I Remember the girl who shouts like a wild animal. She was leather tan and shinny. Pointed bleached blonde hair, sculpted biceps, lowland cargo pants with Doc Martens, ruptured veins in her neck, eyes paralyzed from painted faces.
She stood on a sidewalk in New York City with a folding table covered in poster-sized images in hardcore pornography. A woman wearing a dog collar, a woman wearing a leash, a woman with her body tilted back and seen from behind, crosshatched with scars, etc. She has shown for many hours an explosion of the cover of the famous Hustler magazine, which shows a naked woman feeding him upside down in a meat grinder.
“This is what my husband masturbates,” she cried out. “Girls! Do not be passive! Sign your petition! ”
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Most people turned around or walked on. This is back in 1990. I was 20 years old.
Becoming 20 years old in New York City in 1990 was to own the world as far as I know. It wasn't really important at that time, but anyway this was part of a magical deal that I knew would eventually go ahead even though I barely seemed cherished. The city was still a wild kingdom, a stone fortress with anger burning inside. The crack epidemic has long progressed and was a long way to the end. AIDS was everywhere – beckoning in public service announcements that visibly damaged the body of the disease and preached condoms or death. Graffiti began to emerge from subway cars.
Every man, woman, and many children (including those commuting to a fancy prep school) were attacked or knew someone. Every woman knew what was creepy by a friend in a crowded space, and when this happened, many of us moved her elbows over his abdomen or rolled his eyes away.
Once, at midnight, while walking along Columbus Avenue, a man walked to me. When the red-haired bearded man was probably about 10 years old, he reached out his hand and pushed it just below the left collarbone. It was a very hard shovel. And I almost lifted my arm to push him back. Instead, the moment passed and we continued to follow the path and saw him in disgust and confusion. Thank you for the situation not getting worse.
What I don't remember is that it has something to do with what's called an institutionalized misogyny. This was not a systematic oppression of women. This was simply life in a big city.
Today, an angry woman with a folding table has disappeared from the road. Millions of angry women march on the streets in her place, and far more people run away online. We are small pixels that are integrated into a huge portrait of anger in all justice.
Twenty years after the red-haired man pushed me on Columbus Avenue, the men crashed like bowling pins against # MeToo's unstoppable forces. What can we call the fall of 2017, other than the fall of humans? Beginning with the season of hurricanes and rapid soil erosion, that is, Harby Weinstein, it attracted more people than many can reasonably tolerate.
Or maybe it's the wrong metaphor. Perhaps it was not as chaotic as a huge oil spill in a tanker, where modern Western society had a home for male behavior. Like the fossil fuel itself, this behavior has long been interpreted as a necessary evil, which has made the treated remedies seem useless and faint like reusable shopping bags. (If you touch it, hit it with a dagger! Let me feel his feelings! Open his eyes and force him to read Scum. manifesto!)
I wouldn't try to summarize the fall's case or list the guys in the leak of #MeToo. All the books about the movement will be written. The best of them probably won't start until enough years have passed for the artist to have some perspective. What I can tell you about the fall of 2017 is that it coincides with the downward slope of youth, which is much steeper than what was identified at the time.
Fall 2017 is back two years ago in New York City. Most of the 20 years have left California. Although I left California because there was an incurable, mercifully-married marriage separation in 2015, it took almost two years to officially divorce, and this new status sometimes had a paralyzed effect. How could you imagine that replacing the license plate on a car can feel like death? (Maybe I was able to register my car in California until the last minute possible.) Who knew that shopping for a new health insurance policy could make you feel like you're floating on a plastic pool raft in the Dead Sea? (Okay, everyone knows.)
I left New York when I was almost 30 years old. I was 47 years old now. My main experience with the city was the experience of a young woman, but now I faced entering the middle-aged city again.
I was not only young in New York; New York was my youth. It was where I spent the whole 20s. It was where I found out what kind of person I wanted to be. It's different from figuring out how to actually be that person, and you had to leave New York to complete that mission, but as California says, setting intentions is the most important step in your journey.
