Culture
#MeToo, Literature, and the Enshrinement of the Male Genius
In the #MeToo era, powerful male writers continue to escape the consequences of their abuse.
When I was seventeen years old, I attended a summer workshop for young writers. We had reading assignments each night — all kinds of poems, short stories, memoirs — and I don’t remember most of them, but I do remember writer and MIT professor Junot Díaz’s short story “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars.” I remember curling up in bed, exhausted after hours of impassioned writing, expecting my eyelids to droop shut before I reached the end. But after I started reading, I knew I had to finish the story — unexpectedly, it was a strange mixture of compelling and disturbing. I really don’t know if I enjoyed reading it — if I did, my enjoyment was stifled by the sense of unease it left me with. It wasn’t just the narrator’s constant references to sex and his objectifying remarks that spurred my discomfort, but also his sense of entitlement; for example, after he wins back the girl he cheated on and books an early trip to the beach for the two of them, he thinks to himself that, for doing this, he deserves sex from her. After finishing the story, I felt this strange sense that, as a young woman reader, Díaz’s story didn't belong in my hands.
