I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  Three years before Dylan’s essay came out, I’d also seen a play by Allen, one of three one-acts, by Allen, Ethan Coen, and Elaine May, that were combined into a bill called Relatively Speaking. (I was writing a profile of Marlo Thomas at the time, and she was appearing in the May play.) Allen’s contribution, Honeymoon Motel, was a hokey sex farce about a middle-aged man marrying a bimbo, to the disapproval of his family. Wedged inside the script, there was a sick joke, like a rotted mouse in the floorboards. The joke is part of a scene, late in the play, in which an elderly woman named Fay announces, in a competitive tone, that her childhood was the most deprived of the entire ensemble: After all, she says, her uncle Shlomo had molested her as a child. Instead of sympathizing, the other characters unite to mock Fay, rolling their eyes at the fact she’s telling this story once again, that she’s blaming an ancient trauma for a life of troubles.

  In the middle of the argument, Fay insists, querulously, on the detail that she was molested with three fingers, rather than five. This was, I recognized with a shock, slumped in my fancy comped Broadway seat, a joke about the specific crime that Allen had been accused of by his daughter, which, to be graphic, was digital molestation; according to the account that Dylan gave to investigators, he had touched her genitals. (In a later TV interview, she clarified that he had used one finger to touch her labia and vulva.) The play itself was corny, crude, and full of dated references; it was unclear when Woody Allen had even written that joke, whether it was decades ago or more recently. But it felt like a watermark of ancient scorn, contempt that had been alchemized into something more culturally acceptable, a punch line.

  Even if you chose to put Dylan’s story to the side, however, Woody Allen’s reputation had warped. My opinion had changed, too, because I was no longer a teenage girl. The older I got, the more obvious it seemed that Allen’s relationship with his then-girlfriend’s daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, had predatory origins. The fact that the two of them had stayed married, that they’d raised kids, didn’t erase that fact. What made things worse was the way that Allen responded to any questions, even decades later, about this painful history: He seemed to regard the entire subject as unsophisticated, very non-French, old news; in interviews, he waved away any mention of the repercussions to the people around him, including the idea that he’d harmed Soon-Yi’s siblings by forcing them to choose between their mother and their sister. If he had regrets, he never expressed them. My favorite artist struck me as many things, but mainly, he struck me as a malignant narcissist.

  Even so, my favorite Woody Allen film was The Purple Rose of Cairo.

  * * *

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  What should we do with the art of terrible men?

  In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein exposé, in the age of #MeToo, even asking that question has felt, on many days, like a betrayal of justice. When that portal finally opened in October 2017, eight months into Donald Trump’s presidency, and the rancid stories began to pour out, it felt like they would never stop: first one man, then another, then another. It was like lava from a volcano, vomited up, all the misogyny and abuse that people had ignored, everywhere, in every industry, but especially in Hollywood. Miraculously, when victims named names, harassers began to lose their jobs—an outcome that had seemed inconceivable a year before. All through that autumn, while I struggled to write this essay—an essay in which I’d hoped to wrestle with my own history with the work of terrible men—another hideous story emerged nearly every day: Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, James Toback. Directors, comics, playwrights, choreographers, hip-hop producers, and classical-music conductors, the men were toppling, one by one (or were shoved, or once in a while, threw themselves) from their pedestals. The women who spoke out were heroic figures, willing to go public to expose abusive acts, often at enormous risk to themselves. So were the journalists who helped to expose the rotten systems around them. It was enough to torque my oldest ideas, raising repressed emotions from the ocean’s floor. It made it hard to think. It made it hard to feel. It made the job of criticizing art seem like an indulgence—the monocle-peering that intellectuals resort to when we should be talking about justice.

  Whenever someone new went down, there was a lament, but also, often, a shrug of acknowledgment: Their work had to go with them. There were plenty of strong pragmatic arguments for this position—for the call to erase, to “cancel” or “delete,” the work of bad men, in the stark rhetoric of Twitter. Some of these arguments were economic ones, that we should starve abuse by starving the system that produced it. Giving Bill Cosby money means supporting Bill Cosby. But giving someone attention is also a type of currency. Devoting magazine columns to Cosby, or publishing books about his work, watching his work and then analyzing it, accomplishes the same thing—it’s a way of burnishing his legend, making it marketable by making it central.

  To purge a broken system, this argument went, you needed to make more radical choices; you had to train your eyes to look for what was missing, not what was there. There was a giddy, liberatory energy to the moment, an unbuckled urge to not merely edit, but rewrite, start from scratch. It was better to focus not on the art of bad men, but on the other art, the art that never got made, and also, the art made in the margins. It was better to seek out the attempts that went unnoticed, because criminals controlled the machine. In fall 2017, as these arguments began to dominate the conversation, they swayed me and they shamed me. Some days, I made them myself.