New York was the backdrop for my early victory and stupidity. One place to go out one night and feel like something that can happen absolutely was the first and last place I lived.
Where I had my first real job, my first boyfriend, my first martini, the first call from the debt collector, the first to call from the hospital pay phone, told me that someone had a serious problem. It was my earliest place of rough drafting and rough healing, the things I had visited and what I had done to others. Now that I am back, it seems as if the twenties are back to me in the used state. Strange remnants that are holding in your hands; Stroking Memorable Planks
I was in town again with the girl alone. I was the most primitive self, and in some ways had to be ambitious, but in others it was a lazy girl who could not explain. I was a girl who was technically not a better girl for 30 years but nevertheless felt a strange removal from the word “woman” that seems to convey poise and seriousness that she has not yet achieved.
I may have been in my mid 40's, but it's still decades old, but it was a joke that I still couldn't accept compliment by setting the best Diane Keaton as the default in Manhattan but still couldn't accept compliments Fascinated by
I was everything I was young except in my childhood. I got a better apartment, a little money and a bit more professional recognition. I had a car that had to move around for street cleaning, alternating with a puppy (this was how I craved a baby in my 20s). But my time was about the same. I sat at my desk and drank coffee. I worked when I could, but I looked at the universe more often and wondered what my life would be like. In 1995, I surfed the internet at connection speeds unimaginable.
Due to its speed of connection, the space I've spent most of my time in was not my own physical space, but an unjust turn by floating junk in social media, news media and cyberspace. When Donald Trump entered the office, I probably spent at least three quarters of the time waking up with my head in this space. Until #MeToo reached full strength, my brain no longer felt connected to my body. At times, my brain felt no longer related to the brain I knew. There was a moment when I did not remember the names of people I had been friends for years.
In an intense and lively conversation with a friend or colleague, I regained some sort of great insight and suddenly found a roller coaster popping out halfway, but suddenly sputtering the middle sentence as if it couldn't stop to the end. Tied to a desk chair, stared at the computer screen for hours, hunted the words as if they were chasing lions in safari and actually sweating with exercise. I wondered how many times dementia occurred.
I once read that there is scientific evidence of the correlation between increased perfume and creepy desires. Since returning to New York, I have been nostalgic. Everywhere I went, it was played in my head like a song that was permanently stuck in my twenties. In every area, every subway station, every corner of the street, the memory of those days echoed. Bleecker had John & # 39; s pizzeria, who was with her boyfriend when she gave birth to the wrong guy in the northern part of the university at the age of 21, who was not a boyfriend, not my boyfriend, and memories of his old girlfriend I heard. "It's not pretty but it's sexy," he said.
Among the building slabs on Midtown Sixth Avenue, there were more temporary offices than banks, law firms, insurance companies, each with their own mini kitchen and a password-protected employee toilet. On 57th Street and Broadway, there is a Duane Reade pharmacy, which was once a Colosseum book, and this young woman often stood and shouted and said, "Sign a petition!"
I was abandoned on Delancey Street and kissed Charles Street, having a strange and short-term personal assistant job in the funky apartment of Sutton Place.
I stand on the corner of 8th and 49th streets and remember that we were afraid of an invitation to dinner one summer night, but it rained after a long drunk dinner with an old man in a strong position who is obliged to accept anyway.
The meal started with a business lunch, but migrated to a semi-business dinner. During this dinner, the person will tell me specific details about my personal life in serious crisis. I didn't particularly want to be there, but I accepted the invitation because there was a somewhat vague and abstract in this deal but an implicit concept that could help my career. I accepted them because the deadlines don't feel like a kind of professional self-destructive act as a young plaster irresponsible.
