How much is white male innocence worth?
Forgiveness is possible. It’s just not evenly distributed.
Milan Kundera tells us that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. That’s true today, on this awkward first anniversary of an armed white supremacist attempt to overthrow the state that the US government is trying and failing to fold into its public-facing position that everything is now officially and totally utterly and perfectibly fine.
As long as we don’t talk about the insurrection. Across the political spectrum, for democrats and republicans and everyone else, those ugly, crass, embarrassing images of violence complicate the single, simple story of American innocence. Claims of collective innocence and promises of preemptive impunity are, yet again, what liberals are counting on to paper over the fissures in a fundamentally fucked foundational myth.
And the thing about innocence is that it means you never get to grow up.
I’m thinking today, again, about culpability, about how we all cope as a culture with awkward and painful and shameful truths, and with people who have done terrible things. Today, among many right-thinking comments on the anniversary of the Capitol riot, the writer Joyce Carol Oates made a case for a different sort of forgetting.
In response to a critic who claims Norman Mailer was a ‘fine writer, but a bad husband,’ Oates tweeted:
bad husband" to whom? like many oft-married men Norman Mailer wound up finally with a much younger, adoring, & altogether quite wonderful wife (Norris Church) whom everyone liked. womanizers all eventually wear out, it just takes time & if you're lucky, you are the last wife.’
Let’s not think too hard about what happens to the unlucky ones. They should be grateful to be part of a great man’s story of personal growth, and if they’re not, best they stay buried so that we might remember what matters- as Oates goes on to explain:
‘older Mailer was very unlike the young, hard-drinking Mailer. that is just a fact, & his presence in the literary world also evolved over the decades. a revered older citizen in his late 80's--quite unlike the young brawler in his 20's’
To be clear: this was a ‘young brawler’ who literally tried to kill his wife. As Kayleigh Donaldson reminds us at Pajiba,
In 1960, during a party celebrating his mayoral candidacy in New York, Mailer stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a pen-knife in a drunken altercation. He punctured her cardiac sac, narrowly missing her heart. When one guest at the party went to check on the bleeding Morales, Mailer said, ‘don’t touch her. Let the bitch die.’
It’s cancel culture gone mad, I tell you. The same ‘young brawler’ was fully in his forties when he told an audience at UC Berkeley that ‘A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul.’ Mailer wasn’t just a ‘bad husband’ -he was a homophobe and a misogynist whose continued presence forced Western literary establishment to reenact its own hypocrisies until and beyond his death. Unpicking the fact that a beloved cultural figure was also a violent, abusive douchebag was too uncomfortable, so one part of that history had to be rubbed out, explained away, excused as a necessary part of a Great Man’s history.
Boys will be boys. Womanisers wear out eventually. And that’s okay because, as Adelle Waldman wryly observes in her novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, it’s every young brawler’s right to spend their twenties and thirties and forties repeatedly devastating women until they’re ready to settle down with a woman young enough to have not yet been devastated.
But a culture that makes endless allowances for certain sorts of violence invites more of it. I imagine that many current and former violent white supremacists and murderous misogynists might have made different choices had they not anticipated, on some level, that they would be forgiven. The fact that even a few of the January 6th insurrectionists have faced actual consequences has caused more consternation in conservative circles than the insurrection itself. In the same way that the consequences of naming abuse still weigh heavier than the consequences of being an abuser.
Consequences for protected forms of violence always come as a surprise. It is truly, honestly wild how many men- and women- seem to believe that all it takes is for a man to be decent to one woman, once, when he’s good and ready. All the sexist bullshit of his past is just part of his growing up, and every other woman he has harmed merely collateral damage. I’m not the only person I know who has had men who hurt me knowingly and badly, who violated my boundaries and smashed the furniture in my head, get in touch to tell me proudly how much they have grown since then, how good a partner they are, how much they have improved- as if that might make it all worth it. As long as someone gets to be the last wife.
Forgiveness is possible- it’s just not evenly distributed. The ‘he was young and dumb’ argument, for example, works a lot better if women are also allowed a limited amount of leeway to be foolish and messy before they ‘evolve’. But women and girls don’t get to be ‘young and dumb’. Not in the same way. Women and girls are held fully and forever responsible not just for the mistakes they make but for the boys’ mistakes, too.
