It has been a year of math. How many less-famous women equal one famous man? How many female words of accusation equal how many male words of denial? How many reported articles does it take to topple one network executive? How many women’s careers derailed add up to nine months of a man’s professional banishment? How many credible allegations of sexual harassment and assault render a Presidential candidate unelectable? (Answer: some number greater than twenty.) #MeToo has made us all into algebra students, solving and re-solving for x and y.
There is something almost cathartic about turning into a number, about seeing your value, or lack thereof, confirmed with frankness and neutrality. Math is the enemy of gray areas. Math is pay inequalities and rape statistics. The literal meaning and the enthralling promise of the phrase “held to account” is that one might open the books and force a settlement.
In the arts, too, gendered power analyses often manifest as quantification: How many male writers do we read versus how many female? How many books by men versus women earn reviews in how many magazines, and how many awards do the books receive, and what are the gender compositions of the judging committees? The understanding is that decisions about who gets noticed and praised have implications for what kinds of viewpoints and behaviors are enshrined as valid. In May, the author Lauren Groff submitted a “By the Book” interview to the Times that functioned as a rebuke to previous iterations of the column, in which prominent men of letters frequently proved themselves unable to name any female literary influences on their work. (A subsequent analysis found that, in the hundred most recent “By the Book” ’s, half of the fifty-four male authors featured did not mention a single woman.) “Why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives?” Groff asked, after outlining a remedial, all-female syllabus. Her critique energized a hashtag, #ReadMoreWomen, that had emerged in March, along with a no-men-allowed book club run by the Web site Electric Literature. Implicit in these salvos was the notion that the ledgers need rebalancing—that until parity is achieved, the number of male-authored stories that anyone should consume is zero.
Among literary figures, the closest there has been to a casualty of the #MeToo movement is Junot Díaz: after he was accused of forcible kissing and verbal abuse, he stepped down as the chairman of the Pulitzer Prize board and saw several of his events cancelled, but an investigation at M.I.T. cleared him of misconduct, and he continues to teach writing at the university. (Díaz denied the allegations.) A more meaningful inflection point may have come in May, with the death of Philip Roth. As women, we learned to read Roth’s books—horny, shouty, mournful, profound—with a kind of double vision, which was the inverse of his half-vision, an intermittent, gendered blindness that limited where his warmth and brilliance could be brought to bear. (In “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he characterized New Jersey matrons as “cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg.”) Through him, female readers were acquainted with what may prove the defining dynamic of the past year’s reckoning: that, too often, women are able to imagine men’s subjectivity, but men cannot imagine women’s. This incongruity glared in the confessionals of John Hockenberry, in Harper’s Magazine, and Jian Ghomeshi, in The New York Review of Books: they spoke from exile’s far shore, attempting to add nuance to the fable of the humiliated alpha, the aggressor cast aside. The pieces were mendacious, but what made them especially painful to absorb was their expectation that the authors be granted their full complexity while the women they harmed suffered a second erasure. Both essayists described loneliness and anger, ecstasies of self-recrimination; neither spared much thought for the people they were said to have punched or fondled. “I feel sorry for a lot of these men,” Michelle Goldberg wrote, in the Times, “but I don’t think they feel sorry for women, or think about women’s experience much at all.”
There’s a word for this phenomenon: asymmetry. “Asymmetry” is also the title of a novel that surprised readers, in February, with its nerve and grace—and with its starring turn from a lightly fictionalized Philip Roth. The author, Lisa Halliday, carried on a love affair with Roth when she was a twentysomething publishing assistant. Her book unfolds the romance between Alice, an aspiring writer, and Ezra, a charming, geriatric novelist. Halliday only teases at the inner life of her female protagonist in the book’s first half; it blooms, unexpectedly, in the second. (As my colleague Alexandra Schwartz observes, Roth also wrote about an older man in a relationship with a younger woman. In “The Dying Animal,” he evokes that younger woman chiefly as a pair of breasts.) “Asymmetry” carries a hint of correction, but it is not an act of retaliation of the kind that #MeToo skeptics seem to fear. Ezra remains intact, human, as Alice awakens into her powers. Off the page, one could argue that Halliday has deepened Roth’s legacy, conjuring a vulnerable side to the author that feels almost feminine.
