Some people call me the woman who helped pave the way for the #MeToo movement because last year I stuck my neck out, speaking on behalf of silenced women at Fox News. It was before Tarana Burke’s #MeToo had become mainstream. The afternoon The New York Times posted the article about sexual harassment with my photo on the front page, my terror was only reduced by a private message from Gretchen Carlson, telling me she believed me. She was the extent of my #MeToo support.
After Bill O’Reilly fell from grace — something that absolutely surprised me — I sat back, like the rest of the world, watching corporate heads roll and social change happen. The #MeToo movement moved from industry to industry — entertainment, tech, politics, academia. Sometimes women gleefully marched across Twitter with male heads on stakes. Other times we whispered about “collateral damage’’ when a beloved man was fired. The best part of the #MeToo movement is that it started a global conversation about patriarchy — its aim to control women’s reproduction — and changed the way men treat women in the workplace. I was recently in Stockholm, and a cab driver reached in the glove box in front of my knees for his credit card machine, but not before making prayer hands and saying, “I’m sorry. Please don’t #MeToo me because of my reach.’’
Although the #MeToo movement has made inroads into changing workplace culture, it is unfortunately leaking into the complicated world of human mating. As the #MeToo digital mobs march into our intimate relationships, posting allegations of sexual abuse and misogyny related to male-female personal relationships, the #MeToo boundaries are getting decidedly blurry. Bad boys, jerks, and guys who didn’t know their date just wasn’t so into them are being ensnared like dolphins in a tuna net.
It seems that, as a culture that talks about sex a lot, little is really understood about our labyrinthine love lives — relationships where no one waves a paycheck over the bed nor engages in nonconsensual sexual assault. However, with that said, some consensual relationships may appear to overlap with #MeToo’s territory. Take for example workplace romance between two peers. A 2013 survey by the job-search website CareerBuilder.com reported that of the 8,000 people polled, 4 out of 10 employees say they have dated someone at work. Seventeen percent say they have done it twice. In the United States, workplace relationships are most often viewed negatively, and women suffer the most, since they are falsely perceived as using sex to get ahead. Before #MeToo, it wasn’t widely understood that a paycheck can be a rape tool.
But if 40 percent of workers have had relationships at work, those relationships are less tenuous than thought. A British survey of 2,000 workers showed that, compared with meeting someone in a pub or nightclub, relationships that began at work were more likely to end in marriage.
In a Boston Globe article about #MeToo and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Junot Díaz, it was noted that Díaz and I had a relationship for a number of years. He seems to be the latest bad boy whose head is being hoisted as a misogynist. The online allegations came weeks after he published an article in The New Yorker bravely telling the story of being raped at the age of 8. The world is rereading his books and dissecting his characters, particularly the player Yunior, from “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.’’ They are now calling autobiographical his stories in “This is How You Lose Her,’’ where he writes about Yunior having affairs with 50 women while he was living with a girlfriend.
Newsflash, people: The greatest truths can only be told in fiction. Junot is the lothario, Yunior, one whose understanding of women, according to Díaz, “is pretty . . . limited.’’ And he’s Beli, who is not ashamed by her enormous breasts because they endow her with the power to get people to do what she wants. And he is Oscar, the Dominican kid in New Jersey who suffers from depression. He’s also the father, lying in the hot prison yard in the Dominican Republic with the cinched, drying rope around his head, slowly damaging his brain, to save the women in his life. You don’t need tarot cards. It’s all right there.
Our relationship lasted a few years. In Los Angeles. In New York. In his apartment in Cambridge. And, yes, there were tears and anger. But never because he forcibly kissed me. We exchanged verbal consent. I do not believe Díaz would commit sexual assault. He’s got too much scared Oscar Wao in him. My tears and anger were related only to the fact that I had to share him with others. That he couldn’t commit. I fell in love. And it hurt when he couldn’t love me back in the same way.
But here’s the other conversation no one is having. Innocent, injured babies always find each other, even when they dress up as adults. And their playground is the bed. This is not to victim-blame. And trust me, I have spent enough time on a therapy couch to know my piece in relationship dynamics. I’m only saying that we must shine a brighter light on the deeper underpinnings of adult intimate relationships. They are complicated. But they are not #MeToo.
Wendy Walsh is an adjunct professor of psychology at California State University, Channel Islands. She has written three books on relationships, most recently “The 30-Day Love Detox.’’
