The man is a feminist.
The man is not physically repellent.
The man suffers from major depression.
The man is an artist so the major depression goes untreated.
The man treats his major depression with alcohol, with pills, with a relentless pursuit of adoration, with younger and younger impressionables with badly drawn boundaries.
The man thinks he is, in some way, badly drawn.
The man is not physically repellent, although at times he finds himself so, and so fixates on these self-perceived inadequacies that he effectively convinces those around him that he is.
The man falls in love whenever a woman looks at him.
The man is an artist so this does not seem strange.
The man throws a coffee table at his beloved.
The man swears he will never do so again.
The man is an artist so he writes an essay about the wrongness of throwing a coffee table.
The man closes his eyes when the crowd claps at his essay about the wrongness of throwing a coffee table at the woman you ostensibly love.
The man hears the crowd hear him say the word regret, and the crowd doesn’t notice the absence of apology.
The man is iconic.
The man has his portrait drawn by illustrators for magazine spreads.
The man gives a commencement speech that brings many to tears.
The commencement speech plays on long after the speech is over, repeated and reflected across the Internet.
The man had several terrible things happen to him as a child. No one doubts this and no one should.
The man began as a boy, and that’s the tragedy.
The man is comforted by women.
Every time the man dates a woman he has to tell her how the previous woman was unhinged, unwell, unmade by his constant queries, demands, and assessments, and the new woman must nod along or she will not be the new woman any longer.
There is always a new woman because there is always a woman who is unsure of her prettiness, her talent, her ownership of the air she breathes.
The man had a restraining order, but, he reassures his new beloved, the cops knew what he was working with and had his back.
The man is an artist so when he is at his worst no one notices because it looks like creativity.
Creativity is how the man self-medicated before he became a man, when writing a poem or a story was a way to write himself out of the terrible things that had happened to him.
The terrible things became more terrible in every re-telling.
The man writes an essay about his self-perceived inadequacies and various disadvantages and the women reading it want to comfort him.
When questioned by an audience member about his behavior as a teacher or conference leader or mentor, the man becomes incensed and the audience collectively turns on the audience member, whose voice is shrill, who looks small, who shouldn’t have stepped up to the microphone.
No one questions the man’s anger.
The man had a way about him.
The man had a mind that was very beautiful.
If the man found you brilliant, you were brilliant.
The man could make a woman feel very special when she had his entire attention.
When a woman had his entire attention, it could be very overwhelming.
The man was in the habit of sitting in his car outside her apartment building and watching her struggle with her keys while balancing groceries, but this was the only way he could express love when love was no longer wanted.
Love, to the man, was observation.
Observation, to the man, was a reflection.
Many writers warned their female students about the man. They did so by raising meaningful eyebrows, by innuendo, by waving red flags in complicated patterns by which one might guide a plane to land.
The plane, they thought privately, was rather naïve about how runways worked.
They did not warn the female students about the man in writing.
They did not report the man.
They did not consider reporting the man. To whom would they report? There were no policies in place.
They sometimes assigned the man’s work in their classes because to have their students not read the famous man’s work would be irresponsible.
Art, they would say, is full of authors whose behavior is questionable or looks ugly in retrospect.
Am I, they would say, to stop watching Annie Hall?
They did not question the man’s behavior, not really.
They worked around it and tried to teach the young women they mentored how to work around it as well, never considering that the necessity of teaching this was in some way accepting it as natural, the way we counsel another to grab an umbrella when it is raining.
You cannot stop the rain from falling.
Am I, they did not say, to stop watching this happen and do something?
The man gave a voice to people who had been previously unheard and in this way the man was a hero.
And if the man, under the umbrella of mentorship, romantically pursued some of those people, leaving them in doubt of their own talent and ensuring they remained unheard, surely this did not erase his other good works.
The man is an artist so he tells her he can shape her into a success.
The man, it must be said, painted a picture of the human soul.
The human soul is a weight we have yet to successfully measure.
Attempts have been made, generally by calculating loss.
When the man heard that a famous newscaster had installed a hidden button on his desk, which he used to lock his office shut, trapping female subordinates inside with him, the man was enraged. Who would do that, the man said. What kind of man?
What kind of man am I, the man asked his readers, in his famous essay about masculinity.
There was a joke the man would tell at parties where he’d ask a woman to hold an invisible Barbie.
Point to Barbie’s face, he’d say.
She’d oblige.
Point to Barbie’s hips, he’d say.
She’d oblige.
By now several people were watching. Some of the people knew the joke already. This was his favorite joke when he was drunk.
Between the two of them, they identify all the invisible parts of the invisible woman’s body.
Now, what area haven’t we named, he’d say.
Smiling, because this is all in fun.
And she’d smile back, because a smile dictates a smile, and would oblige, although she’s not aware that the people around her are shifting in different ways that she can’t quite understand.
She’d point.
He’d lean forward and dart his head in, sucking her finger into his mouth. She’d jerk back in shock.
That’s Barbie’s pussy, he’d say.
The man hated himself a great deal, and that is a mitigating factor.
One need only read his work to see that he hated himself a great deal.
Really, the way he treated women was just a way of further punishing himself.
He knew right and wrong, and he suffered for it.
Suffering is one of the tools we, as humans, use to make art.
