a response to Amanda Marcotte

Yesterday, Amanda Marcotte asked me to respond to her Slate piece re: my Awl interview of Ken Hoinsky, and I promised I would.

I wrote about Hoinsky, the author of a PUA-style “seduction guide”, because some days before a man named Casey Malone had misrepresented Hoinsky’s book, quoted from it selectively, and called it a “rape manual.” The furor precipitated by this Malone resulted in Kickstarter’s decision to refuse to host “seduction guide” projects in future. This amounts to prior restraint on speech. Kickstarter can do what it pleases, but it’s beyond wrong of them to imagine that they have the right to take it on themselves to decide, even in the most limited way, what others can write or read.

So I am very angry about what Malone did on a number of levels. I said that Malone “whined and moaned” about Hoinsky. I called attention to the “hysteria” he had deceitfully fomented (these words in quotes because I used them, and meant them, and I still mean them.) Then I interviewed Hoinsky in order to try to figure out what it is he’s actually trying to say.

Kat Stoeffel wrote an utterly fantastic rebuttal to my piece yesterday (“It’s Okay to Hate the Kickstarter ‘Rape Manual’”) in New York magazine. She understood and accurately described what I’d written, took exception to it fairly and made cogent, salient arguments that advanced the discussion masterfully. I’d love to talk with her more. It’s exactly the kind of nuanced thinking that I had hoped would come of taking Hoinsky seriously enough to talk with him.

But other critics, Marcotte included, read and responded less carefully. They were quick to quote the words “whining and moaning” and “hysteria” without reference to the objects of those words as I wrote them. To clarify: Malone deliberately misrepresented Hoinsky in an attempt to stoke outrage. I characterized the reaction to Malone as “hysteria” because he confected it, deliberately distorted the message so as to produce a distorted, overheated response.

In no way was this word meant as a slur against anyone who wants to criticize Hoinsky fairly. In fact I think that would be a very good idea, and I wrote the piece in order to encourage that very thing.

Now, Amanda Marcotte doesn’t believe me, apparently. Even her headline, with its assumption that I meant to “defend” Hoinsky, is misleading and incorrect. She says that I do not “really understand the concept of mutual sexual attraction.” (I am happily married for many years, with grown children. Do I? I don’t know? Perhaps we ought to ask my husband.) Anyway, this accusation sets the tone of the rest of the piece. Marcotte knows what I think, she knows my sex life, she knows what Hoinsky thinks, and it’s all bad.

Except that I don’t think she does. Let us take the much-discussed dick-touching example. Hoinsky advises that once you are already making love, Show Don’t Tell what you desire by taking her hand and putting it on your dick. Quite friendly advice, in a consensual situation. But a very difficult (and risky) thing for a man to do, you might think, to an unwilling woman. Marcotte simply assumes that this hypothetical woman is not willing, anyway. “Hoinsky does not say she will gladly touch your dick because she likes you,” she writes. To me, he didn’t need to: this seemed like an essential precondition of the whole proceedings, implicit from beginning to end. In my interview with him, Hoinsky, who is not a subtle rhetorician, was flatly bewildered by the idea that he would force anyone. “Honestly, why would a man want to hook up with a girl if she’s uncomfortable hooking up? Nothing about that is enjoyable, unless you’re a sociopath or a rapist, you know what I mean?”

I take him at his word there, but Marcotte does not. Which effectively ends the discussion.

Tone is very hard to convey online for a reason: readers bring their own ideas, their anger or hope, their ignorance, experiences, personalities, all kinds of powerful biases to what they read. Readers hear a writer’s words inwardly spoken in their own voices. This is as it should be. Literature is a collaborative enterprise. This piece provoked polarized reactions, passionate on both sides. But in my own estimation, it succeeded for Stoeffel, though she disagreed, because she took my meaning clearly. For Marcotte, it failed.

I enjoy the cut and thrust of debate and am happy to engage anyone who cares to open a meaningful discussion with me. That’s why I do this. In my ideal world, someone will persuade me into a better understanding, teach me something. I welcome disagreement with open arms. How else am I going to improve? But that engagement is only possible with trust on both sides enough to agree on the basic premises of the discussion.

*

In closing: I have a compelling reason to have considered the matter of consent very deeply: I have two daughters. Neither they nor I can wait for the paradise of gender equality to come true. I’ve tried to explain to them as best I could that there are dangers out there, that they should never be alone with a man they haven’t come to trust over time, that they should never be without a fixed, safe way home, not for a moment, that they should be in control of their own bodies. When my younger daughter asked me how she would know when it was time to have sex, I said, your own body will tell you Yes; it has to be not only because he wants to, but because you do, for yourself. Never only to give in, to be nice to him. But when you want it for yourself. You’ll know it then, you’ll be sure.

*

Since I first joined Twitter I’ve had the same bio on there, really just out of laziness: Just some chick. Yesterday I finally replaced it with a better, less flippant one:

change my mind