by Meghan Daum
This was the summer of 1995. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill had come out that June, and I listened to it pretty much on constant repeat through August. One night, after doing my silly routine with this man and riding the subway home in self-disgust, I sat in my room and played Jagged Little Pill and then wandered into the kitchen to talk to my roommate. I remember grumbling to her about my dinner companion, complaining about his lechery while conveniently omitting the parts when I’d dramatically exhaled on my cigarette, looked him straight in the eye, and said something devastatingly witty and possibly a tiny bit dirty. (I’d like to add that I winked, but that wouldn’t past the truth test, since I’m physically unable to wink.)
Instead I said, “God, what a perv.”
“Sounds annoying,” my roommate said. “But hey, you keep showing up. You must be getting something out of it.”
* * *
During the Fall of the Fall of Man, I thought a lot about the showing up I’d done over the years. Every woman seemed to be taking this kind of inventory. It was like a novel everyone was reading, one with a plot that seemed easy enough to follow but whose underlying themes and messages amount to an abstruse thicket of personal projection and postmodern obfuscation. Like any sentient being, I’d been shocked and disgusted by the Weinstein revelations and saw no reason to equivocate about the reliability of his accusers or the severity of his punishment. But as the list of perpetrators piled up and the public censure piled on, the conversation around #MeToo (lacking a specific category, each new scandal was not a story or an issue but a “conversation”) began to split down generational lines.
The first incident to put this divide in notably sharp relief involved a secret Google spreadsheet called the Shitty Media Men list. This was an anonymously sourced, living document meant to warn women about certain men in the media business, mostly publishing, who were known for inappropriate sexual or sexually charged behavior. It included all kinds of men, from powerful editors to freelance writers, and described alleged misdeeds that ranged from “weird lunch dates” to inappropriate flirting to stalking to physical violence and all-out rape. And though the list was never officially published and disappeared from Google Docs almost as quickly as it emerged, enough screenshots were taken that the perpetrators became common knowledge almost immediately.
Within hours of the list’s discovery, the chief line of inquiry around it, even more so than “Who started it?,” was whether infractions like “weird lunches” should be lumped in with crimes like rape. Unsurprisingly, I found myself on the side of the oldsters who were deeply troubled not just by this “lumping” (again, there seemed to be only one operative word, and in this case it was “lump”) but by the idea that anonymously sourced accusations could be made against publicly named people without warning or any sort of due process. “This is so wrong!” my same-age friends and I ranted. “You can’t just do this! These millennials don’t get it!” We said this as we forwarded the screenshots among each other, gawking at the names we recognized.
“Weird lunch!” I said to more than one person. “Welcome to publishing! I’m going to write a memoir about my early days in New York and call it Weird Lunch.”
I laughed. And was legitimately appalled that the list, whether or not it had been meant to be kept secret, had been created in such a way that it could so easily go public. (Weren’t millennials supposed to understand the viral forces of technology better than anyone?) But I also found myself looking back uneasily at my own weird lunches, especially the ones that had turned into weird dinners at the Oyster Bar. Those dinners, in turn, had caused me to act weird, and that memory of weirdness was cringeworthy enough to cause me to cancel out most of my memories of my dealings with the guy. I honestly hadn’t thought of him more than a handful of times in nearly two decades. In fact, so far back in my mind had I shoved these memories that, days after the Shitty Media Men story erupted, I managed to read a #MeToo-related Facebook post describing someone who sounded uncannily like this man and yet brush it off as a coincidence.
I almost marvel at the level of my denial. The post referred to creepy lunches with innocent young aspiring female writers. It talked about women going out of their way to avoid him. Someone used the term quid pro quo. I skimmed the post and thought to myself that even though the man in question sounded like my old dining companion he almost certainly was not. After all, this post was about feeling victimized, which was not a word I’d ever applied to my situation.
A solid week passed before I allowed myself to admit that it was the same guy. In fact, I felt less and less inclined to know. Maybe because knowing would have forced me to place myself among those who didn’t avoid him—at least not as often as I could or should have. That in turn would have forced me to ask myself if I’d had—and perhaps still had—a higher threshold for male nonsense than some other women. If the answer to that question was yes, was that a sign of strength or obtuseness? If the answer was no, would I be forced to admit that on some level I was consciously manipulating this man for the sake of my career? (Never mind that his ability to do anything for my career was negligible at best; “quid pro quo” was not how I would have described things.) I didn’t like either of these interpretations.
More than that, though, I didn’t like being reminded that twenty years had passed since those weird lunch days. And as the “conversation” lurched along and the narrative of the “generational divide” became the default narrative, I found myself reminded of this passage of time on a daily, even hourly, basis. When a scandal broke involving the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari, I felt that my membership on Team Older Feminist was so official that I might as well take out a charge card at Eileen Fisher and call it a day (though has anyone under forty ever used a “charge card”?). That scandal, in case you’re lucky enough to have forgotten the details, involved an anonymous twenty-three-year-old woman telling a twenty-two-year-old web reporter named Katie Way the story of a very bad date with Ansari. The woman, who called herself “Grace,” accused Ansari of failing to pick up on her “verbal and non-verbal cues” during a sexual encounter. Though she was not physically barred from walking out and never said no outright, Grace nonetheless felt violated by the encounter, calling it “by far the worst experience with a man I’ve ever had.” (Ansari, for his part, said he perceived it as entirely consensual.) The date had taken place months earlier. It was only when Grace saw Ansari on television wearing a #TimesUp pin at the Golden Globe Awards in January of 2018 that she decided to come forward.