On September 27th, Christine Blasey Ford, the first of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She recounted how, at a gathering on a summer night, in the early nineteen-eighties, Kavanaugh cornered her in a room, tried to undress her, and clamped his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. Woven into her pliant self-presentation were steel threads: the authority of her scientific training, as well as a legitimacy that seemed to well up from a deeper place. (Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.) In giving testimony, Ford was practicing a form of authorship—a fragile one. As Rebecca Solnit notes, there exists “a long brutal tradition of asserting that men are credible but women are incredible, men are objective, women are subjective”—“so subjective,” Solnit adds, that “we must find them crazy, delusional—or maybe drunk at the time and prone to mistaken identity.”
In the “he said, she said” of sexual violence, male facts and female facts are not created equal. Too many Americans prove willing to credit bizarre flights of fantasy from one side (doppelgängers; the phrase “Renate Alumnius” as a tender gesture of friendship), even as they scoff at the other side’s convincing recollections. When it was Kavanaugh’s turn to testify, he demanded that the woman’s statements bend around the man’s: Ford “may have been assaulted by someone, in some place, at some time,” he insisted, but not by him. The suggestion here is that men dictate reality and that women take the dictation, occasionally making mistakes for which they should be magnanimously forgiven. (“Let’s just be nice to her,” the Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley, urged, about Ford.) If the woman persists in her error, that is when the mask of beneficence falls, revealing the red-faced and indignant bully.
Male rage and female pain have long been foundational literary topics. In books, as in life, narratives of male anger—from the Iliad to a speech by Donald Trump—command a reverent attention. (This interest in men’s interior lives, and in their ires, may have sociological roots: in her book “Toward a New Psychology of Women,” Jean Baker Miller suggests that all members of society stand to gain from theorizing about the psyches of the powerful.) Meanwhile, tales of female suffering, though profuse, are often dismissed as trivial or self-indulgent. Victims fare best when they do not yell, when they dwell not on injustice but on their sadness and on the intimate “impact” the violence against them has had. This vision of authorship, which privileges the subjective and the tragic—and which also underpins the mostly female genre of the harrowing first-person essay—reflects an understanding that women cannot be trusted to be impartial or truthful.
Yet if women lack the intellectual authority to interpret reality, they also lack the creative authority to invent it. Female writers can only write about themselves, it seems: even when they appear to be hatching fantasies, they are actually producing roman à clef. After Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” was published, in The New Yorker, and became a viral sensation, some readers reacted as though the author had crafted an autobiographical piece about a tricky sexual encounter rather than a work of fiction exploring the occluded intricacy of other minds. “Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life,” begs an editorial by the novelist Jami Attenberg, from 2017, pointing out that one’s imagination “is a beautiful place to hide.” When female novelists write about female characters, or domesticity, or children, they face subtle charges of self-absorption—their perspectives classified as all-too-knowable and thus not worth knowing. (Meanwhile: Karl Ove Knausgaard.)
Still, it is women who do the lion’s share of the book reading, editing, agenting, and buying; this fact may help determine the shape of today’s best-seller lists. The buzziest novels and collections of the past year have arrived from the likes of Tayari Jones, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Sally Rooney, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ottessa Moshfegh. And yet you need only refer back to the Harper’s and New York Review of Books essays to remember that the most conservative viewpoint is still the one with the most institutional backing (at least until an old-timer perpetrates something so egregious that continued polite forbearance from the savvier advertising class becomes impossible).
Well-established steps test for symmetry about an axis: replace x or y with -x or -y and then simplify the equation. How do we balance the tonic and witty warmth of a Philip Roth novel against its contempt for mah-jongg-playing heifers? How do we think about the fact that so many boldface names in publishing and literature are female, that feminist reworkings of ancient myths constitute an industry trend, that spiky, honest meditations on motherhood make for another trend—and, still, we live in a world that hates women? #MeToo pulled off its most flamboyant literary crossover to date when Stormy Daniels published her memoir, “Full Disclosure,” earlier this month. It is hard to imagine someone with less traditional authority than a female sex worker; the thought that Daniels’s “lone” voice might “bring down the Goliath of structural sexism that is the Trump administration,” as Sady Doyle writes, trails a kind of Euclidean poetry through the brain. Maybe Daniels, an authentic red-state striver, is the x to the President’s -x; but the equations keep morphing, the coefficients melting. I prefer to think of her as a harbinger of the breakdown of patriarchal math. Powerful men decided that her story was worth exactly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. She had other ideas.
