The Problem with Everything

by Meghan Daum

  CHAPTER 1 Sign the Petition: From the Meat Grinder to #MeToo

  I remember a woman who screamed like a feral animal. She was leather tan and sinewy. Spiked bleached blonde hair, sculpted biceps, low-slung cargo pants with Doc Martens, veins bursting from her neck, eyes bugging from her drawn face. She stood on the sidewalks of New York City with a folding table covered with poster-size images from hard-core pornography: women wearing dog collars, women on leashes, women leaned over and viewed from behind, their backs crosshatched with scars. Much of the time she displayed a blowup of the famous Hustler magazine cover showing a naked woman being fed upside down into a meat grinder.

  “This is what your husbands are masturbating to,” she shouted in a barking monotone. “Wake up, women! Don’t be passive! Sign the petition!”

  Most everyone turned away or just kept walking. This was back in 1990. There were more people shouting things on the streets of New York City than there are now. Hare Krishnas ambled around Grand Central Terminal, Jews for Jesus yelled into megaphones in Times Square, and the obstreperously deranged were everywhere, mostly homeless, sometimes violent. The feral woman didn’t have a homeless vibe to her—a squatting-in-an-East-Village-tenement-vibe maybe, but not a homeless one—but she was clearly a little berserk, if not deranged herself.

  She could be spotted all over town, frequently in the East Village near Astor Place, but I passed her near Lincoln Center nearly every day during the summer of 1990. I was working as an intern—a paid one, $200 a week!—at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the best job I would ever have. I did little more than answer the phone, sort the mail, and test my adult conversational wings by trying to keep up with the endlessly witty banter in our open-space basement digs below Alice Tully Hall. At least one day a week, a male coworker with whom I’d become flirtatiously friendly would relieve me of my duties, such as they were, and take me to press screenings in luxurious Midtown screening rooms, after which we would go out for cheap Thai food. My first day on the job we saw the movie Ghost and agreed that it would be a total box office bomb.

  I practically skipped to the office every morning. I was staying on the Upper West Side, apartment sitting in a sweltering fifth-floor walkup with an exposed-brick wall and a mouse problem. As with the perks of the internship, I did not at the time fully appreciate what a coup this arrangement was. I was twenty years old. Construction workers called out to me most mornings as I walked along Amsterdam Avenue and then over to Broadway. They did this not because I was inordinately eye-catching but (in yet another example of something I did not fully appreciate) because I was twenty years old. Depending on my mood, I ignored them, laughed at them, or gave them the finger over my shoulder, a gesture that felt like hailing a cab in reverse. The men were annoying, and sometimes the annoyance they caused registered as embarrassment and even shame. Mostly, though, they felt like homegrown nuisances, as integral to the New York experience as rats or corrupt landlords.

  To be twenty years old in 1990 in New York City was, as far as I was concerned, to own the world. I owned practically nothing of material value back then, but somehow this was all part of a magical transaction in which I knew I’d eventually get ahead even if it seemed, for the moment, like I could barely keep up. The city was still a wild kingdom, a stone-and-steel fortress with rage burning inside. The crack epidemic was long under way and also a long way from ending. AIDS was everywhere—ravaging the bodies of the visibly ill, beckoning from public service announcements that preached condoms or death, scaring sexually active single people out of their minds. The graffiti was only beginning to come off the subway cars. The Tompkins Square Park riot was just two years gone by. The woman who’d become known as the Central Park Jogger had been beaten, raped, and left for dead barely a year earlier. (And it would be more than a decade before the young men falsely convicted of the crime—convictions due in no small part to punitive grandstanding from local loudmouth Donald Trump—would be exonerated.)

