What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. JoAnn Wypijewski

don’t. And there’s just nothing to do in this town but get high and fuck—well, and hang out and play cards and watch BET on cable, but really nothing else. There used to be a teen club and that was good ’cause you could go dance all night, but that closed up. You can’t get into the bars unless you’re twenty-one—well, you can sneak in—but the only really good DJ is at the Rusty Nail. They got a good one sometimes at Rascal’s. No?! Rascal’s is a gay bar?! Well, anyway, it’s not like you drink that much or get high that much—maybe a beer or some weed—though you know some kids who are in AA now because, you know, life is hard sometimes, and “in this town if you fall you don’t just miss a stair or two; you fall down the whole damn staircase.” And it’s not like you just sleep with anyone, either. You’re not like “those little girls who are just whores, you know, real pigs, who go with anyone.” Those little girls are disgusting, and some of them are real shystee bitches—“you know, not what you’d call real women”—the kind who talk behind your back and steal your man as soon as you go to jail. Oh, yeah, you can go to jail so easy in this town. Your boyfriend—he’s black and from Buffalo—he was in jail for a month and a half for throwing a stick at a car. He was mad—“he has problems with anger”—so he threw this stick and these white kids jumped out and started a fight, and one of them had an outstanding warrant but your boyfriend’s the only one got locked up. And you know this other boy—he’s black and from Brooklyn, he knew Face there—he went to jail for two months for driving without a license. Two months! You’ve been to jail a bunch of times, “always for the little things, never for the big things,” but those little things add up. Or maybe they’re not little things. You were at a boot camp once—eighteen months. And later you were in for four months—breaking probation—’cause you cursed out your landlord, said you’d blow up his house when he wouldn’t do what you needed. You have problems with anger too, but it’s not like you have a history with explosives. Now you’re through with “the business”—the pharmaceutical business, what do you think? selling drugs—’cause you just don’t want to be in jail again. You’re eighteen, nineteen, and you’re not talking about a little time now. But in the business, on a good night, you could make three, four thousand dollars in a few hours—“Jamestown is full of crackheads”—and that sure beat packing boards or sorting screws for five or six dollars. Yeah, you got to get out now. Maybe go to Atlanta, “where there’s some culture”; you and your boyfriend might have a chance in a black city. Nothing’s easy, though. Your little sisters think it’s glamorous ’cause you been out on your own since you were thirteen, fourteen. “But they don’t know how hard it is, how real hard.” It’s not so bad, though; it’s not like your friend in Rochester who has a three-year-old kid by her mother’s boyfriend who still lives in the house and visits her room every other night—and her room is right next to her mom’s! Or like your girl in Buffalo who had HIV—maybe from Face, nobody knows—and who was killed last year. It was an accident, a gun went off that wasn’t supposed to, but you never had a friend who died before. She was eighteen. That was in Buffalo, and Buffalo’s dangerous. “Jamestown isn’t dangerous, it’s just boring.”

       I wish this pain would go awayI wish this pain would go away

      Marx was wrong. Sex, not religion, is the heart in a heartless world. It may not turn out well; in fact, it almost certainly will not. Most every girl I met trailed a broken heart somewhere in her short past; if she didn’t, it was because she was still with her first boyfriend, or because she had never let anyone get too close, or because at eighteen, having determined that “we’re both clean,” she was planning for her wedding right after graduation and heartbreak would catch up with her soon enough. Whatever the case, sex brought the promise of something good, something intimate, something sweet and fleshy and maybe pleasurable; it brought that promise as surely as it carried the darker risk of pain and sorrow. But everything carried that—and more than the risk, the plain, lonesome reality. To be held in someone’s arms, to be kissed, to be entered and, in the act, forgiven for not being the most beautiful or the most responsible or the most stable; to be forgiven for the reckless dream of wanting, a baby, a partner, a life; to exert that power of forgiveness over someone else: only sex carried the slim hope of something better.

      It is difficult now, when his mugshot has appeared across the country and young women have appeared on television weeping over their predicament and his betrayal, speaking of his violence and irascibility, to imagine that there was also a time when Williams delighted them and they delighted him. It is as if these young women, cast as victims of sex, must be denied every pleasure of their past and every power of decision—good and bad—so as to prepare for some future prosecution in which it can be shown that he was just a criminal and not a man, a young man, negotiating his fears and needs through sex as surely as they were.

      Andrea is nineteen, white and HIV positive. She told me she was with Williams for a month or so at the end of 1996 and that she always “despised” him.

      “Always?”

      “The whole time.”

      “But you say you were with him for a month, so there must have been an upside. Was it really just that he bought you presents and took you to restaurants?”

      “He made me feel like I was somebody, like I was special. He was always there, and my other boyfriends were never there.”

      “Anything else?”

      “Well, the sex was great. And he held me in his arms when we slept, and that was important to me. And he kissed me real softly … I thought I loved him, but it was only infatuation. I wanted him because he was something I was told I couldn’t have.”

      Andrea claims she used a condom with every man she was with until Williams. She claims he wouldn’t hear of using one, though she also insists, “He told me when we first had sex that he put on a condom.” To accept that requires believing that she never touched him, never paid attention, that she simply lay back, closed her eyes and took it.

      “Oh, I never touched men. I never played with them or nothing; I think that’s disgusting. I never did oral sex either. I try not to look at them too often—their penis, I mean, it’s ugly.”

      Great sex? “They can go down on me. And I make sure I always get mine.”

      Andrea has been in and out of psych wards, group homes and jails since childhood. When she was four her mother’s fiancé took her to a park and abused her in some way involving oral sex. Her mother, Wendy, traces Andrea’s problems to that event. “At that age,” she says, “there’s part of them that understands it’s violating and part of them that enjoys it.” She says Andrea became obsessed with sex from that moment. At six she was on Ritalin. At twelve she ran away from a group home in Florida and met up with a man who was twenty. She told him she was seventeen, though seven years later, without makeup, she still has a baby-doll face. She remembers sitting on the edge of the bed in a motel, her knees shaking, before he took her virginity. “I thought I was going to be with him for a while,” she said. “A week later he was charged with armed robbery, and I felt like such an idiot.” In the years that followed she’d come home to her mother’s comfortable house, stay awhile, wind up in another institution, run away again and again—selling drugs, being pimped on the street, taking up with men for a ride or a place to stay. “I thought the end point would come when I got caught or when I was dead,” she said. “On the street you always have to watch your back. HIV was the least of it.”

      It still is, in a way. Maybe not for Andrea—who dyed her blond hair black to avoid being recognized, lives at home again and strives to maintain the disciplines of safe sex and a medication schedule—but for many young women in America. “It’s the life that is lethal,” Amber Hollibaugh had said. But the life can’t be prosecuted; Nushawn Williams will have to do. He can stand in for every man who ever violated Andrea and every man who violated the others—and there are probably more fathers and brothers and boyfriends in that company than anyone wants or dares to take account of. He can pay for every rotten thing that ever happened to them that nobody knows how to deal with. If in the end he is convicted,