Other tools are pens, palates, and coffee tables.
Other tools are sentences.
The man was a brilliant critic, and his hand on a student’s knee after everyone else had left the dinner party was a brilliant critique of her inability to raise objections or make a fuss or in any way disrupt the set piece in which she suddenly found herself.
When there were women who would raise objections or make a fuss or disrupt the set piece, they were seen as shrill and their careers stalled or suffered or were henceforth seen solely in relation to the incident with the man.
These women were lessons.
In the many biographies of the man they would mention his behavior with women as the context needed to understand the greatness of his work.
Women are the context against which men are men.
One day a woman would read his account of their relationship in his work and wonder at how unrecognizable she was in it. The more she read the less she knew herself. Perhaps that was how it had been. What kind of woman am I, she wondered? She read to find out.
A relationship, as a term, does not tell us much.
This is why we have modifiers, like codependent, or symbiotic, or equal, or parasitic.
At writing conferences, it was understood that if the man put his hand on your knee it wasn’t to be spoken of. Many women bore the invisible mark of his respect.
What kind of man am I, he asked the young woman at the conference. Can you tell what kind of man I am?
The man, it was apparent in retrospect, groomed his female workshop participants.
The male participants were unaware of this grooming.
The male participants were shocked, years later, when this behavior was revealed.
Why, they asked the women, did you not tell us what was happening?
They took the women’s silence as criticism. It was very unfair; they were allies. They wore T-shirts that said Male Feminist.
What else did the women want of them?
The women kept their own counsel.
The man was published by Playboy, the mark of a true intellectual.
The female author at whom the man had thrown a table was a well-known feminist, so her story was suspect.
Many suspected that the woman’s insistence on reminding them of this story was her hitching her star to his.
Her star was already a perfectly good star, though.
We could be a power couple, the man said, and the woman wondered about power.
Powerful, wrote the man in another famous essay, which was reprinted in a well-regarded anthology, is what we call a man when he is perfectly complicit in society’s inequities.
When the man heard of a famous comedian forcing women to watch him masturbate, the man was enraged. Who would do that, the man said. What kind of man?
At night, by a bonfire, surrounded by other artists and writers in varying states of inebriation, the man spoke to a woman about his love for his child, how a child just made you realize what was important, how having a child left you in awe of its small hands. The woman, also a mother, stepped a little closer.
The other artists and writers in varying states of inebriation took note of how much time the man and the female writer spent together.
For years later, her name is coupled with his, brought up again and again as an amusing bit of trivia.
The woman is a footnote in the man’s history.
The man likes footnotes. He likes how appending a footnote allows you to digress, but not really.
In his famous essay on power, the man talks about the assumption of authorial power. By using the footnote as he does, for sly asides, for play, he is dismantling the long tradition of academic authority and literary power.
His ex-wife finds herself mentioned in a footnote to the essay. Yes, she thinks, that’s about right.
Several women tried to talk about what the man had done to them, but they were not the right sort of women.
He chose young women.
He chose women who had grown up with several disadvantages, who tended to treat their depression and anxieties with alcohol, with pills, with a relentless pursuit of validation.
He chose women of color, women from poverty, women who were at the conference on scholarship, women who were hoping to speak for their sisters.
He chose students.
He chose women who thought they were in a relationship with him.
There was no right woman to tell the story.
Years later, she would tell the story of how the man sat next to her at the end of the conference and leaned over and sniffed her shoulder. I wanted, he said, to know what you smelled like.
She was fifteen.
She told the story again and again, because the story was so funny.
The stories women tell are very funny.
Can you believe what that man did, they say.
It’s unbelievable what he did.
It’s unbelievable how many times he did it.
Can you believe it?
They say, ha ha, listen, can you please believe me.
One day, years later, a woman is at a party telling her funny, funny story, and another woman says, god, I’m so sorry that happened to you.
She pauses, her glass still jauntily raised. She’d been ready to deliver the punch line, but now she can’t.
She’s angry at the other woman for misunderstanding.
She does not want it to be a thing that happened to her.
She does not want to be the punch line.
If other people don’t see the humor, then the humor disappears.
There are anonymous letters, detailing how the man groomed his students.
There are anonymous letters, detailing how the man leveraged his power at a well-known journal/press/literary festival for sexual favors.
There are anonymous letters, detailing how consensual relationships became less so.
There was a list left in a bathroom at a major conference.
There was a website.
The man had his defenders.
The man had the advantage of collective disbelief.
Sometimes, the man denied.
I am a flawed man, but I am not this man.
What kind of man would do such a thing?
Sometimes, the man issued a public apology.
If I have ever crossed a line, then I am sorry.
If my actions were misconstrued, then I am sorry.
If my intention was misunderstood, then I am sorry.
When the apology was critiqued as being not an apology, there were other ways to respond.
If my various disadvantages caused me to take advantage, I am sorry.
If my questionable relationship with drinking and drugs and sex caused me to have questionable relationships, then I am sorry.
The devil of it is, a man said in his colleague’s office, that no one else is writing the books that the man is writing.
She agrees. No one else is writing those books.
But, she says, we can’t read the books that aren’t written.
Have you ever met him? Curious, hoping for a little gossip.
No, she has never encountered that particular man.
But she knows the man regardless.
Every woman knows the man.
