Junot Díaz
Mar. 2nd, 2021 07:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI remember liking Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so I read his short story collection This Is How You Lose Her. It's horribly misogynistic - like, it's about misogyny, and not really in a self-reflexive way - but it's fun, sort of. Until the last story, in which Díaz is more or less talking about trying to sleep with his undergrads.
(If you're wondering what "sleeping with your undergrads" looks like from the perspective of the vast majority of professors, it's very sad and gross. Incest is probably the closest analogy.)
That's when I remembered that Díaz was one of the focal points of the #MeToo movement. I got online and read about what he did, and it's upsetting. It's upsetting that he did these things to begin with, of course, but it's even more upsetting that his abusive behavior and documented assaults were so frequent and so out in the open. He misbehaved violently in public, often in front of numerous witnesses. "How the fuck did he get away with this" was my first thought, but then I remembered that that's just how things are in academia.
I've seen this over and over again, that swarms of leftist academic women will come together to defend one disgusting leftist academic man, usually for the purpose of beating down another female academic. If the disgusting man isn't white, and if the victim who speaks up can thereby be accused of making racist allegations (even if - perhaps especially if - she isn't white herself), so much the better.
After watching this happen a truly tedious number of times over the past fifteen years, the conclusion I eventually came to is that it's not "part of someone's culture" to be an abusive asshole, and trying to suggest as much is racist as fuck.
I still like the short story collection, though. This is one of those things, like Louis CK's "Jizanthapus" bit, that I'm just going to have to have complicated feelings about.
(If you're wondering what "sleeping with your undergrads" looks like from the perspective of the vast majority of professors, it's very sad and gross. Incest is probably the closest analogy.)
That's when I remembered that Díaz was one of the focal points of the #MeToo movement. I got online and read about what he did, and it's upsetting. It's upsetting that he did these things to begin with, of course, but it's even more upsetting that his abusive behavior and documented assaults were so frequent and so out in the open. He misbehaved violently in public, often in front of numerous witnesses. "How the fuck did he get away with this" was my first thought, but then I remembered that that's just how things are in academia.
I've seen this over and over again, that swarms of leftist academic women will come together to defend one disgusting leftist academic man, usually for the purpose of beating down another female academic. If the disgusting man isn't white, and if the victim who speaks up can thereby be accused of making racist allegations (even if - perhaps especially if - she isn't white herself), so much the better.
After watching this happen a truly tedious number of times over the past fifteen years, the conclusion I eventually came to is that it's not "part of someone's culture" to be an abusive asshole, and trying to suggest as much is racist as fuck.
I still like the short story collection, though. This is one of those things, like Louis CK's "Jizanthapus" bit, that I'm just going to have to have complicated feelings about.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-02 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-02 01:57 pm (UTC)