial features become very specific. This guy had a squashed-down forehead, wide-set eyes, and heavy but neatly waxed brows. 

Cops later told me my description was uncannily detailed—the result, I think, of the kind of change in perception post-traumatic-stress experts call “hypervigilance.” The reptilian area of the brain jolts you either to do battle or to bolt. Adrenaline and cortisol juice through you like a hit of meth, so you might find yourself still up and jittery at 4 a.m. (maybe even watching something as god-awful as “Waterworld,” the way I later did). 

I stood outside the doorway of the sandwich shop—pulse pounding in my ears, my heart doing mule kicks in my chest. Inside, the Grabber, as I thought of him, was waiting in line to order a sandwich. He was fine; I was the one with the problem. 

Shame hit, a cold backwash of elemental shame: something bad had been done to me; therefore I was bad. Even though I knew better, I started scanning for how I’d incited this. Pedestrians glided past. A sandwich was being made. I took stock of what I had on: in some ways, I wish I had been wearing booty shorts and Lucite heels and prissing past the Port Authority Bus Terminal holding my décolletage in my hands and saying “hubba hubba.” I should be able to dress that way if the urge possesses me.

Instead, I was wearing a modest dress and platform slides with big cork soles to save the feet from pounding concrete. For an instant, the shoes looked radiantly slutty, the old-maid equivalent of dominatrix spikes. I was drenched in sweat, and part of me wanted to bolt the two blocks to my apartment, scramble up the stairs, double-latch the door, and crawl behind some heavy furniture. But inside all that noise in my head, some space bar got hit, and a moment of quiet opened up.

One good side effect of a childhood as chaotic as my own is that I’ve worked up habits that can pay off in the middle of a butt-whipping. (I take twenty minutes of silence morning and night, and I see a therapist.) While the Grabber paid for his tidily wrapped sandwich, I noticed all the young women passing by—some, yes, in booty shorts, and with bodacious tatas—and I thought, If this sick bastard will do this to me in broad daylight, what’s he doing to these young’uns at 3 a.m.? My mind shuffled through the myriad times that run-ins like this had happened before. Then I came to and shouted from the doorway, “Not today! Not this bitch! You picked the wrong woman to fuck with today!”

The counter guy, bills in hand, craned around the line to see the madwoman outside. As the Grabber half-turned, the size of him shocked me and I backed away farther, to the other side of a parking meter, where my eyes could still shoot flying cartoon daggers at his broad back, albeit with some yardage between us.

Then a voice rose from the sidewalk. “What’d he do?” It was a man on a rectangle of cardboard you might normally step around.

“He grabbed”—polite words didn’t seem fierce enough, and the gross ones struck me as obscene—“my private zone!” This was the name my kid’s grade-school teacher had used for any area covered by a bathing suit: private zone.

So many guys might shrug it off: What’s the big deal? This one jutted his jaw out, saying, “He cain’t do that” with such fire that I started dialing 911. In a moment, I was on with a police dispatcher, describing the Grabber as he got his change and hustled out of the shop with his friend. They ignored me and started to get away, walking fast toward the bus station. My new friend on the cardboard said, “Go, go, go!” and I started to trot. They broke into a sprint, outpacing me right off.

Around Forty-first Street, a cop car pulled up, and I hopped in and recounted it all as they peeled out like they do on “Law & Order.” The female officer riding shotgun radioed the description I gave her to other cops, who nabbed him and hauled him, handcuffed, before me outside the Port Authority. “That’s him!” I said. He was blank-eyed, as if this whole thing were happening to somebody else. His buddy was amped up, though, claiming his friend hadn’t done anything. I shot back that that was horse hockey—yes, he had—and the buddy walked off as an officer put the Grabber in the back of a cruiser.

How satisfying was all this? Very.

En route to the station, the female officer looked back through the cage: Did I need counselling? I told her I’d had enough counselling to chase the sucker up Ninth Avenue.

I only wanted to press charges.

I filed a report. Later they told me the guy was a thirty-something from Jersey. He had a light rap sheet with no record of sexual assault. Nobody ever called me to court, but the cops had cuffed him, dragged him out of the bus station, and booked him. A woman should be able to count on follow-through from the justice system—they’d eventually fail to charge him—but at least he spent a night at Rikers. At the time, I felt somewhat vindicated.