  As an arts critic, however, I knew that every time I shifted, in public, in that direction, a buried part of me kept on privately, stubbornly, rudely snapping back. I craved something else, and it was what all journalists crave, and detectives and maybe shrinks, shoplifters and also plenty of artists: endless access, radical entitlement, the greedy ability to dig up to my elbows into any dirt pile, to chew on the rotten apple instead of spitting it out. I didn’t want to erase the art made by these men: I wanted to scribble all over it in rage, confusion, in pleasure, too—to make it mine instead of theirs. This was true even, and sometimes especially, when the art was saturated with the man’s behavior, as Woody Allen’s clearly was. In certain ways, this impulse felt (and still feels) like simple honesty: It would be nuts for me to behave as if I’d never seen Bananas, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, or Annie Hall, never to refer to those movies, not to place the world in their context, or myself in their context. (It was easier to do this with Allen’s later films, which I’d largely given up on.) If I weren’t an arts critic, maybe it would feel different. But a critic can’t be clean; you can’t scrub history off your skin.

  To tolerate these contradictions, which is to say, these desires, I’d decades ago adopted a rigorous, faintly sociopathic, reasoning of my own, a sort of “good for the goose” critical philosophy. Decent people sometimes create bad art. Amoral people can and have created transcendent works. A cruel and selfish person—a criminal, even—might make something that was generous, life-giving, and humane. Or alternatively, they might create something that was grotesque in a way that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from it, full of contradictions that were themselves magnetic. History was full of such perversity. If artists could separate themselves, well then, so could I. Erasing art didn’t appeal to me, anyway. That felt basic to my nature. But, of course, as with any other strong belief, it looked more contingent when I began to look back. In fact, when I thought about it, it was clear that I’d spent my early twenties reaching the conclusion that the worst thing that a person could be was a censor. Where had I gotten that idea? Unsurprisingly, from politics that I’d found censorious.

  I’d gone to college in the mid-eighties, 1984–88, at the small liberal arts school Oberlin. (Kindly play ’Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry” over this paragraph.) This was at the height of the Reagan era, during a vertiginous clash of sensibilities. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was happening side by side with coked-up Trumpian decaden
ce. ACT UP was roaring in the streets; punk and hip-hop were seething at the margins; and yet the majority of mainstream pop culture, including most television, was dominated by a slick, complacent celebration of wealth, all Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and “Material Girl,” Dynasty and Vanity Fair. It was a smothering and sharp-edged period, all at once. And the message in every glossy magazine was that feminism was no longer necessary: Women were now lawyers in sneakers, problem solved. Activism was the kind of thing that your mom had probably needed, way back in the 1970s.

  There was one type of feminism that was in full flower, however: the anti-pornography movement, which was represented by an organization called Women Against Pornography, founded in the late 1970s. For a brief flash in the 1980s, which happened to coincide with my early adulthood, this ideological vanguard seemed to be establishment feminism—although this is often hard to describe to younger women, since it doesn’t fit easily into the “wave” story that gets taught as feminist history. The two leaders of the anti-pornography cause were the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and the radical feminist activist Andrea Dworkin, who hovered above the landscape like twin moons. MacKinnon was the icy one, a Yale-educated legal powerhouse who had spearheaded the legal concept of sexual harassment. The Midwestern daughter of a right-wing judge, she went on TV in high-necked pastels and pearls, along with the bun of a Victorian reformer. Dworkin was the fiery one, a polemicist from New Jersey, whose obese body, sloppy overalls, and frizzy Jewish ringlets felt like a middle finger to 1980s media; her body itself was a great fuck-you to the patriarchy and she seemed appealingly funny and angry instead of cerebral. I couldn’t stop staring at pictures of Dworkin. She was a scare figure with huge emotional power, a fetish object for cultural disgust.

  The two of them argued, in contrasting tones, against patriarchal oppression. Violence against women, including sexual violence, was everywhere, they pointed out—normalized, trivialized, and ignored by the law. It was the air we breathed in, invisible. I was onboard for that part of the argument; at a Take Back the Night rally, I remember my naive confidence that the new concept of “date rape” was about to remake the justice system, permanently. But in 1984, during my freshman year, Dworkin and MacKinnon formed common cause with the religious right, led by figures like Jerry Falwell and anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly. Or at least, their rhetoric began to overlap: The same legislation Dworkin and MacKinnon had written, which defined pornography as a civil rights offense against women, became the basis for laws introduced to the Indianapolis City Council by an anti-ERA activist. They were signed into law by a Republican mayor. The fact that they got overturned didn’t matter. For young feminists, this development was an ideological shock not unlike the Hitler-Stalin pact had been for my Jewish immigrant grandparents; it was grotesque and disqualifying.

