Book Review/Heather Seggel

The Mess of Life

“What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority, & the Mess of Life” (Verso Books) has a cumbersome title. It’s also a very heavy read. Author JoAnn Wypijewski, a longtime editor at The Nation magazine, has collected essays about #MeToo, Matthew Shepard, Madonna, pedophile priests and other fraught subjects to make larger points that can be challenging to connect with. One central theme is very timely, but its urgency can get lost on the digressive pathways these pieces so often take.

The book’s strongest argument is that waves of moral panic activate our cultural desire for revenge, as often as not in the form of the enhanced sentence, the death penalty, or some other form of carceral politics. When we feel threatened it can be galvanizing to find safety in a binary, any binary, even good vs. evil. But reality is rarely black and white, and sex is chock-full of gray areas. Bouncing this idea off the hand-wringing that Madonna’s sexually explicit art book riled up is good fun; an essay about Woody Allen replete with questions intended to cast doubt on his accusers, much less so.

Full disclosure: I have a tetchy relationship to pleasure, but believe that at least a modicum of empathy is critical to it; I also used to subscribe to The Nation, but rarely finished an issue because the writing was so dense. If these pieces didn’t speak to me, they may well connect with you. Wypijewski is not afraid to take bold chances in her writing, but it can make her purpose hard to divine. Nit-picking various details about Matthew Shepard’s life and death, repeating crude jokes about his murder that circulated in Laramie bars, and currying sympathy for the working-class men who killed him did not strike me as a necessary corrective to the media deification she describes, but which I don’t recall; taking her account of it all at face value, this still feels like overkill. She makes an elegant point about how hate crimes simplify the stories we tell about their victims, again to make the point that prison doesn’t solve these problems, but it was a fight to get there.

An overlong piece about Catholic sex abuse scandals was hard to get through for multiple reasons. At one point she writes, “Even now, as middle-aged men weep about the lifelong trauma inflicted by an uninvited cleric’s hand to the buttocks, I consider my own too-close brush with the cloth as just another scene from childhood.” An author can direct a reader’s attention and care to an unlikeable subject by subtly shifting focus; here, mocking the victims of sex abuse and then positing herself as strong and above it all left me disengaged. Who is helped by this? An essay about the #MeToo movement takes shots at famous women in Hollywood because of their wealth; are sex cimes against the rich less harmful? Again, a lack of empathy for anyone on the page makes everyone seem monstrous, but also as though we are suckers for caring.

After berating myself for the personal deficiencies that were keeping me from understanding this book, I happened to reread Sarah Marshall’s 2018 Believer essay, “The End of Evil.” Marshall describes the way coverage of Ted Bundy made a forked myth of the man, equal parts dapper folk hero (he did jump out of a second-story courthouse window and crack wise about it when apprehended) and psychopathic monster/evil incarnate. What gets lost between those extremes is a man who was profoundly mentally ill, and whose illness, if given proper study, could potentially have helped us learn to intervene and treat symptoms before they become body counts. Instead Bundy was put to death. Marshall convinced me, however reluctantly, that we are poorer for the loss of his life, that it avenged very little while offering the appearance of a tidy conclusion.

I can see flashes of similar insight in this book, but they are so often mired in hostility toward its subjects it feels like touching a hot stove to engage them. “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo” is brazen and potent and points fingers freely, but one wishes there were positive examples, both to learn from and also to better define the spectrum of Wypijewski’s beliefs: Rather than define and redefine the problem, offer a vision of the world you want to see! Because some of these essays are decades old, updating them or adding postscripts might have shown some evolution in thinking over the years. Instead, we’re left with unbending certainty, trapped in amber. It feels like a missed opportunity.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2020

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