Things that Happened: ‘The Female Persuasion’ and #MeToo
In The Female Persuasion (Random House, April 3), Meg Wolitzer writes her protagonist, Greer Kadetsky, into a moment of confusing sexual assault. After Darren Tinzler reaches out and twists Greer’s breast during a conversation at a frat party, Greer recounts: “It wasn’t rape…not even close. Already it was so much less important than what was apparently going on right now at other colleges: the rugby-playing roofie-givers, the police reports, the outrage. But over the next couple of weeks, half a dozen other female Ryland students had their own Darren Tinzler encounters.”
There are Darren’s repeat offenses, which are recounted, in detail, as different women compose a whisper network of their stories, much like the publishing industry’s Shitty Media Men list. There’s Zee, Greer’s best friend, who, as a 13-year-old in 2001, years before coming out as queer, listens to her peers append gay jokes to karaoke lyrics at her bat mitzvah (remember the “no homo” fad?). There’s the game a group of high-school boys play called Rate ‘Em, in which they rate their female peers based on their attractiveness. Greer scores a six. It’s a game that resembles today’s popular area-code rating system: a detailed guidebook of the rules resides on Urban Dictionary, but it is a scale in which the first digit is a score of the woman’s face, the second digit—a 0 is no, a 1 is yes, a 2 means “only under the manipulating influence of alcohol”—tells whether you’d have sex with her, and the third digit rates her body. Greer is three years older than I am—by my calculations, she was born in 1988 to my 1991—so Wolitzer’s novel had a way of prompting me to recall the early aughts in America through the age I was during each cultural moment.
After hearing the stories of #MeToo, I have what now feels like a whole repertoire of instances that occurred so quickly