There is, of course, the inverse, complementary instinct- the Puritan impulse to discover and punish every foolish, hurtful, ignorant thing anyone has ever done, with no possibility of growth or forgiveness. That’s a harmful tactic that has until recently been the special privilege of the powerful. Public humiliation and collective punishment have always been savage, imprecise weapons, but they’re somehow only seen as problematic when the less powerful start using them en masse. Call-outs remain a useful strategy for those seeking justice- but only when they exist within a framework that believes in the possibility of repair, and resolution, and positive change. I believe that collective change is possible. I just don’t think the way to do it is to protect abusers, or dismiss harm, or pre-emptively forgive some acts of violence and punish others.
Our most dangerous cultural contradictions come down to this dilemma: to the childish collective terror of facing up to the violence of the past, to harms we have done and that have been done in our names. To the awful, adult knowledge that some things are never going to have not happened even if you’re really sorry. To the paranoid inertia of chosen ignorance. To the conviction that if someone dares point out the cracks in the foundations, the whole house will come down on top of us.
I don’t have an answer for how we can make room for growth without dismissing the hury of the past, or trying to destroy the evidence, or pretending it didn’t happen, or that if it did, it didn’t matter. All I know is that peace that is built on a pile of other people’s pain isn’t peace at all. That, and no matter how many ugly books he writes, no woman should be expected to suffer so that a man can grow.
Loved this post. :)
Two things are simultaneously true, that within left-wing online spaces:
"There is no probation in the eyes of the social justice world. The only penalty is the death penalty, the attempt to commit permanent character assassination."
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/some-principles-and-observations
And, simultaneously, our culture (even when espousing liberal, progressive values) will continue to award and celebrate (largely white) men who have committed seriously heinous acts, even crimes.
I'm not convinced that Norman Mailer //is// a beloved cultural figure. I genunely don't think I've ever met someone who has read him or, indeed, has even mentioned him without raising the fact that he stabbed his wife. But, the fact definitely holds for David Foster Wallace and John Lennon and William Burroughs and Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemmingway and... I guess it depends where we draw the line.
However, there is a big selection bias in choosing those men who are still famous, rather than confined to obscurity after "cancellation". These are big names that carry cultural clout.
Do you have any idea what, say, Luke Bozier is up to nowadays? I know from a quick Google that Hugo Schwyzer is working at Trader Joe's. That seems fair enough. His own blog posts reflect that he would cause more harm than not if he committed suicide and I think he is correct.
Then, between very minor figures like Hugo Schwyzer and Luke Bozier, and cultural icons like Wallace and Lennon, you have men like Aziz Ansari.
Do you think Ansari should be in jail for ever? Probably not. Do you think he should be getting paid $$$ for Netflix specials? Probably not.
But Ansari knows that not everyone forgives him. Otherwise he wouldn't have shaken off his lightly-worn progressivism for material decrying cancel culture. He's forgiven by a lot of centrist bros... but then, does he want or need their forgiveness? If I stabbed a bunch of kittens to death, I wouldn't be forgiven by most people... but I'd probably be forgiven by other kitten stabbers who wanted to justify their own behaviour.
---
As for women being unforgiven... again, by who? Some people forgive Lena Dunham, for instance; others don't. Like Ansari, she's culturally condemned on one hand, but materially rewarded with a lot on money and visibility on the other. Further down the ladder, I don't see much forgiveness for Asia Argento, but she's not in jail, either. I'm sure a whole bunch of horror fans still love her fine. Lower down the ladder, have the likes of Kaitlyn Hunt and Gemma Barker been forgiven? To be honest, I think they've mostly been forgotten.
In short TL;DL there are metaphysical consequences (i.e. the perpetrator's soul is judged as forever tained) but very limited material consequences. It is a reversal of where our society was 300 years ago, in which (//if you were low down on the cultural hierarchy of class//) you could be executed for transgressions, but God would be asked to have mercy on your soul.