On the Reckoning

#MeToo is a reckoning.

I’ve looked on, seeing the mighty fall and rightfully so. Many of those men accused were ones I was aware of but had no real attachment to--the Harvey Weinstein’s and Kevin Spaceys of the world. Then there was Aziz Ansari whose show Master of None I loved (and for whom the accusations were a bit different in type) and Junot Díaz whose writing had inspired me and whose short stories I had taught.

And I wondered, in this time of reckoning, if I might be found guilty, too.

This wondering implies a level of guilt, because one should ideally know that one is not now and has never been a monster. So does my wondering mean I’m guilty, too, or that my level of self-conscious neuroses is breaking new ground?

I remember an overnight, out-of-state trip, five or so years out of college, staying the night with a woman I imagined I might have asked out had we gotten to know each other a little better a little sooner, or if we’d both been single for longer stretches in school. We had a good time, talking more in her car and her home than I think we had cumulatively in the time we knew each other prior to that weekend, and at the end of our second and final night together, I made a move to kiss her, precipitated by a lame line about something I wanted to ask her, I leaned in, leaving her ten percent of the distance between us to meet me.

She didn’t. She politely declined and offered enough rationalizations to defuse any remaining suspicion of sexual tension from my mind.

I told a friend about it all afterward, under the premise of being proud of myself for making any move at all. I was only a year or two removed from the multi-year relationship that had largely defined what I knew of dating, and was feeling my own arrested development around how to do anything like dating.

My friend wasn’t impressed. He told me I should have kissed her--forget the set up line and leaving her space.

I heard him out and, at that time, actually thought he was right.

Because stealing a kiss isn’t as bad as the kind of grabbing our president suggested celebrity men could get away with, nor the kind of power plays or druggings or aggressive misogyny the worst of those taken to task during #MeToo have faced. But when I recall that night, that advice, and my reaction; when I recalling physically compelling one ex to hold my hand during a post-breakup talk, and not taking the hint on a third date in college when the girl gave me the cheek, and instead bulling through to put my tongue in her mouth--these moments may not have crossed legal boundaries, and some might chalk them up to courtship, or boys being boys. But I’m not comfortable with the roots of my own actions in these cases, all relativity and degrees be darned. The root? I was physically stronger and deluded by male entitlement and aimed to take what wasn’t being offered to me.

And that’s a problem.

I’ve grappled with these memories and this culture more since the birth of my son. I like to think of myself as an enlightened parent, and I’m fortunate to have a wife far more enlightened than me, and not afraid to call me on my BS. So, our son is going to learn about consent and respect for women in ways that I wasn’t taught, but also wasn’t ever confronted with explicitly.

As I write this post, he lies asleep over my shoulder, too young to consider any of this, even on its most abstract terms. There was an activist not long ago who advised parents should look for even their babies’ consent before going so far as to change their diapers. The idea was teaching body ownership and ideas about consent mattering from this nascent point of life. She was promptly lampooned on social media for the extremes she advocated, and even I, who admire the principle she’s getting at, struggle to imagine waiting for definitive body language from my little guy that, yes, he agrees to me tending to his soiled diaper.

And this will not be easy--this selection and rejection of philosophies and practices, these conversations, this coexistence with a surrounding culture that doesn’t entirely agree with anything Heather or I might say.

But we will try to do better, so that our son might do better than me and my friends. So that he’ll never have to worry about his own guilt but rather remember his own agency in his own relationships, and perhaps even using his voice on behalf of those who can’t use their own.

It’s a lot to put on such a little person.

But he will grow.