BOOKS
Because We Make Monsters
Why we should talk about JoAnn Wypijewski’s book
BY SUSIE DAY
Some years ago, a friend
— an ardent gay activist
— phoned me, ecstatic,
nearly weeping
with joy. She had just come from
a courtroom where two Queens
men, charged in the beating and
stabbing death of a gay man in a
Jackson Heights cruising area,
had actually been convicted. Even
better, the pair now faced 15 years
to life in prison. Like all of us in
the queer community, I had been
sickened and angry at hearing of
yet another gay-bashing. But this
verdict didn’t feel like victory. And
the celebration that erupted — our
community-wide gratitude that
society had fi nally deemed us human
enough to send our murderers
to rot for years in prison — did
not feel like liberation.
JoAnn Wypijewski might call
this joy at “justice” a movement
manifestation of “unity through
vengeance.” Wypijewski has spent
most of her life hacking through
the psychological underbrush that
entangles humanity’s efforts to
create good and judge evil. Most
recently, she’s written of the multilayered,
cross-cultural sensation
known as #MeToo, but she’s also
paid close attention to decades of
outrage and scandals. What she’s
found is panic — in particular,
“sex panic.”
Generated panic is how societal
power, in its infi nite forms, controls
our individual feelings of rage
or grief at real atrocities, and manipulates
them into collective, lawand
order-fed lust for revenge. So
it’s probably past time that Wypijewski
brought out a collection of
her essays and called it “What We
Don’t Talk About When We Talk
About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority
& the Mess of Life.”
That shape-shifting “mess of
life” is mighty deep. We’re all swimming
around in it, and those of us
who identify as activists or work
somehow for societal change are no
exception. We don’t easily see how
deeply power — personal, political,
institutional, media, governmental
Writer JoAnn Wypijewski.
Any movement concerned with liberation needs this book.
power — runs through our lives.
“They say power is cunning,”
writes Wypijewski, “power is a hydra;
it has more heads than any
story… can describe.”
Most of us second-wave feminists
grew up to that old adage
about sexual violence not really
being about sex but about power.
But don’t people read most forms of
power as at least a littlesexy? In the
VERSO
VERSO
face of BREAKING!!mainstream
news, revealing, say, another Harvey
Weinstein victim, we’re often
swept up in the melodrama of what
Wypijewski calls “bleached tales
of monstrosity and cowering,” and
are apt to forget, when dealing with
“monsters” like Weinstein, such
basic humanitarian principles as
due process or the presumption
that accused people are innocent
until proven guilty.
Most signifi cantly, we’re never
asked to entertain the prospect
that the guilty can change and
be forgiven. Wypijewski’s remarks
on the excesses of #MeToo can be
applied to other popular cries for
justice: “Strip the veneer of liberation,
and an enthusiasm for punishment
is palpable. Look beyond
the declarations of revolution, and
there is an under-analyzed concept
of patriarchy.”
“What We Don’t Talk About” is
a dauntless, provocatively ethical
book that asks moral questions.
Foremost is, why, in our various
fi ghts for justice, must those judged
guilty automatically be deprived of
their humanity? Why do we, who
seek equality and liberation, need
to make monsters?
Wypijewski relentlessly takes
apart many sex predator/ sex
transgressor stories that have galvanized
(and warped) our collective
imagination for years. She looks
at how a Harvard law professor
— the fi rst African-American faculty
dean — lost his position at an
undergraduate house because he
joined Harvey Weinstein’s defense
team. She explores the murder of
Matthew Shepard, fully considering
the desolate lives of his murderers,
whom the tabloids were happy
to call “redneck trailer-trash.” She
inspects the twisted media spin
given to Nushawn Williams — that
“one-man plague” and sex-perp
extraordinaire — who, whether or
not he transmitted HIV to multiple
partners in the late 1990s, derived
his monster status from the fact
that he was Black and poor and
slept with lots of “stupid or slutty”
white women. And who can forget
how news of Woody Allen’s alleged
molestation of his stepdaughter
drove millions of fi lmgoers to rethink
their whole lives?
I’m especially grateful for a
short, dead-on piece about Brett
Kavanaugh, whose suitability for
the Supreme Court was publicly
contested mostly because of his alleged
sexual assault, as a teenager,
➤ WE DON’T TALK ABOUT, continued on p.33
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