Having it all

The New York Review of Books is once again looking for an editor due to the sudden departure last week of Ian Buruma after a year in the position.  The mechanics of Buruma's departure are not yet fully known.  He may have resigned as asked to, and has intimated to Dutch media (he is Dutch by birth) that there were threats of reprisal from advertisers if he were to remain.  But it surely involved fallout from a decision to give magazine space to former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi for a first person account of his own fall following the surfacing in 2014 of allegations against him of nonconsensual sexual violence against as many as 15 women.  Ghomeshi's accusers described acts that included choking, punching and covering the mouth and nose of women without their consent during sex. His alleged transgressions extended to the workplace as well.  He was reported to have told a young, recently hired colleague in a meeting that he wanted to "hate fuck" her, and on another occasion to grab her from behind and thrust his crotch against her repeatedly in front of colleagues. Photographic evidence supporting the complaints against him were apparently the basis for his long-in-coming dismissal from the CBC.   Criminal charges brought by 3 of his accusers resulted in 4 counts of sexual assault and one of overcoming resistance by choking.  In February 2016, he was acquitted of 4 of the charges and signed a Peace Bond acknowledging regret for his actions as a condition of dismissal of the fifth.  As well as things turned out legally for Ghomeshi all things considered thanks to aggressive lawyering and a responsive judge, he lost a book deal, has been mostly out of work ever since and has received the brunt of the type of internet scorn, hatred, and dehumanizing threats familiar to anyone who has been found to be wrong on the internet.  Yet it takes a tremendous lack of curiosity to ignore the suffering his accusers have endured at his hand.  In their joint effort to surface Ghomeshi's story, Ghomeshi and Buruma may just have managed to do it.

Ghomeshi's piece, Reflections from a Hashtag (think about it), was one of three presented in the pages of the October 11 issue of NYRB under the theme "The Fall of Men".  Also featured are a review by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild of 3 recent books on the topic of the economic and moral decline of particularly middle and working class men and a review by James Wolcott of a new biography of Jim Brown, the '60s era football legend and 70's era movie star (and 2018-era Trump supporter) who has himself had to legally fend charges of sexual and physical abuse of women-- mostly successfully.

The relative absence of legally punitive outcomes for the subjects of the #metoo essays is of importance to the point Buruma appears to want to make in presenting the "Fall of Men" theme.  There was apparently (as per custom for the magazine) no editor's note from Buruma himself introducing the issue.  But in response to a line of inquiry about his decision to publish Ghomeshi's account in the course of a particularly razor sharp interview conducted with him by Slate's Isaac Chotiner, Buruma says this about his motivation:

The reason I was interested in publishing it is precisely to help people think this sort of thing through. I am not talking about people who broke the law. I am not talking about rapists. I am talking about people who behaved badly sexually, abusing their power in one way or another, and then the question is how should that be sanctioned. Something like rape is a crime, and we know what happens in the case of crimes. There are trials and if you are held to be guilty or convicted and so on, there are rules about that. What is much murkier is when people are not found to have broken the law but have misbehaved in other ways nonetheless. How do you deal with such cases? Should that last forever?

What interests Buruma most, then, is the possibility of redemption in the culture for the accused.  In the absence of a legal conviction, the nature of the misbehavior does not concern him and the harm to the women does not apparently factor into it.  As Buruma says when confronted by Chotiner about the brutality of Ghomeshi's reported acts (specifically "punching in the head"):

... as we both know, sexual behavior is a many-faceted business. Take something like biting. Biting can be an aggressive or even criminal act. It can also be construed differently in different circumstances. I am not a judge of exactly what he did. All I know is that he was acquitted and he is now subject to public opprobrium and is a sort of persona non grata in consequence. The interest in the article for me is what it feels like in that position and what we should think about.

In crazy synchronicity, Harper's Magazine's editor/publisher Rick MacArthur has found himself likewise having to defend a similar decision  to publish in his magazine's pages the long #metoo "memoir" by journalist John Hockenberry, himself a disgraced former public radio host, and the subject of a report detailing instances of inappropriate sexual advances, extreme type-A behavior, racism (for which he had complaints filed against him) and general creepiness.  No criminal charges of any kind were brought against Hockenberry.  In the Harper's piece he denies everything but a misunderstood, if unreturned and perhaps occasionally inappropriate, romantic impulse.  But in the article on New York Magazine's The Cut by Suki Kim that brought his misdeeds to light, revealing her own experience as well as well-reported details of the experience of others', a vivid picture is painted of the wrong that Hockenberry did-- arguably less heinous than Ghomeshi's on the scale of male behaviors that Buruma and MacArthur would like to contribute to the cultural discussion but troubling nonetheless.