The man never made an ultimatum or offered me a proposal. I did not feel sexually harassed and apparently no one kidnapped me from my apartment and forced me to Oyster Bar. . I will also patrol some psychological game skills. I sometimes smoked from him. He gave him distance and control, but read him in an intimate gesture.
At least a few times, perhaps after drinking too many wine glasses, I asked about his personal life and was rather suggestive and hilarious, seeing how much he could reveal when he was drunk. I made this partly a defense mechanism. The more we talked about him, the less talked about me. But I did so because I also wanted to ruin his head. And I was young enough to think that doing so would serve as a kind of implicit punishment for his actions.
The truth is, of course (there will be wisdom that everyone realizes, except for the young twerp), and it was a reward for him to mess with his head. I did not blame him for strengthening his actions. As for myself, I'm crying about it since then.
Looking back, it will be easy to say that I acted in this way in my instinctual subordination to man's power. There is an element of truth, but there are also angles at which the situation may appear to be the opposite. In this respect, I acted the way I did because the power imbalance between us is working in favor.
I was young and the man was twice my age. He may have had professional power on me, but it was not unilaterally limited. In fact, the personal information I pulled from him would have made life very difficult to make a call. So I somehow continued my rebellion until the end because the meals were getting less and less and finally followed others. I went this way because my life was an open horizon and his attic was an attic.
I acted this way. When I was 25 years old, I had more power than I could have in my life, and I acted in this way because I knew the unconscious level that even a companion could use that power well.
The jagged little pill of Alanis Morissette came out in June of that year and continued to listen repeatedly until August. One night, after doing silly things with this guy and riding the subway with self-loathing, I sat in my room, playing jagged little pills, then returned to the kitchen to talk with my roommate. I remember complaining about the dinner companion, complaining about his pornography, skipping parts, staring straight at his eyes when he blows cigarettes dramatically and stares straight into his eyes. (I would like to add a wink but I couldn't physically wink, so I would not have passed the truth test.)
Instead I said: “God, indeed pervert.”
My roommate said. “However, you continue to appear. I need to bring something. ”
During the Fall of the Man, I've been thinking a lot about the performances I've done for years. Every woman seemed to have this kind of inventory. It was like a novel that everyone is reading. One seems easy to follow, but the basic themes and messages are nothing more than personal projections and obfuscation of postmodernism.
Like other midway beings, I was shocked and disgusted by Weinstein's revelation, and there was no reason to be confused about the credibility of the complainant or the seriousness of the punishment. But as the list of perpetrators and cumulative accusations piled up, every generation of scans involving #MeToo (without a specific category) started a distinction between generations, as the new scandal was "talk" rather than a story or a problem.
The first incident that significantly bridged this gap was related to the secret Google spreadsheet called the Shitty Media Men List. This document is an anonymous, sourced living document intended to warn women against certain men in the media business (mostly known as publication, inappropriate sexual or sexual behavior).
This included all sorts of people, from powerful editors to freelance writers, and explained misunderstandings from “weird lunch dates” to inappropriate temptations, physical violence and all rape. The list was never officially published and disappeared almost as soon as it disappeared from a Google doc, but I took enough screenshots so that the offender could become general knowledge almost immediately.
A few hours after finding the list, the main question line around it was whether or not a violation such as “weird lunch” should be focused on crimes like rape, rather than “who started it?”. Naturally, I found myself not in terms of this “lump” (in other words, it seemed to have only one working word, in this case “lump”), but in terms of older people who were badly troubled by an anonymous idea. You can be accused of publicly named people without warnings or due process.
I ran away with friends of the same age, "This is wrong!" “You can't do this! This millennial doesn't get it! ”We called the names we recognized as we passed screenshots to each other.
“Urgent lunch!” I told more than one person. “Welcome to the publication! I will write a memoir for my early days in New York and call it a strange lunch. ”
And as the "conversation" was hidden and the story of "generational divisions" became the basic story, I found for myself that this stream of time came to mind every day, even every hour. When the scandal related to the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari broke, I thought that the membership of Older Feminist was so official that I could pull out the billing card from Eileen Fisher and call it a day. "Recharge card"?)
