Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, in which she credibly accused him of assaulting her in high school, failed to stop his ascension to the Supreme Court. Ford now has a new memoir that captures, as writer Moira Donegan puts it, the hazards of “coming forward.” Because the assault didn’t destroy Ford’s life—but talking about it almost did:
Nearly a decade beyond #MeToo, we still do not know much about the after. At least, not for the women. There is a seemingly bottomless popular interest in the experiences of abusive men and in the afterlives of powerful figures who have been accused of sexual misconduct. Fiction, nonfiction, and film have contemplated their humiliation and rage, their professional downfalls, their denials or repentance, their rehabilitation or exile. In 2019, Jane Mayer published a long profile in the New Yorker of former senator Al Franken, who resigned from office after being accused of groping and harassment by multiple women. Mayer’s piece dwelled sympathetically on Franken’s diminished circumstances, writing of how he puttered tragically around his home. In 2022, viewers were enthralled by Todd Field’s two-and-a-half-hour psychodrama Tár, about the exposure and downfall of a sexually predatory orchestra conductor, played by an exquisitely tailored Cate Blanchett. In the aftermath of #MeToo, a number of allegedly abusive men have written long essays contemplating their predicament. The radio host John Hockenberry, accused of sexual harassment by several colleagues, wrote a lengthy Harper’s Magazine piece, “Exile,” in which he mourned the death of a sort of yearning old-timey romance in which he is a noble true believer. In the New York Review of Books, the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi’s “Reflections from a Hashtag” provided meandering thoughts on the author’s newfound infamy, which followed a criminal trial for multiple violent sexual assaults. But the piece ended hopefully, with Ghomeshi flirting with a pretty stranger on a train. The genre, by now, is an old one. Most of these works owe much to J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, in which a South African professor’s impotent and humiliated life in the months after he is exposed for the rape of a student is mixed ominously with the end of apartheid. For these figures, too, it’s less what they’ve done that pains them. It’s what happens when people find out.
Women do not typically receive this kind of prolonged attention in the aftermath of sexual violence. Their psychic life is not pried with pity or prurience; their paralysis or tragic humility is not mined for metaphor. Part of what makes One Way Back such an unusual book is the simple fact that the warped afterlives of public survivors are so rarely depicted at all.
Women’s stories of what happened after their disclosures fail to capture the popular imagination in the way that stories of the accused do. Maybe one reason for this is simple misogyny, that reflexive form of narrative sexism that leads us to imagine men as protagonists and women as tertiary characters. But there is something, too, about the intractability of the survivor’s position that can preclude the narrative tension that so often animates accused men’s stories. She was wronged by the man, and then when she talks about it, she is wronged, too, by the society that refuses to care. No suspense is on offer here: the heroine has tried to change her world by telling a truth about herself, and she has failed. It is a story of narrative inaction, of a failure to effect change. A story, that is, about the futility of storytelling itself.
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