Only a true naïf would conflate legal acquittal with moral innocence.  But Buruma and MacArthur are floating a sophisticated approach to cultural redemption in the #metoo era, proposing a path of expiation by way of public confession.  Perhaps they are on the forefront with this, but if these 2 efforts are an indication, the method is a long way from viable. 

Absent from both pieces is any reflection that goes deeper than the navel.  For his part Ghomeshi while acknowledging that his actions are "part of a systemic culture of unhealthy masculinity" almost explicitly precludes the possibility of a true apology (note the second person, attempting to implicate the reader):

You want the feeling of genuine contrition to stir within you—because people are telling you it’s the first step to redemption. And you let yourself imagine that some grand mea culpa might actually turn your fate around—regardless of the veracity of any allegations. But what you truly feel in the first days after being publicly accused is fear and anger, in that order.

Understandable preoccupation with his own plight leads Ghomeshi to "a crash course in empathy."  The object of his enlightenment: an "unwavering antipathy toward schadenfreude."

That's right, empathy toward the fallen.

I'm not prepared to say "The Fall of Men" is a theme that should be banned from public discourse.  But I am prepared to say it's a stupid theme.  As sociologist Hochschild's piece in the NYRB issue details, most  of the falling is being endured at the bottom of the social hierarchy, not in the cultural echelons inhabited by the likes of Buruma, MacArthur and the fallen cultural brothers they're helping out.  Men in the middle and lower classes are falling (and white men particularly precipitously, hence Trump) because their jobs are being replaced by robots if not women, and they don’t have fathers who care for them and they are not as successful at educating themselves as they used to be and unlike women who require them to be what they aren’t, men don’t ask a lot of them and let them be racist and hateful and violent and "heroic."  Oh and here are a couple of stories about the experience of  #metoo victims—not the women; the men the women accused.  Just like sex, the fall of men is "many-faceted".

Buruma identifies with a guy (a guy of his class—a cultural guy) just trying to have a little modern fun and getting taken down for it.  The topic is interesting to him so he thinks it’s got to be interesting to his audience.  But what  is really owed once mighty men who actually get exposed as transgressors against women even if they don't get the benefit of jail time to point to as a frame for the period of their rehabilitation?   I would argue: nothing.  Not by default.  You're entitled to disagree.

Women in popular culture have been portrayed as pursuing the not quite possible dream of having both success in a career and stewardship of a perfect family.  But men too are obsessed with "having it all."  In their case, this means owning and controlling everything,  achieving glory and maintaining status in the public sphere while being able to indulge privately in whatever proclivities strike their fancy, without having to answer for it to anyone, least of all those they want to perform it on.

While it's easy to say that Ghomeshi and Hockenberry made their own beds by behaving badly and must face eternal consequences for it, I don't believe this to be necessarily true.  It's not like they invented their behavior (and it's good to be clear that the objectionable behavior is not the flavor of sex but the selfishness, piggishness, power imbalance, lack of consent and above all the demeaning and enduring harm that they did to the women).   My guess is most men have done or at least fantasized about doing stuff they’d rather not have to defend, even though most men will not ever be put in the position of having to.  In some respects, Ghomeshi and Hockenberry's misfortune was getting called on their behavior by their victims.  But how after all did they miss the signals that it was no longer quite the man's world of their fathers' generation, and that it was no longer even culturally acceptable for the signals of women to be ignored in the pursuit of pleasure?   Men of a certain age (and certain self-importance) will point to confusion about the mixed messages implied in the Sexual Revolution and Women's Liberation Movement of their youth.  But unlike Ghomeshi, Hockenberry, Louis C.K. (also recently re-emerged), and others who seem to have had some difficulty in this area, many men have been able to navigate the shoals.  An ability to empathize with others even at the expense of self-pleasure is a pretty good compass.  (My free advice to Ghomeshi, Hockenberry and others who seek redemption if they aren't already doing it: Go low-key.  Do some good.  Do small meaningful acts that erase your ego.  You know, redeem yourselves.)

Perhaps the plight of men is somewhat self-inflicted.  Perhaps men are dealing for the first time with the pull of gravity.  After centuries of artificially occupying the top tier in the battle of the sexes, the scaffolding is coming down.   Maybe the "fall" of men is really a settling.