“Uncomfortable, powerful, moving; few writers can give us the nitty-gritty of sex and its messiness within the grand sweep of history, and get both the big picture and the details exactly right.”
— Jeffrey Escoffier, author of American Homo
“What We Don’t Talk About speaks for many women who resist (sometimes quietly) the peer pressure that has no name, and for women dismayed by the politics of belief infecting our secular conversations about sex. Injustice has become a sustainable resource, and JoAnn Wypijewski eloquently documents its variations. Her reporting is solid and energetic. Wypijewski knows how to unpack a monster.”
— Tracy Quan, author of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl
“No other writer is telling these stories; maybe no other writer could with such generosity of spirit. ‘Mercy is the scandal now,’ Wypijewski writes of the ways in which too many have come to prefer the counting of sins to the dream of liberation, but this is no book of lamentations. Through a series of moments intimately observed, she summons us again to consider the possibilities for pleasure, eros as ally, in any struggle to get free. Hers is a prophetic voice.”
— Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family and This Brilliant Darkness
“This book lays bare the twisted logics we employ to convince ourselves that there are easy distinctions between love, brutality, sex, and capitalism. Wypijewski’s work is exemplary journalism, taking us to the hearts of neighborhoods and cities and towns from which sex panics emanate, and eliciting interviews and conversations with those affected which reveal how futile it is to search for perfect victims and villains. But her writing is also brilliant analysis, an unrelenting excavation not just of what happened and to whom, but what it means to all of us watching from the sidelines. She unflinchingly reminds us that the larger problem is not that we see and experience “bad” forms of sex, but that we don’t look at sex enough to understand our complicated and uneasy relationships to it. Like few other writers, Wypijewski provides an archaeology of sex which is in turn an archaeology of power.”
— Yasmin Nair, writer, activist, academic
“JoAnn Wypijewski has written steadily and courageously on topics that paralyze other reporters into silence or lukewarm compromise. She knows that our horror of crime springs from the same root as our need for scapegoats. Her essays are always perceptive, and always worth reading.”
— David Bromwich, author of American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us
“JoAnn Wypijewski stimulates us to think freshly about sex and sexual politics, and she is not afraid to infuriate both those who consider themselves sexual progressives and traditional conservatives. Let’s call a town meeting of the whole country to grapple with the insights, the fury, and most of all the wisdom in this essential book.”
— Peter Davis, Academy Award winning filmmaker of Hearts and Minds, author of Girl of My Dreams
What We Don’t Talk About
When We Talk About #MeToo
Essays on Sex, Authority& the Mess of Life
JoAnn Wypijewski
First published by Verso 2020
© JoAnn Wypijewski 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-805-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-806-4 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-807-1 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number
2020932062
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
From 2015 through 2017, I had the privilege of holding the Belle Zeller Visiting Professorship in political science at Brooklyn College, an honorary post, now, sadly, eliminated under austerity. I taught various classes involving politics and language, and one class called Media Panic, Sex and the Politics of Fear.
This book is dedicated to my students, about two hundred young women and men across four semesters, who had complicated lives and abundant ideas, who didn’t censor themselves or one another, who taught me a lot and who, I hope, are out in the world, smart, skeptical and brave.
Contents
2. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo
5. Pictures from an Exhibition
6. Grand Guignol, American-Style: Convicting Woody Allen
15. Make the Rules, Break the Rules and Prosper