If the Shitty Media Men story had caused many of the older crowd to murmur quietly about whether things had gone too far, the Ansari story elicited a collective “Oh, no you don’t!” It wasn’t just the sloppy randomness of the whole presentation—the woman’s testimony appeared as a poorly written “as told to” on a little-known website and included an especially self-defeating detail about Ansari not serving his date her preferred type of wine—but the way it threatened to upset the very apple cart that had carried it in. You could just hear the thirty-five-and-older crowd shouting at their laptops, Stop right there! This is not what we mean! Watching the saga unfurl, I was reminded of the way Hillary Clinton supporters reacted during the 2008 election when, days after she had lost the Democratic presidential nomination, Sarah Palin appeared out of nowhere and started making noises about being a feminist and breaking the glass ceiling. That’s not what we meant! It doesn’t work like this!
And so the ground began to shake around the fault line. The older feminists scolded the younger ones for not being tough enough to take care of themselves. If the construction worker whistles at you, give him the finger! If the drunk guy sitting next to you at the wedding reception gets fresh, kick him in the shins! In turn, the youngsters chastised the oldsters for enabling the oppressive status quo with cool-girl posturing. We shouldn’t have to suppress our humanity by letting insults roll off us! We shouldn’t have to risk our safety with physical violence because patriarchal norms have
taught the drunk wedding guest he can act like that!
Neither side was entirely wrong, of course. But both sides were talking past each other in ways that suggested there was no meeting in the middle. In the New York Times, Daphne Merkin identified a gulf between what women said publicly about #MeToo and the eye-rolling that went on in private. “Publicly, they say the right things, expressing approval and joining in the chorus of voices that applaud the takedown of maleficent characters who prey on vulnerable women in the workplace,” she wrote. “In private it’s a different story. ‘Grow up, this is real life,’ I hear these same feminist friends say.”
In the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan, whose tendency toward a certain impish prudery has never made her popular among young feminists, wrote that the Ansari fracas, at least the version of it chronicled on Babe.net, constituted “3,000 words of revenge porn.” She decried the helplessness of “a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab.”
On cable news, HLN anchor Ashleigh Banfield looked straight into the camera and addressed “Grace” directly.
“What you have done in my opinion is appalling,” said Banfield, calling the allegations “reckless and hollow” and charging Grace with having “chiseled away at a movement that I along with all of my sisters in the workplace have been dreaming of for decades.”
This being cable news, Banfield’s producers invited Katie Way to appear on the show. And this being the digital era, Way declined the offer not with a “no thanks” but by popping off an e-mail that called Banfield a “burgundy lipstick bad highlights second wave feminist has-been” and noted that “no woman my age would ever watch your network.”
Banfield shot back by reading parts of the e-mail on the air. Then she addressed Way directly.
“If you truly believe in feminism,” Banfield said, “the last thing you should do is attack someone in an ad hominem way for her age. . . . That’s not the way we have those conversations as women or as men. We don’t attack—as journalists—we do not attack people for their age, or their highlights, or their lipstick. It is the most hypocritical thing a woman who says she supports the women’s movement could ever do.”
From there, it was game on, gloves off. It was young versus old. Eileen Fisher versus ironic high-waisted mom jeans. Aging women with burgundy lipstick and blonde highlights versus young women with tattoos and hair rebelliously streaked with blue dye. At least that was the prevailing narrative. There was a handful of generational dissenters. Bari Weiss, a then thirty-four-year-old writer and editor on the New York Times opinion page (who had edited the Merkin article, incidentally), came out swinging against Grace, saying the only thing Ansari was guilty of was not being a mind reader. My Facebook feed also turned up the requisite smattering of middle-aged women offering stories of long-ago icky dates they’d suddenly been given permission to reinterpret as injurious. But by and large, the generational-divide idea, while too simplistic, remained the easiest idea to work with. It was the one I kept returning to when I thought back on my twenties and the various emotional and even potentially physical injuries that I had chalked up to life in the big city. It was the one that elicited the mightiest swells of self-righteousness (why can’t they be tough like we were?) alongside the cruelest glimpses of my mortality or, worse, my expendability (they don’t really care what we think at all, do they?).
