I wasn’t a particularly socially conscious person. I was pretty disengaged from most of what went on in the present tense, interested in little that was real-world-oriented. When the Weinstein scandal broke, in October of 2017, I was going through articles about the Utah nurse. At that point I wasn’t…

I wanted to have been targeted by Mr. New Yorker Writer simply because I’d wandered into his line of sight and not because of anything particular having to do with me. I realized, the other day, that for years I’ve been kidding myself about why for a period in the…

There is a kind of man who is easily angered by women, and the kind of woman who angers him is one who isn’t focused on him the way he thinks she ought to be. I f you watch the trailer for the movie She Said, which is based on…

What maddened Rose McGowan wasn’t so much that Weinstein continued to wield power as the fact that he continued to be celebrated and embraced by folk who considered themselves principled people. There’s a word in Ancient Greek, atē (pronounced “ah-tay”), that means a temporary insanity brought on by extreme moral…

It’s always gratifying when people seem to take an interest in you for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. A fter his confessional phone call, Mr. New Yorker Writer started being very nice to me, very collegial. He gave me a few books, a couple by him and…

Going a little off the rails just very briefly is something I call having “an Isabella moment” because of a scene in Measure for Measure where the heroine comes onstage screaming for justice. I went a little off the rails at the end of my second post here. It’s something…

The person at the center of a story about sexual extortion is entirely lacking in agency. And that’s unappealing. It’s also terrifying. I showed the first installment of my story here to a couple of female friends. Jane, an artist in Boston, found the end abrupt and wanted to know…

The story I didn’t tell is one I want to try telling now — now that the Me Too moment is over and no one is listening. I n the autumn of 2017, I wrote an essay about sexual harassment from the standpoint of someone who had been thinking about…

A friend writes (I mean, a friend literally writes): I think there is something to dig into around the Ansari thing. My son won’t let it go. I get a flood of texts from him every day about this issue, and it is clear he and his bros are incensed…