  Every man, woman, and, yes, many children (including those commuting to fancy prep schools) had been mugged or knew someone who had. Every woman knew what it was like to be creepily rubbed against by some dude in a crowded space, and when this happened many of us either jammed our elbows into his abdomen or rolled our eyes and moved away. One time, as I walked down a mostly empty Columbus Avenue around midnight, a man walked up to me—a redheaded, bearded man perhaps ten years my senior—reached his hand out, and shoved me just below my left collarbone. It was a fairly hard shove, and I almost lifted my arm to shove him back. Instead, the moment passed and I just looked at him in disgust and confusion as we both continued along our way. I figured the guy was mentally ill or on drugs or both. I remember feeling grateful that the situation hadn’t escalated into anything worse. (In retrospect, I realize how extraordinarily lucky I was, and how lucky I have been in other situations since.) What I don’t remember is connecting the incident to anything like what would now be called institutionalized misogyny. This was not systemic oppression of women. This was simply life in the big city.

  Nearly thirty years later, the angry, ranting woman with the folding table is gone from the sidewalk. In her place are millions of angry women marching in the streets and, even more so, ranting online. We are tiny pixels coalescing into a giant portrait of rage in all its definitions. We are shouting at senators in elevators as they prepare to vote for the confirmation of Supreme Court justices accused of sexual assault. We are wearing the red robes and white bonnets of the dystopian Handmaid’s Tale costume and protesting in front of statehouses where lawmakers are threatening reproductive rights. Celebrities are wearing #TimesUp pins on the red carpet. Women of every imaginable walk of life are joining the #MeToo chorus as if Handel had come back and written a new Messiah oratorio just for us. We are owning our anger, breathing fire rather than swallowing our rage. It’s no longer just about signing petitions—it’s about stopping the world as we’ve known it in its tracks.

  What could you call the fall of 2017 other than the Fall of the Fall of Man? It was a season of hurricanes and rapid soil erosion, namely the mudslide that began with Harvey Weinstein and quickly pulled more men down with it than anyone could reasonably keep up with. Or maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. Maybe it wasn’t a mudslide as much as a giant oil spill from the tanker on which contemporary Western society had been carrying its assumptions about male behavior. Like fossil fuels themselves, this behavior had long been construed as a necessary evil, one for which any purported cure seemed as futile and flimsy as a reusable shopping bag. (Hit him with your stiletto if he gets handsy! Make him get in touch with his feelings! Pry his eyes open and force him to read the SCUM Manifesto!) For the first time ever, though, a cure seemed possible. The pathogen had been isolated and identified. Research dollars were flowing. Trials were under way. Hope was in sight, if not for my generation then maybe for the next.

  I’m not going to even try to summarize the events of that fall or list the men who went down in the spill of #MeToo. Entire books will be written about that movement, the best of which probably can’t be embarked upon until enough years have passed to allow authors even a modicum of perspective. What I can tell you about the fall of 2017 is that it coincided with a downward slope of my youth that was far steeper than I had any grasp of at the time. The autumn of 2017 marked my second year back in New York City after being away for the better part of two decades, most of it in California. Though I’d left California in 2015 in the wake of irremediable, if mercifully amicable, marital separation, it had taken nearly two years to officially get divorced, and this new status carried a sting whose effects sometimes proved paralytic. How could I have imagined that replacing the license plates on your car could feel like a death? (Somehow I’d managed to keep my car registered in California until the last possible minute.) Who knew that shopping for a new health insurance policy could make you feel like you’re on a plastic pool raft floating aimlessly in the Dead
Sea? (Okay, I guess everyone knows that.)

  I’d left New York when I was nearly thirty. I was now forty-seven. Whereas my chief experience of the city was that of a young woman, I was now faced with re-entering it as a middle-aged one. It wasn’t just that I had been young in New York; New York was my youth. It was the place where I’d spent my entire twenties. It was the place where I figured out what kind of person I wanted to be. That’s a different thing from actually figuring out how to be that person, and it took leaving New York to accomplish that task, but as they like to say in California, setting your intention is the most important phase of the journey. New York was the backdrop for my earliest triumphs and stupidities. It was the first and last place I ever lived where on any given night you could step outside and feel like absolutely anything could happen, that the course of your life could shift like a subway train switching from the local track to the express. It was the place where I had my first real job, my first grown-up boyfriend, my first martini, my first call from a debt collector, my first call from a hospital pay phone telling me someone was in serious trouble. It was the site of my earliest rough drafts and rough treatments, the ones visited upon me as well as the ones I inflicted on others.