The week of the Ansari dustup was an unsettling week for me in an unsettling season. I was about to turn forty-eight. Though I’d been glued to the #MeToo commentary for months and was duly transfixed by the Ansari story, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to enter the public fray. I had an intuitive sense of my general positions and opinions, but I was having trouble attaching them to words that seemed halfway original or interesting. It was worse than that, even. I felt confused a lot of the time, dazed by the speed at which the world was moving, simultaneously befuddled by and bored with the digital universe. I felt an ambient intellectual exhaustion pretty much constantly. I woke up feeling hungover even if I’d had no alcohol for days. I felt dizzy while sitting perfectly still. I was often certain that it was one p.m. even if it was six p.m. I felt blindsided by time itself.
The week of the Ansari dustup was the same week that Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of the 1990s Irish rock band the Cranberries and all-around Gen X style hero, died at forty-six. It was the same week that Elizabeth Wurtzel, a writer who was both the femme fatale and the bête noire of the 1990s literary scene, announced that, at forty-eight, she had advanced breast cancer. I knew neither of these women personally, but their news shocked me nearly to tears. That same week, some long-avoided internet research forced me to resign myself to the likelihood that I was in perimenopause, a sort of prodrome menopause that can last years and can, within the span of an hour, induce enough rage to topple over a refrigerator followed by enough horniness to have sex with whatever’s in front of you, including that same refrigerator. It can also make you dizzy, headachy, and unable to think of the right words for things.
How devastatingly obvious it all was. My distress and confusion were as much hormonal as they were political, cultural, or personally situational. I didn’t have dementia, but the dream about having Alzheimer’s had obviously been a communication from my subconscious, a courtesy call from the future. In lieu of writing, I spent my days trying to beat back migraines, fantasizing about sex with strangers while exhaustively reading comments on Talking Points Memo. I scrolled through social media posts as if digging through sand for a lost item, lingering for hours on those that reinforced my view and dwelling for days upon those that inflamed me.
Once upon a time, I would have channeled my rage and lust into deep thoughts and big plans. I would have sat in my room listening to Alanis Morissette while jotting down notes for my next opus. I would have gone out onto the street and walked past the feral woman yelling “Sign the petition!” and caught a contact high from all of her fury and insanity. Riding those fumes, I might have taken myself to a movie or called a friend from a pay phone to say, “Hey, I’m in your neighborhood.” Better yet, I might have gone home and written for eight hours with an urgency and focus that now seems as distant a memory as my youth itself. Today, I spend much of that time gawking at “sick burns” in Twitter arguments, trying to pinpoint the moment when people became so much crueler than they used to be, and also so much more fragile.
As I watch the world whiz past me on my computer screen, sharpened by the reading glasses I’ve lately been forced to wear while also dulled by decades of learning how to care a little less about things that are painful to care about, I wonder if my real problem with young feminists—with young activists in general—is that many of them are insufficiently awed by toughness. They didn’t boast about it as children. They don’t value it inordinately as adults. They refuse to be shamed by vulnerability. In fact, in a brilliant move of jujitsu, many have figured out how to use their thin skin as their most powerful weapon. My particular brand of toughness, it turns out, no longer holds much currency.
Maybe what we saw as sassy intrepidness just looked to younger women like wrinkles or age spots. Amid the #MeToo tweetstorm, I’d feel a particular pang when I saw the young feminists dismiss the older ones by pure virtue of their age. Never mind the substance of Flanagan’s arguments, it was her pearls and sweater sets that rendered her not worth listening to. Merkin’s op-ed, someone said, might as well have been titled “Boomer Uncomfortable with Change.” This was a more generous comment than those that asked, simply, “Who the hell is Daphne Merkin?”
Merkin, an established critic and essayist, is about fifteen years older than I am. A year or so later, she would send the Twitter feminists into yet further spasms by publishing a New York magazine profile of Soon-Yi Previn that cast doubt on Mia Farrow’s charges that Woody Allen had molested his daughter Dylan. She would disclose in the article that she was a longtime friend of Allen’s, and that alone was enough to get her written off once and for all. Never mind that w
hen New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof disclosed that he was a longtime friend of Farrow’s and devoted his column to Dylan’s side of the story, he was lauded as a champion of women.
My opinions on the Allen-Farrow affair notwithstanding, it made me sad to see young women, especially young women journalists, dismiss a writer they might be able to learn from. I’ve never met Merkin, but given her age relative to mine she was right in the sweet spot of the kind of writer I looked up to when I was very young. At twenty-five, I not only wanted to know people like Daphne Merkin, I wanted to be them. There were hundreds of writers and artists in my imaginative orbit—some of them over fifty or possibly even sixty—whom I felt this way about. I knew none of them, but I wanted to be all of them. Together, they formed a great phalanx of wise elders whose only duty to me was to be themselves. My duty, in turn, was to watch and learn. By which I mean that was my duty to myself.
But something was different back then. I shared a planet with those elders. We occupied the same universe. We breathed the same air. I had the great gift of being able to look up to my elders because it was possible to be like them. We may have been of different generations, with different problems and preoccupations and ideas about what constituted paying a lot of rent, but we still all grew up holding books in our hands. We called our friends from pay phones and negotiated sexual situations without technological assistance and registered opinions without being smacked down on social media moments later. We made mistakes in private and, in turn, respected the privacy of others in their mistakes.