What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life

by Joann Wypijewski

An exquisite examination of a sexual culture in crisis

What if we took sex out of the box marked 'special', either the worst or best thing that a human person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of reality? In this extraordinary book, despite longstanding tabloid-style sexual preoccupations with monsters and victims, shame and virtue, JoAnn Wypijewski does exactly that.

From the HIV crisis to the paedophile priest panic, Woody Allen to Brett Kavanaugh, child pornography to Abu Ghraib, Wypijewski takes the most famous sex panics of the last decades and turns them inside out, weaving what together becomes a searing indictment of modern sexual politics, exposing the myriad ways sex panics and the expansion of the punitive state are intertwined. What emerges is an examination of the multiple ways in which the ever-expanding default language of monsters and victims has contributed to the repressive power of the state. Politics exists in the mess of life. Sex does too, Wypijewski insists, and so must sexual politics, to make any sense at all.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Politics, Sexuality, Queer, Philosophy

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2020

Reviews

[David M]

This is a brave little book. Many on the left are still in denial about just how bad the climate of moralistic preening and ideological conformity has become. The discourse around sex and gender is now completely schizophrenic. Likewise, leftists can never seem to decide if they want more or fewer prisons. Wypijewski here does a remarkable job speaking up for the rights of the accused and the moral complexity of life.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard the author on the Femsplainers podcast (S8E4) and was immediately hooked by the premise that #MeToo is a continuation of sex panics that go back deep in our American history. Also that the feminist embrace of the police state is not new – such as the collab of anti-porn feminists with the Reagan right – and will backfire. As the author writes in the essay The Upside of Censorship: “Liberals take note: it will be used against you.”

The essays are uneven, and it gets off to a rocky start with the prologue and first essay about the AIDs epidemic. Wypijewski brings in all kinds of disparate ideas to show that nothing is an easy black and white, everything is nuanced, and the media has obscured complicated stories into simple tales of good and evil. But I got lost along the way sometimes – like, how did we get to this topic? How does this connect?

I thought she was at her best in more focused essays, where she covers the murder of Matthew Shepard with a focus on the assailants, the complicated life of Boston street priest Paul Shanley, the Woody Allen allegations, and finally the essay on Brett Kavanaugh’s “adult neglect of reflection and his indifference to suffering.” These I would all recommend!

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engaging and an overall well-researched collection of essays. I think her most compelling claim is that “believe all women” perpetuates an erasure of nuance and human complexity in the name of good vs. evil politics. What do we miss when we confine any life within the tight frame of accusation?

Somewhere in ~the discourse~ we’ve conflated critical examination with either defending abusers or not believing victims?? How grossly minimizing. Things are not oft that black and white, and in adopting that way of thinking, consequentially, invites righteousness and shame, which asserts the #MeToo movement’s whole ethos of vengeance as a social good. It’s less a matter of “but victims deserve to feel vengeful”—it's unmistakably within their right in wanting to seek vindication and besides how dense do you have to be to mistake earnest critique for invalidation of lived experiences & traumas?? Not to mention that’s totally besides the point ?—but more an inquisition and reexamination regarding the limits of embracing punitive attitudes and systems in handling matters of sexual assault and abuse.

[Rosie B · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm really not sure how to rate this. At times, Wypijewski makes astute observations on matters such as white women falsely accusing black men, gay priests being targeted by pedophilia claims...but then she'll treat people suffering from sexual trauma with this sheen of derision. She's clearly never been assaulted, so maybe that's what makes her the perfect person to write this book. I don't know, I didn't love it.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful indictment of the sex panic fueled by media and personal emotion that we all can get caught up in. Deep reporting on cases that seemed cut and dry because of lazy reporting or knee-jerk responses. An eye-opening and important book in an age without nuance.

[Iqra Shagufta Cheema · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book takes count of multiple sex assault allegations/cases in the US and puts it in the cultural and political background. Well researched, some really well put sentences here & there.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays published mostly in The Nation, I think. They are wonderful. Wypijewski speaks to the idea that relationships are complicated and that when they come into the public eye, the predominant narrative paints them in broad strokes in black and white and takes only one perspective and applies no nuance. The rush to judgment runs in a puritanical direction. Her insights are wonderful and beautifully described.

However, the essays vary. Some are long and discursive with a lot of history, others are brief summaries. I would not recommend trying to read the book in a few sittings. The long essays (for example, "Sin, A Story of Life" about the Boston "pedophile priest" scandal, and "Judgment Days" about Abu Gharaib) develop new perspectives about familiar events, but these essays demand your time and relaxed attention, while some of the shorter essays seem to be more like quick pithy comments related to events that were then current.

Great book. Deserves to be more widely available and widely read.

[Liza MacShap · Rating 4 out of 5]

really good

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought provoking and at times uncomfortable read. As a loosely edited collection of articles by Wypijewski spanning from the 1990s to the present day, it is difficult to ascribe a singular rating.