  Now that I had returned, it was as if my twenties were being handed back to me in used condition. What a strange remnant to hold in your hand. What a bittersweet walk down memory’s plank. Here I was again, a girl alone and on the town. I was my most primordial self, a girl who was rabidly ambitious in some ways but inexplicably lazy in others. I was a girl who technically hadn’t been a girl for the better part of thirty years but who nonetheless felt a strange remove from the word “woman,” which seemed to convey a poise and seriousness I hadn’t yet attained. I may have been in my mid-forties, but I was still all jokes and hammy self-deprecation, still unable to accept compliments, still flirting with men by defaulting to my best Diane Keaton in Manhattan impression, even though it had been decades since I was attracted to the kind of men who were attracted to that. I was all the things I’d been when I was young except for the young part. I had a nicer apartment, a little more money, and a little more professional recognition. I had a dog (this I’d longed for in my twenties the way some women long for babies) and a car that I had to move for alternate-side street cleaning. But my days were more or less the same. I sat at my desk and drank coffee. I did my work when I could, but more often I stared into space and wondered what would become of my life. I surfed the internet at a connection speed that would have been unimaginable in 1995.

  In part because of that connection speed, the space I stared into most of the time wasn’t my own physical space but some unholy rotation of social media, news media, and floating junk courtesy of cyberspace. By the time President Trump entered office, I probably spent at least three-quarters of my waking hours with my head in this space. By the time #MeToo reached full force, my brain no longer felt connected to my body. At times, my brain no longer felt associated with my brain as I’d once known it. There were moments in which I couldn’t remember the names of people I’d been acquainted with for years. In intense, animated conversations with friends and colleagues, I’d find myself revving up to some sort of grand insight and then suddenly sputtering out midsentence, like a roller coaster propelled halfway up a loop but unable to make it all the way around. Bunched up in my desk chair, I would stare at the computer screen for hours, hunting for words as though tracking lions on safari and practically sweating from the exertion.

  More than a few times I wondered if I was experiencing some form of dementia. One night I dreamt that a woman wearing a blazer and carrying a clipboard sat me down and informed me that based on a set of tests involving some obscure measurement (the length of my index finger? the distance between my hairline and the top of my ear?), it had been determined that I had very-early-onset Alzheimer’s and would be senile well before my time. In the dream, I was devastated and terrified. Waking up, I was met with the same startled relief I’d felt back in my twenties when I’d awaken from dreams in which I was told I was pregnant or had tested positive for HIV.

  These are phase-of-life dreams, of course, but they’re also dreams of their particular eras of history. In the 1990s I dreamt of HIV, which was then a death sentence and which had loomed over my particular generational cohort as a runaway train that “didn’t discriminate” and would plow into anyone, anyone, who dared to forgo a condom even one time. In the 2000s, in my thirties, I dreamt of real estate I longed for but couldn’t afford. Now, in 2018, I was dreaming of dementia, and maybe for good reason. I once read that there’s scientific proof of a correlation between increased nostalgia and creeping senility. And since returning to New York, I’d been soaking in nostalgia. Everywhere I went, my twenties played in my head like a song stuck there permanently. Every neighborhood, every subway station, in some areas every street corner, echoed with some memory from that time.

  There was John’s pizzeria on Bleecker, where, at twenty-one and playing hooky from college upstate, I sat with a man—a boy, really—who both was and wasn’t my boyfriend and listened to him reminisce about his old girlfriend, who, he said, was “sexy without being pretty, if that makes any sense.” There, at the corner of Eighty-Second and Broadway, was the Barnes & Noble where I remember searching for the bathroom while having a urinary-tract infection so painful it made my hands shake. There, among the slabs of buildings of midtown Sixth Avenue, were the offices of more temp jobs than I could count: banks, law firms, insurance companies, each with its own mini kitchen and passcode-protected employee restrooms. There, on Columbus Avenue, is where the redheaded man had shoved me hard as I passed. There, at Fifty-Seventh and Broadway is a Duane Reade pharmacy that was once Coliseum Books, a place where the feral woman had often stood and yelled “Sign the petition!” I remember being dumped on Delancey Street, kissed on Charles Street, having a strange and short-lived personal-assistant job in a musty apartment on Sutton Place.

