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Imagine a student who, infatuated with her professor, pursues him and, thrilled when he returns her attentions, has sex with him, dates him, only eventually to realize that she was just the latest in a string of students, and that their affair is less a sign of her specialness than it is of his vanity. What happens next? Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, she can no longer take his classes, or spend time in his department (her department); she worries about which of his colleagues (her teachers) know about the relationship, and whether they might hold it against her; she suspects (rightly) that her academic successes will be chalked up to her relationship with him. Now recognize that this is an experience that happens to many women, and almost no men; and, further, that this isn’t because of some natural division of sexual labor, but because of the psychosexual order into which men and women are inducted, from which men disproportionately benefit and by which women are disproportionately harmed. I think it is clear that our imaginary young woman was not sexually harassed by her professor. But was she not denied the benefits of education “on the basis of sex”?
The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me—not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach—that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it. Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School (1996), writes: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.”
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[...] Thanks to the Hollywood actresses of Me Too, these women can now appeal to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund to sue if they are sexually harassed. But to whom should they turn when they need money to escape an abusive partner, or health care for a sick child, or when immigration comes to ask for their papers?70 Few if any feminists believe that harassment should be tolerated, that employers shouldn’t be sued, or that laws against sexual harassment haven’t done much to help working women, poor women included.71 But a feminist politics which sees the punishment of bad men as its primary purpose will never be a feminism that liberates all women, for it obscures what makes most women unfree.
The question—“If not the police, then who?”—also betrays a misunderstanding of the abolitionist tradition. For most abolitionist thinkers—most notably, among the feminists in this tradition, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore—the proposal is not, needless to say, that the angry energies of those who are made to exist on society’s margins should be simply let loose. Abolitionists see that carceral practices substitute control for provision: that “criminalisation and cages” serve as “catchall solutions to social problems.”74 As Davis wrote in June 1971, sitting in a Marin County jail awaiting trial on charges of helping to arm black activists, “the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration.”75 What if, rather than relying on police and prisons to manage the symptoms of social crisis, that crisis were met head-on? As the legal academic James Forman Jr. puts it, abolitionism asks us to “imagine a world without prisons, and then … work to try to build that world.”76 What would that take? It would involve the decriminalization of activity, like drug use and sex work, whose criminalization is known to exacerbate rather than reduce violence.77 It would involve a restructuring of economic relations such that crimes of survival—food theft, border-crossing, homelessness—were unnecessary. (George Floyd was killed after using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. He had recently lost his job.) It would involve putting in place the social and political arrangements to meet the needs that, when they go unfulfilled, produce interpersonal violence: public housing, health care, education, and childcare; decent jobs in democratically organized workplaces; guaranteed basic income; local democratic control of community spending and priorities; spaces for leisure, play, and social gathering; clean air and water. And it would involve creating a justice system that, wherever possible, sought repair and reconciliation. Abolition, Gilmore explains, “isn’t just absence … abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.”78
not new or anything but nicely put still
Of course, she went to the bungalows when summoned. She met television actors and comics and baseball players and even that swivel-hipped singer once, during the years he’d made himself over into a film star. They made promises, but not one made good. No jets would be sent for her. No tête-à-têtes with directors. She would not be installed in a house in Beverly Hills. She passed into her thirties. Thirty-two. Thirty-five. She could not be a starlet, she understood, blowing out the candles. All she had ahead of her was the cold water, the slow ballet.
Lotto’s formidable memory revealed itself when he was two years old, and Antoinette was gratified. [Dark gift; it would make him easy in all things, but lazy.] One night Sallie read him a children’s poem before bed, and in the morning, he came down to the breakfast room and stood on a chair and bellowed it out. Gawain applauded in astonishment, and Sallie wiped her eyes on a curtain. “Bravo,” Antoinette said coolly, and held up her cup for more coffee, masking the tremble in her hand. Sallie read longer poems at night; the boy nailed them by morning. A certainty grew in him with each success, a sense of an invisible staircase being scaled. When watermen came to the plantation with their wives for long weekends, Lotto snuck downstairs, crawled in the dark under the guest dinner table. In the cavern there, he saw feet bulging out of the tops of the men’s moccasins, the damp pastel seashells of the women’s panties. He came up shouting Kipling’s “If—” to a roaring ovation. The pleasure of these strangers’ applause was punctured by Antoinette’s thin smile, her soft “Go to bed, Lancelot,” in lieu of praise. He stopped trying hard when she praised him, she had noticed. Puritans understand the value of delayed gratification.
Silence. No scoffing. The boys were still.
An unknown room in Lotto illuminated. Here, the answer to everything. You could leave yourself behind, transform into someone you weren’t. You could strike the most frightening thing in the world—a roomful of boys—silent. Lotto had gone vague since his father died. In this moment, his sharpness snapped back.
The man heaved a sigh and became himself again. “Your teacher has been stricken with some disease. Pleurisy. Dropsy? I shall be taking his place. I am Denton Thrasher. Now,” he said, “tell me, striplings, what are you reading?”
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[...] “Firstly,” he said, “tell me the difference between tragedy and comedy.”
Francisco Rodríguez said, “Solemnity versus humor. Gravity versus lightness.”
“False,” Denton Thrasher said. “A trick. There’s no difference. It’s a question of perspective. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing. Look here,” he said, and made his hands into a box, which he moved across the room until it settled on Jelly Roll, the sad boy whose neck gooped out over his collar. Denton swallowed what he was about to say, moved the box of his hands on to Samuel Harris, a quick, popular, brown boy, the cox of Lotto’s boat, and said, “Tragedy.” The boys laughed, Samuel loudest of all; his confidence was a wall of wind. Denton Thrasher moved the frame until it alighted with Lotto’s face, and Lotto could see the man’s beady eyes on him. “Comedy,” he said. Lotto laughed with the others, not because he was a punch line, but because he was grateful to Denton Thrasher for revealing theater to him. The one way, Lotto had finally found, that he could live in this world.
[...] They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.
“Rent-controlled,” a girl in a leather miniskirt said, looking around for somebody to save her. The others had melted away when Natalie joined them; she was one of those people it was nice to see when you’re tipsy at some college party, but now they were in the real world, all she did was complain about money. It was exhausting. They were all poor, they were supposed to be poor out of college, get over it. Miniskirt snagged a freckled girl passing by. All three had at one time slept with Lotto. Each of them secretly believed he liked her best.