At it's best this is an excoriating attack attack on the hypocrisy and moralising of the carceral US state. From the propensity to assume guilt, and the ecstatic delight in scandal and moral panic, whipped up by a media class and legal profession that are interested in making profit rather than any sense of nuance or justice. To our tendency to other offenders as evil people, rather than acknowledge them as reflections of the society that produced them, and systems that we ourselves perpetuate.

At other times however I felt a bordering insensitivity for alleged victims. The same nuance that afforded to the supposed 'bad guys', produces a marked sense of uncomfortableness when applied to the accuser. In a way this reveals another layer of hypocrisy which leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth when being faced to confront.

[Megan Mischinski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was debating between giving this book 2 or 3 stars, but I gave it 2 simply because I never could quite connect with the author or find a clear takeaway from any of her essays. The author never quite goes far enough to explain the point she’s trying to make with each string of thoughts she has for each essay topic. Even worse, I find her tone relatively insensitive to the sensitive nature of the topics she’s exploring. Lastly, I don’t find the collection of essays to be cohesive with an overarching theme tying them together enough for me to have a significant impression from reading the book other than confused and a bit offended.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of Wypijewski's essays is brilliantly written. She is frequently provocative and did go some way towards challenging my views on certain topics. Most of these essays serve to complicate the commonly-held picture of major stories of abuse - at best, warning of how bigotry and oppression is propagated by our treatment of these cases; at worst, being somewhat callous towards those who have suffered.

That said, I thought it was a shame the essays here didn't cohere better. The information Wypijewski collects and the arguments she makes are thought-provoking, but I had hopes that they might build towards something which never actually arrived.

The closest she comes to this is in short sections of brilliantly delivered denunciations, and better yet in the Afterword: like the titles at the end of a biopic, she provides brief and galvanising updates related to each essay.

The book I really wanted to read is hopefully the next one that she will write: a continuation of these themes which places the cases in a broader frame, making more systemic analyses - a book which show us the woods more clearly by focusing a little less on the trees.

The highlights:
- The title essay
- "The Upside of Censorship"
- "Through a Lens Starkly"
- "Make the Rules, Break the Rules and Prosper"
- "Stripped"

[Rohan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wypijewski shines when she looks at an individual case or sex crime and broadens its scope to ask; what were the material conditions that led to this, how did the media act as an instrument of sexual panic, and was this just an isolated incident of unbalanced gender power, or something else? The primary tension apparent in these stories exists between the criminal/sexual deviance of an underclass and the outrage of a respectable middle/upper class, and further, the reliance on punishment, rather than prevention, to deliver satisfaction to the aggrieved (with the advent of a tabloid-thinking media, including not only the victim but entire, national communities). She seems to point to an understanding where sex crimes, like other crimes, are understood as an expression of economic immiseration.

"To err is human, to forgive divine" - Paul Shanley

When she's slinging takes about post-metoo era sex culture or Woody Allen or whatever, she can come off as a bit boomer-y and out of touch. Her big ideas on the commodification of 60s-era liberationist principles around sex are interesting but flimsy. However, Wypijewski writing is first-class, some of the best journalistic writing I have ever read. Her depictions of the combination of desire and lack that can lead people to harming others and themselves are extremely compelling, reducing me to tears a couple times.

[Christiane Alsop · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some essays in this collection that demonstrate the height in the art of journalism, in looking for the entire picture and not just blindly following the mood of the moment. Best essay to demonstrate this is A Boy's Life. Matthew Shepard, his killer, his killers, their families, and the town in which it happened: Laramie, Wyoming. The author is going in deep.
There are other essays, the one that serves as the title being one of them, I don't get. Aspects of it are brilliant, yet at the end I wonder: What's the message here? I'll give it another read another time.
All in all, so, so, worth reading.

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays in this collection range dramatically across a handful of years in which the culture they respond to changed dramatically. Some are dated and none truly live up to the promise that the book's headline carries, but most are in some way interesting - although Wypijewski's curiously selective narrative empathy is uneven, to be sure. Not something I would recommend quickly, but glad to have read it.

[Caddyshack Project · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life can get messy, with the intertwining of social media, politics, fact and fiction, sex and “sex panics” have become entangled in the negative discourse of our time. Wypijewski unpacks some of her own experiences, as well as those of others in her beautifully crafted essays to highlight the injustices that remain and encourages us to think about sexual politics. Wise and fierce, worthy of a read.

[amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

none of the essays were cohesive and very few of her arguments were well formatted or clear, all were very poorly argued. she came across as dismissive to the experiences of victims and repeatedly chose to play devils advocate for the accursed. overall a flop.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but also deeply uncomfortable at times in increasingly surprising ways.

[Oisín · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely essential

[Philip Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional collection of essays, wide in scope, but all having to do with Puritan approaches to sex, and our compulsion to reduce, to deny agency, and condemn rather than question.

[Venerdi Handoyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amidst sex panic and moral panic that push us to witch-hunting this book encourages thinking with a clear head, unclouded by faith-based sense of justice, the junk science of “repressed memory”, and fetish for punishment. A collection of strong essays with fact-based arguments that will recalibrate our compass!