In terms of a preamble, here goes. While I have not been able to write to yâall twice a month, I have been editing one essay in the book Iâm writing about betrayal, and have been working on another essay about celebrities. The celebrity essay is about the allure of power that allows one to be free from so called good choices. Think Dave Chappelle who broke his contract with Netflix for season 4 and 5 of the The Chappelle Show to the loss of something like 50 million. His reasons for breaking his contract still remain vague. What freedom. If you enjoy my work and you want to support me right now despite the ebbs and flow, you can always send me money on venmo at @Renee-Greiner. In terms of podcasts, if you are interested in the crossover between nerding out about writing and writing about sexual assault I encourage you to check out this episode of Between the Covers featuring Jeannie Vanasco: Things We Didnât Talk About When I Was a Girl. If you want to be entertained by someone who is not yet famous, watch this YouTube video by toomuchtoni called Unschooling. If youâre looking for a movie to watch on Christmas Day, I will be watching Promising Young Woman.
In the words of professional essayist Leslie Jamison, âAngry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. Itâs as if the prospect of a womanâs anger harming other people threatens to rob her of the social capital she has gained by being wronged. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized.â Todayâs essay is not about Christmas or Hannukah or even really the pandemic. But it is about thoughtfully thinking about power and sexual misconduct and who gets misplaced and how we all participate in that misplacement. In other words, moss wouldnât continue to thrive in the cracks of my sidewalk if it wasnât for the rain and the darkness and the insistence on treating everything with natural products. Men who behave badly wouldnât line the corridors of office buildings if men who we call good men literally did more than almost nothing.
In the case of Bill Clinton being protected and Monica being thrown to the wolves, the media was the rain, most men and some women were the darkness, and a certain brand of feminists were the natural products (nice, kind sometimes avoidant behavior) when you really need bleach (harsh, honest).
But the truths is complicated when it comes to complicity and good behavior. And that is where my anger begins. With complicity.
Me. Sweaty. Happy. Fluid with snake rhythm in my spine. 2015. Pine trees above my eyes, and soft wood beneath my naked feet. That moment when my fingertips connected to my hips and I could feel my own sexuality in a private, bubbley way. And then that older man circling closer and closer until he is dancing too close in my bubble and I canât put up a stop sign because I donât want to embarass him, but if Iâm really, really honest I donât want to deal with something Iâve dealt with much of my life. Women choosing to defend a manâs experience over my own. Women invalidating my experience. So at some point, I end up leaving the dance room to go to the bathroom looking at my feet and squinting my eyes and feeling rounded. And M, a new friend who happens to be a social worker, comes over and I explain what happened and she says, âBut Renee, there are good men too.â And this two years before #MeToo so itâs still trendy for straightish women to say moronic things on a regular basis about menâs behavior. My body is holding back anger in my throat, so much anger. Iâve had my boundaries violated by men since I was 12, often in minor ways, but still. They were violated in Rome and Spain and definitely in NYC and Baltimore and Portland and L.A..
Often, folxs who are complicit in racism or sexism will defend themselves by saying that their intention was good. Mâs intention was good, but she layered her own complicity on layers and layers. These are the folxs who let shame lie in darkness so that it can grow like moss or spray natural products like âlight stories about good menâ when your talking about a repetitive, patriarchal disaster.
And I am so angry because I have a right to be sexual and sensual and to move like a snake without having some Dude think itâs an invitation. Maybe Iâm angry because men constantly are trying to invade my experiences. Like the first time I ever had sex with a woman, the womanâs friend asked while I was till in the room if he could watch, and no I had not met her on a kink website nor did we have that understanding.
My anger continues with A for telling me âYou might not want to go to burning man because you might freak out when someone comes back to our camp saying she thinks she might have been raped.â Or with Isaac Pena who used his ingenue status to prey on many of our mutual yoga students in NYC. My anger extends to my parents who laughed at an incident I explained to them when I was 21 that a Roman cab driver offered to cut my taxi faire if I would give him a blow job. Gross. Thanks Catholic parents.