  I remember standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street as hail rained down like shellfire one summer night following a long, somewhat drunken dinner with an older man in a powerful position whose meal invitations I dreaded but nonetheless felt obliged to accept. I remember pocketing the cab fare he’d given me and taking the subway home.

  I remember a lot about that summer. I was twenty-five, in graduate school, and newly split up from a three-year relationship with a very good man who nonetheless made me feel like my life was wedged in a pair of pliers. I had recently undergone a significant shift in my writing—stumbling upon the personal essay after years of fussing with mediocre short stories—that would set the course of the next two decades of my career. I was staying out late at parties and at various gatherings but also staying up late at home, writing furiously. I was terrifyingly broke, with maxed-out credit cards and past-due student loan payments, though this destitution was unrelated to my allowing the aforementioned older man in a powerful position to buy me expensive meals. Those meals had started out as business lunches but then migrated into semi-business dinners. During these dinners, the man would tell me certain details about his personal life, which was in a state of acute crisis. Caller ID was not yet a household item, and I remember the sinking feeling I got every time I picked up the phone and heard his voice. Every once in a while, as a sort of gift to myself, I’d allow myself to turn him down. Most often, however, I accepted the invitations. I did so because there was in this transaction the implicit notion that he could help my career, albeit in a rather vague, abstract way. I did so because not accepting them felt like a kind of professional self-sabotage, as foolish and irresponsible as missing deadlines.

  Things never got sexual with this man, though I got the feeling they almost certainly would have if I’d allowed them to. At one point he called me up and invited me to his country house for the weekend. I remember feeling sick to my stomach while issuing a perfunctory demurral about having too much schoolwork. He later wrote me a letter apologizing
for that invitation, saying he hoped it didn’t sound strange. At no time did he make an ultimatum or proposition me directly. Creeped out as I occasionally was, I never felt like I was being sexually harassed. Obviously no one was kidnapping me from my apartment and forcibly escorting me to the Oyster Bar, where the man would sit waiting for me, smoking probably the fourth of fifteen cigarettes he’d smoke that night.

  I’ll cop to a certain psychological gamesmanship on my part as well. I’d occasionally bum a cigarette from him, an act that gave me a sense of distance and control but that surely read to him as an intimate gesture. At least a few times, after I probably had one too many glasses of wine, I became rather suggestive and flirtatious, probing into his personal life, seeing how much I could get him to disclose as he got drunker and drunker. I did this in part as a defense mechanism. The more we talked about him, the less we talked about me. But I also did it because I wanted to mess with his head, and I was young enough then to think that doing so would serve as some kind of tacit punishment for his behavior. The truth, of course (which anyone but a young twerp would have the wisdom to realize), was that messing with his head was its own reward. I wasn’t censuring his behavior as much as reinforcing it. As for my own, I’ve been cringing about it ever since.

  Looking back, it would be easy to say I behaved like this out of some instinctive subordination to the man’s power. There’s an element of truth to that, but there’s also an angle at which the situation could be viewed as quite the opposite. From this angle, I behaved the way I did because in some ways the power imbalance between the two of us was tipped in my favor. I was young and the man was twice my age. He may have had professional power over me, but it was limited and in no way unilateral. In fact, thanks to the personal details I’d siphoned out of him, I probably could have placed one phone call and made his life very difficult. And so I carried on with my coquettishness until somehow the meals became fewer and farther between and then finally ended, probably because he took up with someone else. I carried on this way because my life was an open horizon and his was an overstuffed attic. I behaved this way because I must have known on some unconscious level that, at twenty-five, I had more of a certain kind of power than I was ever going to have in my life and that I might as well use it, even if the accompanying rush was laced with shame.