  Crucially, this all took place long before the Internet, when print was all that existed. Sexual material, in any medium, was a relative rarity, not easily accessible outside big cities. And, historically, a lot of ban-worthy sexual expression involved queer sex, which was considered pornographic by cultural default and in many states was illegal. In one notorious case in the 1980s and early 1990s, Canadian Customs blocked books about gay and lesbian sex that were shipped from the U.S., citing “obscenity.” All of this overlapped, in my head, with the near-simultaneous attempts by Tipper Gore to ban rap lyrics, NEA vetoes of grants for performance artists like Karen Finley, and censorship of dissident art in the Soviet Union. I didn’t trust any attempt to clamp down on speech, whether it came from the right or the left. In interviews, anti-porn feminists continually insisted that the law could distinguish between “erotica” and “pornography,” but I didn’t buy it. Many of my favorite writers—from Mary Gaitskill to Dennis Cooper—hovered on the boundary between art and smut.

  Still, what bugged me most was the notion that some types of speech weren’t speech at all. They weren’t words or images, they were violence. In the ordinances Women Against Pornography supported, pornography was defined as “the sexually explicit subordination of women.” The credo of the era was feminist activist Robin Morgan’s coinage “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.” This was true whether or not the participants consented. The notion of consent was wobbly, anyway, under patriarchy, because free choice was illusory for anyone in the feminized role (which, in 1980s anti-porn analysis, frequently included gay men). That wasn’t a crazy idea: Marital rape, for example, was not fully criminalized until 1993. But during my college years and early adulthood, as the parameters of the conversation about pornography kept expanding, I began to feel intensely alienated by this analysis, and, also, accused by it. Blame seemed to extend not merely to rapists, but to anyone linked to the sexist culture: publishers of sexually graphic material, women who stripped or turned tricks, those who were turned on by porn, or who had kinky sex, or who had rape fantasies, or even who sympathized with women who did these things. All of it was complicity.

  Among true believers, these weren’t just disagreements, but a clash between the enlightened and those poisoned by “false consciousness,” the self-hatred dressed up as desire—a feminist extension of Marxist theories about the origins of consumer behavior. (The basic theory of false consciousness was that desire was a form of brainwashing: “You don’t even know what you want.”) It’s this period that Margaret Atwood reflected in the 1985 book The Handmaid’s Tale, when Offred remembers attending a protest with her feminist mother, where they burn sadomasochistic pornography, showing women hanging from chains. “Don’t let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick. I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash, in the air, before my eyes.”

  The Sex Wars had all sorts of weird interpersonal effects in my immediate circle. A friend who worked at Good Vibrations, the feminist sex store in San Francisco, had anti-porn activists scream at her for being a traitor. In the early 1990s, another friend confessed that I was the first “pro-porn” feminist she’d ever met; she was surprised she could be close with someone with such rancid beliefs. In 1989, I had a screaming argument in a co-op kitchen about whether it was okay for me to read Glamour magazine, a debate that descended into a detailed discussion of which sex acts qualified as erotica: Blow job? Blow job, clothes off? What if one person was dressed as a boss and the other as a secretary? A male friend’s girlfriend found a porn magazine in his closet, then yelled at him for betraying her by masturbating to the pictures. Out of curiosity, I attended an anti-porn workshop at Brown University, which was run by Dworkin’s partner John Stoltenberg, author of the 1989 book Refusing to Be a Man. It was a disaster that involved a man volunteering to pose with his legs spread in order to experience the humiliation of pornography—and ended in a screaming match between a lesbian-feminist and a male “ally.” Honestly, the whole decade felt like that workshop.

  Even heterosexual sex itself sometimes seemed to be suspect. At one point during a college internship at a publishing company in New York in 1987, I picked up a galley of Dworkin’s book Intercourse, which was lying around my boss’s office. I read it during lunch, feeling that I should open my mind to Dworkin’s ideas, which included an extended description of penetrative sex as a form of colonization: “The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center.” I didn’t get far. Instead, I became so enraged that I threw the galley into a garbage can, effectively banning something because it seemed to want to ban me.

  Why were these ideas so alienating? Part of it was my strong distrust of safety as an ideal. Unlike Andrea Dworkin, who had been beaten by her ex-husband and sexually violated by a prison doctor, I had lived a comparatively safe life, with only a handful of exceptions, none very traumatic. Safety and freedom seemed to me to be in opposition; if you got one, you lost the other. Histori
cally speaking, the rhetoric of keeping women “safe”—especially white women, who were more prized in a racist culture, treated as “pure”—was a way to control them, not protect them. And I was a young woman who wanted to get the world’s fingerprints on me, just like men got to do. When feminist activists boycotted Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho in 1991, I read the book, curious; when there were attempts to shut down the movies Basic Instinct and The Silence of the Lambs, I wanted to see them, to judge for myself. (I was a morally conflicted goody-goody, it’s true: I once snuck into a theater to see Basic Instinct, since it seemed wrong for me to judge without seeing it—but also, maybe, wrong to pay for a homophobic movie.)

  I read the feminist porn magazine On Our Backs, as well as polemicists like Susie Bright and queer journalists like Donna Minkowitz, Pat Califia, and Joan Nestle. I pored over Pleasure and Danger, an anthology that included essays by prostitutes. I was hardly a major sex radical in my personal life, but I nonetheless thought of myself as a member of the “pro-sex” resistance, even if no one in that resistance knew I existed.