I sometimes hate myself so much when I write these essays. Because I know that my audience is primarily straightish white women. And because I know if we have one thing in common, itâs that we make ourselves smaller than weâd like to. But straightish young white women have the advantage. We have a hell of a lot more tolerance for an angry Taylor Swift than we do for a Rosie OâDonnell or quite frankly any black lives matter activist who doesnât talk like sheâs had her words shined and buffed by Jesus Christ himself.
So I hate myself for wanting more from WOMEN. For wanting women to hold me or to comfort me or to recognize the fact that I freak out when a woman says she was raped is a good thing. And I hate myself sometimes for being imperfect. Iâve made 10 or 20 rape jokes in my life. As a survivor of rape, sometimes it feels like my personal right.
The impeachment scandal that changed the course of a young White House Internâs life was 24 years ago. I hate that when I thought of Monica Lewinsky, it was primarily as some silly woman who was kinda slutty. I hate that I didnât know in 1996 (I was 14) that the real person who should have been shamed was Bill Clinton, and the main reason I think he should have been shamed was simply for lying. âI did not have sexual relations with THAT woman.â Whatever Bill.
The Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal began in 1996 when it became public information. In 1996, Monica Lewinsky was 24 and Bill Clinton was 50 years old. What actually happened is less known than what Bill Clinton said or who came forward to capitalize on the sexual relationship. Linda Tripp secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky without her consent. As Paula Jones came out with her own charges against Bill Clinton when he was in Arkansas, Hilary Clinton called it, âa vast right wing conspiracy.â Monica had been choosing to hide the sexual relationship, but she wasnât also working for a foreign government, laundering money, or bribing anyone. Because the affair did not lead to her landing prestigious positions at the white house, one canât sit around and lament and say but look what she was after?! In 1996, Harvey Weinstein was still running Miramax Pictures, Roger Ailesâ had taken over at Fox News, and the U.N. Court for the first time in history considered rape a war crime. And E Jean Carroll was raped by Mr. Donald Trump in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman lingerie department. Powerful men did really terrible things in the 1990s and some of those men will continue to into the 2020âs.
But Iâm angry because capitalism and patriarchy does a pretty lovely job of slut shaming and a pretty lovely job of convincing women they are better off defending menâs questionable (often reprehensible) behavior rather than defending each other. I think these traits of adoring men who use womenâs sexuality often for their own narcissistic means has its own imitation crab meat in the queer community. We have Shane. We are so used to worshipping Bill Clinton types that Shane gets a pass again and again even though her behavior towards women most closely resembles narcissistic sexual men. Sheâs human and sheâs not as bad as Bill Clinton for the simple phenomenal reason that you canât compare a lesbian character on tv to the President of the United States. But our cultures tendency to shame sexual women and to fail to develop a culture around consent leads to some bad consequences.
Bill Clinton was a complete fuck boi.
Monica Lewinsky made some bad choices that derailed her life.
Something Iâve realized as of recent while writing this: Monica Lewinsky is a pretty terrific writer and communicator. She uses language like someone who should write for Vanity Fair. And she does sometimes write for Vanity Fair. She also is kind in a way you donât see in many celebrities. In a deep, useful sorta way. She comforts me in a way that Brene Brown just canât. Maybe I relate to her because she feels more complicated, and I struggle to relate to folxs who seem like flat versions of a woman. I know she did something stupid once. And I know she could be angry and bitter and hiding under a rock.
As she Monica Lewinsky put it so well herself, âIf you want to know what power looks like, watch a man safely, even smugly, do interviews for decades, without ever worrying whether he will be asked the questions he doesnât want to answer. But in June of this year, during an interview on NBC, Craig Melvin asked Bill Clinton those questions. Was I owed a direct apology from him? Billâs indignant answer: âNo.ââ
It takes incredible courage to endure national slut shaming while you watch a powerful man 26 years older than you endure virtually no consequences.
And that is all. See yâall on the page in 2021. In the meantime, you can watch Promising Young Woman, a movie directed by a woman, on Christmas. You can also read Leslie Jamisonâs piece, I Used to Insist I Didnât Get Angry, Not Anymore in the NYTimes Opinion. Or read Monica Lewinskyâs own take on her experience with Who Gets To Live in Victimville: Why I Participated in a New Docuseries on The Clinton Affair in Vanity Fair.
Goodbye 2020. I wish I could say goodbye Corona.
Renee
I'm so grateful for your anger.