An artist retrospective: Montreal-born Jill Ciment’s memoir asks ‘Me Too?’ after the fact.
This is a better and more perceptive review than I was expecting it to be. I have not read (and probably will not read) Ciment’s book, but I like how Maltz Bovy does not go for the easy bien-pensant head-nodding along with current harmful strictures of how relationships “should” work.
It gets trickier once you factor in the newer, more questionable quasi-taboos. #MeToo has long since stopped being the of-the-moment fixation, but it has left its mark. Relationships between what would have once been deemed consenting adults now get picked apart for imperceptible or theoretical power imbalances. It’s squicky to meet someone at school or at work, even absent any supervisory capacities, because (supposedly) women find it threatening to be hit on, even by men who take no for an answer.
Facilitated by the existence of dating apps—that is, by the possibility of meeting someone only after vetting their willingness—we now have a generation increasingly convinced it’s weird and problematic to flirt with someone your own age, with whom there is no power imbalance, in a public space. A woman should be allowed to go to the supermarket without some man talking to her! (Never mind that most women will at some points in their lives want this sort of thing, or initiate it, even.) Age-gap discourse is not, in its current incarnation, particularly concerned with what would legally constitute statutory rape. Rather, it’s all about whether it’s a violation (of what? of whom?) for a 30-year-old to date a 50-year-old. #MeToo’s legacy is, in part, this proliferation of relationship categories that are a bit hmm, one that will soon enough encompass all potential love affairs.
What a great couple of paragraphs. In not that many words, she really shows how absolutely absurd the accepted discourse and conclusions are now. #MeToo, though it began for noble ends, caused and continues to cause quite a lot of harm to women. Like incels, many women have torpedoed their chances of happiness and then blamed others for their self-gestated problems.
I don’t want to detract from the work with my ranting. I’ll have more to say in other posts. But it is a good one; read it.
