A searing indictment of modern sexual politics.
JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer and editor based in New York. From 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at the Nation magazine. She has written for the magazine, as well as for Harper’s, CounterPunch, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and other publications. She is on the editorial committee of the New Left Review. She was the co-editor with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo speaks for many
women who resist (sometimes quietly) the peer pressure that has no
name, and for women dismayed by the politics of belief infecting
our secular conversations about sex. Injustice has become a
sustainable resource, and JoAnn Wypijewski has been documenting its
variations quite eloquently for 25 years. Her reporting is solid
and energetic. Wypijewski knows how to unpack a monster.
*Tracy Quan, author of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl*
Just causes, Wypijewski reminds us, have a bad habit of
overreaching justice. Revisiting some of the most notorious sex
abuse cases of recent times, she shows how little attention the
media has given to actual facts and alternative interpretations.
These incisive and controversial essays are a tour d'force by a
brilliant journalist with unbounded empathy.
*Mike Davis*
JoAnn Wypijewski stimulates us to think freshly about sex and
sexual politics, and she is not afraid to infuriate both those who
consider themselves sexual progressives and traditional
conservatives. Let's call a town meeting of the whole country to
grapple with the insights, the fury, and most of all the wisdom in
this essential book.
*Peter Davis, Academy Award winning filmmaker of Hearts and Minds,
author of Girl of My Dreams*
Wypijewski lays bare the twisted logics we employ to convince
ourselves that there are easy distinctions between love, brutality,
sex, and capitalism. Forceful and brilliant analysis, an
unrelenting excavation not just of what happened and to whom, but
what it means to all of us watching from the sidelines. Wypijewski,
like few other writers, provides an archaelogy of sex which is in
turn an archaelogy of power.
*Yasmin Nair*
Uncomfortable, powerful, and moving; few writers can give us the
nitty-gritty of sex and its messiness within the grand sweep of
history, and get both the big picture and the details exactly
right.
*Jeffrey Escoffier, author of American Homo, Research Associate at
the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research*
JoAnn Wypijewski has written steadily and courageously on topics
that paralyze other reporters into silence or lukewarm compromise.
She knows that our horror of crime springs from the same root as
our need for scapegoats. Her essays are always perceptive, and
always worth reading
*David Bromwich, author of American Breakdown: The Trump Years and
How They Befell Us*
From Woody Allen to Matthew Shepherd to monster priests and Harvey
Weinsteins, today's high sex scandals are media and courtroom myths
of total innocence versus total guilt-larded with very real,
globalized rage. They're postmodern passion plays whose buy-in, not
just from patriarchs but also from feminists, has rendered these
narratives chillingly sterile-and dead in their sterility. For
years, JoAnn Wypijewski has been packing her bags and visiting the
venues of civic libido behind the scandals. And then, with
beautiful prose and complex analysis, she reports back to us the
true messiness: of sex, life, late capitalism, fear, and yet the
hope that still breathes in the mess. Her work is a national
treasure.
*Debbie Nathan, journalist, co-author of Satan’s Silence: Ritual
Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt*
JoAnn Wypijewski is the finest and most fearless literary
journalist writing today, and in these crucial and stunningly
beautiful essays she brings into bracing focus the deepest politics
of desire. No other writer is telling these stories; maybe no other
writer could with such generosity of spirit. 'Mercy is the scandal
now,' she writes of the the ways in which too many have come to
prefer the counting of sins to the dream of liberation, but this is
no book of lamentations. Through a series of moments intimately
observed, Wypijewski summons us again to consider the possibilities
for pleasure, eros as ally, in any struggle to get free. Hers is a
prophetic voice.
*Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family and This Brilliant
Darkness*
Wypijewski is an original thinker as well as a careful reporter,
and this collection offers exemplary exercises in narrative
journalism.
*Spiked*
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo consists of 16
deep dives into events we thought we understood, revealing "the
mess of life" in all its glorious refusal to be squeezed into
convenient boxes. A tireless investigative journalist, Wypijewski
travels to cities, small towns, and courtrooms to give us the full
stories that "exist in the region of raw emotion, the region of
danger and fury. Here be demons.
*Skeptic*
Wypijewski is perhaps at her most exciting when she models the
"sensual intelligence" she calls for - namely, in her short
celebrations of Madonna and David Wojnarowicz. The mark of her
humanity is her ability to sympathize even with those she ends up
condemning. She begins by gesturing at a sexual politics that
passes beyond vengeance; I hope someday she envisions one that
takes us all the way to pleasure.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[An] invaluable collection.
*New York Journal of Books*
Wypijewski's strength is in restoring a sense of profundity and
nuance - the factors left out when polarising victim vs monster and
the contradictions alive in human relations, with human sexuality,
and therefore vulnerability, at its centre.
*Morning Star*
Wise, compassionate, and refreshingly sex-positive. ... With
courage and a veteran journalist's attention to detail,
[Wypijewski] investigates and explores the stories of the real
human beings behind the sex panicked headlines of our times.
*CounterPunch*
Not only diagnoses what's wrong with mainstream, carceral feminism
but also helps us plot a way forward.
*The Baffler*
Wypijewski is part of a very brave group of critical thinkers who
oppose the culture of punishment that has found a media-driven home
in feminism today.
*Medium*
A dauntless, provocatively ethical book that asks moral
questions.
*Gay City News*
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