Mainly, the #metoo movement shows that we are deeply afraid of sex and that this fear can be used against us to allow us to ignore the larger and worse violations that are nearly-ubiquitous and are almost all unremarked.

Can you really expect newcomers to these professions, seeing how small and intimately networked they appear, to believe they operate on merit? Obviously not. And yet you know that most of their grindingly dull exploitations and discriminations, the uneven distributions of advantage, involve no sex at all.


Still, in discourse, sex continually upstages its ism. You receive an agonized email from a former colleague about whether he should have intervened on the night a notorious and more senior man invited you to an industry party alone. You consider replying with a list of all the deeply unerotic ways in which that job, where no one ever made a pass at you, drained and demoralized you—the derisory pay you were expected to be grateful for, the obligation to exploit those paid still less, the fuzzy boundary between professional and social expectations. Instead, you write back at fulsome length to reassure him that he did nothing wrong.

It was inevitable, of course, that #metoo became more about upper-middle-class women’s assortative mating preferences and sexual dysfunction, and I don’t really give a shit about any of that at all. Cancel me all you like; you can’t make me care.