So the ground began to shake around the defects. Old feminists scolded young children who were not strong enough to take care of themselves. Give your finger if the construction worker whistles you! Shine when the drunk person sitting next to you at the wedding reception is fresh!
After that, young people followed the old people in a cool girl position to enable oppressive conditions. We do not have to restrain mankind by avoiding insults! The patriarchal norms have taught drunken wedding guests that they can do so, so there is no need to threaten safety with physical violence!
Of course, neither is completely wrong. But both sides were talking to each other in the past, suggesting that there was no meeting in between. In the New York Times, Daphne Merkin only identified between what women said publicly about #MeToo and their personal eyes. "Publicly, they express the right to compliment the withdrawal of male annoying characters who are aiming for vulnerable women at work and say the right thing by participating in a chorus of voices." “It's a different story personally. I hear feminist friends like 'Grow up, this is real life.'
In the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote that the tendency for silly pebbles was not popular with her among young feminists, and at least Babe's chronicle version Ansari fracas wrote "3,000 words of revenge porn". . She declared the helplessness of “a country full of young women who do not know how to call a taxi”.
In cable news, HLN anchor Ashleigh Banfield looked directly at the camera and mentioned "Grace" directly.
"I think what you've done is terrible," said Van Field. "The charges are reckless and hollow," she told Grace. "I was attracted to the movement I had dreamed of with all the sisters at work." Dozens ”.
The news was Banfield's producers invited Katie Way to the show. And in the digital age, Way popped out of an email, not “thank you,” but Banfield sent an email, “The bad highlights of Burgundy lipstick came with a second feminist.” “No woman of my age will be. Try your network ”.
When I saw all the whiz past me on the computer screen sharply with the reading glasses I had to wear lately, I wondered how small my real problem with young feminists seemed they needed us. As far as I can see they didn't even want to know us.
At 25, I wanted to know not only people like Daphne Merkin and Ashleigh Banfield, but also wanted to be them too. There were hundreds of women on the orbit with imagination. Some of them were people over 50, even over 60. I didn't know any of them but wanted to be everyone. Together they formed a large phalanx of wise elders who were only obliged to me. My duty was to see and learn in turn. It means my own duty.
But at the time there was something else. I shared the planet with the elders. We occupied the same universe. We drank the same air. The same is true of the relationship between our generation and those who follow us.
The world has changed so much between my time and their age that a person less than 10 years old may belong to another geological age. To a young man, someone like me is not as elder as extinction. Is it surprising then that the previous generation's contribution to dialogue was at best not a sort of verbal meteor shower, flickering and calm planetary debris in the ion?
This is where I find In my upheaval and confusion I wandered into a devastated but alone beautiful revelation. My generation will be the last to know the world in analog form. As a result, we actually got old before we got old. We became dinosaurs before we were 50 years old.
And from the perspective of this primitive creation, I was pressed for another revelation. The question we now face with men and women is the second one. Modern man has been for about 200,000 years. Civilization as we know it has probably disappeared for 6,000 years. By the time the pill came out in 1960, all of us were essentially prisoners of nature, and the condition of women was significantly worsened and sometimes indecent.
By 1960, the idea that women could compete with men in the job market, that men had to do household chores, had a higher purpose in life than women had babies, and wars that men could financially support or protect them Thoughts that have a higher purpose than doing them are close to unthinkable.
It is amazing that we have come so far in very little time. So far it's crazy that you should expect all kinks to be resolved.
The 59 years that elapsed between 1960 and today in the planning of things is nanoseconds, so we can't recognize this moment, so it's increased by billions until we read this sentence. Already about thirty years ago, it was already thirty years ago that a wild woman yelled at a folding table and said, "Sign a petition." I feel yesterday. And again, every day I feel yesterday. Every day is yesterday before you know it.
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