For days after, I kept chewing on what thrill the Grabber got from his move. It just won’t translate to my gender. There are plenty of guys I might fancy kissing on the mouth, but to grab a passing one in the crotch and say, nice package? One pal joked, “Oh, yeah, try it,” suggesting that, for men, any sexual overture is welcome. I asked how he’d feel if a fellow weighing three-forty cornered him somewhere isolated and manhandled him. Suddenly this struck him as way more sinister.

Statistics show that nearly twenty per cent of women in the U.S. have been raped at some point in their lives, and around forty-four per cent of women have reported some other kind of sexual violence. But I suspect that the figure is more like a hundred per cent for women who will have endured things many men might consider minor—an unwelcome penis pressed against your leg at a party; being humped at the water cooler; being fondled, lunged at, felt up, squeezed, rubbed against. Verbal assaults few try to count. I’m glad to have aged out of the days when every street worker or blunt-puffing idler was part of a masculine gantlet I had to clear.

Since ending a ten-year relationship this fall, I’ve been subject to several gropings and gross jibes of the type you’d expect behind a junior-high gym dance, and they’ve been delivered by grownups, putative pals, not one of whom I even dimly considered getting jiggy with. Did they think that coarsely describing some body part or restraining me in locked arms or bending me over furniture would help to bed me? A few tried to say that at my age I should be flattered.

Not all offenses hurt the same way. Crude cracks seldom overwhelm the way a physical attack can. Nor are the sloppy lunges of somebody at a well-lit party as intimidating as some random dude grabbing you in an alley. One girlfriend of mine had a stranger in a first-class cabin turn his computer to show her snakes coming out of a woman’s private zone. It deeply upset her. “Some things you just can’t unsee.” At a Thanksgiving dinner where I hosted my son and his fiancée, a boorish guest showed everybody smartphone shots he’d taken of a woman’s breasts. (I told him that if I wanted to look at boobs, I’d go to a titty bar.) The point is: even a boundary violation mild enough to invoke nudges and winks among less sympathetic people can leave you feeling slimy.

Underlying all these actions exists the apparently unshakable tenet that any expression of male sexuality is somehow normal and every man’s right, whether or not a woman on the receiving end is repulsed or upset by it. All of us—male and female—envision all manner of erotic encounters without acting them out. But many of my male friends brush aside the behaviors that women find truly scary, the kind we know from experience can be the prelude to a nasty or even dangerous run-in. And something in the repetition of these behaviors—and in the culture’s blindness to the insult—wires itself into your body fibres and instills a debilitating sense that you’re not quite safe walking around.

My therapist—less a how-do-you-feel-about-that nodder than a wry commenter on my human comedy—didn’t argue with my estimate that all women have been to some degree sexually assaulted (as she was, as every one of her female patients over thirty-plus years has been). “It’s nothing you’re doing,” she said, adding that guys who force themselves on ninety-year-olds don’t target them for how hot they are but for how easily overpowered. 

My own pet opinion is that the guys who make creepy comments on the street or grab you or constantly seek to reassert sexual possibilities in ways that make you uncomfortable aren’t just oafs. They seem to get a perverse thrill from mortifying you. That’s why I chased the Grabber down. It bothers me to say that it took a man’s urging to give me the gumption. Still, I’ve often wanted to find that guy living on a piece of cardboard, to thank him.

No matter your chromosomal sex, let us all be the wrong woman you picked to fuck with today.

Let us all be not-this-bitch.

It's also International Day of the Girl Child Day.

Think about that.

If you know how to think.

May you only be a man who has only boy children, so you never have to learn how to think. Because thought is hard. And you might have to change your mind. Or learn something. Or learn anything.

I don't need to be a parent or a husband to a female member of our species to value the other sex or defend her against singular or epidemic expressions of sexual predation or assault.

We need to have compassion for women, support, nurture, and celebrate them, because we are all people, they are people, and all people should be given a real chance to thrive. Plus, as Tony Kushner wrote, it's harder for women.

Have a nice day in the Patriarchy, everyone, it's the International Day for the Girl Child Day!--it's like Labor Day for girls! And there never was a more delightfully clunky, cross-multiple-languages expression of support for women--or people--that I can I imagine.

Have a great day.